The Human Comedy (9 page)

“Yes,” said de Marsay. “There you have put your finger on the great flaw of our age. The epigram, that book in one word, no longer centers on people or things, as it did in the eighteenth century, but on trivial events, and it dies at day’s end.”

“And so the wit of the creature of fashion, when she has any,” Blondet continued, “consists in doubting all things, just as that of the bourgeoise serves to affirm them for her. Here lies the great difference between the two: The bourgeoise’s virtue is a thing beyond question, the creature of fashion is not certain she hasn’t lost hers nor that she never will; she hesitates and resists, where the other simply refuses to succumb. This hesitancy in all things is one of the last touches of elegance that our horrible age has allowed her. She is rarely in church, but will talk of religion and attempt to convert you should you have the good taste to play the freethinker, for you will thereby have opened the floodgates for well-worn pronouncements, for soulful gazes, for all the conventional gestures that every woman knows: ‘Ah! Come now! I thought you far too deep a man to attack religion! Society is crumbling, and you would rob it of its one underpinning. But religion today is nothing but you and me, it’s property, it’s our children’s future. Ah! It is time we stopped thinking always of ourselves. Individualism is the malady of our age, and religion its only cure, it unites the families that your laws drive apart,’ and so on. She then launches into a neo-Christian oration, generously laced with political concerns, something neither Catholic nor Protestant, but moralistic—oh, moralistic as can be!—in which you will recognize a patch of every fabric woven by our many competing modern doctrines.”

The women could not repress a laugh at the simpers by which Émile illustrated his caricature.

“From that oration, my dear Count Adam,” said Blondet to the Pole, “you will see that the creature of fashion is an embodiment of intellectual no less than political confusion, just as the glittering, flimsy objects around her are produced by an industry forever bent on destroying its own creations, so as to replace them. You will leave her house thinking, ‘A woman of superior mind, no doubt about it!’ You will believe this all the more firmly because she will have sounded your heart and your mind with a delicate hand, she will have sought out your secrets, for the creature of fashion gives the impression of knowing nothing in order to learn everything; there are some things that she never knows, even when she does. But you will be uneasy, for you will know nothing of the state of her heart. The grande dame of old loved with banners and broadsheets; today the creature of fashion’s ardors are as orderly as a page of sheet music: half note, quarter note, eighth note, rest. She is but a vulnerable woman, and careful not to compromise her love, nor her husband, nor her children’s future. The flags of name, rank, and fortune no longer command respect enough to ensure safe passage for the goods on board. No more does the entire aristocracy step forward to act as a screen for a fallen woman. And so unlike the late, lamented grande dame, the creature of fashion never goes too far, she can trample nothing underfoot, it is she who would be broken and crushed. She is thus the woman of the Jesuitical
mezzo termine
, of dubious compromises, respect for the niceties, anonymous passions conducted between two treacherous shorelines. She’s afraid of her servants, like some Englishwoman who might at any moment find herself hauled up for
criminal conversation
. So free at the ball, so pretty as she strolls the streets, this woman is a slave in her own home; she enjoys her independence only behind closed doors or in her thoughts. She wants to remain a woman of fashion. That’s her watchword. And today a woman abandoned by her husband, reduced to a meager pension, no carriage, no luxuries, no box at the theater, with none of the divine accessories that make up her raiment, today such a woman is no longer a woman at all, or a girl, or a bourgeoise: She is dissolved and becomes simply a thing. The Carmelites will have nothing to do with a married woman; that would be bigamy. Will her lover still want her? That is the question. The creature of fashion can perhaps be a subject of slander but never of gossip.”

“All that is horribly true,” said the Princess de Cadignan.

“And so,” Blondet resumed, “the creature of fashion lives between British hypocrisy and the elegant brazenness of the eighteenth century; a bastard system all too typical of an age when nothing that comes along resembles what is lost, in which transitions lead to nothing, in which there are only shades of gray, in which all greatness pales, in which all distinctions are purely personal. I am convinced that no woman, even born near the throne, can hope to acquire before age twenty-five the encyclopedic knowledge of trifles, the gift for machinations, the great little things, the music of the voice and the harmonies of color, the angelic deviltries and innocent impostures, the language and the silence, the seriousness and the mockery, the wit and witlessness, the diplomacy and ignorance, that make up the creature of fashion.”

“And where, in this system you’ve just laid out for us,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to Émile Blondet, “would you place the woman writer? Is she a creature of fashion?”

“Save the occasional genius, she is a creature to be shunned,” answered Émile Blondet, accompanying his response with an urbane glance that may just as well have been overt flattery for
Camille Maupin
. “That’s not my opinion but Napoleon’s,” he added.

“Oh, don’t blame Napoleon,” said Canalis, with a sententious gesture. “It was one of his pettinesses to be jealous of literary genius, for pettinesses he had. Who will ever succeed in explaining, portraying, understanding Napoleon? A man always depicted in idleness, and who did all there is to do! Who was the finest power ever known, the most concentrated power, the most mordant, the most acid of all powers; a singular genius who led armed civilization everywhere and established it nowhere; a man who could do everything because he wanted everything; a prodigious phenomenon of will, taming an illness by a battle, and who would nonetheless die of an illness in his bed after a life lived amid shot and shell; a man who had in his head a code and a sword, word and deed; a visionary who foresaw everything but his own fall; an eccentric statesman who wasted men without number for the sake of economy, and who spared at all costs the heads of Talleyrand, of Pozzo di Borgo, and of Metternich, diplomats whose deaths would have saved the French Empire, and who in his mind outweighed thousands of soldiers; a man to whom, by a rare favor, Nature had left a heart in his body of bronze; a jovial, gentle man at midnight among women, and who the next morning toyed with Europe like a young girl amusing herself by splashing her bathwater! Perfidious and honorable, fond of flash and simplicity, devoid of taste and protective of the arts; and for all these antitheses, great in all things, by instinct or by conformation; Caesar at age twenty-five, Cromwell at thirty; and all the while, like a shopkeeper buried at Père Lachaise, ‘a devoted father and a loving husband.’ In short, he improvised monuments, empires, kings, codes, verses, a novel, his reach ever exceeding his grasp. Did he not seek to make all of Europe France? And then, once he had given us a weight on this earth that altered the laws of gravity, he left us poorer than the day he first laid hands on us. And he, who had acquired an empire along with his name, lost his name at the very edge of his empire in a sea of blood and soldiers. A man of pure thought and pure action, Desaix and Fouché rolled into one!”

“Purely arbitrary and purely just, every inch a king!” said de Marsay.

“Ach! Vaht a bleasure to zit hier tichesting vile you talk!” said the Baron de Nucingen.

“And you do realize, this is no common fare we’re serving you?” said Joseph Bridau. “If you had to pay for the pleasures of conversation as you pay for the pleasures of music or dance, your fortune would never suffice! There’s no repeat performance for a tour de force of wit.”

“Are we women really so diminished as these gentlemen believe?” said the Princess de Cadignan, addressing the others of her sex with a smile both dubious and mocking. “Today, under a regime that reduces all things, you like little dishes, little apartments, little paintings, little articles, little newspapers, little books, but does that mean women must be small as well? Why should the human heart change, simply because you’ve changed your dress? The passions are the same in every age. I know of magnificent devotions, sublime sufferings; they’re simply not public knowledge, they lack the celebrity, if you like, that ennobled the missteps of some of our women of old. But even without saving a king of France, a woman can still be
Agnès Sorel
! Do you believe that our beloved Marquise d’Espard is not in every way the equal of Madame Doublet or Madame du Deffand, in whose salons so many wicked things were said and done? Is Marie Taglioni not just as fine a dancer as La Camargo? Is Malibran not a soprano to rival La Saint-Huberti? Are our poets not superior to those of the eighteenth century? If, at this moment, by the fault of the shopkeepers who govern our land, we have no style all our own, did the Empire not have its special cachet, no less than the century of Louis XV, and was its splendor not as grand? Have the sciences lost ground?”

“I share your opinion, madame; the women of this age are truly great,” answered General de Montriveau. “When posterity has put us all behind it, will Madame Recamier not shine as brightly as the loveliest women of times past? We have made so much history that the historians will never see! The century of Louis XIV had only one Madame de Sévigné; today we have thousands in Paris alone, who surely write better than she and do not publish their letters. Whether we call her a creature of fashion or a grande dame, the woman of France will always be the woman par excellence. Émile Blondet has painted us a portrait of the charms of a woman of today, but should the need arise, this woman who simpers and struts and chatters the ideas of Messieurs X, Y, and Z could be a heroine! And, let us say, your missteps, mesdames, are all the more poetic in that they will always and forever be surrounded by the greatest perils. I’ve seen much of society, perhaps I’ve observed it too late, but in those circumstances where the illicitness of your sentiments might be excused, I have always found that some sort of chance, something you might call Providence, inevitably undoes those we call faithless women.”

“I hope,” said Madame de Vandenesse, “that we can be great in some other way.”

“Oh! Let the Marquis de Montriveau preach to us,” cried Madame d’Espard.

“Especially because he has so often practiced what he preaches,” added the Baronne de Nucingen.

“Indeed,” the general resumed, “among all the dramas, since you’re so fond of that word,” he said, looking at Blondet, “in which I have seen the finger of God at work, the most terrible was almost my own doing.”

“Oh, tell us!” cried Lady Barimore. “I so like a good shiver.”

“A fitting fondness for a virtuous woman,” replied de Marsay, looking at Lord Dudley’s charming daughter.

“In the course of the campaign of 1812,” said General de Montriveau, “I was the unwitting cause of a terrible misfortune that might help you, Dr. Bianchon,” he said, looking at me, “you who study the human mind even as you study the body, to resolve a few of your lingering questions on the subject of the will. This was my second campaign; I was in love with danger and took nothing seriously, like the green young artillery lieutenant I was! By the time we arrived at the Berezina, the army had lost all its discipline, as you know, and had no sense of military obedience. It was a rabble of men from all manner of nations, all instinctively heading southward. The soldiers did not hesitate to chase a barefooted general in rags away from their bonfires if he had no food or fuel to contribute. This disorder in no way improved once we crossed that notorious river. I had made my way out of the swamps of Zembin all alone, with nothing to eat, and I went looking for a house where I might be taken in. Finding none, or driven away from those I did find, I had the good fortune to spy, just as night was falling, a shabby little Polish farm, a place of which no description can give you an idea unless you have seen the wooden houses of lower Normandy or the poorest smallholdings of the Beauce. These abodes consist of one single room, walled off with planks at one end, the smaller half being a storeroom for forage. Through the dusk I spotted a plume of smoke rising from that distant house, and I walked boldly toward it, hoping to find comrades more compassionate than those I had so far met up with. I entered to find the table set for dinner. Several officers, with a woman among them—not an uncommon thing—were eating a meal of potatoes, horse meat grilled over embers, and frozen beets. Among the tablemates I spied two or three artillery captains from the First Regiment, in which I had served. I was greeted by a hearty ‘Hurrah!’ that would have greatly surprised me on the other bank of the Berezina; but now the cold was less fierce, my comrades were idle, they were warm, they were eating, and the room, strewn with hay bales, promised them a most delightful night. We weren’t so demanding back then. My fellow soldiers could be philanthropists without cost, one of the most common ways of being a philanthropist. I took my place on a hay bale and began eating. At the end of the table, beside the door to the little room full of straw and hay, sat my former colonel, one of the most extraordinary men I have ever encountered in all the motley crowd it has been my lot to meet. He was Italian. Now, when mankind is beautiful in the southern lands, it is sublime. I don’t know if you’ve ever noted the curious fairness of Italians, when their skin is fair . . . it’s magnificent, particularly by lamplight. I was reminded of this man on reading Charles Nodier’s fantastical portrait of Colonel Oudet; I rediscovered my own impressions in each of his elegant sentences. An Italian, like most of the officers who made up his regiment—borrowed by the emperor from Eugène’s army—my colonel cut an imposing figure; he was easily five foot eight or nine inches tall, admirably proportioned, perhaps a little fat, but prodigiously vigorous and agile too, graceful as a greyhound. His abundant black curls set off his complexion, which was as pale as a woman’s; he had small hands, a nicely shaped foot, a graceful mouth, and a slender aquiline nose with nostrils that automatically clenched and paled when he was angry, as he often was. His irascibility was a phenomenon beyond all belief, and so I will tell you nothing of it; in any case, you’ll have a sense of it soon enough. No one could feel at ease in his presence. I alone, perhaps, did not fear him; he had conceived for me, it is true, so singular a friendship that everything I did he found right and proper. When anger took hold of him, his brow tensed and his muscles sketched out a delta in the middle of his forehead—something like Redgauntlet’s horseshoe, to put it more plainly. That sign terrified you perhaps even more than the mesmerizing fire of his blue eyes. His entire body trembled, and his strength, already so great in his normal state, became almost unbounded. He had a habit of gargling his
r
’s. His voice, easily as mighty as that of Charles Nodier’s Oudet, gave a powerful resonance to the syllable or consonant on which that gargle landed. If at times this mispronunciation was a most elegant thing, it was quite different when he was commanding maneuvers or in the grip of emotion: Never can you imagine the potency expressed by that intonation, however vulgar it may be considered in Paris. You would have had to hear him. When the colonel felt at peace, his blue eyes painted a portrait of angelic mildness, and his noble brow bore an expression full of charm. At a review, no man in all the Italian army could rival him. D’Orsay himself, the magnificent d’Orsay, was bested by our colonel during Napoleon’s final review of the troops before entering Russia. All was opposition in this extraordinary man. Now, contrast is the lifeblood of passion; no need to ask, then, if he exerted on women that irresistible influence to which your nature”—the general was looking at the Princess de Cadignan—“bends like molten glass beneath the glassblower’s pipe. But by a curious caprice of fate, as any observer could see for himself, the colonel had very little luck with the ladies, or perhaps he neglected to try. To give you an idea of his tempers, let me recount in two words what I once saw him do in a fit of rage. We were climbing a very narrow path with our cannon, a rather high embankment on one side of the road and woods on the other. Halfway up, we met with another artillery regiment, headed by a colonel, coming the other way. This colonel ordered our regiment’s captain, who was leading the first battery, to reverse course. Naturally our captain refuses, but the colonel waves his first battery forward, and despite the quick-thinking driver’s attempt to steer into the woods, the wheel of the first cannon caught our captain’s right leg and broke it at one go, tossing him over his horse. All this in the blink of an eye. From some distance away, our colonel spies the quarrel in progress and comes galloping forward, weaving his way between cannon and trees, at the risk of finding himself knocked flat on his back at any moment. He reaches the other colonel just as our captain is falling from his horse and crying for help. No, our Italian colonel was no longer a man! . . . A foam like frothing champagne bubbled from his lips, and he growled like a lion. Unable to speak a word, unable even to shout, he made his fearsome meaning clear to his antagonist simply by drawing his saber and pointing toward the woods. The two colonels strode off into the trees. Two seconds later we saw our colonel’s adversary sprawled on the ground, his head split in two. The other soldiers backed away, oh by God they did, and double-quick! Now, this captain who’d nearly been killed, still howling in the mud puddle where the cannon had deposited him, was married to a stunning Italian woman from Messina, who was not indifferent to our colonel’s charms. This had only heightened his fury. The husband had been placed in his charge; he had to defend him, just as he would the woman herself. As it happens, in that hospitable hut just past Zembin, this same captain sat facing me at the table, and his wife at the other end, across from the colonel. She was a small woman by the name of Rosina, very dark, but all the heat of the Sicilian sun could be seen in her almond-shaped black eyes. She had grown frightfully thin; her cheeks were speckled with dirt, like a piece of fruit on a tree by a well-traveled road. Clad—and just barely!—in rags, weary from too much walking, her hair matted and uncombed beneath a torn marmot-fur shawl, she had nevertheless retained a certain womanliness: Her gestures were pretty to see, her mouth pink and puckered; her white teeth, the contours of her face and her bust—charms that privation, cold, and neglect had not entirely blighted—still spoke of love to anyone able to think of such things. Rosina offered a fine example of a nature frail in appearance but spirited and full of force all the same. The husband, a gentleman of the Piedmont, had a face made to express mocking camaraderie, if those two words may indeed be joined. Brave, educated, he seemed blissfully unaware of the liaison his wife and the colonel had kept up for some three years. I attributed this laxity to Italian mores or some private marital understanding, but there was in this man’s physiognomy one feature that had always inspired in me an involuntary unease. His thin, mobile lower lip drooped at the corners rather than turning up, betraying, I thought, a deep-seated cruelty in what seemed a phlegmatic and indolent character. As you may well imagine, the conversation I’d walked in on was none too brilliant. My weary comrades ate in silence, though naturally they had a number of questions for me, and we recounted our misfortunes, mingling them with reflections on the campaign, on the generals, on their failings, on the Russians, on the cold. A moment after my arrival, the colonel, having finished his meager repast, wipes his mustaches, wishes us all a good night, turns his dark gaze toward the Italian woman, and says, ‘Rosina?’ Then, not troubling to await a reply, he goes off to bed in the little storeroom. The sense of the colonel’s question was quite clear to us all, so clear that an indescribable gesture escaped the young woman, expressing at once her evident irritation at seeing her dependence so openly displayed, with no trace of respect for her autonomy, and the offense done to her womanly dignity or to her husband. But there was also, in her clenched features, in her darkened brow, a sort of foreboding: Perhaps she had foreseen her fate. Rosina sat silently at the table. A moment later, very likely after the colonel had lain down on his bed of hay or straw, he called out again: ‘Rosina?’ The tone of this second summons was even more brutally insistent than the first. The guttural
r
, the peculiar resonance the Italian tongue gives a word’s vowels and ending, all this eloquently expressed the man’s tyranny, his impatience, his willfulness. Rosina blanched, but she rose from the table and brushed past us to go and join the colonel. My tablemates sat in deep silence, but I, alas, looked around at them all and let out a laugh, and my laughter spread from one mouth to the next. ‘
Tu ridi
?’ asked the husband. ‘Oh, but my dear comrade,’ I answered, serious again, ‘I confess, I was wrong, I beg of you a thousand pardons, and if these apologies seem to you insufficient, I can only agree.’ ‘The fault lies with me, not with you!’ he answered, grimly. With this we all settled down for the night in the main room, and soon we were sound asleep. The next day we each set off anew without waking the others, without seeking a traveling companion, in whatever direction we thought best, concerned only with ourselves, displaying the egoism that made of our disorderly retreat one of the most terrible dramas of human nature, of sorrow, and of horror that was ever played out beneath the heavens. Nevertheless, some seven or eight hundred paces from our quarters for the night, we nearly all met up again, and we walked on together, like a flock of geese driven along by the blind despotism of a child. One single, common need urged us ever forward. Arriving at a small hill within sight of the farmhouse, we heard cries like lions roaring in the desert, like bellowing bulls; but no, that clamor cannot be likened to anything known to man. Nevertheless, amid that horrible howl, we heard the faint shriek of a woman. We turned around, struck by some unnamable dread; there was nothing to be seen of the house, only a towering pyre. The building was wholly engulfed in flames and every doorway barricaded. Billows of windblown smoke carried those strident sounds our way, along with an overpowering odor. The captain was walking close by, having calmly come and joined our caravan. We gazed at him in silence, no one daring to question him, but suspecting our curiosity, he put his right index finger to his breast and, gesturing toward the blaze with his other hand, said, ‘
Son’io!
’ We walked on without a word.”