The Human Comedy (54 page)

“Admirable courage! Such villainy is a luxury beyond the ken of those bourgeois women whom you so despise. They know how to give themselves and forgive; they know how to love and suffer. They make us look small by the grandeur of their devotions. The higher we rise in society, we find as much filth as at the bottom, only it is hardened and gilded. Yes, to achieve perfect baseness you need a fine education, a great name, a pretty woman, a duchess. To fall as low as possible, you needed to be above it all. I express my thoughts poorly, I still suffer from too many wounds you inflicted; but do not imagine that I complain! No. My words are not the expression of any personal hope and contain no bitterness. Be assured, madame, I forgive you, and this forgiveness is so complete that you need not feel sorry that you’ve come here to find it against your will . . . But you might abuse other hearts as childlike as mine, and I must spare them that pain. You have thus inspired me with an idea for justice. Expiate your sin here on earth, perhaps God will forgive you—I certainly hope so—but He is implacable and will strike you.”

At these words, the eyes of this woman—battered, torn—filled with tears.

“Why are you weeping? Stay true to your nature. You coldly contemplated the tortures of the heart you were breaking. Enough, madame, console yourself. I can suffer no more. Others will tell you that you have given them life. I, on the other hand, am delighted to tell you that you have given me nothingness. Perhaps you imagine that I haven’t a minute to myself, that I live for my friends, and that from now on I will have to bear death’s coldness and life’s sorrows together? Do you really have such kindness in you? Perhaps you are like the tigers in the desert, who lick the wounds they have first inflicted?”

The duchess dissolved in tears.

“Spare yourself these tears, madame. If I believed in them, it would only put me on my guard. Is it merely one of your artful tricks or not? After all those you have used, how can one think there is any truth in you? Henceforth, you have no more power to move me. I have said all I have to say.”

Madame de Langeais rose, moving with both a noble bearing and humility.

“You are right to treat me harshly,” she said, holding out to this man a hand that he did not take. “Your words are still not harsh enough, and I deserve this punishment.”

“
I
punish you, madame! But to punish someone is to love them, is it not? Do not expect anything from me that resembles an emotion. On behalf of my own cause, I might make myself both accuser and judge, pronounce your sentence and be your executioner. But for me the cruelest vengeance is to disdain any possible vengeance. Who knows! Perhaps I will be the minister of your pleasures. From now on, elegantly wearing the sad uniform society prescribes for criminals, perhaps you will be forced to have their integrity. And then you will love!”

The duchess listened with a submission that was no longer infused with calculated coquetry; she spoke only after an interlude of silence.

“Armand,” she said, “it seems to me that by resisting love, I was obeying all the considerations of a woman’s modesty, and I would not have expected such reproach from you. You have turned all my weaknesses against me and made them into crimes. How could you fail to understand that all the curiosities of love might have led me beyond my duties, and that the next day I would have been angry with myself, in despair that I had gone so far? Alas, there was as much good faith in my sins as in my remorse. My severity betrayed much more love than my concessions. And besides, what are you complaining about? The gift of my heart was not enough for you, you brutally demanded my person—”

“Brutally!” cried Monsieur de Montriveau. But he said to himself, “I am lost if I allow myself to take up this argument over words.”

“Yes, you arrived at my house as if it were the house of one of those fallen women, showing no respect, none of the attentions of love. Had I not the right to think it over? Well, I have thought it over. The unseemliness of your conduct is excusable: Love is the main point—let me believe that and justify your behavior to myself. So, Armand, at the very moment this evening when you were predicting my unhappiness,
I
was thinking of our happiness. Yes, I had confidence in your proud and noble character—you’ve given me proof of that . . . and I was all yours,” she added, leaning toward Montriveau’s ear.

“Yes, I had some mysterious desire to make a man happy who has so violently suffered from adversity. Master for master, I wanted a great man. The loftier I felt, the less I wanted to settle for less. I had confidence in you and saw a life full of love while you were showing me death . . . Strength does not work without goodness. My friend, you are too strong to be wicked to a poor woman who loves you. If I was wrong, can I not be pardoned? Can I not set things right? Repentance is love’s grace, I want to be full of grace to you. How could I, alone among women, fail to share those uncertainties, those fears, that timidity so natural when you are bound for life, and know how you men break such bonds so easily! Those bourgeois women, to whom you compare me, give themselves, but they struggle. Well, I have struggled, but here I am . . . My God! He isn’t listening to me—” She broke off, twisting her hands and crying. “But I love you! I am yours!” She fell at Armand’s knees. “Yours! Yours, my one and only master!”

“Madame,” said Armand, trying to raise her, “Antoinette can no longer save the Duchesse de Langeais. I do not believe either one anymore. You give yourself today, perhaps you will refuse to give yourself tomorrow. No power on heaven or earth could guarantee the sweet constancy of your love. Love’s pledges were in the past, and now there is no more past.”

At this moment, a glimmer shone so brightly that the duchess could not help turning her head toward the curtain, and this time she saw distinctly three masked men.

“Armand,” she said, “I would not like to misjudge you. What are those men doing there? What are you going to do to me?”

“Those men are as discreet as I will be myself on what will happen here,” he said. “Think of them simply as my arms and my heart. One of them is a surgeon—”

“A surgeon,” she said. “Armand, my friend, uncertainty is the cruelest form of suffering. Speak to me, then, tell me if you want to take my life. I will give it to you, you shall not take it.”

“So you have not understood me?” replied Montriveau. “Did I not speak to you of justice?” he added coldly, taking a small steel object from the table. “I am going to put an end to your apprehensions, to explain what I have decided to do with you.”

He showed her a cross of Lorraine at the end of a steel rod.

“Two of my friends are even now heating a cross like this one. We will apply it to your forehead, just there between your eyes, so that you shall not be able to hide it behind diamonds and avoid the questions of society. In short, your forehead will bear the brand of infamy your brother convicts wear on their shoulders. The pain involved is minor, but I was afraid of an attack of nerves or some resistance—”

“Of resistance?” she said, clapping her hands with joy. “No, no, I would have the whole world here to watch. Ah, my Armand, brand me quickly, brand your creature like some poor little thing you own. You were asking for pledges of my love, but here they are, all in one. Ah! I see only mercy and forgiveness, only eternal happiness in your vengeance . . . When you have marked a woman as yours this way, when you have a soul in bondage who will bear your red mark, well then, you can never abandon her, you will be mine forever. By isolating me on earth, you will be responsible for my happiness on pain of cowardice, and I will know your nobility, your greatness! But the woman in love is always branded by herself. Come, gentlemen, enter and brand me, brand the Duchesse de Langeais. Enter quickly, all of you, my forehead burns more than your iron.”

Armand turned away quickly so as not to see the duchess on her knees, her heart throbbing. He spoke to them briefly and his three friends disappeared. Women used to salon life know the game of mirrors. So the duchess, intensely interested in reading Armand’s heart, was all eyes, while Armand, unaware of his mirror, openly shed two tears before quickly wiping them away. The duchess’s entire future lay in those two tears. When he turned back again to help her rise, he found Madame de Langeais already on her feet; she was sure that she was loved. And her heart must have throbbed hearing Montriveau tell her, with the firmness she knew so well how to take when she used to toy with him, “I spare you, madame. Believe me, this scene will be as if it had never taken place. But let us say farewell here. I like to think that you were sincere in your coquetries on your divan, and sincere in your emotional effusions here. Farewell. I no longer have faith. You would still torment me, you would always be a duchess. And . . . but farewell, we will never understand each other. Now, what would you like?” he said, assuming the air of a master of ceremonies. “To go home or to return to the ball at Madame de Sérizy’s? I have done everything in my power to leave your reputation intact. Neither your servants nor the world can know anything of what has passed between us for the last quarter of an hour. Your servants believe you are at the ball—your carriage has not left Madame de Sérizy’s courtyard, and likewise your brougham is in the courtyard of your own mansion. Where do you wish to be?”

“What do you think, Armand?”

“There is no more Armand, madame la duchesse. We are strangers to each other.”

“Take me to the ball, then,” she said, still curious to test Armand’s power. “Throw back into the hell of society a creature who would suffer there, and who must continue to suffer if there is no happiness left for her. Oh, my friend, I still love you as your bourgeois women love. I would love to throw my arms around your neck at the ball, before everyone, if you asked me to. That dreadful society has not corrupted me. Go, I am young and I have just grown younger. Yes, I am a child, your child, you have just created me. Oh, do not banish me from my Eden!”

Armand shook his head.

“If I leave, at least let me take something with me, anything—this—to engrave this evening on my heart,” she said, taking Armand’s cap and wrapping it in her handkerchief, “No,” she continued, “I am not part of that world of depraved women. You do not know it, and so you cannot appreciate me. Know this, then: Some give themselves for gold, others can be plied with gifts—all vile. Oh, I would like to be a simple bourgeois woman, a working girl, if you prefer a woman beneath you to a woman in whom devotion is bound up with high rank. But my Armand, I am one of those noble, great, chaste, pure women, and they are lovely. I would like to have all the noble virtues that I might sacrifice them all to you. Misfortune has made me a duchess; I would like to have been royalty so that I might make the greatest possible sacrifice to you. I would be a shopgirl to you and a queen to others.”

He was listening while moistening his cigars.

“When you want to leave,” he said, “let me know.”

“But I would like to stay—”

“That is another matter!” he said.

“Come, that was badly done,” she cried, seizing a cigar and devouring what Armand’s lips had touched.

“Do you smoke?”

“Oh, what would I not do to please you?”

“Very well. Leave, madame.”

“I will obey you,” she said, weeping.

“You must be blindfolded so as not to get a glimpse of the way back.”

“I am ready, Armand,” she said, covering her eyes.

“Can you see?”

“No.”

Noiselessly he knelt before her.

“Ah! I can hear you!” she cried, allowing a caressing gesture to escape, believing that this pretended harshness was over.

He leant as if to kiss her lips; she held up her face.

“You can see, madame.”

“I am just a little curious.”

“So you are deceiving me still?”

“Ah!” she said with the rage of great generosity scorned. “Take off this handkerchief and lead me, monsieur, I will not open my eyes.”

Armand felt certain of her honesty in that cry. He led the duchess who, true to her word, kept herself nobly blind. But in taking her paternally by the hand to help her climb up, then descend, Montriveau studied the throbbing of this woman’s heart so quickly invaded by a true love. Madame de Langeais, happy to be able to speak to him this way, took pleasure in telling him everything; but he remained inflexible, and when the duchess’s hand felt for him, his remained mute. At last, after having traveled for some time together, Armand told her to come forward. She did so and perceived that he was preventing her dress from touching the walls of what must have been a narrow opening. Madame de Langeais was moved by this care, which betrayed still a little love for her; but this was Montriveau’s way of bidding her farewell, for he left without a word. Feeling the warmth around her, the duchess opened her eyes. She saw that she was alone in front of the fireplace in the Countess de Sérizy’s boudoir. Her first concern was to see to her disordered toilette; in a moment she had readjusted her dress and restored her charming coiffure.

“Well, my dear Antoinette, we have searched for you everywhere,” said the countess, opening the door to the boudoir.

“I came in here to breathe,” she said, “it is unbearably hot in the public rooms.”

“We thought you had gone, but my brother Ronquerolles told me he had seen your servants waiting for you.”

“I am worn out, my dear, let me rest here a moment.”

The duchess sat down on her friend’s divan.

“What’s the matter with you? You’re trembling all over.”

The Marquis de Ronquerolles entered.

“I was afraid, madame la duchesse, that something had happened to you. I just saw your coachman looking as tipsy as the Swiss.”

The duchess did not answer but looked at the fireplace, at the mirrors, trying to see some trace of her passage. Then she experienced an extraordinary sensation to see herself in the midst of the pleasures of the ball after the terrible scene that had just set her life on another course. She began to tremble violently.

“Monsieur de Montriveau’s prediction this evening has shaken my nerves. Joking or not, I shall see if his London ax will haunt my sleep. Adieu then, my dear. Adieu, monsieur le marquis.”