“Madame Firmiani, monsieur? I do not know her.” This man is of the class of Dukes. He recognizes no woman who has not been presented. Excuse him; he was created Duke by Napoleon.
“Madame Firmiani? Was she not a singer at the Italian opera house?”—A man of the genus Simpleton. The individuals of this genus must have an answer to everything. They would rather speak calumnies than be silent.
Two old Ladies (the wives of retired lawyers).—The First (she has a cap with bows of ribbon, her face is wrinkled, her nose sharp, she holds a prayerbook, and her voice is harsh).—“What was her maiden name?—this Madame Firmiani?”
The Second (she has a little red face like a lady-apple, and a gentle voice).—“She was a Cadignan, my dear, niece of the old Prince de Cadignan, and cousin, consequently, to the Due de Maufrigneuse.”
Madame Firmiani then is a Cadignan. Bereft of virtues, fortune, and youth, she would still be a Cadignan; that, like a prejudice, is always rich and living.
An Eccentric—“My dear fellow, I never saw any clogs in her anteroom; you may go to her house without compromising yourself, and play there without hesitation; for if there should be any rogues, they will be people of quality, consequently there is no quarreling.”
An old man of the species Observer.—“You go to Madame Firmiani’s, my dear fellow, and you find a handsome woman lounging indolently by the fire. She will scarcely move from her chair; she rises only to greet women, or ambassadors, or dukes—people of importance. She is very gracious, she charms you, she talks well, and likes to talk of everything. She bears every indication of a passionate soul, but she is credited with too many adorers to have a lover. If suspicion rested on only two or three intimate visitors, we might know which was her cavaliere servente. But she is all mystery; she is married, and we have never seen her husband; Monsieur Firmiani is purely a creature of fancy, like the third horse we are made to pay for when traveling post, and which we never see; Madame, if you believe the professionals, has the finest contralto voice in Europe, and has not sung three times since she came to Paris; she receives numbers of people, and goes nowhere.”
The Observer speaks as an oracle. His words, his anecdotes, his quotations must all be accepted as truth, or you risk being taken for a man without knowledge of the world, without capabilities. He will slander you lightly in twenty drawing-rooms, where he is as essential as the first piece in the bill—pieces so often played to the benches, but which once upon a time were successful. The Observer is a man of forty, never dines at home, and professes not to be dangerous to women; he wears powder and a maroon-colored coat; he can always have a seat in various boxes at the Théâtre des Bouffons. He is sometimes mistaken for a parasite, but he has held too high positions to be suspected of sponging, and, indeed, possesses an estate, in a department of which the name has never leaked out.
“Madame Firmiani? Why, my dear boy, she was a mistress of Murat’s.” This gentleman is a Contradictory. They supply the errata to every memory, rectify every fact, bet you a hundred to one, are cocksure of everything. You catch them out in a single evening in flagrant delicts of ubiquity. They assert that they were in Paris at the time of Mallet’s conspiracy, forgetting that half an hour before they had crossed the Beresina. The Contradictories are almost all members of the Legion of Honor; they talk very loud, have receding foreheads, and play high. “Madame Firmiani, a hundred thousand francs a year? Are you mad? Really some people scatter thousands a year with the liberality of authors, to whom it costs nothing to give their heroines handsome fortunes. But Madame Firmiani is a flirt who ruined a young fellow the other day, and hindered him from making a very good marriage. If she were not handsome, she would be penniless.”
This speaker you recognize: he is one of the Envious, and we will not sketch his least feature. The species is as well-known as that of the domestic felis. How is the perpetuity of envy to be explained? A vice which is wholly unprofitable!
People of fashion, literary people, very good people, and people of every kind were, in the month of January 1824, giving out so many different opinions on Madame Firmiani that it would be tiresome to report them all. We have only aimed at showing that a man wishing to know her, without choosing, or being able, to go to her house, would have been equally justified in the belief that she was a widow or a wife—silly or witty, virtuous or immoral, rich or poor, gentle or devoid of soul, handsome or ugly; in fact, there were as many Mesdames Firmiani as there are varieties in social life, or sects in the Catholic Church. Frightful thought! We are all like lithographed plates, of which an endless number of copies are taken off by slander. These copies resemble or differ from the original by touches so imperceptibly slight that, but for the calumnies of our friends and the witticisms of newspapers, reputation would depend on the balance struck by each hearer between the limping truth and the lies to which Parisian wit lends wings.
Madame Firmiani, like many other women of dignity and noble pride, who close their hearts as a sanctuary and scorn the world, might have been very hardly judged by Monsieur de Bourbonne, an old gentleman of fortune, who had thought a good deal about her during the past winter. As it happened, this gentleman belonged to the Provincial Landowner class, folks who are accustomed to inquire into everything, and to
