The phenomenon of speech, which, when duly studied and well handled, is the power of the actor and the storyteller, had never so completely bewitched me. Nor was I alone under the influence of its spell; we all spent a delightful evening. The conversation had drifted into anecdote, and brought out in its rushing course some curious confessions, several portraits, and a thousand follies, which make this enchanting improvisation impossible to record; still, by setting these things down in all their natural freshness and abruptness, their elusive divarications, you may perhaps feel the charm of a real French evening, taken at the moment when the most engaging familiarity makes each one forget his own interests, his personal conceit, or, if you like, his pretensions.
At about two in the morning, as supper ended, no one was left sitting round the table but intimate friends, proved by intercourse of fifteen years, and some persons of great taste and good breeding, who knew the world. By tacit agreement, perfectly carried out, at supper everyone renounced his pretensions to importance. Perfect equality set the tone. But indeed there was no one present who was not very proud of being himself.
Mademoiselle des Touches always insists on her guests remaining at table till they leave, having frequently remarked the change which a move produces in the spirit of a party. Between the dining-room and the drawing-room the charm is destroyed. According to Sterne, the ideas of an author after shaving are different from those he had before. If Sterne is right, may it not be boldly asserted that the frame of mind of a party at table is not the same as that of the same persons returned to the drawing-room? The atmosphere is not heady, the eye no longer contemplates the brilliant disorder of the dessert, lost are the happy effects of that laxness of mood, that benevolence which comes over us while we remain in the humor peculiar to the well-filled man, settled comfortably on one of the springy chairs which are made in these days. Perhaps we are not more ready to talk face to face with the dessert and in the society of good wine, during the delightful interval when everyone may sit with an elbow on the table and his head resting on his hand. Not only does everyone like to talk then, but also to listen. Digestion, which is almost always attent, is loquacious or silent, as characters differ. Then everyone finds his opportunity.
Was not this preamble necessary to make you know the charm of the narrative, by which a celebrated man, now dead, depicted the innocent jesuistry of women, painting it with the subtlety peculiar to persons who have seen much of the world, and which makes statesmen such delightful storytellers when, like Prince Talleyrand and Prince Metternich, they vouchsafe to tell a story?
De Marsay, prime minister for some six months, had already given proofs of superior capabilities. Those who had known him long were not indeed surprised to see him display all the talents and various aptitudes of a statesman; still it might yet be a question whether he would prove to be a solid politician, or had merely been moulded in the fire of circumstance. This question had just been asked by a man whom he had made a préfet, a man of wit and observation, who had for a long time been a journalist, and who admired de Marsay without infusing into his admiration that dash of acrid criticism by which, in Paris, one superior man excuses himself from admiring another.
“Was there ever,” said he, “in your former life, any event, any thought or wish which told you what your vocation was?” asked Émile Blondet; “for we all, like Newton, have our apple, which falls and leads us to the spot where our faculties develop—”
“Yes,” said de Marsay; “I will tell you about it.”
Pretty women, political dandies, artists, old men, de Marsay’s intimate friends—all settled themselves comfortably, each in his favorite attitude, to look at the Minister. Need it be said that the servants had left, that the doors were shut, and the curtains drawn over them? The silence was so complete that the murmurs of the coachmen’s voices could be heard from the courtyard, and the pawing and champing made by horses when asking to be taken back to their stable.
“The statesman, my friends, exists by one single quality,” said the Minister, playing with his gold and mother-of-pearl dessert knife. “To wit: the power of always being master of himself; of profiting more or less, under all circumstances, by every event, however fortuitous; in short, of having within himself a cold and disinterested other self, who looks on as a spectator at all the changes of life, noting our passions and our sentiments, and whispering to us in every case the judgment of a sort of moral ready-reckoner.”
“That explains why a statesman is so rare a thing in France,” said old Lord Dudley.
“From a sentimental point of view, this is horrible,” the Minister went on. “Hence, when such a phenomenon is seen in a young man—Richelieu, who, when warned overnight by a letter of Concini’s peril, slept till midday, when his benefactor was killed at ten o’clock—or say Pitt, or Napoleon, he was a monster. I became such a monster at a very early age, thanks to a woman.”
“I fancied,” said Madame de Montcornet with a smile, “that more politicians were undone by us than we could make.”
“The monster of which I speak is a monster just because he withstands you,” replied de Marsay, with a little ironical bow.
“If this is a love-story,” the Baronne de Nucingen interposed, “I request that it may not be interrupted by any reflections.”
“Reflection is so antipathetic to it!”
