“Do what I will, I cannot amuse my children; they smile at me, but the smile is forced from them by my playfulness, and is not spontaneous; they cry because they cannot respond to my fondness. Illness has left them completely run down, even their affection. So you may imagine how dismal Clochegourde is. Monsieur de Mortsauf reigns unopposed.”
“Oh my glory, my friend!” she wrote to me again, “you must love me well indeed if you can love me still—can love me, so apathetic as I am, so unresponsive, so petrified by grief.”
At this juncture, when I felt myself more deeply appealed to than ever, when I lived only in her soul, on which I strove to shed the luminous breath of morning and the hope of purpled evenings, I met, in the rooms of the Élysée, one of those superb English ladies who are almost queens. Immensely wealthy, the daughter of a race unstained by any mésalliance since the time of the conquest, married to an old man, one of the most distinguished members of the British peerage—all these advantages were no more than accessories adding to her beauty, her manners, her wit, a faceted lustre that dazzled before it charmed you. She was the idol of the day, and reigned all the more despotically over Paris society because she had the qualities indispensable to success, the iron hand in a velvet glove spoken of by Bernadotte.
You know the curious individuality of the English—the impassable and arrogant Channel, the icy St. George’s Straits that they set between themselves and those who have not been introduced to them. The human race might be an ant-heap on which they tread; they recognize none of their species but those whom they accept; they do not understand the language even of the rest; those have lips that move and eyes that see, but neither voice nor looks can reach so high; to them the herd are as though they were not. Thus the English are an image of their island where the law rules everything; where in each sphere everything is uniform; where the practice of virtue seems to be the inevitable working of wheels that move at fixed hours.
These fortifications of polished steel built up round an Englishwoman, caged by golden wires into her home, where her feeding trough and drinking cup, her perches and her food are all perfection, lend her irresistible attractions. Never did a nation more elaborately scheme for the hypocrisy of a married woman by placing her always midway between social life and death. For there is no compromise between shame and honor; the fall is utter, or there is no slip; it is all or nothing—the “To be or not to be” of Hamlet. This alternative, combined with the habits of disdain to which manners accustom her, makes an Englishwoman a creature apart in the world. She is but a poor creature, virtuous perforce, and ready to abandon herself, condemned to perpetual falsehood buried in her soul; but she is enchanting in form, because the race has thrown everything into form. Hence the beauties peculiar to the women of that country: the exultation of an affection in which life is compulsorily summed up, their extravagant care of their person, the refinement of their love—so elegantly expressed in the famous scene in Romeo and Juliet, in which Shakespeare has with one touch depicted the Englishwoman.
To you, who envy them so many things, what can I say that you do not know about these fair sirens, apparently impenetrable but so quickly known, who believe that love is enough for love, and who taint their pleasures with satiety by never varying them, whose soul has but one note, whose voice but one word—an ocean of love, in which, if a man has not bathed, he will forever remain ignorant of one form of poetic sensuality, just as a man who has never seen the sea must always lack certain chords to his lyre?
You know the purport of these words. My acquaintance with Lady Dudley was notorious. At an age when the senses exert their greatest power over our decisions, and in a man whose fires had been so violently suppressed, the image of the saint who was enduring her long martyrdom at Clochegourde shone so brightly that he could resist every fascination. This fidelity was the distinction that won me Lady Arabella’s attention. My obstinacy increased her passion. What she longed for, like many Englishwomen, was something conspicuous and extraordinary. She craved for spice, for pepper to feed her heart on, as English epicures insist on pungent condiments to revive their palate. The lethargy produced in these women’s lives by unfailing perfection in everything about them, and methodical regularity of habit, reacts in a worship of the romantic and difficult. I was incapable of gauging this character. The more I retired into cold disdain the more eager was Lady Dudley. This contest, of which she boasted, excited some curiosity in certain drawing-rooms, and this was the first fruits of satisfaction which made her feel it incumbent on her to triumph. Ah! I should have been saved if only some friend had repeated the odious speech she had uttered concerning Madame de Mortsauf and me: “I am sick,” said she, “of this turtledove sighing!” Though I have no wish to justify my crime, I must point out to you, Natalie, that a man has less chances of resisting a woman than you women have of evading our pursuit. Our manners forbid to our sex those tactics of stern repression which in you are baits to tempt the lover, and which indeed propriety requires of you. In us, on the contrary, some
