Beatrix

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Beatrix


On the floor above are two suites of rooms separated by the staircase.
Mademoiselle des Touches has taken for herself the one that looks
toward the sea and the marshes, and arranged it with a small salon, a
large chamber, and two cabinets, one for a dressing-room, the other
for a study and writing-room. The other suite, she has made into two
separate apartments for guests, each with a bedroom, an antechamber,
and a cabinet. The servants have rooms in the attic. The rooms for
guests are furnished with what is strictly necessary, and no more. A
certain fantastic luxury has been reserved for her own apartment. In
that sombre and melancholy habitation, looking out upon the sombre and
melancholy landscape, she wanted the most fantastic creations of art
that she could find. The little salon is hung with Gobelin tapestry,
framed in marvellously carved oak. The windows are draped with the
heavy silken hangings of a past age, a brocade shot with crimson and
gold against green and yellow, gathered into mighty pleats and trimmed
with fringes and cords and tassels worthy of a church. This salon
contains a chest or cabinet worth in these days seven or eight
thousand francs, a carved ebony table, a secretary with many drawers,
inlaid with arabesques of ivory and bought in Venice, with other noble
Gothic furniture. Here too are pictures and articles of choice
workmanship bought in 1818, at a time when no one suspected the
ultimate value of such treasures. Her bedroom is of the period of
Louis XV. and strictly exact to it. Here we see the carved wooden
bedstead painted white, with the arched head-board surmounted by
Cupids scattering flowers, and the canopy above it adorned with
plumes; the hangings of blue silk; the Pompadour dressing-table with
its laces and mirror; together with bits of furniture of singular
shape,--a "duchesse," a chaise-longue, a stiff little sofa,--with
window-curtains of silk, like that of the furniture, lined with pink
satin, and caught back with silken ropes, and a carpet of Savonnerie;
in short, we find here all those elegant, rich, sumptuous, and dainty
things in the midst of which the women of the eighteenth century lived
and made love.

The study, entirely of the present day, presents, in contrast with the
Louis XV. gallantries, a charming collection of mahogany furniture; it
resembles a boudoir; the bookshelves are full, but the fascinating
trivialities of a woman's existence encumber it; in the midst of which
an inquisitive eye perceives with uneasy surprise pistols, a narghile,
a riding-whip, a hammock, a rifle, a man's blouse, tobacco, pipes, a
knapsack,--a bizarre combination which paints Felicite.

Every great soul, entering that room, would be struck with the
peculiar beauty of the landscape which spreads its broad savanna
beyond the park, the last vegetation on the continent. The melancholy
squares of water, divided by little paths of white salt crust, along
which the salt-makers pass (dressed in white) to rake up and gather
the salt into /mulons/; a space which the saline exhalations prevent
all birds from crossing, stifling thus the efforts of botanic nature;
those sands where the eye is soothed only by one little hardy
persistent plant bearing rosy flowers and the Chartreux pansy; that
lake of salt water, the sandy dunes, the view of Croisic, a miniature
town afloat like Venice on the sea; and, finally the mighty ocean
tossing its foaming fringe upon the granite rocks as if the better to
bring out their weird formations--that sight uplifts the mind although
it saddens it; an effect produced at last by all that is sublime,
creating a regretful yearning for things unknown and yet perceived by
the soul on far-off heights. These wild and savage harmonies are for
great spirits and great sorrows only.

This desert scene, where at times the sun rays, reflected by the
water, by the sands, whitened the village of Batz and rippled on the
roofs of Croisic with pitiless brilliancy, filled Camille's dreaming
mind for days together. She seldom looked to the cool, refreshing
scenes, the groves, the flowery meadows around Guerande. Her soul was
struggling to endure a horrible inward anguish.

No sooner did Calyste see the vanes of the two gables shooting up
beyond the furze of the roadside and the distorted heads of the pines,
than the air seemed lighter; Guerande was a prison to him; his life
was at Les Touches. Who will not understand the attraction it
presented to a youth in his position. A love like that of Cherubin,
had flung him at the feet of a person who was a great and grand thing
to him before he thought of her as a woman, and it had survived the
repeated and inexplicable refusals of Felicite. This sentiment, which
was more the need of loving than love itself, had not escaped the
terrible power of Camille for analysis; hence, possibly, her
rejection,--a generosity unperceived, of course, by Calyste.

At Les Touches were displayed to the ravished eyes of the ignorant
young countryman, the riches of a new world; he heard, as it were,
another language, hitherto unknown to him and sonorous. He listened to
the poetic sounds of the finest music, that surpassing music of the
nineteenth century, in which melody and harmony blend or struggle on
equal terms,--a music in which song and instrumentation have reached a
hitherto unknown perfection. He saw before his eyes the works of
modern painters, those of the French school, to-day the heir of Italy,
Spain, and Flanders, in which talent has become so common that hearts,
weary of talent, are calling aloud for genius. He read there those
works of imagination, those amazing creations of modern literature
which produced their full effect upon his unused heart. In short, the
great Nineteenth Century appeared to him, in all its collective
magnificence, its criticising spirit, its desires for renovation in
all directions, and its vast efforts, nearly all of them on the scale
of the giant who cradled the infancy of the century in his banners and
sang to it hymns with the lullaby of cannon.

Initiated by Felicite into the grandeur of all these things, which
may, perhaps, escape the eyes of those who work them, Calyste
gratified at Les Touches the taste for the glorious, powerful at his
age, and that artless admiration, the first love of adolescence, which
is always irritated by criticism. It is so natural that flame should
rise! He listened to that charming Parisian raillery, that graceful
satire which revealed to him French wit and the qualities of the
French mind, and awakened in him a thousand ideas, which might have
slumbered forever in the soft torpor of his family life. For him,
Mademoiselle des Touches was the mother of his intellect. She was so
kind to him; a woman is always adorable to a man in whom she inspires
love, even when she seems not to share it.

At the present time Felicite was giving him music-lessons. To him the
grand apartments on the lower floor, and her private rooms above, so
coquettish, so artistic, were vivified, were animated by a light, a
spirit, a supernatural atmosphere, strange and undefinable. The modern
world with its poesy was sharply contrasted with the dull and
patriarchal world of Guerande, in the two systems brought face to face
before him. On one side all the thousand developments of Art, on the
other the sameness of uncivilized Brittany. No one will therefore ask
why the poor lad, bored like his mother with the pleasures of
/mouche/, quivered as he approached the house, and rang the bell, and
crossed the court-yard. Such emotions, we may remark, do not assail a
mature man, trained to the ups and downs of life, whom nothing
surprises, being prepared for all.

As the door opened, Calyste, hearing the sound of the piano, supposed
that Camille was in the salon; but when he entered the billiard-hall
he no longer heard it. Camille, he thought, must be playing on a small
upright piano brought by Conti from England and placed by her in her
own little salon. He began to run up the stairs, where the thick
carpet smothered the sound of his steps; but he went more slowly as he
neared the top, perceiving something unusual and extraordinary about
the music. Felicite was playing for herself only; she was communing
with her own being.

Instead of entering the room, the young man sat down upon a Gothic
seat covered with green velvet, which stood on the landing beneath a
window artistically framed in carved woods stained and varnished.
Nothing was ever more mysteriously melancholy than Camille's
improvisation; it seemed like the cry of a soul /de profundis/ to God
--from the depths of a grave! The heart of the young lover recognized
the cry of despairing love, the prayer of a hidden plaint, the groan
of repressed affliction. Camille had varied, modified, and lengthened
the introduction to the cavatina: "Mercy for thee, mercy for me!"
which is nearly the whole of the fourth act of "Robert le Diable." She
now suddenly sang the words in a heart-rending manner, and then as
suddenly interrupted herself. Calyste entered, and saw the reason.
Poor Camille Maupin! poor Felicite! She turned to him a face bathed
with tears, took out her handkerchief and dried them, and said,
simply, without affectation, "Good-morning." She was beautiful as she
sat there in her morning gown. On her head was one of those red
chenille nets, much worn in those days, through which the coils of her
black hair shone, escaping here and there. A short upper garment made
like a Greek peplum gave to view a pair of cambric trousers with
embroidered frills, and the prettiest of Turkish slippers, red and
gold.

"What is the matter?" cried Calyste.

"He has not returned," she replied, going to a window and looking out
upon the sands, the sea and the marshes.

This answer explained all. Camille was awaiting Claude Vignon.

"You are anxious about him?" asked Calyste.

"Yes," she answered, with a sadness the lad was too ignorant to
analyze.

He started to leave the room.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"To find him," he replied.

"Dear child!" she said, taking his hand and drawing him toward her
with one of those moist glances which are to a youthful soul the best
of recompenses. "You are distracted! Where could you find him on that
wide shore?"

"I will find him."

"Your mother would be in mortal terror. Stay. Besides, I choose it,"
she said, making him sit down upon the sofa. "Don't pity me. The tears
you see are the tears a woman likes to shed. We have a faculty that is
not in man,--that of abandoning ourselves to our nervous nature and
driving our feelings to an extreme. By imagining certain situations
and encouraging the imagination we end in tears, and sometimes in
serious states of illness or disorder. The fancies of women are not
the action of the mind; they are of the heart. You have come just in
time; solitude is bad for me. I am not the dupe of his professed
desire to go to Croisic and see the rocks and the dunes and the
salt-marshes without me. He meant to leave us alone together; he is
jealous, or, rather, he pretends jealousy, and you are young, you are
handsome."

"Why not have told me this before? What must I do? must I stay away?"
asked Calyste, with difficulty restraining his tears, one of which
rolled down his cheek and touched Felicite deeply.

"You are an angel!" she cried. Then she gaily sang the "Stay! stay!"
of Matilde in "Guillaume Tell," taking all gravity from that
magnificent answer of the princess to her subject. "He only wants to
make me think he loves me better than he really does," she said. "He
knows how much I desire his happiness," she went on, looking
attentively at Calyste. "Perhaps he feels humiliated to be inferior to
me there. Perhaps he has suspicions about you and means to surprise
us. But even if his only crime is to take his pleasure without me, and
not to associate me with the ideas this new place gives him, is not
that enough? Ah! I am no more loved by that great brain than I was by
the musician, by the poet, by the soldier! Sterne is right; names
signify much; mine is a bitter sarcasm. I shall die without finding in
any man the love which fills my heart, the poesy that I have in my
soul--"

She stopped, her arms pendant, her head lying back on the cushions,
her eyes, stupid with thought, fixed on a pattern of the carpet. The
pain of great minds has something grandiose and imposing about it; it
reveals a vast extent of soul which the thought of the spectator
extends still further. Such souls share the privileges of royalty
whose affections belong to a people and so affect a world.

"Why did you reject my--" said Calyste; but he could not end his
sentence. Camille's beautiful hand laid upon his eloquently
interrupted him.

"Nature changed her laws in granting me a dozen years of youth beyond
my due," she said. "I rejected your love from egotism. Sooner or later
the difference in our ages must have parted us. I am thirteen years
older than /he/, and even that is too much."

"You will be beautiful at sixty," cried Calyste, heroically.

"God grant it," she answered, smiling. "Besides, dear child, I /want/
to love. In spite of his cold heart, his lack of imagination, his
cowardly indifference, and the envy which consumes him, I believe
there is greatness behind those tatters; I hope to galvanize that
heart, to save him from himself, to attach him to me. Alas! alas! I
have a clear-seeing mind, but a blind heart."

She was terrible in her knowledge of herself. She suffered and
analyzed her feelings as Cuvier and Dupuytren explained to friends the
fatal advance of their disease and the progress that death was making
in their bodies. Camille Maupin knew the passion within her as those
men of science knew their own anatomy.

"I have brought him here to judge him, and he is already bored," she
continued. "He pines for Paris, I tell him; the nostalgia of criticism
is on him; he has no author to pluck, no system to undermine, no poet
to drive to despair, and he dares not commit some debauch in this
house which might lift for a moment the burden of his ennui. Alas! my
love is not real enough, perhaps, to soothe his brain; I don't
intoxicate him! Make him drunk at dinner to-night and I shall know if
I am right. I will say I am ill, and stay in my own room."

Calyste turned scarlet from his neck to his forehead; even his ears
were on fire.

"Oh! forgive me," she cried. "How can I heedlessly deprave your
girlish innocence! Forgive me, Calyste--" She paused. "There are some
superb, consistent natures who say at a certain age: 'If I had my life
to live over again, I would so the same things.' I who do not think
myself weak, I say, 'I would be a woman like your mother, Calyste.' To
have a Calyste, oh! what happiness! I could be a humble and submissive
woman--And yet, I have done no harm except to myself. But alas! dear
child, a woman cannot stand alone in society except it be in what is
called a primitive state. Affections which are not in harmony with
social or with natural laws, affections that are not obligatory, in
short, escape us. Suffering for suffering, as well be useful where we
can. What care I for those children of my cousin Faucombe? I have not
seen them these twenty years, and they are married to merchants. You
are my son, who have never cost me the miseries of motherhood; I shall
leave you my fortune and make you happy--at least, so far as money can
do so, dear treasure of beauty and grace that nothing should ever
change or blast."

"You would not take my love," said Calyste, "and I shall return your
fortune to your heirs."

"Child!" answered Camille, in a guttural voice, letting the tears roll
down her cheeks. "Will nothing save me from myself?" she added,
presently.

"You said you had a history to tell me, and a letter to--" said the
generous youth, wishing to divert her thoughts from her grief; but she
did not let him finish.

"You are right to remind me of that. I will be an honest woman before
all else. I will sacrifice no one--Yes, it was too late, yesterday,
but to-day we have time," she said, in a cheerful tone. "I will keep
my promise; and while I tell you that history I will sit by the window
and watch the road to the marshes."

Calyste arranged a great Gothic chair for her near the window, and
opened one of the sashes. Camille Maupin, who shared the oriental
taste of her illustrious sister-author, took a magnificent Persian
narghile, given to her by an ambassador. She filled the nipple with
patchouli, cleaned the /bochettino/, perfumed the goose-quill, which
she attached to the mouthpiece and used only once, set fire to the
yellow leaves, placing the vase with its long neck enamelled in blue
and gold at some distance from her, and rang the bell for tea.

"Will you have cigarettes?--Ah! I am always forgetting that you do not
smoke. Purity such as yours is so rare! The hand of Eve herself, fresh
from the hand of her Maker, is alone innocent enough to stroke your
cheek."

Calyste colored; sitting down on a stool at Camille's feet, he did not
see the deep emotion that seemed for a moment to overcome her.



VIII

LA MARQUISE BEATRIX

"I promised you this tale of the past, and here it is," said Camille.
"The person from whom I received that letter yesterday, and who may be
here to-morrow, is the Marquise de Rochefide. The old marquis (whose
family is not as old as yours), after marrying his eldest daughter to
a Portuguese grandee, was anxious to find an alliance among the higher
nobility for his son, in order to obtain for him the peerage he had
never been able to get for himself. The Comtesse de Montcornet told
him of a young lady in the department of the Orne, a Mademoiselle
Beatrix-Maximilienne-Rose de Casteran, the youngest daughter of the
Marquis de Casteran, who wished to marry his two daughters without
dowries in order to reserve his whole fortune for the Comte de
Casteran, his son. The Casterans are, it seems, of the bluest blood.
Beatrix, born and brought up at the chateau de Casteran, was twenty
years old at the time of her marriage in 1828. She was remarkable for
what you provincials call originality, which is simply independence of
ideas, enthusiasm, a feeling for the beautiful, and a certain impulse
and ardor toward the things of Art. You may believe a poor woman who
has allowed herself to be drawn along the same lines, there is nothing
more dangerous for a woman. If she follows them, they lead her where
you see me, and where the marquise came,--to the verge of abysses. Men
alone have the staff on which to lean as they skirt those precipices,
--a force which is lacking to most women, but which, if we do possess
it, makes abnormal beings of us. Her old grandmother, the dowager de
Casteran, was well pleased to see her marry a man to whom she was
superior in every way. The Rochefides were equally satisfied with the
Casterans, who connected them with the Verneuils, the d'Esgrignons,
the Troisvilles, and gave them a peerage for their son in that last
big batch of peers made by Charles X., but revoked by the revolution
of July. The first days of marriage are perilous for little minds as
well as for great loves. Rochefide, being a fool, mistook his wife's
ignorance for coldness; he classed her among frigid, lymphatic women,
and made that an excuse to return to his bachelor life, relying on the
coldness of the marquise, her pride, and the thousand barriers that
the life of a great lady sets up about a woman in Paris. You'll know
what I mean when you go there. People said to Rochefide: 'You are very
lucky to possess a cold wife who will never have any but head
passions. She will always be content if she can shine; her fancies are
purely artistic, her desires will be satisfied if she can make a
salon, and collect about her distinguished minds; her debauches will
be in music and her orgies literary.' Rochefide, however, is not an
ordinary fool; he has as much conceit and vanity as a clever man,
which gives him a mean and squinting jealousy, brutal when it comes to
the surface, lurking and cowardly for six months, and murderous the
seventh. He thought he was deceiving his wife, and yet he feared her,
--two causes for tyranny when the day came on which the marquise let
him see that she was charitably assuming indifference to his
unfaithfulness. I analyze all this in order to explain her conduct.
Beatrix had the keenest admiration for me; there is but one step,
however, from admiration to jealousy. I have one of the most
remarkable salons in Paris; she wished to make herself another; and in
order to do so she attempted to draw away my circle. I don't know how
to keep those who wish to leave me. She obtained the superficial
people who are friends with every one from mere want of occupation,
and whose object is to get out of a salon as soon as they have entered
it; but she did not have time to make herself a real society. In those
days I thought her consumed with a desire for celebrity of one kind or
another. Nevertheless, she has really much grandeur of soul, a regal
pride, distinct ideas, and a marvellous facility for apprehending and
understanding all things; she can talk metaphysics and music, theology
and painting. You will see her, as a mature woman, what the rest of us
saw her as a bride. And yet there is something of affectation about
her in all this. She has too much the air of knowing abstruse things,
--Chinese, Hebrew, hieroglyphics perhaps, or the papyrus that they
wrapped round mummies. Personally, Beatrix is one of those blondes
beside whom Eve the fair would seem a Negress. She is slender and
straight and white as a church taper; her face is long and pointed;
the skin is capricious, to-day like cambric, to-morrow darkened with
little speckles beneath its surface, as if her blood had left a
deposit of dust there during the night. Her forehead is magnificent,
though rather daring. The pupils of her eyes are pale sea-green,
floating on their white balls under thin lashes and lazy eyelids. Her
eyes have dark rings around them often; her nose, which describes
one-quarter of a circle, is pinched about the nostrils; very shrewd and
clever, but supercilious. She has an Austrian mouth; the upper lip has
more character than the lower, which drops disdainfully. Her pale
cheeks have no color unless some very keen emotion moves her. Her chin
is rather fat; mine is not thin, and perhaps I do wrong to tell you
that women with fat chins are exacting in love. She has one of the
most exquisite waists I ever saw; the shoulders are beautiful, but the
bust has not developed as well, and the arms are thin. She has,
however, an easy carriage and manner, which redeems all such defects
and sets her beauties in full relief. Nature has given her that
princess air which can never be acquired; it becomes her, and reveals
at sudden moments the woman of high birth. Without being faultlessly
beautiful, or prettily pretty, she produces, when she chooses,
ineffaceable impressions. She has only to put on a gown of cherry
velvet with clouds of lace, and wreathe with roses that angelic hair
of hers, which resembles floods of light, and she becomes divine. If,
on some excuse or other, she could wear the costume of the time when
women had long, pointed bodices, rising, slim and slender, from
voluminous brocaded skirts with folds so heavy that they stood alone,
and could hide her arms in those wadded sleeves with ruffles, from
which the hand comes out like a pistil from a calyx, and could fling
back the curls of her head into the jewelled knot behind her head,
Beatrix would hold her own victoriously with ideal beauties like
/that/--"

And Felicite showed Calyste a fine copy of a picture by Mieris, in
which was a woman robed in white satin, standing with a paper in her
hand, and singing with a Brabancon seigneur, while a Negro beside them
poured golden Spanish wine into a goblet, and the old housekeeper in
the background arranged some biscuits.

"Fair women, blonds," said Camille, "have the advantage over us poor
brown things of a precious diversity; there are a hundred ways for a
blonde to charm, and only one for a brunette. Besides, blondes are
more womanly; we are too like men, we French brunettes--Well, well!"
she cried, "pray don't fall in love with Beatrix from the portrait I
am making of her, like that prince, I forget his name, in the Arabian
Nights. You would be too late, my dear boy."

These words were said pointedly. The admiration depicted on the young
man's face was more for the picture than for the painter whose /faire/
was failing of its purpose. As she spoke, Felicite was employing all
the resources of her eloquent physiognomy.

"Blond as she is, however," she went on, "Beatrix has not the grace of
her color; her lines are severe; she is elegant, but hard; her face
has a harsh contour, though at times it reveals a soul with Southern
passions; an angel flashes out and then expires. Her eyes are thirsty.
She looks best when seen full face; the profile has an air of being
squeezed between two doors. You will see if I am mistaken. I will tell
you now what made us intimate friends. For three years, from 1828 to
1831, Beatrix, while enjoying the last fetes of the Restoration,
making the round of the salons, going to court, taking part in the
fancy-balls of the Elysee-Bourbon, was all the while judging men, and
things, events, and life itself, from the height of her own thought.
Her mind was busy. These first years of the bewilderment the world
caused her prevented her heart from waking up. From 1830 to 1831 she
spent the time of the revolutionary disturbance at her husband's
country-place, where she was bored like a saint in paradise. On her
return to Paris she became convinced, perhaps justly, that the
revolution of July, in the minds of some persons purely political,
would prove to be a moral revolution. The social class to which she
belonged, not being able, during its unhoped-for triumph in the
fifteen years of the Restoration to reconstruct itself, was about to
go to pieces, bit by bit, under the battering-ram of the bourgeoisie.
She heard the famous words of Monsieur Laine: 'Kings are departing!'
This conviction, I believe was not without its influence on her
conduct. She took an intellectual part in the new doctrines, which
swarmed, during the three years succeeding July, 1830, like gnats in
the sunshine, and turned some female heads. But, like all nobles,
Beatrix, while thinking these novel ideals superb, wanted always to
protect the nobility. Finding before long that there was no place in
this new regime for individual superiority, seeing that the higher
nobility were beginning once more the mute opposition it had formerly
made to Napoleon,--which was, in truth, its wisest course under an
empire of deeds and facts, but which in an epoch of moral causes was
equivalent to abdication,--she chose personal happiness rather than
such eclipse. About the time we were all beginning to breathe again,
Beatrix met at my house a man with whom I had expected to end my days,
--Gennaro Conti, the great composer, a man of Neapolitan origin,
though born in Marseilles. Conti has a brilliant mind; as a composer
he has talent, though he will never attain to the first rank. Without
Rossini, without Meyerbeer, he might perhaps have been taken for a man
of genius. He has one advantage over those men,--he is in vocal music
what Paganini is on the violin, Liszt on the piano, Taglioni in the
ballet, and what the famous Garat was; at any rate he recalls that
great singer to those who knew him. His is not a voice, my friend, it
is a soul. When its song replies to certain ideas, certain states of
feeling difficult to describe in which a woman sometimes finds
herself, that woman is lost. The marquise conceived the maddest
passion for him, and took him from me. The act was provincial, I
allow, but it was all fair play. She won my esteem and friendship by
the way she behaved to me. She thought me a woman who was likely to
defend her own; she did not know that to me the most ridiculous thing
in the world is such a struggle. She came to see me. That woman, proud
as she is, was so in love that she told me her secret and made me the
arbiter of her destiny. She was really adorable, and she kept her
place as woman and as marquise in my eyes. I must tell you, dear
friend, that while women are sometimes bad, they have hidden grandeurs
in their souls that men can never appreciate. Well, as I seem to be
making my last will and testament like a woman on the verge of old
age, I shall tell you that I was ever faithful to Conti, and should
have been till death, and yet I /know him/. His nature is charming,
apparently, and detestable beneath its surface. He is a charlatan in
matters of the heart. There are some men, like Nathan, of whom I have
already spoken to you, who are charlatans externally, and yet honest.
Such men lie to themselves. Mounted on their stilts, they think they
are on their feet, and perform their jugglery with a sort of
innocence; their humbuggery is in their blood; they are born
comedians, braggarts; extravagant in form as a Chinese vase; perhaps
they even laugh at themselves. Their personality is generous; like
Murat's kingly garments, it attracts danger. But Conti's duplicity
will be known only to the women who love him. In his art he has that
deep Italian jealousy which led the Carlone to murder Piola, and stuck
a stiletto into Paesiello. That terrible envy lurks beneath the
warmest comradeship. Conti has not the courage of his vice; he smiles
at Meyerbeer and flatters him, when he fain would tear him to bits. He
knows his weakness, and cultivates an appearance of sincerity; his
vanity still further leads him to play at sentiments which are far
indeed from his real heart. He represents himself as an artist who
receives his inspirations from heaven; Art is something saintly and
sacred to him; he is fanatic; he is sublime in his contempt for
worldliness; his eloquence seems to come from the deepest convictions.
He is a seer, a demon, a god, an angel. Calyste, although I warn you
about him, you will be his dupe. That Southern nature, that
impassioned artist is cold as a well-rope. Listen to him: the artist
is a missionary. Art is a religion, which has its priests and ought to
have its martyrs. Once started on that theme, Gennaro reaches the most
dishevelled pathos that any German professor of philosophy ever
spluttered to his audience. You admire his convictions, but he hasn't
any. Bearing his hearers to heaven on a song which seems a mysterious
fluid shedding love, he casts an ecstatic glance upon them; he is
examining their enthusiasm; he is asking himself: 'Am I really a god
to them?' and he is also thinking: 'I ate too much macaroni to-day.'
He is insatiable of applause, and he wins it. He delights, he is
beloved; he is admired whensoever he will. He owes his success more to
his voice than to his talent as a composer, though he would rather be
a man of genius like Rossini than a performer like Rubini. I had
committed the folly of attaching myself to him, and I was determined
and resigned to deck this idol to the end. Conti, like a great many
artists, is dainty in all his ways; he likes his ease, his enjoyments;
he is always carefully, even elegantly dressed. I do respect his
courage; he is brave; bravery, they say, is the only virtue into which
hypocrisy cannot enter. While we were travelling I saw his courage
tested; he risked the life he loved; and yet, strange contradiction! I
have seen him, in Paris, commit what I call the cowardice of thought.
My friend, all this was known to me. I said to the poor marquise: 'You
don't know into what a gulf you are plunging. You are the Perseus of a
poor Andromeda; you release me from my rock. If he loves you, so much
the better! but I doubt it; he loves no one but himself.' Gennaro was
transported to the seventh heaven of pride. I was not a marquise, I
was not born a Casteran, and he forgot me in a day. I then gave myself
the savage pleasure of probing that nature to the bottom. Certain of
the result, I wanted to see the twistings and turnings Conti would
perform. My dear child, I saw in one week actual horrors of sham
sentiment, infamous buffooneries of feeling. I will not tell you about
them; you shall see the man here in a day or two. He now knows that I
know him, and he hates me accordingly. If he could stab me with safety
to himself I shouldn't be alive two seconds. I have never said one
word of all this to Beatrix. The last and constant insult Geranno
offers me is to suppose that I am capable of communicating my sad
knowledge of him to her; but he has no belief in the good feeling of
any human being. Even now he is playing a part with me; he is posing
as a man who is wretched at having left me. You will find what I may
call the most penetrating cordiality about him; he is winning; he is
chivalrous. To him, all women are madonnas. One must live with him
long before we get behind the veil of this false chivalry and learn
the invisible signs of his humbug. His tone of conviction about
himself might almost deceive the Deity. You will be entrapped, my dear
child, by his catlike manners, and you will never believe in the
profound and rapid arithmetic of his inmost thought. But enough; let
us leave him. I pushed indifference so far as to receive them together
in my house. This circumstance kept that most perspicacious of all
societies, the great world of Paris, ignorant of the affair. Though
intoxicated with pride, Gennaro was compelled to dissimulate; and he
did it admirably. But violent passions will have their freedom at any
cost. Before the end of the year, Beatrix whispered in my ear one
evening: 'My dear Felicite, I start to-morrow for Italy with Conti.' I
was not surprised; she regarded herself as united for life to Gennaro,
and she suffered from the restraints imposed upon her; she escaped one
evil by rushing into a greater. Conti was wild with happiness,--the
happiness of vanity alone. 'That's what it is to love truly,' he said
to me. 'How many women are there who would sacrifice their lives,
their fortune, their reputation?'--'Yes, she loves you,' I replied,
'but you do not love her.' He was furious, and made me a scene; he
stormed, he declaimed, he depicted his love, declaring that he had
never supposed it possible to love as much. I remained impassible, and
lent him money for his journey, which, being unexpected, found him
unprepared. Beatrix left a letter for her husband and started the next
day for Italy. There she has remained two years; she has written to me
several times, and her letters are enchanting. The poor child attaches
herself to me as the only woman who will comprehend her. She says she
adores me. Want of money has compelled Gennaro to accept an offer to
write a French opera; he does not find in Italy the pecuniary gains
which composers obtain in Paris. Here's the letter I received
yesterday from Beatrix. Take it and read it; you can now understand
it,--that is, if it is possible, at your age, to analyze the things of
the heart."