The Human Comedy (47 page)

The duchess, already struck by the appearance of this romantic figure, was even more impressed when she learned that this was the Marquis de Montriveau whom she had dreamed of during the night. She had been with him in the burning desert sands, he had been her nightmare’s companion: For such a woman, was this not a delicious foretaste of a new amusement in her life? Never was a man’s character better reflected in his face, and no one could be more intriguing in his appearance alone. His head, large and square, was notable chiefly for his luxurious and abundant black hair, which framed his face in a way reminiscent of General Kléber. The resemblance continued in the vigor of his forehead, in the cut of his features, in the calm audacity of his eyes, and a kind of fiery vehemence expressed by his prominent features. He was short, with a broad chest, and muscular as a lion. There was something imposing, even despotic in his bearing, his movement, his slightest gesture—he projected an ineffable confidence in his strength. He seemed to know that nothing could oppose his will, perhaps because he wanted nothing but what was right. Nonetheless, like all truly strong people, his speech was soft, his manners simple, and he was naturally kind. Yet all these fine qualities seemed to disappear in grave circumstances when a man had to be implacable in his feelings, firm in his resolutions, terrible in his actions. A close observer could have seen a habitual movement at the corner of his mouth, something that betrayed his penchant for irony.

The Duchesse de Langeais, knowing the fleeting glory to be won by such a conquest, resolved in the brief time the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse took to introduce them to make Monsieur de Montriveau one of her lovers, set him above all others, attach him to her person, and use all her wiles to do so. This was a fantasy, a pure duchess’s caprice, the sort used by Calderón or by Lope de Vega in
The Gardener’s Dog
. She would not permit this man to belong to another woman, but she had no intention of belonging to him. The Duchesse de Langeais had been endowed by nature to play the coquette, and her education had perfected this endowment. Women envied her and men fell in love with her for good reason. Her every quality was meant to inspire love, to justify it, and to perpetuate it. Her sort of beauty, her manners, her speech, her bearing—all matched her talent for a natural coquetry that in a woman seems to be her consciousness of power. She was graceful and perhaps exaggerated her movements with too much complacency, the one affectation for which she might have been reproached. Everything about her was harmonious, from her slightest gesture, to her particular turns of phrase, to the deceptive innocence of her glance. Her most striking feature was her elegant nobility, which was not compromised by her very French vivacity. This incessantly changing manner was prodigiously attractive to men. She would be the most delicious mistress when removing her corset and the paraphernalia of her performance. Indeed, all the joys of love were surely budding in the freedom of her expressive looks, in the tender tones of her voice, in the grace of her words. All these gestures implied that within her there was a noble courtesan whom the duchess’s religion tried in vain to deny.

You might be seated near her during a soiree and find her by turns gay and melancholy, and both moods would seem genuine. She knew how to be gracious or disdainful, impertinent or confiding. She seemed good and was. In her situation, nothing forced her to descend to meanness. But her mood was changeable, first pliable then wily, easily moved then so hard and dry it would break your heart. But to depict her accurately there would be no need to invoke all the extremes of a feminine nature. In short, she was what she wanted to be or to appear to be. Her face was slightly too long, but it had grace, something fine and thin that recalled the faces in medieval portraits. Her complexion was pale, slightly pink. Everything about her erred, as it were, by an excess of delicacy.

Monsieur de Montriveau was pleased to be introduced to the Duchesse de Langeais, who, following the habit of persons whose exquisite taste leads them to avoid banalities, made her welcome him without an avalanche of questions or compliments but with a sort of respectful grace that surely flattered a superior man, for superiority in a man assumes a bit of tact that allows women to understand all sorts of feelings. If the duchess showed any curiosity it was through her look; her manners conveyed any compliments; and she deployed that caressing speech and refined desire to please which she could display better than any of her rivals. Yet all her conversation was in some way merely the body of the letter; there should have been a postscript in which the chief thought was still to come. When, after half an hour of trivial chitchat whose accent and smiles alone gave value to the words, Monsieur de Montriveau was about to retire discreetly when the duchess retained him with an expressive gesture.

“Monsieur,” she said to him, “I do not know whether the few moments in which I have had the pleasure of chatting with you have proved attractive enough to allow me to invite you to pay me a visit—I’m afraid that it may be selfish to wish to have you all to myself. If I should be so fortunate that it would please you to call, you would find me at home every evening until ten o’clock.”

This invitation was offered in such a charming way that Monsieur de Montriveau could not refuse it. When he hurried back to the groups of men gathered at a distance from the women, several of his friends congratulated him, half seriously, half teasingly, on the extraordinary welcome extended to him by the Duchesse de Langeais. This difficult and brilliant conquest was decisively achieved, and its glory had been reserved for the artillery of the guard. It is easy to imagine the pleasantries, good and bad, which the topic provoked in one of those Parisian salons so eager for such amusement, where mockeries are so brief that everyone hastens to take full advantage while they are still fresh.

The general felt unwittingly flattered by these inane remarks. From his vantage point, his eyes were drawn to the duchess by a thousand vague reflections. And he could not help admitting to himself that of all the women whose beauty had captivated him, none had offered him a more delicious expression of faults and virtues, harmonies the most juvenile imagination could want in a French mistress. What man, in any rank of life, has not felt in his soul an indefinable pleasure in a woman he has chosen, even dreamed of as his own, who embodies the triple moral, physical, and social perfections that allow him to see in her the satisfaction of all his wishes? If this is not a cause of love, this flattering combination is surely one of its greatest inducements. Love would be an invalid, said a profound moralist of the last century, were it not for vanity. For men and for women there is surely a wealth of pleasure in the superiority of the beloved. Is it not a great deal, if not everything, to know that they will never bruise our self-regard? That our beloved is so noble that a contemptuous glance will never wound her? Rich enough to be surrounded by a radiance equal to the splendors in which even the ephemeral kings of finance wrap themselves? Intelligent enough never to be humiliated by a good joke, and beautiful enough to be the rival of all her sex? These are thoughts a man has in the blink of an eye. But if the woman who inspires them introduces him at the same time, in the future of his precocious passion, to the shifting delights of grace, the innocence of a virgin soul, the thousand folds of a coquette’s dress, the perils of love—would these qualities fail to move the coldest man’s heart?

This was indeed Monsieur de Montriveau’s situation at the present moment with regard to the duchess, and his past life in some way explained this bizarre fact. Tossed as a youth into the hurricane of the Napoleonic Wars, he had lived his life on battlefields, and he knew about women only what a hurried traveler knows about a country as he goes from inn to inn. The marquis might have said of his own years what Voltaire used to say at eighty: He had thirty-seven follies to regret. At his age, he was as new to love as a young man who has just read
Faublas
in secret. He knew everything about women but nothing about love, and his virginity of feeling made his desires entirely new.

Just as Monsieur de Montriveau had been absorbed by the course of war and the events of his life, some men are absorbed by the labors to which poverty or ambition, art or science have condemned them, and they are familiar with this singular situation, although they rarely admit it. In Paris, all men are supposed to have been in love. No woman wants what another woman has rejected. In France, fear of being taken for a fool is the source of a general tendency to lie, since no Frenchman can be taken for a fool. At this moment, Monsieur de Montriveau was gripped both by violent desire, a desire accumulated in the desert heat, and by a movement of the heart whose burning grip he had not known before. As strong as he was violent, this man knew how to control his emotions, but even as he chatted about meaningless things, he retreated into himself and swore to possess this woman, for this was the only way he could enter into love. His desire became a vow made in the manner of the Arabs with whom he had lived, and for them, a vow is a contract with destiny. The success of the enterprise consecrated by their vow is crucial, and they count even their death as merely a means to that success. A younger man would have said, “I should certainly like to have the Duchesse de Langeais for my mistress!” or “Anyone loved by the Duchesse de Langeais will be a very lucky rascal!” But the general said to himself, “I will have Madame de Langeais for my mistress.” When a man with a virginal heart, for whom love becomes a religion, takes such an idea into his head, he does not know that he has just set foot into hell.

Monsieur de Montriveau abruptly left the salon and returned home, consumed by the first fevers of love he had ever felt. At around middle age, if a man still retains the beliefs, the illusions, the frankness, the impetuousness of childhood, his first impulse is, as it were, to reach out his hand and grab what he desires. Then once he has gauged the nearly impossible distance he must cross, he is overcome by a sort of childish astonishment or impatience, which reinforces the value of the coveted object and causes him to tremble or weep. So the next day, after the stormiest reflections that had ever racked his soul, Armand de Montriveau discovered he was under the yoke of his senses, made even heavier by a true love. This woman, treated so cavalierly the evening before, had become by the following day the holiest, most dreaded of powers. From that time forward she was his world and his life. The memory of the slightest emotions she had stirred in him was now his greatest joy, and his deepest sorrows paled beside it. The most violent revolutions only trouble a man’s interests while passion overturns his feelings. And for those who live more by feeling than by interest, for those who have more soul and blood than mind and lymph, a real love produces a total change of existence. With a single line, through a single reflection, Armand de Montriveau thus erased all his past life. After asking himself twenty times, like a child, “Will I go? Won’t I go?,” he dressed, went to the Hôtel de Langeais at around eight o’clock in the evening, and was admitted. He was to see the woman—no, not the woman, the idol he had seen the evening before, in the light, like a fresh and pure young girl dressed in gauze, lace, and veiling. He arrived impetuously to declare his love for her, as if he were firing the first cannon shot on the battlefield.

Poor novice! He found his ethereal sylph wrapped in a brown cashmere peignoir, cunningly frilled, languidly reclining on the divan in a dimly lit boudoir. Madame de Langeais did not even rise, she lifted only her head, her tousled hair held back in a veil. Then the duchess made a sign to him to take a seat, gesturing with her hand which, in the shadows produced by the trembling light of a single, distant candle, seemed to Montriveau’s eyes as white as a hand made of marble. And with a voice as soft as the candlelight, she said to him, “If it had not been you, monsieur le marquis, if it had been a friend with whom I could be frank or someone indifferent to me who was only of slight interest, I would have sent you away. You see me suffering terribly.”

Armand said to himself, “I will go.”

“But,” she went on, giving him a piercing glance, which the simple warrior attributed to the heat of fever, “I do not know whether it was a presentiment of your kind visit, for whose promptness I am only too conscious, but for a moment now I felt my head somewhat clear of its vapors.”

“So I can stay,” Montriveau said to her.

“Oh, I would be so sorry to see you leave. I was saying to myself only this morning that I must not have made the slightest impression on you, and that you had doubtless taken my invitation for one of those banal remarks Parisian women scatter at random. And I forgave your ingratitude in advance. A man who comes in from the deserts cannot be expected to know how exclusive we are in our friendships in the Faubourg.”

These gracious, half-murmured words fell one by one, as if they were laden with the joyful feeling that seemed to dictate them. The duchess wanted to have all the benefits of her migraine, and her speculation was successful. The poor soldier was truly suffering from this lady’s pretended suffering. Like
Crillon hearing the story of Jesus Christ
, he was ready to draw his sword against the vapors. Ah, how could a man dare to speak to this suffering woman of the love she inspired? Armand already understood that he was ridiculous to fire off his love point-blank at such a superior woman. He understood in a single thought all the delicacies of feeling and demands of the soul. To love—what is this but to know how to plead, to beg, to wait? Feeling such love, did he not need to prove it? He found his tongue paralyzed, frozen by the conventions of the noble Faubourg, by the majesty of the migraine, and by the shyness of true love. But no power in the world could veil the look in his eyes, which burst with warmth, the endless vastness of the desert—eyes as calm as those of panthers that rarely blinked. She adored this fixed look that bathed her in light and love.