To Léon Gozlan, in sincere literary fellowship
THERE are two very different parties to be found at nearly every Parisian ball or rout. First the official party, peopled by its invitees, a fine crowd of very bored people. Everyone poses for his neighbor. Most of the young women have come solely for the sake of one person. Once each is satisfied that for this person she is the most beautiful woman of all, and that a few others have formed the same opinion, then—after exchanging a few trivial sentences (“Will you be leaving soon for La Crampade?” “Didn’t Madame de Portenduère sing beautifully!” “Who is that little woman with so many diamonds?”) or tossing out a handful of epigrammatic remarks of the sort that cause fleeting pleasure and lasting wounds—the crowd thins, the indifferent guests go on their way, the candles burn down into their rings. But with this the mistress of the house holds back a few artists, people of good cheer, friends, saying, “Stay, we’re having a late supper among ourselves.” They gather in the little drawing room. Here the second, true party begins, a party in which, as under the ancien régime, everyone hears what is said, in which the conversation is shared in by all, in which each is obliged to display his wit and contribute to the public amusement. All is in high relief; openhearted laughter replaces the starchy airs that, in society, dull the prettiest faces. In short, where the rout ends, pleasure begins. The rout, that dreary review of fashionable fineries, that parade of well-dressed self-infatuations, is one of those English inventions currently mechanifying the other nations. England seems determined to see the entire world bored just as she is, and just as bored as she. This second party is thus, in France, in a few houses, a welcome affirmation of the spirit that was once ours in this ebullient land. But alas, few houses thus affirm, and for a very simple reason: If people rarely take part in these suppers today, it is because there have never been, under any regime, fewer people settled, established, and secure than under the reign of Louis Philippe, in which the Revolution has begun a second time, legally. Everyone strives toward some goal or scurries after fortune. Time has become the dearest commodity on the market, and so no one can indulge in the prodigious prodigality of returning home a day after leaving, with no plans save to sleep late. Thus, that second party is found today only in the homes of women endowed with the means to open their salons; and since July 1830, such women can be counted on the fingers of one hand in Paris. Braving the mute opposition of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, two or three women, among them Madame la Marquise d’Espard and Mademoiselle des Touches, have declined to abandon the influence they once held over Paris and have not closed their doors.
The salon of Mademoiselle des Touches, celebrated in Paris, is the last refuge for the lost art of French conversation, with its hidden profundity, its thousand digressions, its exquisite politesse. There you will still find manners of genuine grace, despite all the conventions of etiquette; you will find talk enjoyed with abandon, despite the innate reserve of the comme il faut set; above all, you will find noble and magnanimous ideas. There no one thinks of keeping his thoughts to himself with a mind to penning a drama, and in an anecdote no one sees a book to be written. In short, the hideous skeleton of a desperate, moribund literature never walks through the door when a felicitous jape is made or an interesting subject raised. The memory of one such evening has remained with me particularly, less for a tale told in confidence, by which the illustrious de Marsay laid bare one of the deepest recesses of the female heart, than for the observations his account inspired concerning the changes wrought in French womankind since the fateful July revolution.
That evening, chance had assembled a small crowd whose indisputable talents have earned them reputations all across Europe. This is not an appeal to French national pride, for there were more than a few foreigners among us. But it was not in fact the most famous who shone brightest that evening. Ingenious repartee, subtle observations, sparkling gibes, pictures painted with brilliant clarity came thick and fast in a spontaneous, effervescent rush, offered up without arrogance or artifice, spoken with sincerity, and savored with delight. Above all, the guests shone by their refinement and their inventiveness, which were nothing short of artistic. You will find elegant manners elsewhere in Europe—you will find cordiality, bonhomie, sophistication—but only in Paris, in this salon, and in those of whom I’ve just spoken, does there flourish the special wit that gives all these social virtues a pleasing, multifaceted unity, a sort of fluvial momentum by which that profusion of musings, aphorisms, tales, and pages from history wend their way in an easy and untrammeled flow. Paris alone, the capital of taste, possesses the secret that makes of conversation a joust, in which every temperament is encapsulated in a quip, in which each has his say, all his experience condensed in a word, in which all find amusement, refreshment, and exercise. And only there, too, will you truly exchange your ideas; there you will not, like the dolphin in the fable, carry a monkey on your shoulders; there you will be understood, with no danger of wagering gold against pot metal. Secrets artfully betrayed, exchanges both light and deep, everything undulates, spins, changes luster and color with each passing sentence. Keen judgments and breathless narrations follow one upon the next. Every eye listens, every gesture is a question, every glance an answer. There, in a word, all is perspicuity and reflection. Never did the phenomenon of speech, to which, when carefully studied and skillfully wielded, an actor or storyteller owes his glory, cast so overpowering a spell on me. I was not the only one bewitched by this magic; it was a delicious evening for all of us. The conversation soon fell into an anecdotal mood, its precipitous course ferrying some curious confidences, several portraits, a thousand follies, making that delightful improvisation utterly untranslatable. But if these things are told with all their candor intact, all their natural forthrightness, all their illusory aimlessness, perhaps you will fully grasp the charm of a true French party, captured at the moment when the sweetest companionship makes everyone forget his own interests, his exclusive self-love, or, if you like, his pretensions.
Toward two in the morning, our supper winding down, no one was left at the table but intimate friends, tempered by fifteen years’ frequentation, or people of great taste, well bred and worldly. By an unspoken, unquestioned convention, everyone renounced his importance at supper. Absolute equality was the order of the night, though there was no one who was not entirely proud to be who he was. Mademoiselle des Touches keeps her guests at the table until they go on their way, having often observed the great mental change that takes place when one is forced to move. Between the dining room and the drawing room, the spell is broken. According to Sterne, the ideas of a freshly shaved author are not what they were just a few minutes before. If Sterne is right, could we not make so bold as to claim that the mood of a crowd of tablemates is no longer their mood when they have returned to the drawing room? Gone is the headiness of the atmosphere; no more does the eye gaze over the gleaming disarray of dessert, bathed in the benevolence, the salutary idleness of mind that settles over a man with a nicely filled belly, comfortably ensconced in one of those well-cushioned chairs that can be had nowadays. Perhaps people speak more freely over dessert, in the company of fine wines, come that delicious moment when each can rest his elbow on the table and his head on his hand—and not only speak but listen as well. Digestion nearly always sharpens the mind, but it can be silent or voluble, depending on the temperament. Everyone finds his own pleasure. Let us take this preamble as necessary to prepare you for the charms of a story told by a famous man, now deceased, portraying the innocent Jesuitism of womankind with the finesse peculiar to those who have seen much of life, and which makes of statesmen such captivating raconteurs, when, like the Princes de Talleyrand and von Metternich, they consent to recount their experiences.
De Marsay, named prime minister six months before, had already given evidence of superior abilities. Although his longtime acquaintances were not surprised to see him display all the varied talents and aptitudes of a statesman, one might well wonder if he knew himself to be a great politician from the start or if he evolved in the heat of circumstances. This very question had just been put to him, in a philosophical frame of mind, by a man of intelligence and discernment whom he had named as prefect, a veteran journalist whose admiration for de Marsay was untainted by that vinegary dash of disparagement by which, in Paris, one superior man exculpates himself for admiring another.
“Was there, in your earlier existence, some deed, some thought, some desire that taught you the nature of your vocation?” asked Émile Blondet. “For surely, like Newton, we all have our apple, revealing our true calling as it falls.”
“There was,” answered de Marsay. “I’ll tell you the story.”
Pretty women, political dandies, artists, old men—de Marsay’s private circle—everyone then sat back, each in his own pose, and fixed their eyes on the prime minister. Need it be said that the servants had all withdrawn, that the doors had been shut and the portieres pulled? So deep was the silence that the coachmen’s muted conversation could be heard from the courtyard, and the stamping and snorting of the horses, impatient to be back in their stables.
“One quality alone makes a statesman, my friends,” said the minister, playing with his gold- and mother-of-pearl knife, “an unfailing self-mastery, a talent for grasping the full import of an event, however fortuitous it may seem—in short, the possession of a cool-headed, disinterested self deep inside, who observes, as if from without, all the movements of our life, our passions, our emotions, and who in all things whispers to us the decree of a sort of moral multiplication table.”
“Which explains why there are so few statesmen in France,” said old Lord Dudley.
“Where the sentiments are concerned, this is a dreadful thing,” the minister resumed. “And so, when that phenomenon appears in a young man—think of Richelieu: a letter informs him that his benefactor Concini will be murdered the next morning at ten, and he sleeps until noon!—when that phenomenon occurs in a young man, say Pitt or Napoleon, then he is a monster. I myself became that monstrosity at a very early age, and all thanks to a woman.”
“I would have thought,” said Madame de Montcornet, with a smile, “that we women unmade many more politicians than we made.”
“The monster of which I speak is a monster only because he resists you,” replied de Marsay, archly bowing his head.
“If this is to be a tale of amorous adventure,” said the Baronne de Nucingen, “may I ask that it not be interrupted by incidental reflections?”
“Reflection has no place in such things!” cried Joseph Bridau.
“I was seventeen years old,” de Marsay resumed. “The Restoration was beginning in earnest, and my old friends will remember the impetuous young hothead I was in those days. I was in love for the first time, and, I can say this today, I was one of the prettiest young men in Paris. I had youth, beauty, two advantages conferred by chance, and of which we are as proud as if they were hard-won. I will hold my tongue concerning the others. Like all young men, I loved a woman six years older than I. None of you,” he said, glancing around the table, “can guess her name nor recognize her. Only Ronquerolles, at the time, saw through my secret; he kept it well. I would have feared his smile, but he has left us,” said the minister, looking around him.
“He declined the invitation to supper,” said Madame de Sérizy.
“For six months, possessed by my love, unable to grasp that my passion was becoming my master, I gave myself over to those charming idolatries that are both the triumph and the fragile joy of youth. I kept her old gloves, I drank an infusion of the flowers she had worn, I rose at night to go and gaze up at her windows. My head grew light on inhaling the perfume she had adopted. I was a thousand leagues from the realization that every woman is a stove with a marble top.”
“Oh! Spare us your horrible judgments, won’t you?” said Madame de Camps with a smile.
“I believe I would have poured withering scorn on any philosopher who published that terrible, profoundly true thought,” de Marsay went on. “You all know too well what’s what for me to say anything more of it. Those few words will remind you of your own follies. A grande dame if ever there was one, and a childless widow—oh! nothing was missing!—my idol closeted herself away to stitch a mark into my linens with her hair; in short, she answered my follies with follies of her own. And how not to believe in passion, when it is vouchsafed by folly? We devoted our every thought to concealing so perfect and so beautiful a love from the eyes of the world, and we succeeded. Oh, what charms did our escapades not possess? Of her I will tell you nothing: Perfect back then, still today she is considered one of the most beautiful women of Paris, but in those days people would have signed their own death warrant for one glance from her. Her fortune was still quite sufficient for a woman worshipped and in love, but scarcely suited to her name, now that the Restoration had granted it a new luster. Things being as they were, I was too full of myself to think of being wary. Although my jealousy had the strength of a hundred and twenty Othellos, that redoubtable sentiment slumbered inside me, like the gold in a nugget. I would have ordered my servant to beat me with a stick had I been so ignoble as to doubt the purity of that angel, so frail and so strong, so blond and so naïve, pure, artless, whose adorably docile blue eyes let my gaze plunge straight into them, all the way to her heart. Not one iota of reticence in her manner, in her eyes or her words; always white, fresh, and open to her lover, like the Oriental lily in the Song of Songs! . . . Ah! my friends!” the minister cried despondently, a young man once more. “One has to crack one’s head very hard against the marble top to drive out that poetry!”
This heartfelt lament struck a chord among the tablemates and goaded their curiosity, already so ably aroused.
“Every morning, mounted on that fine Sultan you’d sent me from England,” he said to Lord Dudley. “I used to ride past her calèche, the horses deliberately slowed to a walk, and read the daily message written in the flowers of her bouquet, in case the opportunity for a quick exchange of words was denied us. Although we saw each other nearly every evening in society, and although she wrote me every day, we had adopted a certain code of conduct to deceive inquisitive eyes and thwart untoward remarks. Never looking at each other, avoiding each other’s company, speaking ill of each other, preening and boasting of oneself, or posing as a spurned suitor, none of those old ruses can match this: each lover openly admitting a false passion for an indifferent person and an air of indifference for the genuine idol. If two lovers choose to play that game, the world will always be duped, but they must have absolute faith in each other. Her chosen surrogate was a man then in favor, a man of the court, austere and devout, whom she never received at home. That comedy was performed for the benefit of fools and drawing rooms, and they duly laughed. Never did the question of marriage arise between us: A difference of six years might well have given her pause; she knew nothing of my fortune, which, as a matter of principle, I have always kept to myself. For my part, charmed by her wit, her ways, the breadth of her acquaintances, her worldliness, I would have married her without a second thought. Nevertheless, I liked her reserve. Had she been the first to raise the subject of marriage, I might well have found something vulgar about that ineffable soul. Six full months, a diamond of the finest water! Six good months: There is my allotted share of love in this world. One morning, laid low by the fever that accompanies an oncoming cold, I wrote her a note to postpone one of those secret sessions of merrymaking that take place beneath the roofs of Paris, invisible as pearls in the sea. No sooner had the letter been dispatched than I found myself beset by remorse. ‘She won’t believe I’m genuinely ill!’ I reflected. She often played at jealousy and suspicion. When jealousy is real,” said de Marsay, interrupting himself, “it is the unmistakable sign of an exclusive love.”
“Why is that?” Princess de Cadignan briskly asked.
“True, exclusive love,” said de Marsay, “produces a sort of bodily inertia, in harmony with our meditative mood. The mind then complicates everything, it tortures itself, it conceives wild fancies, it transforms them into realities and torments, and such a jealousy is as delightful as it is distressing.”
A foreign minister smiled, glimpsing the truth of this observation by the light of a memory.
“Besides, I asked myself, how could I say no to a moment of bliss?” said de Marsay, returning to his tale. “Was it not better to go with a raging fever? Besides, on learning I was ill she might have come running to my side and compromised herself. I summoned my strength, wrote a second letter, and carried it myself, for my valet had gone off. We were separated by the river, I had all of Paris to cross, but finally, at a suitable distance from her home, I spied an errand boy and enjoined him to have the letter brought up to her straightaway, and I had the fine idea of passing by her front door in a fiacre to see if she might not by chance receive the two messages at once. Just as I pulled up, at two o’clock, the main door is being opened for a carriage, and whose carriage is it, do you suppose? The surrogate’s!” Fifteen years have gone by . . . and yet, as he tells it to you now, the world-weary orator, the minister hardened by long experience with matters of state, still feels a tumult in his heart and a fire in his diaphragm. “An hour later, I passed by again: The carriage was still in the courtyard! My note must have stayed with the porter. Finally, at half past three, the carriage set off, affording me an opportunity to study my rival’s expression: He was somber, not a trace of a smile on his face; but he was in love, and no doubt it was some private concern that was troubling him. I went to our meeting place, and the queen of my heart comes as well, and I find her calm, pure, serene. Here I must confess that I’ve always thought Othello not only a fool but also a man without taste. Only a half Negro could do such a thing. Indeed, Shakespeare sensed this quite clearly, since he titled his play The Moor of Venice. The sight of a woman we adore comes as such a balm for the heart that it can only dispel all our sorrow, our doubts, and our grievances. My anger subsided, my smile returned. At my present age, such a demeanor would be a vile dissimulation, but at that time, it simply reflected my youth and my love. All jealousy stilled, I found the strength to observe her. My ill health was plain to see, and the dreadful doubts tormenting me had aggravated it still further. At last I found an opportune moment to slip in these words: ‘So you had no callers this morning?’—justifying the question by my fear that she might have made other plans for her day on reading my first note.
“‘Ah!’ she said, ‘only a man could have such ideas! Do you really believe I could think of anything but your misery? Until that second word came, I did nothing but try to find some way of coming to see you.’
“‘And you were alone?’
“‘Alone,’ she said, looking at me with an air of the most perfect innocence. It must have been just such a look that drove the Moor to do in Desdemona. As she was the sole resident of her hôtel particulier, that word was clearly an ignoble lie. One single falsehood shatters the perfect confidence that is, for some at least, the very foundation of love. In order to grasp what was taking place within me at that moment, let us imagine that we each have an inner self of which the visible us is the sheath, and that this self, brilliant as light, is also as delicate as a shadow . . . well, that fine me was then garbed in crepe for all eternity. Yes, I felt a cold, fleshless hand drape the shroud of experience over me, sentence me to the eternal mourning that a first betrayal injects into our soul. Lowering my eyes lest she note my distress, I steadied myself with this prideful thought: ‘If she is untrue to you, she is unworthy of you!’ I blamed the sudden redness of my face and the tears in my eyes on an abrupt aggravation of my symptoms, and that sweet creature insisted on accompanying me home, with the coach shades carefully drawn. On the way, her tenderness and solicitude would have deceived that same Moor of Venice I’ve been using as a point of comparison. Indeed, as any intelligent spectator can see, if that overgrown child hesitates two seconds longer, he will be begging Desdemona’s forgiveness. From which we may conclude that killing a woman is truly the act of a child! She wept as we parted, distraught that she couldn’t minister to me herself. She wished she were my valet, whose happiness was for her a subject of undying jealousy—and all this said with such turns of phrase, oh! precisely like what a happy Clarissa would have written. Even in the prettiest and most angelic of women, there is always an ape!”
Here the women lowered their eyes, as if wounded by that cruel truth, so cruelly put.
“I will say nothing to you of the night that ensued, nor the week,” de Marsay resumed. “It was then that I realized I was a politician.”
This quip was so neatly said that a gesture of admiration escaped us all.
“Reviewing, in a diabolical mood, all the cruel vengeances one can exact on a woman,” de Marsay continued, “and, since we were in love, some of them were terrible indeed, and irreparable, I felt only contempt for myself, I felt vulgar, little by little I was drawing up a horrible code, the code of indulgence. When we seek vengeance for the sake of a woman, are we not acknowledging that there is only one woman for us, that we cannot do without her? And in that case, is vengeance the way to win her back? If one does not think her indispensable, if there are others, then why not allow her the same right to change that we claim for ourselves? This, let me be clear, applies only to extramarital passion; otherwise it would do harm to society, and nothing better proves the necessity of an unbreakable marriage bond than the instability of passion. The two sexes must be chained, like the fierce beasts they are, by unyielding laws, deaf and mute. Take away vengeance, and betrayal is of no import in love. Those who believe there is only one woman in all the world for them must choose vengeance, and in that case there is only one, Othello’s. Here is mine.”
These last words provoked in us all that slight stirring in our seats that journalists represent in parliamentary speeches with the word commotion.
“Cured of my cold and of absolute, pure, divine love, I inaugurated an adventure with a most charming heroine, her beauty of a sort perfectly counter to that of my fickle angel. I was careful not to break it off with that woman, that brilliant, unflappable actress, for I’m not sure that true love holds any pleasure so sweet as those afforded by faithlessness. Such duplicity is as good as virtue. I do not speak for you Englishwomen, milady.” This last comment the minister interjected sotto voce to Lady Barimore, Lord Dudley’s daughter. “In short, I tried to remain the same lover as before. My new angel required a keepsake fashioned from my locks. I thus called on a skilled artist who lived, at the time, on rue Boucher. This man had the monopoly on capillary souvenirs, and I provide his address for those who have little hair of their own: He has it in all colors and of every sort. Once he had heard me describe what I wished, he showed me his wares, among which I saw works of patience surpassing anything folktales attribute to fairies, any prisoner’s pastime. He told me of the caprices and fashions that governed the hair-worker’s trade. ‘For the past year,’ he said, ‘the rage has been to mark linens with a stitching of hair. Happily, I have a fine collection of hair and some excellent seamstresses.’ Suspicion takes hold of me on hearing these words. I pull out my handkerchief and say, ‘Then this was done in your establishment and with false hair?’ He looked at the handkerchief and said, ‘Oh! She was a most difficult customer, she insisted that the match with her own hair be perfect. My wife stitched those handkerchiefs herself. You have here, monsieur, one of the finest pieces ever produced.’ Before this last ray of light, I might still have believed in something, I might still have paid heed to a lady’s word. I left that place still believing in pleasure, but where love was concerned, I had become as atheistic as a mathematician. Two months later, I was sitting alongside that exquisite woman, in her boudoir, on her divan. I held one of her hands clasped in my own, and such lovely hands they were; we were scaling the Alps of emotion, picking the prettiest flowers, pulling the petals from daisies (one always ends up pulling the petals from daisies, even in a drawing room, without a daisy in sight). At the peak of tenderness, when one is most in love, love is so aware of its fleetingness that each lover feels an imperious need to ask, ‘Do you love me? Will you love me forever?’ I seized that elegiac moment, so warm, so florid, so radiant, to make her tell her most wonderful lies, in that glittering language of exquisite poetry and purple prose peculiar to love. Charlotte laid out all her prettiest falsehoods: She couldn’t live without me; I was the only man for her in all the world; she feared she might bore me, as my presence stripped her of her wit; when I was beside her, her every faculty turned solely to love; she was too full of tenderness not to be frightened; for six months she’d been seeking the manner to bind me to her eternally, and for that, the good Lord above alone knew the way—in short, she made of me her god!”
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.
“The wives of today’s princes are mere creatures of fashion, obliged to share the expense of a box at the theater with their girlfriends, a box that not even the favor of the king could enlarge by a quarter inch, confined to the murky waters between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, neither entirely noble nor wholly bourgeois,” said the Marquise de Rochefide in disgust.
“Woman’s role has been inherited by the press,” cried Rastignac. “Once every woman was a living gazette, a font of delicious slanders cast in beautiful language. Today all our gazettes are written, and written in a jargon that changes every three years, little journals amusing as undertakers, light as the lead in their souls. French conversations are couched in revolutionary babble from one end of France to the other, in long columns printed in hôtels particulier where the grind of a printing press has replaced the elegant circles that once scintillated there.”
“The death knell of high society is sounding, do you hear?” said a Russian prince. “And the first toll is that modern expression of yours, ‘the creature of fashion’!”
“Quite right, prince,” said de Marsay. “This woman, fallen from the ranks of the nobility or hoisted up from the bourgeoisie, this woman who comes from anywhere at all, even the provinces, is the very image of our times, one final exemplum of good taste, wit, grace, and distinction, all bound up together but shrunken. We will see no more grandes dames in France, but for a long time to come there will be creatures of fashion, elected by public opinion to a feminine high chamber, and who will be for the fair sex what the gentleman is in England.”
“And they call that progressing!” said Mademoiselle des Touches. “Where is the progress, I’d like to know.”
“Ah! Here it is,” said Madame de Nucingen. “In times past a woman could have the voice of a fishmonger, the walk of a grenadier, the brow of a brazen courtesan, cowlicks in her hair, an oversize foot, a fleshy hand, and she was still a grande dame, but today, even if she were a Montmorency, assuming the demoiselles de Montmorency could ever be thus, she would not be a creature of fashion.”
“But what do you mean by creature of fashion?” Count Adam Laginski asked, ingenuously.
“She is a modern creation, a deplorable triumph of the electoral system applied to the fair sex,” said the minister. “Every revolution has its word, a word that summarizes and portrays it.”
“It’s true,” said the Russian prince, who had come to Paris in hopes of making his name in the literary world. “An explanation of certain words that have been added to your beautiful language over the centuries would be a magnificent history in itself. Organization, for instance, is a word of the Empire and contains all of Napoleon within it.”
“But none of this tells me what a creature of fashion might be,” cried the young Pole.
“Well, let me explain,” Émile Blondet said to Count Adam. “You’re out strolling the streets of Paris on a fine afternoon. It’s past two o’clock but not yet five. You see a woman approaching, and your first glimpse of her is like the preface of a wonderful book, it hints at a whole world of fine and elegant things. Like a botanist combing hill and dale for exceptional specimens, you have finally chanced onto a rare flower in the midst of the Parisian vulgarities. She may be accompanied by two very distinguished men, at least one of them decorated; if not, some domestic in town clothes is following ten steps behind her. She wears neither bright colors nor openwork stockings, nor too finely wrought a belt buckle, nor pantaloons with embroidered cuffs ruffling about her ankles. You will observe on her feet either prunella flats with laces crisscrossed over a stocking of exceedingly fine cotton or solid gray silk, or perhaps lace-up boots of the most exquisite simplicity. A rather pretty fabric of moderate price will draw your eye to her gown, whose cut surprises more than one woman of the bourgeoisie: It’s nearly always a fitted coat closed by knots and prettily edged with a braid or a discreet cord. This stranger has her own particular way with a shawl or a mantle; she can envelop herself from her neck to the small of her back, devising a sort of shell that would make a turtle of any bourgeoise, but beneath which this woman shows you the shapeliest curves, even as she veils them. How does she do it? This secret she keeps to herself, unprotected though it be by any patent. Her walk creates a certain concentric and harmonious movement that sets her innocent or dangerous forms wriggling under the fabric, like the noontime garter snake beneath the green netting of the quivering grass. Is it to an angel or a demon that she owes the graceful undulation that plays beneath the long cloak of black silk, that stirs the lace at its hem, that fills the air with an ethereal balm I might call the breeze of the Parisienne? About her arms, around her waist and throat, you will see the work of a science of drapery that bends even the most resistant cloth to its will and find yourself thinking of the ancient Mnemosyne. Ah! How perfectly she understands, if you will allow me this expression, the cut of the walk! See how she thrusts out her foot, molding the dress with such chaste precision that she excites in the passing stranger a wonderment spiked with desire but restrained by a profound respect! When an Englishwoman attempts that gait, she resembles a grenadier charging on a redoubt. None but the Parisienne knows the fine art of walking—hence the asphalt on our sidewalks, the least the city could do for her. This beautiful stranger does not jostle or shove: when she wishes to pass someone by, she waits with proud modesty for room to be made. The distinction peculiar to women of breeding is most clearly displayed by her way of holding the shawl or mantle crossed over her breast. Even as she walks, her air is tranquil and dignified, like the Madonnas of Raphael in their frames. Her manner, at once serene and aloof, compels even the most insolent dandy to step aside for her. Her hat is remarkably simple and adorned with crisp ribbons. There may be flowers, but the most expert of these women will have only bows. Feathers require a carriage, flowers too insistently attract the eye. Beneath that hat you will see the fresh, rested face of a woman who is confident but not smug, who looks at nothing and sees everything, whose vanity, jaded by ceaseless gratification, imbues her face with an indifference that arouses the interest of all who behold her. She knows she is being studied, she knows that nearly everyone, even the ladies, will turn around for a second look when she passes. Thus does she drift through Paris like gossamer, white and pure. This magnificent species prefers to keep to the warmest latitudes, the cleanest longitudes of Paris; you will find her between the 10th and 110th arcades on rue de Rivoli; along the equator of the Grands Boulevards, from the parallel of the Passage des Panoramas, where the products of the Indies abound, where industry’s freshest creations flourish, to the cape of the Madeleine; in those lands least sullied by the bourgeoisie, between the 30th and 150th house on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In the winter, she sojourns on the Terrasse des Feuillants, in the Jardin des Tuileries, and not on the asphalt sidewalk that adjoins it. When the weather is fine, she glides along the allée des Champs-Élysées, within the bounds of place Louis XV on the east, avenue de Marigny on the west, the roadway on the south, and the gardens of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré on the north. Never will you encounter such a fine feminine specimen in the hyperborean regions of rue Saint-Denis, nor in the Kamchatkas of muddy, small, or commercial streets; never anywhere at all in bad weather. These flowers of Paris bloom when the weather is Oriental; they perfume the promenades, and then, after five o’clock, close up like morning glories. Those you will see later in the evening, vaguely similar in their air, doing their best to mimic them, are mere creatures of passion; only the beautiful stranger, your Beatrice for a day, is the true creature of fashion. A foreigner, my dear count, may well find it difficult to spot the details by which seasoned observers distinguish the one from the other, for women are gifted actresses indeed. To a Parisian, however, those differences fairly cry out aloud: ill-concealed clasps, dingy laces showing through a gaping slit, frayed shoes, re-dyed hat ribbons, a billowing gown, an over-starched bustle. You will observe a sort of effort in the calculated droop of her eyelid. There is something conventional in her manner. A bourgeoise, on the other hand, could never be confused with a creature of fashion: She sets her off wonderfully, she explains the spell that your stranger has cast on you. The bourgeoise has things to do, goes out in all weather, scurries, comes, goes, looks, wonders whether to enter a shop or go on. Where the creature of fashion knows precisely what she wants and what she is doing, the bourgeoise dithers, hitches up her skirts to step over a gutter, drags a child beside her, keeping a vigilant eye out for oncoming coaches; she is a mother in public and chats with her daughter; she has money in her shopping bag and openwork stockings on her legs; in the winter she wears a boa over a fur cape, in the summer a shawl and a scarf; the bourgeoise has a remarkable talent for vestimentary redundancy. As for your beautiful stranger, you will see her again at the Théâtre des Italiens, at the Opéra, at a ball, where she will show herself in such a different form that you will swear the two incarnations have nothing in common. She has emerged from her mysterious garments, as the butterfly from its silken cocoon. Like some delicacy, she serves up before your enchanted eyes the forms that her bodice only hinted at that morning. At the theater she is never encountered beyond the mezzanine, save at the Italiens. Here you will have the leisure to study the trained indolence of her movements. That adorable tricksteress exploits all of womankind’s little ploys with an innocence that forbids any suspicion of guile or premeditation. If she has a regally beautiful hand, even the shrewdest observer will believe it was vitally important that she twirl, plump, or push back the ringlet or curl she is caressing. If she has something splendid in her profile, you will feel sure she is offering her neighbor remarks full of irony or grace as she turns her head to produce that magical three-quarters-profile effect, so dear to the great painters, which lets the light fall over the cheek, clearly delineates the nose, illuminates the pink of the nostrils, cuts cleanly across the forehead, preserves the gaze’s bright spark while directing it into space, and dots the white roundness of the chin with a point of light. If she has a pretty foot, she will throw herself down on a divan with all the coquetry of a cat in the sun, her legs outstretched before her, and in her pose you will see nothing other than the most delicious model of weariness ever offered up to the art of statuary. No one is at ease in fine clothes like the creature of fashion; nothing troubles her poise. Never will you catch her, as you will a bourgeoise, tugging up a recalcitrant shoulder strap, tugging down an insubordinate whalebone, verifying that the fichu is discharging its mission as the faithless guardian of two dazzling white treasures, nor glancing at herself in mirrors to be sure that her coiffure is obeying its confinement to quarters. Her appearance is ever in harmony with her character; she’s had the time to examine herself, to choose only what best becomes her, having long since determined what does not become her at all. You will not see her later in the throngs pouring out of the theater; she vanishes before the curtain comes down. If by chance she appears, calm and noble, on the red steps of the staircase, she is then in the throes of the deepest emotion. She is there on command, she has a furtive glance to give, a promise to receive. It may well be to flatter the vanity of a slave whom she sometimes obeys that she is slowly making her way down those stairs. Should you encounter her at a ball or a party, you will drink in the honey, artificial or natural, of her lilting voice; you will be delighted by her empty words—empty but endowed with the force of deep thought by an inimitable artifice.”
“Does a creature of fashion not need a fine mind?” asked the Polish count.
“More than anything else, she must have very fine taste,” answered Madame d’Espard.
“And in France, to have taste is to have something more than a fine mind,” said the Russian.
“This woman’s conversation is the triumph of a very plastic art,” Blondet went on. “You won’t know what she said, but you will be enchanted. She will have nodded her head, or sweetly raised her white shoulders, she will have gilded an insignificant sentence with the smile of a charming little pout, or she will have expressed an entire Voltairean epigram in one ah!, one hmm?, one well! A cock of the head will be her most vigorous interrogation; she will impart meaning to the movement by which she tosses a vinaigrette attached to her finger by a ring. With her all is artificial grandeur, wrought by magnificent trifles; she nobly lets her hand droop, hanging over the arm of a chair, like dewdrops on the rim of a flower, and with this everything has been said, she has pronounced an unappealable judgment, eloquent enough for the most insensitive soul. She has heard you out, she has afforded you the opportunity to sparkle, and—I appeal to your modesty—such moments are all too rare.”
The young Pole’s wide-eyed stare sent all the tablemates into gales of laughter.
“With a bourgeoise, you haven’t been chatting half an hour before she ushers in her husband, in one form or another,” Blondet went on, grave as ever. “But even if you know your creature of fashion to be married, she will have the delicacy to conceal her husband so utterly that it will require a labor worthy of Columbus to discover him. Often you can’t manage it single-handed. If you’ve found no one to question, at the end of the evening you’ll see her staring significantly at a bemedalled middle-aged man, who will nod and go out. She’s asked for her coach, and now she goes on her way. You’re not her one and only, but you’ve been near her, and you go to bed beneath the gilded paneling of a delicious dream that will perhaps continue when Sleep, with her mighty finger, opens the ivory gates to the temple of fantasies. At home, no creature of fashion can be seen before four o’clock, when she receives visitors. She is no fool: She will always keep you waiting. You will find the signs of good taste all around you; luxury is her constant companion, replaced as necessary. You will see nothing under glass domes, nor the shapeless mass of a wrap hung on the wall like a feedbag. The stairway will be warm. Everywhere flowers will gladden your gaze—flowers, the only gift she accepts, and from only a few people. Bouquets live for just a day, give pleasure, and must then be changed; for her they are, as in the Orient, a symbol, a promise. You will see a display of costly and fashionable bagatelles, but nothing of the museum or the curiosity shop. You will discover her by the fireside, on her love seat, and she will greet you without rising. Her conversation will no longer be that of the ball. There she was your creditor; at home, her wit owes you a debt of pleasure. Creatures of fashion master these nuances wonderfully. She loves in you a man who will broaden her social circle, the sole object of care and concern that creatures of fashion permit themselves today. Thus, to keep you in her drawing room, she will prove a delightful flirt. In this, above all else, you sense the terrible isolation of women today, you understand why they want a little world of their own, for which they serve as a constellation. Without generalities, no conversation is possible.”
“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.”
“There’s nothing so fearsome as the revolt of a sheep,” said de Marsay.
“It would be too awful to let us go with that horrible image in our memories,” said Madame de Portenduère. “It will be in my dreams.”
“And how will Monsieur de Marsay’s first love be punished?” asked Lord Dudley, with a smile.
“An Englishman gibes with velveted claws,” said Blondet.
“I’ll let Monsieur Bianchon tell us,” de Marsay answered, looking at me. “He was witness to her final moments.”
“I was,” I said, “and her death is one of the most beautiful I know. The duke and I had spent the night at her bedside, for her lung fever had attained its final stages and no hope was left. She’d been given last rites the day before. The duke soon fell asleep. Waking toward four in the morning, the duchess gave me a friendly gesture of the most touching sort, with a smile, enjoining me not to disturb him—and this when she was about to take her last breath! She’d grown extraordinarily thin, but her face and her features were, as always, truly sublime. In her pallor, her skin was like porcelain with a light glowing behind it. Her bright eyes and flushed cheeks stood out against that languidly elegant cast and an imposing tranquillity radiated from her face. She seemed full of pity for the duke, her emotion unbounded as her final moments approached. The silence was total. Softly lit by a lamp, the room looked precisely like every patient’s bedchamber at the moment of death. Just then the clock struck. The duke awoke, distraught at having drifted off. I did not see the infuriated gesture by which he expressed his regret at closing his eyes on his wife in one of the last moments granted her on this earth, but surely anyone other than she would have misread it. A man of state, preoccupied with the interests of France, the duke had a thousand of those unguarded eccentricities for which a genius is often thought mad, but whose explanation is to be found in his mind’s exquisite nature and the labors required of it. He sat down in an armchair beside his wife’s bed and stared into her eyes. She reached out weakly, gave her husband’s arm a faint squeeze, and in a voice at once quiet and full of emotion, said, ‘My poor friend, who will understand you now?’ Then she died, her eyes still looking into his.”
“The doctor’s tales always move us so deeply,” said the Duc de Rhétoré.
“But so sweetly,” added Mademoiselle des Touches.
“Ah! Madame,” the doctor replied, “I have some truly terrible stories in my repertoire, but every tale has its own appointed time in a conversation, as Chamfort so neatly admonished the Duc de Fronsac: ‘Ten bottles of champagne stand between this moment and that little jest of yours.’”
“But it’s two in the morning, and the story of Rosina has prepared us,” said the mistress of the house.
“Go on, Monsieur Bianchon! . . .” he was urged from all sides.
The doctor made a conciliatory gesture, and silence fell once again.
“Some hundred paces from the town of Vendôme, on the banks of the Loir,” he said, “stands an aged brown house with high pointed roofs, perfectly isolated, neighbored by no squalid tannery or shabby inn of the sort that you see outside nearly any small city. Before that house lies a riverside garden whose boxwood shrubs, once cut short to border the walkways, now grow however they please. Born in the Loir, a row of quick-growing willows stands like a hedge, half concealing the house. Those plants we call weeds grace the riverbank’s slope with their beautiful green. After ten years of neglect, the fruit trees offer no harvest, and their offshoots have grown into dense thickets. The overgrown espaliers make a canopy, as in an ornamental bower. The sand of the walkways is now thick with portulaca, but in truth no sign of a walkway remains. Standing atop the great hill that offers a perch to the ruined château of the Dukes of Vendôme, the only spot from which to see into that enclosure, one muses that in some indistinct past this patch of land was the joy of some gentleman with a passion for roses, for tulip trees, for horticulture in short, but above all for fine fruit. One spies an arbor, or what remains of an arbor; beneath it there still sits a table, not yet entirely obliterated by time. In that garden that is no longer a garden one can glimpse, as if in negative, the joys of the peaceable existence the provinces offer, just as one glimpses the life led by a good merchant from the epitaph on his grave. To cap off all the sad and beguiling ideas that deluge the onlooker’s soul, one of the walls displays a sundial ornamented with this bourgeois Christian inscription: ULTIMAM COGITA! The roofs are in terrible disrepair, the shutters are always closed, the balconies are covered with swallows’ nests, the doors never open. Tall grasses highlight the steps’ cracks in green; the hinges have rusted. The moon, the sun, the winter’s cold, the summer’s heat have worn down the wood, warped the boards, scoured the paint. The desolate silence is troubled only by the birds, cats, ferrets, rats, and mice that dart unhindered this way and that, doing battle, devouring one another. Everywhere an invisible hand has written this word: Mystery. If, your curiosity piqued, you went to study this house from the street, you would see the broad outer door with its rounded top, liberally staved through by the local children. I later learned that this door had been sealed shut ten years before. Through those irregular breaches, you would note how perfectly the courtyard side of the house harmonizes with the garden side: The same disarray reigns over both. Sprays of tall grass outline the paving stones. Enormous cracks snake over the walls, whose blackened tops are enlaced by the thousand festoons of a wild pellitory. The front steps are askew, the rope on the bell has rotted away, the gutters are broken. What fire fallen from the sky has ravaged this place? What tribunal ordered that these grounds be sown with salt? Was God insulted here? Was France betrayed? one wonders. The lizards make no reply but merely crawl on their way. This empty, abandoned house is an enormous riddle whose answer is known to none. Formerly a small feudal estate, it bears the name La Grande Bretèche. The sight of that singular dwelling became one of the keenest pleasures of my sojourn in Vendôme, where Desplein had left me to look after a well-to-do patient. Was it not better than a ruin? A ruin is bound up with memories of an irrefutable reality, but this house—still standing, if suffering a slow demolition by a vengeful hand—this house held a secret, an unknown idea; at the very least, it bore witness to a caprice. More than once, after nightfall, I squeezed through the overgrown hedge that protected the grounds. Braving scratches and scrapes, I made my way into that garden with no master, that land now neither public nor private, and there I stayed for hours on end, contemplating its disarray. I would never have dreamt of consulting some talkative citizen of Vendôme in hopes of learning the story behind that strange sight. There I composed delicious novels in my head; I abandoned myself to little orgies of melancholy that filled me with delight. Had I known the perhaps perfectly ordinary cause of the house’s desolation, I would have been robbed of the unspoken poems that so intoxicated me. For me, this asylum embodied the most varied images of human existence, darkened by its sorrows: now a cloister, without the monks; now a silent cemetery, without the dead speaking to you in their epitaphic language; today the house of the leper, tomorrow that of Atreus; but it was above all the provinces, with their meditative ideas, their hourglass lives. Often I wept there; I never laughed. More than once I felt a surge of terror on hearing the rustle of a ringdove’s wings as it fled overhead. The ground there is damp; you must look out for lizards, vipers, and frogs, which wander with all the wild freedom of nature; above all you must have no fear of cold, for within a few moments you feel a chill mantle falling over your shoulders, like the hand of the commendatore on Don Giovanni’s neck. One evening I shuddered there: The wind had set a rusted old weathervane spinning, and its creak was like the plaint of the house itself, all this just as I was concluding a rather grim drama in my mind, an explanation for this sort of monumentalized sorrow. I returned to my inn, consumed by somber ideas. After my supper, the landlady came to me with a mysterious air and announced, ‘Monsieur Regnault is here, monsieur.’ ‘And who is Monsieur Regnault?’ ‘What, monsieur, you do not know Monsieur Regnault? Ah! How strange!’ she said, walking out. I found myself facing a tall, thin man, all in black, hat in hand, with a stance like a bull about to charge, presenting to me a sloping brow, a small pointed head, and a pallid face rather like a glass of murky water. He seemed the very model of some government minister’s private secretary. His suit was old and badly worn at the seams, but he had a diamond stickpin in his jabot and rings in his earlobes. ‘Monsieur, to whom do I have the honor?’ I asked. He sat down on a chair, warmed himself by my fire, set his hat on my table, and replied, rubbing his hands, ‘Oh, isn’t it cold! Monsieur, I am Monsieur Regnault.’ I nodded, saying to myself, ‘Il bondo cani! What is he after?’ ‘I am,’ he went on, ‘a notaire in Vendôme.’ ‘Delighted, monsieur,’ I cried, ‘but I am not in a position to draw up my will, for reasons known only to me.’ ‘Beg pardon,’ he answered, raising his hand as if to still my tongue. ‘If I may, monsieur, if I may! I have learned that you are in the habit of stepping out for a stroll in the garden of La Grande Bretèche.’ ‘Yes, monsieur.’ ‘Beg pardon!’ he said, repeating his gesture. ‘That is a flagrant infraction. Monsieur, in the name of and as executor of the estate of the late Madame la Comtesse de Merret, I come to ask that you discontinue your visits. Beg pardon! I am not a Turk and do not wish to make too much of this. Besides, you have every right to know nothing of the circumstances that oblige me to let the finest house in Vendôme go to ruin. Nonetheless, monsieur, you seem a man of some learning, and must know that the law forbids incursions onto fenced property, under penalty of grave sanctions. A hedge is as good as a wall. But the current state of the house might justifiably serve to excuse your curiosity. I would like nothing better than to allow you to come and go freely in that house, but charged as I am with executing the wishes of the late countess, I have the honor, monsieur, of requesting that you never enter the garden again. I myself, monsieur, since the unsealing of the will, have not set foot in that house, which belongs, as I have had the honor of informing you, to the estate of Madame de Merret. We simply recorded the number of doors and windows to calculate the taxes, which I pay annually from a fund set up for that purpose by the late countess. Ah! My dear monsieur, her will caused quite a stir in Vendôme!’ Here the distinguished gentleman paused to blow his nose. I made no attempt to quell his loquacity, understanding full well that Madame de Merret’s legacy was the most significant event of his life, the source of his standing in this world, his glory, his Restoration. Farewell to my beautiful daydreams, my novels; I was thus in no way hostile to the pleasure of learning the truth from an official source. ‘Monsieur,’ I said, ‘would it be indiscreet to ask you the reasons for this strange whim?’ On hearing those words, the notaire’s face beamed with the deep delight of a man who loves nothing so much as straddling his hobbyhorse. He turned up his shirt collar with a satisfied air, pulled out his snuffbox, opened it, held it out to me; when I declined, he took a healthy pinch for himself. He was happy! A man with no hobbyhorse has no notion of all that life has to offer. A hobbyhorse is the precise middle ground between passion and monomania. At that moment, I understood the full sense of Sterne’s eloquent term, and I grasped with what joy Uncle Toby mounted his steed, aided by Corporal Trim. ‘Monsieur,’ said Monsieur Regnault, ‘I was once head clerk in the offices of Maître Roguin, in Paris. An excellent practice—perhaps you’ve heard of it? No? And yet the name has become widely known, owing to a most unfortunate bankruptcy. Lacking the wherewithal to open my own practice in Paris, the fees having been raised in 1816, I came here to purchase my predecessor’s. I had relatives in Vendôme, among them a very well-to-do aunt, who gave me her daughter in marriage . . . ’ After a brief pause, he continued: ‘Monsieur, three months after obtaining my license from the Ministry of Justice, I was summoned one evening, just as I was about to retire (I was not yet married), by Madame la Comtesse de Merret, from her Château de Merret. Her chambermaid, a fine girl who today serves in this very hostelry, was waiting at my door with the countess’s coach. Ah! Beg pardon! I must tell you, monsieur, that the Comte de Merret had gone off to die in Paris two months before I came to this place. He died a sordid death, after indulging in all manner of excesses. You understand? The day of his departure, the countess had vacated La Grande Bretèche, taking everything with her. Some even claim that she burned the furniture, the tapestries, in short everything, for the most part of no very great value, that filled the premises currently rented by the aforementioned . . . (Wait, what am I saying? Forgive me, for a moment I thought I was dictating a lease.) That she burned them,’ he resumed, ‘on the grounds of the Château de Merret. Have you ever been to Merret, monsieur? No,’ he said, answering for me. ‘Ah! It’s a beautiful place! For some three months,’ he went on after a quick shake of the head, ‘the count and countess had lived a curious life; they no longer received visitors, madame had her rooms on the ground floor, monsieur on the second. When the countess was alone, she went out only for church. Later, at home in her château, she refused to see the friends of both sexes who came calling. She was already very changed when she left La Grande Bretèche for Merret. That dear woman . . . (I say “dear” because this diamond comes to me from her, and yet I saw her only once in my life!) The good woman was very ill; no doubt she had abandoned all hope of recovery, for she died without allowing a doctor to be summoned. Many of our ladies believed she was not in full possession of her faculties. My curiosity was thus singularly aroused, monsieur, by the news that Madame de Merret desired my assistance. I was not the only one to take an interest in this matter. That very evening, late though it was, all the city knew I was bound for Merret. The chambermaid offered only evasive replies to the questions I posed on the way; nonetheless, she informed me that her mistress had that day been given last rites by the curé of Merret and seemed unlikely to live through the night. I arrived at the château toward eleven o’clock. I climbed the great staircase. I walked through several large salons, high-ceilinged and dark, devilishly cold and damp, and finally came to the master bedroom, where the countess lay. From the rumors I’d heard of this woman (monsieur, I would never be done with it if I set out to repeat all the tales people told of her!), I pictured her as a coquette. Just imagine, I had great difficulty even finding her in that enormous bed! It is true that to light that vast room, with molded friezes straight out of the ancien régime, so liberally coated with dust that the mere sight of them made you sneeze, she had only an old Argand lamp. Ah! But you’ve never been to Merret! Well, monsieur, the bed is one of those beds of days gone by, with a high canopy covered in floral calico. A small nightstand sat near the bed, and on it I saw The Imitation of Christ, which, parenthetically, I bought for my wife, along with the lamp. There was also a large bergère for the chambermaid and two straight-backed chairs. No fire, as it happens. No other furniture than that. It wouldn’t have filled ten lines in an inventory. Ah! My dear monsieur, if you had seen, as I saw it then, that vast room, those brown tapestries on the walls, you would have thought yourself transported into a veritable novel. It was cold—and more than that, it was funereal,’ he added, raising one arm in a theatrical gesture and marking a pause. ‘I approached the bed, my eyes searching, and finally spied Madame de Merret, once again thanks to the lamp, which shone onto the pillows. Her face was yellow as wax and resembled two hands joined in prayer. Her lace bonnet revealed her hair, quite beautiful but white as cotton thread. She was sitting up with what seemed considerable difficulty. Her large black eyes, no doubt ravaged by fever, almost dead even now, scarcely moved beneath the bones under her eyebrows. This,’ he said, pointing to his brow. ‘Her forehead was damp. Her wizened hands were like bones wrapped in soft skin; her veins stood out clearly, her muscles. She must once have been very beautiful, but now her appearance filled me with an emotion without name. Never, according to those who buried her, had a living creature grown so emaciated and gone on living. Oh, it was terrible to see! The poor woman had been so cruelly withered by illness that she was nothing more than a ghost. Her pale purple lips seemed not to move when she spoke. My profession has accustomed me to such sights—I have been summoned to more than one deathbed, to record a patient’s last wishes—but I will confess that all the agonies and lamentations I’ve witnessed pale to nothing beside that silent, solitary woman in that enormous château. I heard not the slightest sound, I saw no movement of the covers, as her breathing might cause; I stood riveted to the spot, lost in mute contemplation. I might almost still be there at this moment. Finally her large eyes moved; she tried to raise her right hand, then let it drop back to the bed, and these words emerged from her mouth, like a whisper, for her voice was already no longer a voice: “I’ve been waiting for you most impatiently.” Her cheeks flushed bright red. Speaking, monsieur, was a great struggle for her. “Madame,” I answered. She gestured me to be still. At that moment, her old housemaid stood and whispered in my ear, “Do not speak: The countess cannot hear a sound, and anything you say might upset her.” I sat down again. A few moments later, Madame de Merret summoned all her remaining strength and moved her right arm, slipping it under the pillow with great effort; she stopped for a brief moment, then, expending the last of her forces, slowly extracted her hand. By the time she pulled out a sealed paper, drops of sweat were falling from her forehead. “I entrust to you my will,” she said. “Ah! My God! Ah!” That was all. She took up a crucifix that was lying on her bed, pressed it quickly to her lips, and died. I still shiver when I think of the expression in her frozen gaze. How she must have suffered! There was joy in her final glance, an emotion that remained imprinted in those lifeless eyes. I took the will, and when it was opened I saw that Madame de Merret had named me her executor. Apart from a few individual legacies, she left all her assets to the Hospital of Vendôme. But here are her instructions concerning La Grande Bretèche. She ordered me to leave this house, for fifty full years, starting from the day of her death, just as it was at the moment of her demise, forbidding all entry into the rooms, forbidding even the most minor repair. She went so far as to set aside a pension to hire guards, should they be required for the perfect fulfillment of her intentions. At the end of that time, assuming her wishes have not been violated, the house will become the property of my heirs, for monsieur knows that a notaire can accept no bequeathal; otherwise, La Grande Bretèche will be passed on to her legal inheritors, but with it will come the obligation to fulfill the conditions of a codicil that can only be unsealed when those fifty years have elapsed. No one has come forward to contest the will, and so . . . ’ With this, and leaving his sentence there, the oblong notaire looked at me triumphantly, and I completed his delight with a few complimentary words. ‘Monsieur,’ I said in conclusion, ‘your story has stirred me so deeply that even now I believe I can see that dying woman, paler than her sheets; her shining eyes frighten me, and I shall dream of her tonight. But you must surely have wondered at the instructions contained in that singular will.’ ‘Monsieur,’ he answered, with comical dignity, ‘I never permit myself to judge the conduct of those who have honored me with the gift of a diamond.’ I soon loosened the tongue of the scrupulous notaire of Vendôme, who passed along, not without several lengthy digressions, the thoughts offered up by various local sages of both sexes, whose judgments are as holy writ in Vendôme. But so contradictory were those reflections, and so rambling, that I nearly drifted off, despite my great interest in this living history. My curiosity was no match for the grandiloquent delivery and monotonous tones of the notaire, no doubt long used to hearing himself speak and to commanding the rapt attention of his clients or compatriots. At long last, to my relief, he went on his way. ‘Ah! Ah! Monsieur, many people,’ he told me on the stairs, ‘would like to live another forty-five years—but, beg pardon!’ And slyly he laid his right index finger alongside his nostril, as if to say: Listen closely now! ‘But if that is your goal,’ he said, ‘you’d best not be in your sixties.’ I closed the door, roused from my apathy by this last quip, which the notaire thought very witty, and then I sat down in my armchair, propping my feet on the two andirons of my fireplace, my mind consumed by a living Ann Radcliffe novel built on the material offered by Monsieur Regnault. A few moments later, my door turned on its hinges, opened by a woman’s adroit hand. My hostess came in, a fat, jolly sort, always in a sunny mood, who had missed her calling: She was a woman of Flanders, who should have been born into a canvas by Teniers. ‘Well, monsieur?’ she said. ‘I imagine Monsieur Regnault regaled you with his beloved tale of La Grande Bretèche.’ ‘He did, Madame Lepas.’ ‘And what did he say?’ In a few words I repeated the cold, dark story of Madame de Merret. With each sentence my hostess bent nearer, peering at me with an innkeeper’s perspicacity, a sort of happy medium between the instinct of the gendarme, the cunning of the spy, and the guile of the shopkeeper. ‘My dear lady Lepas!’ I said as I concluded. ‘You seem to know something more of all this. Am I wrong? Why else should you have come up to see me?’ ‘Ah! Word of an honest woman, and as true as my name is Lepas—’ ‘Swear no oaths, your eyes are heavy with secrets. You knew Monsieur de Merret. What manner of man was he?’ ‘Oh, Monsieur de Merret was a fine figure of a man, and he went on and on, he was so tall! An upstanding gentleman from Picardy, and a touch thin-skinned, as we say around here. He always paid cash, just so there’d never be trouble! He was hot-blooded, do you see? The local ladies all found him most amiable.’ ‘Because he was hot-blooded!’ I answered. ‘Quite likely,’ she said. ‘You understand, monsieur, he must have had something going for him, as they say, to marry Madame de Merret, who, no offense to the others, was the richest, most beautiful lady in all the area. She had an income of something like twenty thousand pounds. The whole town came to her wedding. She made an adorable bride, charming, a perfect jewel of a woman. Ah! They were a lovely couple back then!’ ‘Was their household a happy one?’ ‘Hmm hmm, yes and no, as best we can tell, for you can well imagine, they didn’t cozen much with the likes of us! Madame de Merret was a wonderful woman, sweetness itself, perhaps a bit put-upon by her husband’s hot temper, but we all liked him, even if he was a little proud. That’s just how the man was, and it was nobody’s business but his. When you’re noble, you know . . . ’ ‘And yet there must have been some sort of catastrophe, for Monsieur and Madame de Merret to part ways so abruptly?’ ‘I never said a word about any catastrophe, monsieur. I don’t know the first thing about it.’ ‘I see. Now I know you know everything.’ ‘Well then, monsieur, I’ll tell you the whole story. Seeing Monsieur Regnault heading up to your rooms, I had a feeling he was going to tell you about Madame de Merret, in connection with La Grande Bretèche. That gave me the idea of having a nice heart-to-heart with you, as you seem to me a man of good counsel, not at all the sort to betray a poor woman such as myself, who’s never done any harm to anyone and who nevertheless now finds herself tormented by her conscience. I’ve never dared bare my soul to these people around here—they’re a bunch of chattering parrots, with tongues hard as steel! And besides, monsieur, I’ve never had a traveler who stayed so long as you in my inn, someone I might tell the story of the fifteen thousand francs—’ ‘My dear Madame Lepas!’ I answered, stanching that torrent of words. ‘If your confession is of a nature to compromise me, I won’t be burdened with it for anything in the world—’ ‘Have no fear,’ she said, interrupting me. ‘You’ll see.’ This insistence suggested that I was not the first she’d entrusted with this secret of which I was supposedly the sole repository, and I settled down to listen. ‘Monsieur,’ she said, ‘years ago the emperor sent a number of Spaniards here to Vendôme, prisoners of war or what have you, and I was asked to provide lodging at government expense for a young Spaniard who’d been released on parole. Parole or no parole, he had to go and show his face to the subprefect every day. He was a Spanish grandee, no less! He had a name with an os and a dia, Bagos de Férédia or some such thing. I have his name written down in my register; you can go and see it, if you like. Oh! He was a most handsome young man, for a Spaniard—you know people say they’re all homely. He can’t have been more than five feet two or three inches tall, but nicely put together; he had small hands, and the way he looked after them! Ah! It was something to see. He had as many brushes for his hands as a woman has for all her primping put together! He had a big shock of black hair and an eye full of fire; his complexion was a touch coppery, but I liked it all the same. He wore linens like I’ve never seen on anyone, and remember, I’ve put up princesses, along with General Bertrand, the Duc and Duchesse d’Abrantès, Monsieur Decazes, the King of Spain, I could go on. He didn’t eat much, but you couldn’t hold that against him, he was always so polite and so amiable. Oh! I was very fond of him indeed, though he didn’t speak four words in a day, and there was no way to have a conversation with him. You could talk all you liked, but he never answered. It was a quirk of his, though from what I’ve heard they’re all just the same. He read his breviary like a priest; he went to Mass and all the services regularly. And where did he choose to sit? We only noticed it later: not two steps away from Madame de Merret’s chapel. That was where he sat down on his first visit to our church, so no one ever imagined he had an ulterior motive. Besides, he never took his nose out of his prayer book, that poor young man! In the evening, he liked to walk on the big hill, in the ruins of the château. That was his one amusement, poor thing, it put him in mind of his homeland. They say it’s all mountains in Spain! Almost right from the start, he loved to spend time up there. It worried me, not seeing him come back before midnight, but we soon got used to his little fancies. He took the front door key, and we stopped waiting up for him. He was staying in our house on rue des Casernes. And then one of our grooms told us a curious thing: He was taking the horses for a bath in the river one evening and thought he saw the Spanish grandee in the distance, swimming along like a regular fish. Next time I saw him, I told him to look out for the floating grasses, and he didn’t seem happy to have been spotted in the water. Finally, monsieur, one day, or one morning, we didn’t find him in his room; he hadn’t come back. I gave the place a good going-over, and finally opened his table drawer, where I found a note, and then fifty of those Spanish gold coins they call portugaises, worth about five thousand francs, and then on top of that ten thousand francs’ worth of diamonds in a little sealed box. The note said that if he didn’t come back we were to use that money and those diamonds to fund Masses thanking God for his escape and safety. My husband was still with me in those days, and he ran off to hunt for him. And here’s the queer thing! He came back with the Spaniard’s clothes, which he’d found under a big rock, in a sort of pier on the bank of the river on the château side, more or less directly in front of La Grande Bretèche. No one would have seen my husband take them; it was too early in the morning. Once he’d read the letter, he burned all the clothes, and we reported that he’d escaped, just like Count Férédia wanted. The subprefect sent the whole gendarmerie out on his trail, but they never did catch him. Lepas thought the Spaniard had drowned. Myself, I’m not so sure. My idea is that he had something to do with that Madame de Merret business, because Rosalie told me her mistress had a silver-and-ebony crucifix she so loved that she wanted to be buried with it, and when he first came here Monsieur Férédia had a silver-and-ebony crucifix that I never saw with him again. Now, monsieur, is it not true that I should feel no remorse over the Spaniard’s fifteen thousand francs, and that they truly are mine?’ ‘Certainly. But you never tried to question Rosalie?’ I asked her. ‘Oh! I did indeed, monsieur. But what can you do? The girl’s like a wall. She knows something, but there’s no way to wring it out of her.’ After a few more moments’ conversation, my hostess left me in the grips of vague, dark ideas, a yearning to understand, as any good novel inspires, a religious terror not unlike the profound sentiment that seizes us when we enter a dark church by night and spot a tremulous glimmer between the distant arches; a hesitant figure glides along, a rustling gown or cassock breaks the silence . . . a shiver runs through us. The image of La Grande Bretèche appeared fantastically before me, its tall grasses, its sealed windows, its rusted hinges, its locked doors, its empty rooms. I tried to find some way into that mysterious abode, seeking the key that would unlock this solemn story, this drama that had ended with three people dead. In my eyes, Rosalie was the most interesting creature in all of Vendôme. Examining her, I saw signs of unspoken thoughts, for all the simple good health that radiated from her dimpled face. She had in her some essence of remorse or anticipation; her manner bespoke a secret, like that of the devout women you see in church, rapt in over-fervent prayer, like the young infanticide with her child’s last shriek still ringing in her ears. Outwardly, nonetheless, she was naïve and unpolished, there was no criminality in her dim-witted smile, and you would have thought her perfectly innocent based simply on the sight of the large red-and-blue-checked fichu that covered her generous bust, framed, squeezed, bound by a dress of red and violet stripes. ‘No,’ I thought, ‘I will not leave Vendôme until I have learned the full story of La Grande Bretèche. And to that end I will become Rosalie’s lover, if need be.’ ‘Rosalie!’ I said to her one evening. ‘May I help you, monsieur?’ ‘You’re not married, are you?’ She gave a small start. ‘Oh! I’ll have no lack of men, when the fancy to ruin my life strikes me!’ she said with a laugh. She’d immediately recovered from her emotion, for all women have their own particular form of sangfroid, from the grande dame to the maidservant, inclusive. ‘A fresh, appealing girl such as you should have no lack of suitors! But tell me, Rosalie, why go to work as a chambermaid when you’ve been in the employ of Madame de Merret? Did she not leave you some sort of pension?’ ‘Oh! She did indeed! But, monsieur, my place here is the best in all Vendôme.’ This response was of the sort that judges and lawyers call dilatory. In this vast novel, Rosalie seemed to occupy the square at the very middle of a checkerboard; all the interest of the tale was centered on her, and all the truth; I thought her bound up in the tale’s mainspring. This was no ordinary seduction to be undertaken; the girl held within her the last chapter of a novel, and so, from that moment on, Rosalie became the object of my every attention. After careful study, I found in her, as in all women of whom we make our principal preoccupation, a whole host of qualities: She was clean, conscientious; she was beautiful, that goes without saying; she soon took on all the allures that our desire lends to women, whatever their situation in life. Two weeks after the notaire’s visit, one evening, or rather one morning, for it was very early, I said to Rosalie, ‘Tell me all you know about Madame de Merret, won’t you?’ ‘Oh,’ she answered, recoiling, ‘don’t ask that of me, Monsieur Horace!’ Her lovely face dimmed, her bright, youthful colors faded, and her eyes lost their glistening, innocent glow. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘since you ask, I’ll tell you, but you must keep my secret!’ ‘Come now, my poor girl, I’ll keep all your secrets with the probity of a thief, the most loyal there is.’ ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ she said to me, ‘I’d rather you keep it with yours.’ With this, she put her fichu to rights and sat up in a storyteller’s pose; for the body must be secure and at ease before we can tell a good tale. The best narratives are spun at a certain hour —look at all of us sitting here at this table! No one has ever told a good story on his feet nor with an empty stomach. Now, a whole volume would scarcely suffice to faithfully reproduce Rosalie’s meandering eloquence, but since as it happens the event of which she offered me a tangled knowledge lies between Madame Lepas’s chatter and the notaire’s, just as the middle terms of a mathematical ratio lie between the two extremes, I can recount it in just a few words. With some abridgement, then, here it is. The room occupied by Madame de Merret at La Bretèche lay on the ground floor. In one wall, a small closet, some four feet deep, served as her wardrobe. Three months before the evening in question, Madame de Merret had fallen ill, gravely enough that her husband had taken to sleeping upstairs, so as not to disturb her. By one of those unforeseeable strokes of fate, that evening he returned two hours later than usual from his club, where he often went to read the papers and talk politics with the locals. His wife thought him at home, in bed and asleep. But the invasion of France had sparked a most animated discussion; the billiard match had grown heated; he’d lost forty francs, an enormous sum in Vendôme, where everyone saves and where life is lived within the boundaries of an admirable modesty that may well be the source of a genuine happiness, for which no Parisian cares a whit. Monsieur de Merret had fallen into the habit, on his return from the club, of simply asking Rosalie if his wife had retired for the night; the answer was always affirmative, and so he went straight up to his rooms, with an amiability born of trust and routine. This particular night, he fancied he might pay a call on Madame de Merret, to tell her of his misadventure and perhaps seek some manner of consolation as well. He had found Madame de Merret most fetchingly dressed at dinner; now, on his way home from the club, he told himself that his wife’s illness had passed, her beauty returning as she convalesced—and he noticed this, as husbands notice everything, a bit late. Rather than call for Rosalie, who was then occupied in the kitchen watching the coachman and the cook play a tense round of brisque, Monsieur de Merret made for his wife’s bedroom, lit by the lantern he’d set down on the first step of the stairway. His distinctive footfalls echoed off the arched ceiling of the corridor. Turning the key to his wife’s room, he thought he heard the closet door closing, but when he entered Madame de Merret was alone, standing before the fireplace. Naïvely, the husband thought it was Rosalie in the closet; nevertheless a burst of suspicion rang in his ear, like tolling bells, and put him on guard; he looked at his wife and found in her eyes something mysterious and wild. ‘You’re home very late,’ she said. He thought he detected a faint agitation in that voice, ordinarily so mild and gracious. Monsieur de Merret made no reply, for just then Rosalie came in. He was dumbstruck. He paced through the room, from one window to the other, arms crossed over his chest. ‘Have you had bad news? Are you ill?’ his wife timidly asked, as Rosalie undressed her. He said nothing. ‘Leave us,’ said Madame de Merret to her chambermaid, ‘I’ll put my curlpapers in myself.’ From the look on her husband’s face, she foresaw some manner of trouble, and she wanted to be alone with him. When Rosalie was gone, or supposed to be gone, for she lingered a few moments in the corridor, Monsieur de Merret planted himself before his wife and said to her coldly, ‘Madame, there is someone in your closet!’ She looked at her husband, impassive, and answered simply, ‘No, monsieur.’ Monsieur de Merret was sorely aggrieved by that ‘no’; he didn’t believe it. And yet never had his wife seemed to him purer nor more pious than at that moment. He stalked off to open the closet; Madame de Merret grasped his hand, stopped him, looked at him dolefully, and told him, with singular urgency, ‘If you find no one, understand that everything will be over between us!’ The remarkable dignity of his wife’s manner revived the gentleman’s deep esteem for her and inspired him to one of those resolutions that need only a grand theater to become immortal. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Joséphine, I won’t look. Whatever I find, we would be parted forever. Listen, I know how pure is your soul and how saintly your life; you would never throw all that away by committing a mortal sin.’ Madame de Merret looked at her husband, wild-eyed. ‘Here, here is your crucifix,’ the man added. ‘Swear to me before God that no one is there. I will believe you, and I will never open that door.’ Madame de Merret took the crucifix and said, ‘I swear.’ ‘Louder,’ said the husband, ‘and repeat: I swear before God that there is no one in that closet.’ She repeated the sentence without batting an eye. ‘Very well,’ said Monsieur de Merret coolly. And then, after a moment of silence: ‘This is a very fine thing you have here; I’ve not seen it before.’ He was studying that ebony crucifix, artistically carved and incrusted with silver. ‘I found it at Duvivier’s. He bought it from a Spanish monk when those prisoners came through Vendôme last year.’ ‘Ah!’ said Monsieur de Merret, replacing the crucifix on its nail; and he rang. A moment later Rosalie appeared. Monsieur de Merret went briskly to meet her, led her to the window that looked onto the garden, and said to her quietly, ‘I know that Gorenflot is eager to marry you, that poverty alone stands in your way, that you’ve told him you won’t be his wife until he establishes himself as a mason. Well, go and fetch him; tell him to come out at once and bring his trowel and tools. See to it that no one in his house is awakened but him; his reward will exceed your desires. Above all, leave this place without one word to anyone, or . . . ’ He scowled. Rosalie set off, but he called her back. ‘Here, take my passkey,’ he said. ‘Jean,’ cried Monsieur de Merret in a thundering voice from the corridor. Jean, who was both his coachman and his valet, abandoned his game of brisque and came to him. ‘Everyone to bed,’ said his master, beckoning him nearer, and in a whisper he added, ‘Once they’re all asleep—asleep, do you hear?—come downstairs and tell me.’ Monsieur de Merret had kept one eye on his wife as he delivered these orders; now he calmly joined her before the fire and began to recount the events of the billiard match and the discussions at the club. Rosalie returned to find Monsieur and Madame de Merret chatting most amicably. The gentleman had recently had new ceilings made for his ground-floor reception rooms. Plaster is a rarity in Vendôme, its cost increased by the need to transport it in; he had thus ordered a generous quantity, knowing he would always find buyers for the excess. It was this that inspired the plan he was now setting in motion. ‘Monsieur Gorenflot is here,’ said Rosalie, quietly. ‘Show him in!’ her master answered. Madame de Merret paled a little on seeing the mason. ‘Gorenflot,’ said the husband, ‘go and fetch some bricks from the shed, enough to wall up the closet; you can use my leftover plaster to seal the door.’ Then, drawing Rosalie and the mason to him, he said in low tones, ‘Listen, Gorenflot, you will sleep here tonight. But tomorrow morning, you will have a passport to go to a foreign country, and a city that I will name. I’ll give you six thousand francs for the journey. You will live in that city for ten years; should it not be to your liking, you may move to another, so long as it’s in the same country. You will go by way of Paris, where you will wait for me. There, I will guarantee you by contract a further six thousand francs, payable on your return, assuming you fulfill our bargain’s conditions. That price should assure your most profound silence on all that you do here tonight. And for you, Rosalie: ten thousand francs, to be delivered only on your wedding day, so long as you marry Gorenflot, but in order for the marriage to take place, you must hold your tongue. Otherwise, no dowry.’ ‘Rosalie,’ said Madame de Merret, ‘come and do my hair.’ The husband paced lazily around the room, watching over the door, the mason, and his wife, taking care to conceal all suspicion. Gorenflot could not help making some noise. Seizing on a moment when the worker was unloading bricks and her husband happened to be at the far end of the room, Madame de Merret whispered to Rosalie, ‘A thousand francs annual pension for you, my dear child, if you can tell Gorenflot to leave a gap at the bottom.’ Then, aloud, she offhandedly ordered her, ‘Go and help him!’ In all the time Gorenflot spent sealing the doorway, Monsieur and Madame de Merret did not speak a word. On the husband’s part, this silence was a stratagem, not wanting to give his wife the occasion to speak coded words to the others; in the case of Madame de Merret, it was prudence or pride. When the bricks filled half the doorway, the quick-witted mason waited for the gentleman to turn his back, then struck one of the door’s two windows with his pickax. This gave Madame de Merret to understand that Rosalie had spoken to Gorenflot. The three of them then saw the face of a man, dusky and tanned, black hair, eyes afire. Before her husband turned around, the poor woman had time to nod at the foreigner, for whom this sign signified, ‘Do not lose hope!’ At four o’clock, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, for it was the month of September, the wall was done. The mason remained under Jean’s guard, and Monsieur de Merret went to bed in his wife’s room. The next morning, on rising, he said blithely, ‘Ah! Hang it all, I’ve got to go to the mayor’s for the passport.’ He put on his hat, took three steps toward the door, turned back, took the crucifix. His wife was trembling with joy. ‘He means to call at Duvivier’s,’ she thought. As soon as the gentleman was gone, Madame de Merret summoned Rosalie and cried out, in a desperate voice, ‘The pickax, the pickax, and to work! I watched how Gorenflot went about it last night; we’ll have time to make a hole and repair it again.’ In the blink of an eye, Rosalie came back with a sort of ax, and with a vigor that cannot be described, the countess began to demolish the wall. She had already dislodged several bricks when, stepping back to strike a blow still more furious than the last, she saw Monsieur de Merret behind her and fainted away. ‘Lay madame on her bed,’ said the gentleman coldly. Foreseeing what would take place in his absence, he had set a trap for his wife; he had quite simply written the mayor and sent for Duvivier. The jeweler arrived after the room had been tidied up. ‘Duvivier,’ asked the gentleman, ‘did you not buy several crucifixes from the Spaniards that passed through this town?’ ‘No, monsieur.’ ‘Very well, I thank you,’ he said, shooting his wife a glance fierce as a tiger’s. ‘Jean,’ he added, turning to his valet, ‘I’ll be taking my meals in Madame de Merret’s bedchamber; she’s not well, and I won’t leave her side until she has fully recovered.’ For twenty days that heartless man did not leave his wife’s room. In the beginning, noises could sometimes be heard from the walled-up closet, and Joséphine stared imploringly at her husband in hopes that he might spare the dying stranger’s life. He would not allow her to speak a word, and his answer was always the same: ‘You swore on the cross that was no one was there.’”
The tale at an end, all the women rose from the table, and with this the spell Bianchon had cast on them was broken. Nevertheless, some had felt almost cold on hearing those final words.
Translated by Jordan Stump