第15章

In 1818, M.le Duc de Langeais commanded a division of the army, and the Duchess held a post about one of the Princesses, in virtue of which she was free to live in Paris and apart from her husband without scandal.The Duke, moreover, besides his military duties, had a place at Court, to which he came during his term of waiting, leaving his major-general in command.The Duke and Duchess were leading lives entirely apart, the world none the wiser.Their marriage of convention shared the fate of nearly all family arrangements of the kind.Two more antipathetic dispositions could not well have been found; they were brought together; they jarred upon each other; there was soreness on either side; then they were divided once for all.

Then they went their separate ways, with a due regard for appearances.The Duc de Langeais, by nature as methodical as the Chevalier de Folard himself, gave himself up methodically to his own tastes and amusements, and left his wife at liberty to do as she pleased so soon as he felt sure of her character.He recognised in her a spirit pre-eminently proud, a cold heart, a profound submissiveness to the usages of the world, and a youthful loyalty.Under the eyes of great relations, with the light of a prudish and bigoted Court turned full upon the Duchess, his honour was safe.

So the Duke calmly did as the grands seigneurs of the eighteenth century did before him, and left a young wife of two-and-twenty to her own devices.He had deeply offended that wife, and in her nature there was one appalling characteristic--she would never forgive an offence when woman's vanity and self-love, with all that was best in her nature perhaps, had been slighted, wounded in secret.Insult and injury in the face of the world a woman loves to forget; there is a way open to her of showing herself great; she is a woman in her forgiveness; but a secret offence women never pardon; for secret baseness, as for hidden virtues and hidden love, they have no kindnessThis was Mme la Duchesse de Langeais's real position, unknown to the world.She herself did not reflect upon it.It was the time of the rejoicings over the Duc de Berri's marriage.The Court and the Faubourg roused itself from its listlessness and reserve.

This was the real beginning of that unheard-of splendour which the Government of the Restoration carried too far.At that time the Duchess, whether for reasons of her own, or from vanity, never appeared in public without a following of women equally distinguished by name and fortune.As queen of fashion she had her dames d'atours, her ladies, who modelled their manner and their wit on hers.They had been cleverly chosen.None of her satellites belonged to the inmost Court circle, nor to the highest level of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; but they had set their minds upon admission to those inner sanctuaries.Being as yet simple dominations, they wished to rise to the neighbourhood of the throne, and mingle with the seraphic powers in the high sphere known as le petit chateau.Thus surrounded, the Duchess's position was stronger and more commanding and secure.Her "ladies" defended her character and helped her to play her detestable part of a woman of fashion.She could laugh at men at her ease, play with fire, receive the homage on which the feminine nature is nourished, and remain mistress of herself.

At Paris, in the highest society of all, a woman is a woman still; she lives on incense, adulation, and honours.No beauty, however undoubted, no face, however fair, is anything without admiration.Flattery and a lover are proofs of power.And what is power without recognition? Nothing.If the prettiest of women were left alone in a corner of a drawing-room, she would droop.Put her in the very centre and summit of social grandeur, she will at once aspire to reign over all hearts--often because it is out of her power to be the happy queen of one.Dress and manner and coquetry are all meant to please one of the poorest creatures extant--the brainless coxcomb, whose handsome face is his sole merit; it was for such as these that women threw themselves away.The gilded wooden idols of the Restoration, for they were neither more nor less, had neither the antecedents of the petits maitres of the time of the Fronde, nor the rough sterling worth of Napoleon's heroes, not the wit and fine manners of their grandsires; but something of all three they meant to be without any trouble to themselves.Brave they were, like all young Frenchmen; ability they possessed, no doubt, if they had had a chance of proving it, but their places were filled up by the old worn-out men, who kept them in leading strings.It was a day of small things, a cold prosaic era.Perhaps it takes a long time for a Restoration to become a Monarchy.

For the past eighteen months the Duchesse de Langeais had been leading this empty life, filled with balls and subsequent visits, objectless triumphs, and the transient loves that spring up and die in an evening's space.All eyes were turned on her when she entered a room; she reaped her harvest of flatteries and some few words of warmer admiration, which she encouraged by a gesture or a glance, but never suffered to penetrate deeper than the skin.

Her tone and bearing and everything else about her imposed her will upon others.Her life was a sort of fever of vanity and perpetual enjoyment, which turned her head.She was daring enough in conversation; she would listen to anything, corrupting the surface, as it were, of her heart.Yet when she returned home, she often blushed at the story that had made her laugh; at the scandalous tale that supplied the details, on the strength of which she analysed the love that she had never known, and marked the subtle distinctions of modern passion, not with comment on the part of complacent hypocrites.For women know how to say everything among themselves, and more of them are ruined by each other than corrupted by men.