“He will be all the more delighted to come here,” replied Nathan, “because I know he is so much in love with you as to commit any folly.”
“But he has committed every folly already, I am told.”
“Every folly? No,” replied Nathan, “he has not yet been so foolish as to love a decent woman.”
A few days after the plot of the Boulevard had been laid between Maxime and the seductive Count Charles-Édouard, this young gentleman, on whom Nature had bestowed—in irony, no doubt—a pathetically melancholy countenance, made his first incursion into the nest in the Rue de Courcelles, where the dove, to receive him, fixed an evening when Calyste was obliged to go out with his wife. If ever you meet la Palférine—or when you come to the “Prince of Bohemia” in the third part of this long picture of modern manners—you will at once understand the triumph achieved in a single evening by that sparkling wit, those astonishing high spirits, especially if you can conceive of the capital byplay of the sponsor who agreed to second him on this occasion. Nathan was a good fellow; he showed off the young Count as a jeweler shows off a necklace he wants to sell, by making the stones sparkle in the light.
La Palférine discreetly was the first to leave; he left Nathan and the Marquise together, trusting to the great author’s cooperation, which was admirable. Seeing the Marquise quite amazed, he fired her fancy by a certain reticence, which stirred in her such chords of curiosity as she did not know existed in her. Nathan gave her to understand that it was not so much la Palférine’s wit that won him his successes with women as his superior gifts in the art of love; and he cried him up beyond measure.
This is the place for setting forth a novel result of the great law of contrasts, which gives rise to many a crisis in the human heart, and accounts for so many vagaries that we are forced to refer to it sometimes, as well as to the law of affinities. Courtesans—including all that portion of the female sex which is named, unnamed, and renamed every quarter of a century—all preserve, in the depths of their hearts, a vigorous wish to recover their liberty, to feel a pure, saintly, and heroic love for some man to whom they can sacrifice everything. (See Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.) They feel this antithetical need so keenly, that it is rare to find a woman of the kind who has not many times aspired to become virtuous through love. The most frightful deception cannot discourage them. Women who are, on the contrary, restrained by education, and by their rank in life, fettered by the dignity of their family, living in the midst of wealth, crowned by a halo of virtue, are tempted—secretly, of course—to try the tropical regions of passion. These two antagonistic types of women have, at the bottom of their hearts, the one a little craving for virtue, the other a little craving for dissipation, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau first had the courage to point out. In those it is the last gleam of the divine light not yet extinct; in these it is a trace of the primitive clay.
This remaining claw of the beast was tickled, this hair of the devil was pulled with the greatest skill, by Nathan. The Marquise seriously wondered whether she had not hitherto been the dupe of her intellect, whether her education was complete. Vice!—is perhaps the desire to know everything.
Next day Calyste was seen by Béatrix as what he was—a perfect and loyal gentleman, devoid of spirit and wit.
In Paris, to be known as a wit, a man’s wit must flow as water flows from a spring; for all men of fashion, and Parisians in general, are witty. But Calyste was too much in love, he was too much absorbed to observe the change in Béatrix, and satisfy her by opening up fresh veins; he was very colorless in the reflected light of the previous evening, and could not give the greedy Béatrix the smallest excitement. A great love is a credit account open to such voracious drafts on it that the moment of bankruptcy is inevitable.
In spite of the weariness of this day—the day when a woman is bored by her lover!—Béatrix shuddered with fears as she thought of a duel between la Palférine, the successor of Maxime de Trailles, and Calyste du Guénic, a brave man without brag. She therefore hesitated to see the young Count any more; but the knot was cut by a simple incident. Béatrix had a third share in a box at the Italiens—a dark box on the pit tier where she might not be seen. For some few days Calyste had been so bold as to accompany the Marquise and sit behind her, timing their arrival late enough to attract no attention. Béatrix was always one of the first to leave before the end of the last act, and Calyste escorted her, keeping an eye on her, though old Antoine was in waiting on his mistress.
Maxime and la Palférine studied these tactics, dictated by the proprieties, by the love of concealment characteristic of the “Eternal Baby,” and also by a dread that weighs on every woman who, having once been a constellation of fashion, has fallen for love from her rank in the zodiac. She then fears humiliation as a worse agony than death; but this agony of pride, this shipwreck, which women who have kept their place on Olympus inflict on those who have fallen, came upon her, by Maxime’s contriving, under the most horrible circumstances.
At a performance of Lucia, which ended, as is well known, by one of Rubini’s greatest triumphs, Madame de Rochefide, before she was called by Antoine, came out from the corridor into the vestibule of the theatre, where the
