The Duchesse de Langeais

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Very carefully he untied the knots that bound her feet.

"What would be the use of calling out? Nobody can hear your
cries. You are too well bred to make any unnecessary fuss. If
you do not stay quietly, if you insist upon a struggle with me, I
shall tie your hands and feet again. All things considered, I
think that you have self-respect enough to stay on this sofa as
if you were lying on your own at home; cold as ever, if you will.
You have made me shed many tears on this couch, tears that I hid
from all other eyes."

While Montriveau was speaking, the Duchess glanced about her; it
was a woman's glance, a stolen look that saw all things and
seemed to see nothing. She was much pleased with the room. It
was rather like a monk's cell. The man's character and thoughts
seemed to pervade it. No decoration of any kind broke the grey
painted surface of the walls. A green carpet covered the floor.
A black sofa, a table littered with papers, two big easy-chairs,
a chest of drawers with an alarum clock by way of ornament, a
very low bedstead with a coverlet flung over it--a red cloth with
a black key border--all these things made part of a whole that
told of a life reduced to its simplest terms. A triple
candle-sconce of Egyptian design on the chimney-piece recalled
the vast spaces of the desert and Montriveau's long wanderings; a
huge sphinx-claw stood out beneath the folds of stuff at the
bed-foot; and just beyond, a green curtain with a black and
scarlet border was suspended by large rings from a spear handle
above a door near one corner of the room. The other door by
which the band had entered was likewise curtained, but the
drapery hung from an ordinary curtain-rod. As the Duchess
finally noted that the pattern was the same on both, she saw that
the door at the bed-foot stood open; gleams of ruddy light from
the room beyond flickered below the fringed border. Naturally,
the ominous light roused her curiosity; she fancied she could
distinguish strange shapes in the shadows; but as it did not
occur to her at the time that danger could come from that
quarter, she tried to gratify a more ardent curiosity.

"Monsieur, if it is not indiscreet, may I ask what you mean to
do with me?" The insolence and irony of the tone stung through
the words. The Duchess quite believed that she read extravagant
love in Montriveau's speech. He had carried her off; was not
that in itself an acknowledgment of her power?

"Nothing whatever, madame," he returned, gracefully puffing the
last whiff of cigar smoke. "You will remain here for a short
time. First of all, I should like to explain to you what you
are, and what I am. I cannot put my thoughts into words whilst
you are twisting on the sofa in your boudoir; and besides, in
your own house you take offence at the slightest hint, you ring
the bell, make an outcry, and turn your lover out at the door as
if he were the basest of wretches. Here my mind is unfettered.
Here nobody can turn me out. Here you shall be my victim for a
few seconds, and you are going to be so exceedingly kind as to
listen to me. You need fear nothing. I did not carry you off to
insult you, nor yet to take by force what you refused to grant of
your own will to my unworthiness. I could not stoop so low. You
possibly think of outrage; for myself, I have no such thoughts."

He flung his cigar coolly into the fire.

"The smoke is unpleasant to you, no doubt, madame?" he said,
and rising at once, he took a chafing-dish from the hearth, burnt
perfumes, and purified the air. The Duchess's astonishment was
only equaled by her humiliation. She was in this man's power;
and he would not abuse his power. The eyes in which love had
once blazed like flame were now quiet and steady as stars. She
trembled. Her dread of Armand was increased by a nightmare
sensation of restlessness and utter inability to move; she felt
as if she were turned to stone. She lay passive in the grip of
fear. She thought she saw the light behind the curtains grow to
a blaze, as if blown up by a pair of bellows; in another moment
the gleams of flame grew brighter, and she fancied that three
masked figures suddenly flashed out; but the terrible vision
disappeared so swiftly that she took it for an optical delusion.

"Madame," Armand continued with cold contempt, "one minute,
just one minute is enough for me, and you shall feel it
afterwards at every moment throughout your lifetime, the one
eternity over which I have power. I am not God. Listen
carefully to me," he continued, pausing to add solemnity to his
words. "Love will always come at your call. You have boundless
power over men: but remember that once you called love, and love
came to you; love as pure and true-hearted as may be on earth,
and as reverent as it was passionate; fond as a devoted woman's,
as a mother's love; a love so great indeed, that it was past the
bounds of reason. You played with it, and you committed a crime.
Every woman has a right to refuse herself to love which she feels
she cannot share; and if a man loves and cannot win love in
return, he is not to be pitied, he has no right to complain. But
with a semblance of love to attract an unfortunate creature cut
off from all affection; to teach him to understand happiness to
the full, only to snatch it from him; to rob him of his future of
felicity; to slay his happiness not merely today, but as long as
his life lasts, by poisoning every hour of it and every thought
--this I call a fearful crime!"

"Monsieur----"

"I cannot allow you to answer me yet. So listen to me still. In
any case I have rights over you; but I only choose to exercise
one--the right of the judge over the criminal, so that I may
arouse your conscience. If you had no conscience left, I should
not reproach you at all; but you are so young! You must feel
some life still in your heart; or so I like to believe. While I
think of you as depraved enough to do a wrong which the law does
not punish, I do not think you so degraded that you cannot
comprehend the full meaning of my words. I resume."

As he spoke the Duchess heard the smothered sound of a pair of
bellows. Those mysterious figures which she had just seen were
blowing up the fire, no doubt; the glow shone through the
curtain. But Montriveau's lurid face was turned upon her; she
could not choose but wait with a fast-beating heart and eyes
fixed in a stare. However curious she felt, the heat in Armand's
words interested her even more than the crackling of the
mysterious flames.

"Madame," he went on after a pause, "if some poor wretch
commits a murder in Paris, it is the executioner's duty, you
know, to lay hands on him and stretch him on the plank, where
murderers pay for their crimes with their heads. Then the
newspapers inform everyone, rich and poor, so that the former are
assured that they may sleep in peace, and the latter are warned
that they must be on the watch if they would live. Well, you
that are religious, and even a little of a bigot, may have masses
said for such a man's soul. You both belong to the same family,
but yours is the elder branch; and the elder branch may occupy
high places in peace and live happily and without cares. Want or
anger may drive your brother the convict to take a man's life;
you have taken more, you have taken the joy out of a man's life,
you have killed all that was best in his life--his dearest
beliefs. The murderer simply lay in wait for his victim, and
killed him reluctantly, and in fear of the scaffold; but _you_
. . . ! You heaped up every sin that weakness can commit against
strength that suspected no evil; you tamed a passive victim, the
better to gnaw his heart out; you lured him with caresses; you
left nothing undone that could set him dreaming, imagining,
longing for the bliss of love. You asked innumerable sacrifices
of him, only to refuse to make any in return. He should see the
light indeed before you put out his eyes! It is wonderful how
you found the heart to do it! Such villainies demand a display
of resource quite above the comprehension of those bourgeoises
whom you laugh at and despise. They can give and forgive; they
know how to love and suffer. The grandeur of their devotion
dwarfs us. Rising higher in the social scale, one finds just as
much mud as at the lower end; but with this difference, at the
upper end it is hard and gilded over.

"Yes, to find baseness in perfection, you must look for a noble
bringing up, a great name, a fair woman, a duchess. You cannot
fall lower than the lowest unless you are set high above the rest
of the world.--I express my thoughts badly; the wounds you dealt
me are too painful as yet, but do not think that I complain. My
words are not the expression of any hope for myself; there is no
trace of bitterness in them. Know this, madame, for a
certainty--I forgive you. My forgiveness is so complete that you
need not feel in the least sorry that you came hither to find it
against your will. . . . But you might take advantage of other
hearts as child-like as my own, and it is my duty to spare them
anguish. So you have inspired the thought of justice. Expiate
your sin here on earth; God may perhaps forgive you; I wish that
He may, but He is inexorable, and will strike."

The broken-spirited, broken-hearted woman looked up, her eyes
filled with tears.

"Why do you cry? Be true to your nature. You could look on
indifferently at the torture of a heart as you broke it. That
will do, madame, do not cry. I cannot bear it any longer. Other
men will tell you that you have given them life; as for myself, I
tell you, with rapture, that you have given me blank extinction.
Perhaps you guess that I am not my own, that I am bound to live
for my friends, that from this time forth I must endure the cold
chill of death, as well as the burden of life? Is it possible
that there can be so much kindness in you? Are you like the
desert tigress that licks the wounds she has inflicted?"

The Duchess burst out sobbing.

"Pray spare your tears, madame. If I believed in them at all,
it would merely set me on my guard. Is this another of your
artifices? or is it not? You have used so many with me; how can
one think that there is any truth in you? Nothing that you do or
say has any power now to move me. That is all I have to say."

Mme de Langeais rose to her feet, with a great dignity and
humility in her bearing.

"You are right to treat me very hardly," she said, holding out
a hand to the man who did not take it; "you have not spoken
hardly enough; and I deserve this punishment."

"_I_ punish you, madame! A man must love still, to punish, must
he not? From me you must expect no feeling, nothing resembling
it. If I chose, I might be accuser and judge in my cause, and
pronounce and carry out the sentence. But I am about to fulfil a
duty, not a desire of vengeance of any kind. The cruelest
revenge of all, I think, is scorn of revenge when it is in our
power to take it. Perhaps I shall be the minister of your
pleasures; who knows? Perhaps from this time forth, as you
gracefully wear the tokens of disgrace by which society marks out
the criminal, you may perforce learn something of the convict's
sense of honour. And then, you will love!"

The Duchess sat listening; her meekness was unfeigned; it was no
coquettish device. When she spoke at last, it was after a
silence.

"Armand," she began, "it seems to me that when I resisted
love, I was obeying all the instincts of woman's modesty; I
should not have looked for such reproaches from _you_. I was weak;
you have turned all my weaknesses against me, and made so many
crimes of them. How could you fail to understand that the
curiosity of love might have carried me further than I ought to
go; and that next morning I might be angry with myself, and
wretched because I had gone too far? Alas! I sinned in
ignorance. I was as sincere in my wrongdoing, I swear to you, as
in my remorse. There was far more love for you in my severity
than in my concessions. And besides, of what do you complain? I
gave you my heart; that was not enough; you demanded, brutally,
that I should give my person----"

"Brutally?" repeated Montriveau. But to himself he said, "If
I once allow her to dispute over words, I am lost."

"Yes. You came to me as if I were one of those women. You
showed none of the respect, none of the attentions of love. Had
I not reason to reflect? Very well, I reflected. The
unseemliness of your conduct is not inexcusable; love lay at the
source of it; let me think so, and justify you to myself.--Well,
Armand, this evening, even while you were prophesying evil, I
felt convinced that there was happiness in store for us both.
Yes, I put my faith in the noble, proud nature so often tested
and proved." She bent lower. "And I was yours wholly," she
murmured in his ear. "I felt a longing that I cannot express to
give happiness to a man so violently tried by adversity. If I
must have a master, my master should be a great man. As I felt
conscious of my height, the less I cared to descend. I felt I
could trust you, I saw a whole lifetime of love, while you were
pointing to death. . . . Strength and kindness always go
together. My friend, you are so strong, you will not be unkind
to a helpless woman who loves you. If I was wrong, is there no
way of obtaining forgiveness? No way of making reparation?
Repentance is the charm of love; I should like to be very
charming for you. How could I, alone among women, fail to know a
woman's doubts and fears, the timidity that it is so natural to
feel when you bind yourself for life, and know how easily a man
snaps such ties? The bourgeoises, with whom you compared me just
now, give themselves, but they struggle first. Very well--I
struggled; but here I am!--Ah! God, he does not hear me!" she
broke off, and wringing her hands, she cried out "But I love
you! I am yours!" and fell at Armand's feet.

"Yours! yours! my one and only master!"

Armand tried to raise her.

"Madame, it is too late! Antoinette cannot save the Duchesse de
Langeais. I cannot believe in either. Today you may give
yourself; tomorrow, you may refuse. No power in earth or heaven
can insure me the sweet constancy of love. All love's pledges
lay in the past; and now nothing of that past exists."

The light behind the curtain blazed up so brightly, that the
Duchess could not help turning her head; this time she distinctly
saw the three masked figures.

"Armand," she said, "I would not wish to think ill of you. Why
are those men there? What are you going to do to me?"

"Those men will be as silent as I myself with regard to the
thing which is about to be done. Think of them simply as my
hands and my heart. One of them is a surgeon----"

"A surgeon! Armand, my friend, of all things, suspense is the
hardest to bear. Just speak; tell me if you wish for my life; I
will give it to you, you shall not take it----"

"Then you did not understand me? Did I not speak just now of
justice? To put an end to your misapprehensions," continued he,
taking up a small steel object from the table, "I will now
explain what I have decided with regard to you."

He held out a Lorraine cross, fastened to the tip of a steel rod.

"Two of my friends at this very moment are heating another
cross, made on this pattern, red-hot. We are going to stamp it
upon your forehead, here between the eyes, so that there will be
no possibility of hiding the mark with diamonds, and so avoiding
people's questions. In short, you shall bear on your forehead
the brand of infamy which your brothers the convicts wear on
their shoulders. The pain is a mere trifle, but I feared a
nervous crisis of some kind, of resistance----"

"Resistance?" she cried, clapping her hands for joy. "Oh no,
no! I would have the whole world here to see. Ah, my Armand,
brand her quickly, this creature of yours; brand her with your
mark as a poor little trifle belonging to you. You asked for
pledges of my love; here they are all in one. Ah! for me there
is nothing but mercy and forgiveness and eternal happiness in
this revenge of yours. When you have marked this woman with your
mark, when you set your crimson brand on her, your slave in soul,
you can never afterwards abandon her, you will be mine for
evermore? When you cut me off from my kind, you make yourself
responsible for my happiness, or you prove yourself base; and I
know that you are noble and great! Why, when a woman loves, the
brand of love is burnt into her soul by her own will.--Come in,
gentlemen! come in and brand her, this Duchesse de Langeais. She
is M. de Montriveau's forever! Ah! come quickly, all of you, my
forehead burns hotter than your fire!"

Armand turned his head sharply away lest he should see the
Duchess kneeling, quivering with the throbbings of her heart. He
said some word, and his three friends vanished.

The women of Paris salons know how one mirror reflects another.
The Duchess, with every motive for reading the depths of Armand's
heart, was all eyes; and Armand, all unsuspicious of the mirror,
brushed away two tears as they fell. Her whole future lay in
those two tears. When he turned round again to help her to rise,
she was standing before him, sure of love. Her pulses must have
throbbed fast when he spoke with the firmness she had known so
well how to use of old while she played with him.

"I spare you, madame. All that has taken place shall be as if
it had never been, you may believe me. But now, let us bid each
other goodbye. I like to think that you were sincere in your
coquetries on your sofa, sincere again in this outpouring of your
heart. Good-bye. I feel that there is no faith in you left in
me. You would torment me again; you would always be the Duchess,
and----But there, good-bye, we shall never understand each
other.

"Now, what do you wish?" he continued, taking the tone of a
master of the ceremonies--"to return home, or to go back to Mme
de Serizy's ball? I have done all in my power to prevent any
scandal. Neither your servants nor anyone else can possibly know
what has passed between us in the last quarter of an hour. Your
servants have no idea that you have left the ballroom; your
carriage never left Mme de Serizy's courtyard; your brougham may
likewise be found in the court of your own hotel. Where do you
wish to be?"

"What do you counsel, Armand?"

"There is no Armand now, Mme la Duchesse. We are strangers to
each other."

"Then take me to the ball," she said, still curious to put
Armand's power to the test. "Thrust a soul that suffered in the
world, and must always suffer there, if there is no happiness for
her now, down into hell again. And yet, oh my friend, I love you
as your bourgeoises love; I love you so that I could come to you
and fling my arms about your neck before all the world if you
asked it off me. The hateful world has not corrupted me. I am
young at least, and I have grown younger still. I am a child,
yes, your child, your new creature. Ah! do not drive me forth
out of my Eden!"

Armand shook his head.

"Ah! let me take something with me, if I go, some little thing
to wear tonight on my heart," she said, taking possession of
Armand's glove, which she twisted into her handkerchief.

"No, I am _not_ like all those depraved women. You do not know
the world, and so you cannot know my worth. You shall know it
now! There are women who sell themselves for money; there are
others to be gained by gifts, it is a vile world! Oh, I wish I
were a simple bourgeoise, a working girl, if you would rather
have a woman beneath you than a woman whose devotion is
accompanied by high rank, as men count it. Oh, my Armand, there
are noble, high, and chaste and pure natures among us; and then
they are lovely indeed. I would have all nobleness that I might
offer it all up to you. Misfortune willed that I should be a
duchess; I would I were a royal princess, that my offering might
be complete. I would be a grisette for you, and a queen for
everyone besides."

He listened, damping his cigars with his lips.

"You will let me know when you wish to go," he said.

"But I should like to stay----"

"That is another matter!"

"Stay, that was badly rolled," she cried, seizing on a cigar
and devouring all that Armand's lips had touched.

"Do you smoke?"

"Oh, what would I not do to please you?"

"Very well. Go, madame."

"I will obey you," she answered, with tears in her eyes.

"You must be blindfolded; you must not see a glimpse of the
way."

"I am ready, Armand," she said, bandaging her eyes.

"Can you see?"

"No."

Noiselessly he knelt before her.

"Ah! I can hear you!" she cried, with a little fond gesture,
thinking that the pretence of harshness was over.

He made as if he would kiss her lips; she held up her face.

"You can see, madame."

"I am just a little bit curious."

"So you always deceive me?"

"Ah! take off this handkerchief, sir," she cried out, with the
passion of a great generosity repelled with scorn, "lead me; I
will not open my eyes."

Armand felt sure of her after that cry. He led the way; the
Duchess nobly true to her word, was blind. But while Montriveau
held her hand as a father might, and led her up and down flights
of stairs, he was studying the throbbing pulses of this woman's
heart so suddenly invaded by Love. Mme de Langeais, rejoicing in
this power of speech, was glad to let him know all; but he was
inflexible; his hand was passive in reply to the questionings of
her hand.

At length, after some journey made together, Armand bade her go
forward; the opening was doubtless narrow, for as she went she
felt that his hand protected her dress. His care touched her; it
was a revelation surely that there was a little love still left;
yet it was in some sort a farewell, for Montriveau left her
without a word. The air was warm; the Duchess, feeling the heat,
opened her eyes, and found herself standing by the fire in the
Comtesse de Serizy's boudoir.

She was alone. Her first thought was for her disordered
toilette; in a moment she had adjusted her dress and restored
her picturesque coiffure.

"Well, dear Antoinette, we have been looking for you
everywhere." It was the Comtesse de Serizy who spoke as she
opened the door.

"I came here to breathe," said the Duchess; "it is unbearably
hot in the rooms."

"People thought that you had gone; but my brother Ronquerolles
told me that your servants were waiting for you."

"I am tired out, dear, let me stay and rest here for a minute,"
and the Duchess sat down on the sofa.

"Why, what is the matter with you? You are shaking from head to
foot!"

The Marquis de Ronquerolles came in.

"Mme la Duchesse, I was afraid that something might have
happened. I have just come across your coachman, the man is as
tipsy as all the Swiss in Switzerland."

The Duchess made no answer; she was looking round the room, at
the chimney-piece and the tall mirrors, seeking the trace of an
opening. Then with an extraordinary sensation she recollected
that she was again in the midst of the gaiety of the ballroom
after that terrific scene which had changed the whole course of
her life. She began to shiver violently.

"M. de Montriveau's prophecy has shaken my nerves," she said.
"It was a joke, but still I will see whether his axe from London
will haunt me even in my sleep. So good-bye, dear.--Good-bye, M.
le Marquis."

As she went through the rooms she was beset with inquiries and
regrets. Her world seemed to have dwindled now that she, its
queen, had fallen so low, was so diminished. And what, moreover,
were these men compared with him whom she loved with all her
heart; with the man grown great by all that she had lost in
stature? The giant had regained the height that he had lost for
a while, and she exaggerated it perhaps beyond measure. She
looked, in spite of herself, at the servant who had attended her
to the ball. He was fast asleep.

"Have you been here all the time?" she asked.

"Yes, madame."

As she took her seat in her carriage she saw, in fact, that her
coachman was drunk--so drunk, that at any other time she would
have been afraid; but after a great crisis in life, fear loses
its appetite for common food. She reached home, at any rate,
without accident; but even there she felt a change in herself, a
new feeling that she could not shake off. For her, there was now
but one man in the world; which is to say that henceforth she
cared to shine for his sake alone.

While the physiologist can define love promptly by following out
natural laws, the moralist finds a far more perplexing problem
before him if he attempts to consider love in all its
developments due to social conditions. Still, in spite of the
heresies of the endless sects that divide the church of Love,
there is one broad and trenchant line of difference in doctrine,
a line that all the discussion in the world can never deflect. A
rigid application of this line explains the nature of the crisis
through which the Duchess, like most women, was to pass. Passion
she knew, but she did not love as yet.

Love and passion are two different conditions which poets and men
of the world, philosophers and fools, alike continually confound.
Love implies a give and take, a certainty of bliss that nothing
can change; it means so close a clinging of the heart, and an
exchange of happiness so constant, that there is no room left for
jealousy. Then possession is a means and not an end;
unfaithfulness may give pain, but the bond is not less close; the
soul is neither more nor less ardent or troubled, but happy at
every moment; in short, the divine breath of desire spreading
from end to end of the immensity of Time steeps it all for us in
the selfsame hue; life takes the tint of the unclouded heaven.
But Passion is the foreshadowing of Love, and of that Infinite to
which all suffering souls aspire. Passion is a hope that may be
cheated. Passion means both suffering and transition. Passion
dies out when hope is dead. Men and women may pass through this
experience many times without dishonor, for it is so natural to
spring towards happiness; but there is only one love in a
lifetime. All discussions of sentiment ever conducted on paper
or by word of mouth may therefore be resumed by two questions
--"Is it passion? Is it love?" So, since love comes into
existence only through the intimate experience of the bliss
which gives it lasting life, the Duchess was beneath the yoke of
passion as yet; and as she knew the fierce tumult, the
unconscious calculations, the fevered cravings, and all that is
meant by that word _passion_--she suffered. Through all the
trouble of her soul there rose eddying gusts of tempest, raised
by vanity or self-love, or pride or a high spirit; for all these
forms of egoism make common cause together.