The Human Comedy (48 page)

“Madame la duchesse,” he answered, “I fear I am clumsy in expressing my gratitude for your inspiring kindnesses. At this moment I wish for only one thing, the power to relieve your suffering.”

“Allow me to take this off, I feel too warm now,” she said, gracefully tossing aside the cushion that was covering her bare feet.

“Madame, in Asia your feet would be worth nearly ten thousand sequins.”

“A traveler’s compliment,” she said, smiling.

This witty woman took pleasure in casting the rough Montriveau into a conversation full of silliness, commonplaces, and nonsense, as Prince Charles might have done in battle with Napoleon. She took mischievous amusement in seeing the extent of this budding passion displayed by the number of foolish words drawn from this novice, whom she led little by little into a hopeless maze where she wished to leave him ashamed of himself. So she began by mocking this man, though it pleased her to make him forget the passage of time. The length of a first visit is often a compliment, but Armand was not informed of this. The famous traveler was in this boudoir for an hour, chatting about everything, saying nothing, feeling that he was merely an instrument being played upon by this woman, when she rose, sat down again, put the veil she had worn on her head around her neck, leaned on her elbow, did him the honor of a complete cure, and rang for someone to light the candles in her boudoir. Her absolute inaction was followed by the most graceful movements. She turned toward Monsieur de Montriveau and told him, in response to a confidence she had just drawn from him and which seemed of vivid interest to her, “You want to make fun of me by trying to make me think that you have never loved before. This is the great pretense of men with us. We believe them. Out of pure politeness! Do we not know what to expect of it ourselves? Where is the man who has not fallen in love at least once in his life? But you like to deceive us, and we allow you to do so, poor fools that we are, because your deceptions are still homage paid to the superiority of our feelings, which are all purity.”

These last words were spoken with a proud disdain that made this novice lover feel like a ball tossed to the bottom of a chasm, while the duchess was an angel soaring back to her private heaven.

“Good grief!” Armand de Montriveau exclaimed to himself. “How can I tell this wild creature that I love her?”

He had already told her twenty times, or rather the duchess had read it twenty times in his eyes and seen in the passion of this truly great man something to amuse her, something of interest to inject into her dull life, so she prepared with great cleverness to raise a certain number of fortifications around her for him to overcome before allowing him to enter her heart. As the plaything of her caprice, Montriveau would have to stay still while jumping from one difficulty to another, like one of those insects a child torments by making it jump from one finger to another, thinking that it is going forward while its mischievous executioner keeps it in place. Nonetheless, the duchess recognized with inexpressible happiness that this man of character was true to his word. Armand had, indeed, never loved. He was about to retreat, displeased with himself, still more displeased with her, but she was joyful to see him in a sulk, which she could dispel with a word, a glance, or a gesture.

“Will you come tomorrow evening?” she said to him. “I am going to the ball, but I will wait for you until ten o’clock.”

The marquis spent most of the following day sitting at the window of his study, smoking an indeterminate number of cigars. In this way he passed the hours until it was time to dress and go to the Hôtel de Langeais. It would have been a great pity for one of those who knew the magnificent value of this man to see him become so small, so trembling, to see the thought that might encompass worlds shrunk to the proportions of the boudoir of a “
petite-maîtresse
.” But he already felt so fallen in his happiness that to save his life, he would not have confided his love to any of his closest friends. Is there not always a touch of shame in the modesty a man feels when he loves, and perhaps in a woman a certain pride in his reduced standing? But for a host of motives of this kind, how shall we explain why women are nearly always the first to betray the secret of their love—a secret that perhaps bores them?

“Monsieur,” said the valet, “madame la duchesse is not presentable, she is dressing and begs you to wait for her here.”

Armand strolled around the salon, studying the taste reflected in the smallest details. He admired Madame de Langeais by admiring her things, which betrayed her habits before he could grasp in them her person and her ideas. After about an hour, the duchess emerged from her room without a sound. Montriveau turned, saw her walking toward him with the lightness of a shadow; he was shaken. She came to him, without saying in bourgeois fashion: “How do I look?” She was sure of herself, and her steady look conveyed: “I have embellished myself like this to please you.”

No one but an old fairy godmother to some unheralded princess could have wrapped around this coquettish woman’s neck the cloud of gauze whose bright folds floated to reveal the dazzling satin of her skin. The duchess was radiant. The pale blue of her gown, repeated in the flowers of her coiffure, seemed to lend body by the richness of its color to the fragile, ethereal forms. Gliding quickly toward Armand, she made the ends of her scarf, which had been hanging by her sides, float on the air, and the brave soldier could not then help but compare her to the pretty blue insects that hover above the water, among the flowers with which they seemed to mingle.

“I’ve made you wait,” she said, in a voice that women know how to use for the man they want to please.

“I would wait patiently for an eternity if I were sure to find a goddess as beautiful as you. But to speak to you of your beauty is no longer a compliment; nothing but adoration can touch you. Therefore, let me only kiss your scarf.”

“Oh, pooh!” she said, with a proud gesture. “I admire you enough to offer you my hand.”

And she held out to him her still-moist hand to kiss. A woman’s hand, when she emerges from her bath, has an ineffable soft freshness, a velvet smoothness that sends a tingle from the lips to the soul. And in a man in love, who is so sensual that love has filled his heart, this seemingly chaste kiss can stir formidable storms.

“Will you always give it to me like this?” the general humbly asked.

“Yes, but we shall stop here,” she said, smiling.

She sat down and seemed very clumsy pulling on her gloves, wishing to slide the narrow, delicate leather the length of her fingers, and looking at the same time at Monsieur de Montriveau, who was admiring first the duchess, then the grace of her repeated gestures.

“Oh, that’s quite right,” she said. “You were punctual, I love punctuality. His Majesty says it is the courtesy of kings, but to my mind, I think that it is the most respectful of flatteries a man can show a woman. Now is it not? Tell me . . .”

Then she gave him another look to express a seductive friendship, finding him mute with happiness and quite happy from these nothings. Ah! The duchess understood to perfection the art of being a woman, she knew admirably how to raise a man in his own esteem as he humbled himself to her and to reward him with empty flatteries at every step he took in his descent to sentimental inanities.

“You will never forget to come at nine o’clock.”

“No, but will you go to the ball every evening?”

“How do I know?” she answered, shrugging her shoulders with a childish gesture, as if to admit that she was utterly capricious and that a lover should take her as she was. “Besides,” she went on, “what difference does it make to you? You shall be my escort.”

“For this evening,” he said, “it would be difficult. I am not properly dressed.”

“It seems to me,” she answered, looking at him proudly, “that if someone must suffer from your dress, I must. But you should know, Monsieur Explorer, that the man whose arm I accept is always above fashion, no one would dare to criticize him. I see that you do not know the world, and I like you the more for it.”

And so she threw him into the pettiness of the world, attempting to initiate him into the vanities of a woman of fashion.

“If she wants to do something foolish for me,” Armand said to himself, “I would certainly be a simpleton to prevent her. She surely loves me, and of course she does not despise the world more than I do myself. So let us go to the ball!”

The duchess surely thought that in seeing the general follow her to the ball in boots and a black cravat, no one would hesitate to believe he was passionately in love with her. Happy to see the queen of this elegant world wishing to compromise herself for him, the general’s hope gave him wit. Sure to please, he displayed his ideas and feelings without the restraint that had deeply embarrassed him the evening before. This substantive, animated conversation was filled with those first confidences as sweet to speak as to hear. Was Madame de Langeais really seduced by his talk or had she devised this charming bit of coquetry? In any case, she looked mischievously at the clock when it struck midnight.

“Ah, you are making me miss the ball!” she said, expressing surprise and vexation that she had forgotten. Then she justified this exchange of pleasures by a smile that made Armand’s heart leap. “I really had promised Madame de Beauséant,” she added. “Everyone is expecting me.”

“Well then, go.”

“No—go on. I will stay. Your adventures in the Orient charm me. Tell me all about your life. I love to take part in the sufferings experienced by a man of courage, for I feel them, truly!” She played with her scarf, twisting it and tearing it by her impatient movements that seemed to speak of an inner discontent and deep feelings.

“We are worthless, we society women,” she went on. “Ah, we are contemptible creatures, selfish and frivolous. We know only how to bore ourselves with amusements. Not one of us understands what part to play in life. In the old days in France, women were benevolent lights, they lived to comfort those who wept, to encourage great virtue, to reward artists and animate their lives with noble thoughts. If the world has become so petty, the fault is ours. You make me hate this world and the ball. No, I am not sacrificing much for you.”

She finished destroying her scarf, like a child playing with a flower who ends by tearing off all its petals. She rolled it up and threw it away from her, so she could display her swan’s neck.

She rang the bell. “I will not be going out,” she said to her valet de chambre. Then she timidly turned her big blue eyes toward Armand, and by the fear they expressed he was meant to take this order for an admission, for a first and great favor. “You have surely had a difficult life,” she said, after a pause full of thought and with the tenderness that women often have in their voice, if not in their heart.

“No,” replied Armand. “Until today, I did not understand happiness.”

“You know it now?” she said, looking up at him with a sly, hypocritical glance.

“For me, from now on happiness is to see you, to hear you . . . Until today I have only suffered, and now I understand that I can be unhappy—”

“Enough, enough,” she said. “You must go, it is midnight, we must respect the conventions. I did not go to the ball and you were here. Let us not make people talk. Farewell. I do not know what I will say, but the migraine is a good friend and tells no lies.”

“Is there to be a ball tomorrow?” he asked.

“You will grow used to it, I think. Very well, yes, we will go to the ball again tomorrow night.”

Armand went home the happiest man in the world and came every evening to Madame de Langeais’s at the hour reserved for him by a sort of tacit agreement. It would be tiresome and redundant for a multitude of young men who have such fine memories to follow this story step by step, like following the poem of these secret conversations that were advanced or retarded at a woman’s whim—quarreling over words when feelings were too rampant or appealing to feelings when words no longer corresponded to her thought. So to mark this work in progress in the manner of Ulysses’s Penelope, perhaps we would have to mark its material expressions of feeling.

For instance, a few days after the first meeting between the duchess and Armand de Montriveau, the assiduous general had won and kept the right to kiss his mistress’s insatiable hands. Wherever Madame de Langeais went, Monsieur de Montriveau was inevitably seen to follow, so that certain persons jokingly called him “the duchess’s orderly.” Armand’s position had already made him the object of envy, jealousy, and enmity. Madame de Langeais had attained her goal. The marquis was just one of her numerous admirers and helped her to humiliate those who bragged of being in her good graces by setting him publicly a step above the others.

“Decidedly,” said Madame de Sérizy, “Monsieur de Montriveau is the man the duchess prefers.”

Who does not know what it means, in Paris, to be preferred by a woman? Things were thus perfectly in order. The stories people were pleased to tell about the general made him so formidable that the clever young men quietly abdicated their claims on the duchess and remained in her circle only to exploit the importance it reflected on them, to make use of her name, of her person, to put themselves on a better footing with certain powerful persons of the second order, who would be delighted to take a lover away from Madame de Langeais. The duchess had a shrewd enough eye to spot these desertions and alliances, and she was too proud to be duped by them. And as Monsieur le Prince de Talleyrand, who was very fond of her, used to say, she knew how to take renewed revenge by striking these
“morganatic” unions
with a double-edged remark. Her disdainful mockery contributed more than a little to making her feared and thought to be excessively clever. In this way, she consolidated her reputation for virtue while amusing herself with the secrets of others and never letting them penetrate her own. Nonetheless, after two months of regular attendance, she had a sort of vague fear deep in her soul that Monsieur de Montriveau still understood nothing of the Faubourg Saint-Germain sort of coquetry and took Parisian mannerisms seriously.