The Human Comedy (50 page)

If to keep a man whose ardent passion gave her unaccustomed emotions, or if out of weakness she let herself be ravished by a swift kiss, she feigned fear, blushed, and banished Armand from her sofa as soon as the sofa became dangerous to her. “Your pleasures are sins that I must expiate, Armand; they cost me penitence and remorse,” she cried.

When Montriveau was two chairs away from that aristocratic skirt, he began to blaspheme and railed against God. The duchess grew angry then.

“But my friend,” she said dryly, “I do not understand why you refuse to believe in God, for it is impossible to believe in men. Keep quiet, do not speak this way; you have too great a soul to espouse the nonsense of liberalism and its pretention to annihilate God.”

The theological and political discussions acted like cold showers to calm Montriveau, who did not know how to return to the subject of love when the duchess made him angry, throwing him a thousand miles away from this boudoir in her theories of absolute monarchy, which she defended to perfection. Few woman dare to be democrats, for this would be in contradiction to their sentimental despotism. But often, too, the general shook out his mane, dropped politics, incapable of holding his heart and thought in contradiction, he would growl like a lion and lash his flanks as he leaped upon his prey, returning fiercely to his mistress with love. If this woman felt the prick of fancy exciting enough to compromise her, she knew how to escape from her boudoir: She would leave the air she had been breathing, thick with desire, and would come into her salon, sit down at the piano, sing the most delightful melodies by modern composers, and thus trick the sensual love that sometimes left her no mercy but which she had the strength to defeat. In these moments she was sublime in Armand’s eyes. She did not pretend, she was true to her feeling, and the poor lover believed he was loved.

This selfish resistance gave her the appearance of a saint and a virtuous creature, and he resigned himself and spoke of platonic love, this general of the artillery! When she had played long enough with religion in her personal interest, Madame de Langeais played with it in Armand’s. She wanted to bring him back to Christian feelings, so she brought out her edition of
Génie du Christianisme
, designed for the use of military personnel. Montriveau grew impatient with this, found his yoke too heavy. And then, out of a spirit of contradiction, she tried to knock God into his head to see if God might not rid her of this suitor, for the man’s persistence was beginning to frighten her. In any case, she was glad to prolong any quarrel that seemed to keep the dispute on moral grounds indefinitely. The material struggle that followed was much more dangerous.

But if the opposition in the name of marriage laws represents the
époque civile
of this sentimental warfare, the current struggle constituted the
époque religieuse
, and like its predecessor, it would also have its crisis and then diminishing severity. One evening Armand happened to come quite early and found Monsieur l’Abbé Gondrand, the director of Madame de Langeais’s conscience, ensconced in an armchair by the fireside, like a man digesting his dinner and the pretty sins of his penitent. At the sight of this fresh-faced, well-rested man with a calm forehead, an ascetic mouth, a maliciously inquisitive look, with a noble ecclesiastical bearing and already dressed in the episcopal purple, Montriveau’s face grew unusually dark; he pronounced no greetings and remained silent. Apart from his love, the general was not lacking in tact; he guessed, therefore, by exchanging glances with the future bishop that this man was the real promoter of the obstacles in the way of the duchess’s love for him. Let an ambitious priest dabble and interfere with the happiness of a man of Montriveau’s temper? This thought boiled in his face, clenched his fists, and made him stand up, pace back and forth. Then, when he came back to his place intending to make a scene, a single look from the duchess was enough to calm him. Madame de Langeais, not at all embarrassed by her lover’s gloomy silence, which would have unsettled any other woman, continued to converse very intelligently with Monsieur Gondrand about the necessity of re-establishing religion in its former splendor. She expressed better than the priest why the church should be a power at once temporal and spiritual, and regretted that the Chamber of Peers did not still have its Bishops’ Bench
,
as did the House of Lords. Nonetheless, the abbé yielded his place to the general and took his leave, knowing that during Lent he would be allowed to take his revenge. The duchess scarcely rose to return her director’s humble bow, so intrigued was she by Montriveau’s attitude.

“What is the matter, my friend?”

“I cannot stomach that abbé of yours.”

“Why did you not bring a book?” she said to him, unconcerned whether she was overheard or not by the abbé, who was just closing the door.

Montriveau stayed mute for a moment because the duchess accompanied this remark with a gesture that enforced its sheer impertinence.

“My dear Antoinette, I thank you for giving love precedence over the church, but for pity’s sake, permit me to ask you a question.”

“Ah! You are going to interrogate me. I am quite willing,” she went on. “Are you not my friend? Certainly I can show you the bottom of my heart, and you will see only one image inside.”

“Do you speak to that man of our love?”

“He is my confessor.”

“Does he know that I love you?”

“Monsieur de Montriveau, you are not, I think, claiming permission to penetrate the secrets of my confession?”

“So this man knows about all our quarrels and my love for you—”

“A man, monsieur! Say God.”

“God! God! I must be alone in your heart. But leave God in peace where He is, for the love of Him and of me. Madame, you will no longer go to confession or—”

“Or?” she said, smiling.

“Or I will not come back here again.”

“Leave, Armand. Farewell, farewell forever . . .”

She rose and went into her boudoir without a single look at Montriveau, who remained standing, his hand resting on a chair. How long he stood this way he could not have said. Love has the unknown power to extend as well as to compress time. He opened the door of the boudoir and saw that it was dark. A weak voice grew stronger, saying bitterly, “I did not ring. Besides, why do you enter without an order? Suzette, leave me alone.”

“Are you suffering?” exclaimed Montriveau.

“Stand up, monsieur, and leave the room at least for a moment,” she said, ringing for the servant.

“Madame la duchesse is asking for some light,” he said to the valet, who came into the boudoir and lit the candles.

When the two lovers were alone, Madame de Langeais remained reclining on her divan, speechless, immobile, absolutely as if Montriveau had not been there.

“Dearest,” he said with a note of pain and sublime kindness, “I was wrong. I would not have you without religion.”

“It is fortunate,” she replied without looking at him, her voice hard, “that you recognize the necessity of conscience. I thank you in God’s name.”

Here the general, beaten down by the harshness of this woman who knew how to become a stranger or a sister to him at will, took a step toward the door in despair and was going to abandon her forever without saying a single word. He was suffering and the duchess was laughing inside over the suffering caused by a mental torture much crueler than the judicial torture of former times. But this man was not strong enough to leave. In every sort of crisis, a woman is somehow full of a certain quantity of words, and when she does not say them, she feels a sensation of something incomplete. Madame de Langeais, who had not finished speaking her mind, took another turn.

“We do not have the same convictions, General, I am pained to admit. It would be dreadful for a woman not to believe in a religion that allows us to love beyond the grave. I set Christian sentiments aside since you do not understand them. Let me speak to you only of expedience. Do you want to forbid a woman of the court
the Lord’s table
when it is customary to take the sacrament at Easter? But you must do something for your party. The Liberals, whatever their preference, will not kill religious feeling. Religion will always be a political necessity. Would you take on the responsibility of governing a people who live by reason alone? Napoleon did not dare; he persecuted the ideologues. To prevent peoples from reasoning, you must impose feelings on them. Let us accept the Catholic religion with all its consequences. If we want France to go to Mass, should we not begin by going ourselves? Religion, Armand, is, you see, the bond uniting all conservative principles that enable the rich to live peacefully. Religion is intimately bound to property. It is certainly finer to lead people by moral ideas than by scaffolds, as in the time of the Terror, the only means that your detestable revolution had invented to instill obedience. The priest and the king—they are but you and me, they are my neighbor the princess. In short, they are all the interests of respectable people personified. So, my friend, be so good as to belong to your party, you who might become its
Sulla
if you had the slightest ambition. I myself am ignorant of politics, I reason through feeling; nonetheless I know enough to understand that society would be overturned if we put in question its basis at each moment—”

“If your court, if your government thinks this way, I pity you,” said Montriveau. “The Restoration, madame, must tell itself—as Catherine de Médicis did when she believed
the Battle of Dreux
to be lost—‘Very well; now we will go to hear the sermon’! Today, 1815 is your Battle of Dreux. Like the throne of that time, you have won in practice but lost in principle. Political Protestantism is victorious in people’s minds. If you do not want to issue an Edict of Nantes or if after doing so you wish to revoke it, if one day you are accused and convicted of repudiating the Charter, which is merely a pledge to maintain revolutionary interests, the Revolution will rise again, terrible in its might, and will give you only a single blow. It will not be the Revolution that will leave France—it is the soil itself. Men will let themselves die, but not their interests . . . My God, what is France, the throne, legitimacy, the whole world to us? They are nonsense compared to my happiness. Reign or be overthrown, no matter. Where am I now?”

“My friend, you are in the boudoir of Madame la Duchesse de Langeais.”

“No, no, no more duchess, no more Langeais, I am with my dear Antoinette!”

“Do you wish to do me the pleasure of staying where you are,” she said, laughing as she pushed him away, but gently.

“Then you have never loved me,” he said with a rage that shot like lightning from his eyes.

“No, my friend.”

This “no” stood for a “yes.”

“I am a great idiot,” he replied, kissing the hand of this terrible queen, who became a woman once more.

“Antoinette,” he went on, leaning his head on her feet, “you are too chastely tender to speak of our happiness to anyone in the world.”

“Ah! You are a great fool,” she said, standing up with a swift but graceful movement. And without adding a word, she ran into the salon.

“What is it now?” wondered the general, little knowing that the touch of his burning head had sent a jolt of electricity through her from head to foot.

Just as he arrived, furious, in the salon, a run of celestial chords was heard. The duchess was at her piano. Men of science or poetry, who can both understand and enjoy without harm to their pleasures, know that the alphabet and musical phrasing are the musician’s intimate tools, just as wood or copper are tools of the orchestral performer. For them music exists apart at the basis of the double expression of this sensual language of souls.
Andiam, mio ben
can draw tears of joy or pitying laughter, depending on the singer. Often, here and somewhere in the world, a young girl expiring beneath the weight of an unknown punishment, a man whose soul vibrates beneath the pricks of passion, takes a musical theme and reaches to heaven, or they speak to each other through some sublime melody, a kind of lost poem. Just now the general was hearing one of those unknown poems, like the solitary plaint of some bird dying without a mate in a virgin forest.

“My God, what are you playing?” he said, his voice betraying his emotion.

“The prelude of a romance called, I believe, ‘Fleuve du Tage.’”

“I did not know that a piano could produce such music,” he replied.

“Ah, my friend,” she said, looking at him for the first time like a woman in love, “neither do you know that I love you, that you make me suffer horribly, and that I must express my pain without making myself too clearly understood, otherwise I would be yours . . . But you see nothing.”

“And you do not want to make me happy!”

“Armand, the next day I would die of sorrow.”

The general left abruptly, but when he found himself in the street, he wiped away two tears that he had been strong enough to contain until then.

Religion lasted for three months. Once this term expired, the duchess grew bored with repeating the same thing and offered God, bound hand and foot, to her lover. Perhaps she feared that having spoken so forcefully of eternity, she would only perpetuate the general’s love in this world and the next. For this woman’s honor, we must believe she was a virgin, even in her heart, otherwise she would be too horrible. The youthful duchess was still far from that age when a man and a woman realize they are too close to the future to waste time arguing about their joys. She was certainly not on the verge of her first love but of its first sensual pleasures. For want of the experience to compare good to bad, for want of the pain that would have taught her the value of the treasures thrown at her feet, she dallied. Not knowing the dazzling delights of the sun, she was content to remain in the shadows. Armand, who was beginning to glimpse this bizarre situation, put his hope in the first language of nature. Every evening as he was leaving Madame de Langeais’s residence, he thought that a woman didn’t accept seven months’ worth of a man’s solicitations and the tender proofs of his love then yield to the superficial demands of a passion only to betray love in a moment, and he waited patiently for the season of sun, having no doubt that he would harvest the fruits in their ripeness. He had perfectly conceived the scruples of the married woman and her religious feelings. He even rejoiced in these battles. He took the duchess’s dreadful coquetry for modesty, and he would not have wished her otherwise. So he loved to see her invent obstacles. Would he not triumph over them gradually? And every triumph would surely increase little by little the small sum of amorous intimacies long denied, then conceded with every sign of love. But he had sampled at such leisure the small progressive conquests timid lovers feed on that they had become mere habits to him. In the way of obstacles, he no longer had anything but his own terrors to overcome; he saw nothing left standing between him and his happiness but the caprices of this woman who allowed herself to be called “Antoinette.” He then made up his mind to demand more, to demand all. Embarrassed like a young lover who dares not believe that his idol will stoop so low, he hesitated for a long time and experienced terrible pangs, those desires that were brought up short with an annihilating word, those resolves that died on the threshold of a door. He despised himself for a weakling, unable to say a word, and still he did not say it. Nonetheless, one evening his gloomy melancholy transformed into a fierce demand for his illegally legitimate rights. The duchess did not have to wait for her slave’s request to guess his desire. Is a man’s desire ever a secret? And do not all women have a deep knowledge of certain changes of countenance?