Beatrix Part 29

August.

I was, alas! at the edge of a precipice, amusing myself, like the innocent heroines of all melodramas, by gathering flowers.

Suddenly a horrible thought rode full tilt through my happiness, like the horse in the German ballad. I thought I saw that Calyste's love was increasing through his reminiscences; that he was expending on _me_ the stormy emotions I revived by reminding him of the coquetries of that hateful Beatrix,--just think of it!

that cold, unhealthy nature, so persistent yet so flabby, something between a mollusk and a bit of coral, dares to call itself Beatrix, _Beatrice!_

Already, dearest mother, I am forced to keep one eye open to suspicion, when my heart is all Calyste's; and isn't it a great catastrophe when the eye gets the better of the heart, and suspicion at last finds itself justified? It came to pa.s.s in this way:--

"This place is dear to me," I said to Calyste one morning, "because I owe my happiness to it; and so I forgive you for taking me sometimes for another woman."

The loyal Breton blushed, and I threw my arms around his neck. But all the same I have left Les Touches, and never will I go back there again.

The very strength of hatred which makes me long for Madame de Rochefide's death--ah, heavens! a natural death, pleurisy, or some accident--makes me also understand to its fullest extent the power of my love for Calyste. That woman has appeared to me to trouble my sleep,--I see her in a dream; shall I ever encounter her bodily? Ah! the postulant of the Visitation was right,--Les Touches is a fatal spot; Calyste has there recovered his past emotions, and they are, I see it plainly, more powerful than the joys of our love. Ascertain, my dear mamma, if Madame de Rochefide is in Paris, for if she is, I shall stay in Brittany. Poor Mademoiselle des Touches might well repent of her share in our marriage if she knew to what extent I am taken for our odious rival! But this is prost.i.tution! I am not myself; I am ashamed of it all. A frantic desire seizes me sometimes to fly from Guerande and those sands of Croisic.

August 25th.

I am determined to go and live in the ruins of the old chateau.

Calyste, worried by my restlessness, agrees to take me. Either he knows life so little that he guesses nothing, or he _does_ know the cause of my flight, in which case he cannot love me. I tremble so with fear lest I find the awful certainty I seek that, like a child, I put my hands before my eyes not to hear the explosion--

Oh, mother! I am not loved with the love that I feel in my heart.

Calyste is charming to me, that's true! but what man, unless he were a monster, would not be, as Calyste is, amiable and gracious when receiving all the flowers of the soul of a young girl of twenty, brought up by you, pure, loving, and beautiful, as many women have said to you that I am.

Guenic, September 18.

Has he forgotten her? That's the solitary thought which echoes through my soul like a remorse. Ah! dear mamma, have all women to struggle against memories as I do? None but innocent young men should be married to pure young girls. But that's a deceptive Utopia; better have one's rival in the past than in the future.

Ah! mother, pity me, though at this moment I am happy as a woman who fears to lose her happiness and so clings fast to it,--one way of killing it, says that profoundly wise Clotilde.

I notice that for the last five months I think only of myself, that is, of Calyste. Tell sister Clotilde that her melancholy bits of wisdom often recur to me. She is happy in being faithful to the dead; she fears no rival. A kiss to my dear Athenais, about whom I see Juste is beside himself. From what you told me in your last letter it is evident he fears you will not give her to him.

Cultivate that fear as a precious product. Athenais will be sovereign lady; but I who fear lest I can never win Calyste back from himself shall always be a servant.

A thousand tendernesses, dear mamma. Ah! if my terrors are not delusions, Camille Maupin has sold me her fortune dearly. My affectionate respects to papa.

These letters give a perfect explanation of the secret relation between husband and wife. Sabine thought of a love marriage where Calyste saw only a marriage of expediency. The joys of the honey-moon had not altogether conformed to the legal requirements of the social system.

During the stay of the married pair in Brittany the work of restoring and furnishing the hotel du Guenic had been carried on by the celebrated architect Grindot, under the superintendence of Clotilde and the Duc and d.u.c.h.esse de Grandlieu, all arrangements having been made for the return of the young household to Paris in December, 1838. Sabine installed herself in the rue de Bourbon with pleasure,--less for the satisfaction of playing mistress of a great household than for that of knowing what her family would think of her marriage.

Calyste, with easy indifference, was quite willing to let his sister-in-law Clotilde and his mother-in-law the d.u.c.h.ess guide him in all matters of social life, and they were both very grateful for his obedience. He obtained the place in society which was due to his name, his fortune, and his alliance. The success of his wife, who was regarded as one of the most charming women in Paris, the diversions of high society, the duties to be fulfilled, the winter amus.e.m.e.nts of the great city, gave a certain fresh life to the happiness of the young household by producing a series of excitements and interludes. Sabine, considered happy by her mother and sister, who saw in Calyste's coolness an effect of his English education, cast aside her gloomy notions; she heard her lot so envied by many unhappily married women that she drove her terrors from her into the region of chimeras, until the time when her pregnancy gave additional guarantees to this neutral sort of union, guarantees which are usually augured well of by experienced women. In October, 1839, the young Baronne du Guenic had a son, and committed the mistake of nursing it herself, on the theory of most women in such cases. How is it possible, they think, not to be wholly the mother of the child of an idolized husband?

Toward the end of the following summer, in August, 1840, Sabine had nearly reached the period when the duty of nursing her first child would come to an end. Calyste, during his two years' residence in Paris, had completely thrown off that innocence of mind the charm of which had so adorned his earliest appearance in the world of pa.s.sion. He was now the comrade of the young Duc Georges de Maufrigneuse, lately married, like himself, to an heiress, Berthe de Cinq-Cygne; of the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduere, the Duc and d.u.c.h.esse de Rhetore, the Duc and d.u.c.h.esse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and all the _habitues_ of his mother-in-law's salon; and he fully understood by this time the differences that separated Parisian life from the life of the provinces. Wealth has fatal hours, hours of leisure and idleness, which Paris knows better than all other capitals how to amuse, charm, and divert. Contact with those young husbands who deserted the n.o.blest and sweetest of creatures for the delights of a cigar and whist, for the glorious conversations of a club, or the excitements of "the turf," undermined before long many of the domestic virtues of the young Breton n.o.ble. The motherly solicitude of a wife who is anxious not to weary her husband always comes to the support of the dissipations of young men. A wife is proud to see her husband return to her when she has allowed him full liberty of action.

One evening, on October of that year, to escape the crying of the newly weaned child, Calyste, on whose forehead Sabine could not endure to see a frown, went, urged by her, to the Varietes, where a new play was to be given for the first time. The footman whose business it was to engage a stall had taken it quite near to that part of the theatre which is called the _avant-scene_. As Calyste looked about him during the first interlude, he saw in one of the two proscenium boxes on his side, and not ten steps from him, Madame de Rochefide. Beatrix in Paris! Beatrix in public! The two thoughts flew through Calyste's heart like arrows.

To see her again after nearly three years! How shall we depict the convulsion in the soul of this lover, who, far from forgetting the past, had sometimes subst.i.tuted Beatrix for his wife so plainly that his wife had perceived it? Beatrix was light, life, motion, and the Unknown.

Sabine was duty, dulness, and the expected. One became, in a moment, pleasure; the other, weariness. It was the falling of a thunderbolt.

From a sense of loyalty, the first thought of Sabine's husband was to leave the theatre. As he left the door of the orchestra stalls, he saw the door of the proscenium box half-open, and his feet took him there in spite of his will. The young Breton found Beatrix between two very distinguished men, Ca.n.a.lis and Raoul Nathan, a statesman and a man of letters. In the three years since Calyste had seen her, Madame de Rochefide was amazingly changed; and yet, although the transformation had seriously affected her as a woman, she was only the more poetic and the more attractive to Calyste. Until the age of thirty the pretty women of Paris ask nothing more of their toilet than clothing; but after they pa.s.s through the fatal portal of the thirties, they look for weapons, seductions, embellishments among their _chiffons;_ out of these they compose charms, they find means, they take a style, they seize youth, they study the slightest accessory,--in a word, they pa.s.s from nature to art.

Madame de Rochefide had just come through the vicissitudes of a drama which, in this history of the manners and morals of France in the nineteenth century may be called that of the Deserted Woman. Deserted by Conti, she became, naturally, a great artist in dress, in coquetry, in artificial flowers of all kinds.

"Why is Conti not here?" inquired Calyste in a low voice of Ca.n.a.lis, after going through the commonplace civilities with which even the most solemn interviews begin when they take place publicly.

The former great poet of the faubourg Saint-Germain, twice a cabinet minister, and now for the fourth time an orator in the Chamber, and aspiring to another ministry, laid a warning finger significantly on his lip. That gesture explained everything.

"I am happy to see you," said Beatrix, demurely. "I said to myself when I recognized you just now, before you saw me, that _you_ at least would not disown me. Ah! my Calyste," she added in a whisper, "why did you marry?--and with such a little fool!"

As soon as a woman whispers in the ear of a new-comer and makes him sit beside her, men of the world find an immediate excuse for leaving the pair alone together.

"Come, Nathan," said Ca.n.a.lis, "Madame la marquise will, I am sure, allow me to go and say a word to d'Arthez, whom I see over there with the Princesse de Cadignan; it relates to some business in the Chamber to-morrow."

This well-bred departure gave Calyste time to recover from the shock he had just received; but he nearly lost both his strength and his senses once more, as he inhaled the perfume, to him entrancing though venomous, of the poem composed by Beatrix. Madame de Rochefide, now become bony and gaunt, her complexion faded and almost discolored, her eyes hollow with deep circles, had that evening brightened those premature ruins by the cleverest contrivances of the _article Paris_. She had taken it into her head, like other deserted women, to a.s.sume a virgin air, and recall by clouds of white material the maidens of Ossian, so poetically painted by Girodet. Her fair hair draped her elongated face with a ma.s.s of curls, among which rippled the rays of the foot-lights attracted by the shining of a perfumed oil. Her white brow sparkled. She had applied an imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, upon the faded whiteness of a skin revived by bran and water. A scarf so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was indeed a masterpiece of composition.

As for her pose, one word will suffice--it was worthy of the pains she had taken to arrange it. Her arms, now thin and hard, were scarcely visible within the puffings of her very large sleeves. She presented that mixture of false glitter and brilliant fabrics, of silken gauze and c.r.a.ped hair, of vivacity, calmness, and motion which goes by the term of the _Je ne sais quoi_. Everybody knows in what that consists, namely: great cleverness, some taste, and a certain composure of manner. Beatrix might now be called a decorative scenic effect, changed at will, and wonderfully manipulated. The presentation of this fairy effect, to which is added clever dialogue, turns the heads of men who are endowed by nature with frankness, until they become possessed, through the law of contrasts, by a frantic desire to play with artifice. It is false, though enticing; a pretence, but agreeable; and certain men adore women who play at seduction as others do at cards. And this is why: The desire of the man is a syllogism which draws conclusions from this external science as to the secret promises of pleasure. The inner consciousness says, without words: "A woman who can, as it were, create herself beautiful must have many other resources for love." And that is true.

Deserted women are usually those who merely love; those who retain love know the _art_ of loving. Now, though her Italian lesson had very cruelly maltreated the self-love and vanity of Madame de Rochefide, her nature was too instinctively artificial not to profit by it.

"It is not a question of loving a man," she was saying a few moments before Calyste had entered her box; "we must tease and hara.s.s him if we want to keep him. That's the secret of all those women who seek to retain you men. The dragons who guard treasures are always armed with claws and wings."

"I shall make a sonnet on that thought," replied Ca.n.a.lis at the very moment when Calyste entered the box.

With a single glance Beatrix divined the state of Calyste's heart; she saw the marks of the collar she had put upon him at Les Touches, still fresh and red. Calyste, however, wounded by the speech made to him about his wife, hesitated between his dignity as a husband, Sabine's defence, and a harsh word cast upon a heart which held such memories for him, a heart which he believed to be bleeding. The marquise observed his hesitation; she had made that speech expressly that she might know how far her empire over Calyste still extended. Seeing his weakness, she came at once to his succor to relieve his embarra.s.sment.

"Well, dear friend, you find me alone," she said, as soon as the two gentlemen had left the box,--"yes, alone in the world!"

"You forget me!" said Calyste.

"You!" she replied, "but you are married. That was one of my griefs, among the many I have endured since I saw you last. Not only--I said to myself--do I lose love, but I have lost a friendship which I thought was Breton. Alas! we can make ourselves bear everything. Now I suffer less, but I am broken, exhausted! This is the first outpouring of my heart for a long, long time. Obliged to seem proud before indifferent persons, and arrogant as if I had never fallen in presence of those who pay court to me, and having lost my dear Felicite, there was no ear into which I could cast the words, _I suffer!_ But to you I can tell the anguish I endured on seeing you just now so near to me. Yes," she said, replying to a gesture of Calyste's, "it is almost fidelity. That is how it is with misery; a look, a visit, a mere nothing is everything to us. Ah!

you once loved me--you--as I deserved to be loved by him who has taken pleasure in trampling under foot the treasures I poured out upon him.

And yet, to my sorrow, I cannot forget; I love, and I desire to be faithful to a past that can never return."

Having uttered this tirade, improvised for the hundredth time, she played the pupils of her eyes in a way to double the effect of her words, which seemed to be dragged from the depths of her soul by the violence of a torrent long restrained. Calyste, incapable of speech, let fall the tears that gathered in his eyes. Beatrix caught his hand and pressed it, making him turn pale.

"Thank you, Calyste, thank you, my poor child; that is how a true friend responds to the grief of his friend. We understand each other. No, don't add another word; leave me now; people are looking at us; it might cause trouble to your wife if some one chanced to tell her that we were seen together,--innocently enough, before a thousand people! There, you see I am strong; adieu--"

She wiped her eyes, making what might be called, in woman's rhetoric, an ant.i.thesis of action.

"Let me laugh the laugh of a lost soul with the careless creatures who amuse me," she went on. "I live among artists, writers, in short the world I knew in the salon of our poor Camille--who may indeed have acted wisely. To enrich the man we love and then to disappear saying, 'I am too old for him!' that is ending like the martyrs,--and the best end too, if one cannot die a virgin."

She began to laugh, as it to remove the melancholy impression she had made upon her former adorer.

"But," said Calyste, "where can I go to see you?"

"I am hidden in the rue de Chartres opposite the Parc de Monceaux, in a little house suitable to my means; and there I cram my head with literature--but only for myself, to distract my thoughts; G.o.d keep me from the mania of literary women! Now go, leave me; I must not allow the world to talk of me; what will it not say on seeing us together!

Adieu--oh! Calyste, my friend, if you stay another minute I shall burst into tears!"

Calyste withdrew, after holding out his hand to Beatrix and feeling for the second time that strange and deep sensation of a double pressure--full of seductive tingling.

"Sabine never knew how to stir my soul in that way," was the thought that a.s.sailed him in the corridor.

During the rest of the evening the Marquise de Rochefide did not cast three straight glances at Calyste, but there were many sidelong looks which tore of the soul of the man now wholly thrown back into his first, repulsed love.

When the baron du Guenic reached home the splendor of his apartments made him think of the sort of mediocrity of which Beatrix had spoken, and he hated his wealth because it could not belong to that fallen angel. When he was told that Sabine had long been in bed he rejoiced to find himself rich in the possession of a night in which to live over his emotions. He cursed the power of divination which love had bestowed upon Sabine. When by chance a man is adored by his wife, she reads on his face as in a book; she learns every quiver of its muscles, she knows whence comes its calmness, she asks herself the reason of the slightest sadness, seeking to know if haply the cause is in herself; she studies the eyes; for her the eyes are tinted with the dominant thought,--they love or they do not love. Calyste knew himself to be the object of so deep, so naive, so jealous a worship that he doubted his power to compose a cautious face that should not betray the change in his moral being.