“If it were any other woman—”
“But, dearest Fanny, if the woman was a saint, she would not make your son welcome.”
The Baroness went back to the paper.
“I will go to see her,” said the old man, “and tell you what I think of her.”
The speech has no point but in retrospect. After hearing the history of Camille Maupin, you may imagine the Baron face to face with this famous woman.
The town of Guérande, which for two months past had seen Calyste—its flower and its pride—going every day, morning or evening—sometimes both morning and evening—to les Touches, supposed that Mademoiselle des Touches was passionately in love with the handsome lad, and did her utmost to bewitch him. More than one girl and one young woman wondered what was the witchcraft of an old woman that she had such absolute empire over the angelic youth. And so, as Calyste crossed the High Street to go out by the gate to le Croisic, more than one eye looked anxiously after him.
It now becomes necessary to account for the reports that were current concerning the personage whom Calyste was going to see. These rumors, swelled by Breton gossip, and envenomed by the ignorance of the public, had reached even the Curé. The Tax-Receiver, the Justice of the Peace, the head clerk of the customs at Saint-Nazaire, and other literate persons in the district, had not reassured the Abbé by telling him of the eccentric life led by the woman and artist hidden under the name of Camille Maupin.
She had not yet come to eating little children, to killing her slaves, like Cleopatra, to throwing men into the river, as the heroine of the Tour de Nesle is falsely accused of doing; still, to the Abbé Grimont, this monstrous creature, at once a siren and an atheist, was a most immoral combination of woman and philosopher, and fell short of every social law laid down to control or utilize the weaknesses of the fair sex. Just as Clara Gazul is the feminine pseudonym of a clever man, and George Sand that of a woman of genius, so Camille Maupin was the mask behind which a charming girl long hid herself—a Bretonne named Félicité des Touches, she who was now giving the Baronne du Guénic and the worthy Curé of Guérande so much cause for anxiety. This family has no connection with that of the des Touches of Touraine, to which the Regent’s ambassador belongs, a man more famous now for his literary talents than for his diplomacy.
Camille Maupin, one of the few famous women of the nineteenth century, was long supposed to be really a man, so manly was her first appearance as an author. Everybody is now familiar with the two volumes of dramas, impossible to put on the stage, written in the manner of Shakespeare or of Lopez de Vega, and brought out in 1822, which caused a sort of literary revolution when the great question of Romanticism versus Classicism was a burning one in the papers, at clubs, and at the Académie. Since then Camille Maupin has written several plays and a novel which have not belied the success of her first efforts, now rather too completely forgotten.
An explanation of the chain of circumstances by which a girl assumed a masculine incarnation—by which Félicité des Touches made herself a man and a writer—of how, more fortunate than Madame de Staël, she remained free, and so was more readily excused for her celebrity—will, no doubt, satisfy much curiosity, and justify the existence of one of those monstrosities which stand up among mankind like monuments, their fame being favored by their rarity—for in twenty centuries scarcely twenty great women are to be counted. Hence, though she here plays but a secondary part, as she had great influence over Calyste, and is a figure in the literary history of the time, no one will be sorry if we pause to study her for a rather longer time than modern fiction usually allows.
In 1793, Mademoiselle Félicité des Touches found herself an orphan. Thus her estates escaped the confiscation which no doubt would have fallen on her father or brother. Her father died on the 10th of August, killed on the palace steps among the defenders of the King, on whom he was in waiting as major of the bodyguard. Her brother, a young member of the corps, was massacred at les Carmes. Mademoiselle des Touches was but two years old when her mother died of grief a few days after this second blow. On her deathbed Madame des Touches placed her little girl in the care of her sister, a nun at Chelles. This nun, Madame de Faucombe, very prudently took the child to Faucombe, an estate of some extent near Nantes, belonging to Madame des Touches, where she settled with three Sisters from the convent. During the last days of the Terror, the mob of Nantes demolished the château and seized the Sisters and Mademoiselle des Touches, who were thrown into prison under a false charge of having harbored emissaries from Pitt and from Coburg. The ninth Thermidor saved them. Félicité’s aunt died of the fright; two of the Sisters fled from France, the third handed the little girl over to her nearest relation, Monsieur de Faucombe, her mother’s uncle, who lived at Nantes, and then joined her companions in exile.
Monsieur de Faucombe, a man of sixty, had married a young wife, to whom he left the management of his affairs. He busied himself only with archaeology, a passion, or, to be accurate, a mania, which helps old men to think themselves alive. His ward’s education was left entirely to chance. Félicité, little cared-for by a young woman who threw herself into all the pleasures of the Emperor’s reign, brought herself up like a boy. She sat with Monsieur de Faucombe in his
