“What is the matter?”
“Never,” said he in a choked voice, “never in my life have I seen a woman so beautiful as you are, excepting my mother; and I cannot control my agitation.”
“Why, have you not Camille Maupin here?”
“But what a difference!” said Calyste artlessly.
“Ha! Calyste,” Félicité whispered in his ear; “did I not tell you that you would forget me as though I had never existed? Sit there, next her on her right, and Vignon on her left.—As for you, Gennaro, I keep you by me,” she added, laughing; “we will keep an eye on her flirtations.”
The accent in which Camille spoke struck Claude, who looked at her with the wily and apparently absent glance, which in him showed that he was observant. He never ceased watching Mademoiselle des Touches throughout dinner.
“Flirtations!” replied the Marquise, drawing off her gloves and showing her beautiful hands; “I have every excuse; on one side of me I have a poet,” and she turned to Claude; “on the other poetry.”
Gennaro bestowed on Calyste a gaze full of flattery.
By candlelight Béatrix looked even more beautiful than before. The pale gleam of the wax-lights cast a satin sheen on her forehead, set sparks in her gazelle-like eyes, and fell through her silky ringlets, making separate hairs shine like threads of gold. With a graceful movement she threw off her gauze scarf, uncovering her shoulders. Calyste could then see the delicate nape, as white as milk, with a deep hollow that parted into two, curving off towards each shoulder with a lovely and delusive symmetry. The changes of aspect in which pretty women indulge produce very little effect in the fashionable world, where every eye is blasé, but they commit fearful ravages in a soul as fresh as was Calyste’s. This bust, so unlike Camille’s, revealed a perfectly different character in Béatrix. There could be seen pride of race, a tenacity peculiar to the aristocracy, and a certain hardness in that double muscle of the shoulder, which is perhaps the last surviving vestige of the conqueror’s strength.
Calyste found it very difficult to seem to eat; he was full of nervous feelings, which took away his hunger. As in all young men, Nature was in the clutches of those throes which precede first love, and stamp it so deeply on the soul. At his age the ardor of the heart repressed by the ardor of the moral sense leads to an internal conflict, which accounts for the long, respectful hesitancy, the deep absorption of love, the absence of all self-interest—all the peculiar attractions of youths whose heart and life are pure.
As he noted—by stealth, so as not to rouse Gennaro’s jealous suspicions—all the details which make the Marquise de Rochefide so supremely beautiful, Calyste was oppressed by the majesty of the lady beloved; he felt himself shrink before the haughtiness of some of her glances, the imposing aspect of her face, overflowing with aristocratic self-consciousness, a pride, which women can express by slight movements, by airs of the head and a magnificent slowness of gesture, which are all less affected and less studied than might be supposed. There is a sentiment behind all these modes of expression. The ambiguous position in which Béatrix found herself, compelled her to keep a watch over herself, to be imposing without being ridiculous; and women of the highest stamp can all achieve this, though it is the rock on which ordinary women are wrecked.
Béatrix could guess from Félicité’s looks all the secret adoration she inspired in her neighbor, and that it was unworthy of her to encourage it; so from time to time she bestowed on him a repellant glance that fell on him like an avalanche of snow. The unfortunate youth appealed to Mademoiselle des Touches by a gaze in which she felt the tears kept down in his heart by superhuman determination, and Félicité kindly asked him why he ate nothing. Calyste stuffed to order, and made a feint of joining in the conversation. The idea of being tiresome instead of agreeable was unendurable, and hammered at his brain. He was all the more bashful because he saw, behind the Marquise’s chair, the manservant he had met in the morning on the jetty, who would no doubt report his curiosity.
Whether he were contrite or happy, Madame de Rochefide paid no attention to him. Mademoiselle des Touches had led her to talk of her journey in Italy, and she gave a very witty account of the point-blank fire of passion with which a little Russian diplomat at Florence had honored her, laughing at these little young men who fling themselves at a woman as a locust rushes on grass. She made Claude Vignon and Gennaro laugh, and Félicité also; but these darts of sarcasm went straight to Calyste’s heart, who only heard words through the humming in his ears and brain. The poor boy made no vow, as some obstinate men have done, to win this woman at any cost; no, he was not angry, he was miserable. When he discerned in Béatrix an intention to sacrifice him at Gennaro’s feet, he only said to himself—“If only I can serve her in any way!” and allowed himself to be trampled on with the meekness of a lamb.
“How is it,” said Claude Vignon to the Marquise, “that you, who so much admire poetry, give it so bad a reception? Such artless admiration, so sweet in its expression, with no second thought, no reservation, is not that the poetry of the heart? Confess now that it gives you a sense of satisfaction and well-being.”
“Certainly,” she replied, “but we should be very
