Those who are excessive in prudery should be excessive in love; Englishwomen are so; they throw everything into form, but the love of form does not, in them, produce a feeling for art; they may say what they will. Protestantism and Catholicism account for the differences which give to a Frenchwoman’s spirit so great a superiority over the reasoned, calculating love of Englishwomen. Protestantism is sceptical, it examines and kills belief; it is the death of art and of love. Where the world rules the people of the world must obey; but those who know what passion means, flee away; to them it is intolerable.
You may understand, then, how much my self-respect was wounded by discovering that Lady Dudley would not live without the world, and that these British transitions were habitual with her. They were not a necessity imposed on her by the world; no, she naturally showed herself under two aspects adverse to each other; when she loved it was with intoxication; no woman of any nationality could be compared with her; she was as good as a whole seraglio; but then a curtain fell on this fairy display, and shut out even the remembrance of it. She would respond neither to a look nor a smile; she was neither mistress nor slave; she behaved like an ambassadress compelled to be precise in her phrases and demeanor, she put me out of patience with her calmness, outraged my heart by her primness; she thus stored up her love till it was required, instead of raising it to the ideal by enthusiasm. In which of the two women was I to believe?
I felt by a myriad pinpricks the infinite difference that divided Henriette from Arabella. When Madame de Mortsauf left me for a few minutes she seemed to charge the air with the care of speaking of her; as she went away the sweep of her gown appealed to my eyes, as its rippling rustle came to my ear when she came back; there was infinite tenderness in the way her eyelids unfolded when she looked down; her voice, her musical voice, was a continual caress; her speech bore witness to an ever-present thought; she was always the same. She did not divide her soul between two atmospheres, one burning and the other icy; in short, Madame de Mortsauf kept her wit and the bloom of her intelligence to express her feelings, she made herself fascinating to her children and to me by the ideas she uttered. Arabella’s wit did not serve her to make life pleasant, she did not exert it for my benefit, it existed only by and for the world; it was purely satirical, she loved to rend and bite, not for the fun of it, but to gratify a craving. Madame de Mortsauf would have hidden her happiness from every eye; Lady Arabella wanted to show hers to all Paris, and yet with horrible dissimulation she maintained the proprieties even while riding with me in the Bois de Boulogne.
This mixture of ostentation and dignity, of love and coldness, was constantly chafing my soul that was at once virgin and impassioned, and as I was incapable of thus rushing from one mood to another my temper suffered; I was throbbing with love when she relapsed into conventional prudery. When I ventured to complain, not without the greatest deference, she turned her three-barbed tongue on me, mingling the rhodomontade of adoration with the English wit I have tried to describe. As soon as she found herself in antagonism to me she made a sport of wounding my heart, and humiliating my mind, and moulded me like dough. To my remarks as to a medium to be observed in all things, she retorted by caricaturing my ideas, and carrying them to extremes. If I reproached her for her conduct she would ask me if I wanted her to embrace me under the eyes of all Paris—at the Italian opera—and she took the matter so seriously that I, knowing her mania for making herself talked about, quaked lest she should fulfil her words.
In spite of her real passion, I never felt in her anything sacred, reserved, and deep, as in Henriette; she was as insatiable as a sandy soil. Madame de Mortsauf was always composed; she felt my soul in an accent or a glance, while the Marchioness was never overpowered by a look, by a pressure of the hand, or a murmured word. Nay, more, the happiness of yesterday was as nothing on the morrow. No proof of love ever surprised her; she had such a craving for excitement, turmoil, and show, that nothing, I imagine, came up to her ideal in these points; hence her frenzied excesses of passion; it was for her own sake, not for mine, that she indulged her extravagant fancies.
Madame de Mortsauf’s letter, the beacon that still shone on my path, and showed how the most virtuous wife can obey her genius as a Frenchwoman by proving her perpetual vigilance, her unfailing comprehension of all my vicissitudes—that letter must have enlightened you as to the care with which Henriette kept watch over my material interests, my political connections, my moral conquests, and her intimate interest in my life in all permitted ways.
On all these points Lady Dudley affected the reserve of a mere acquaintance. She never inquired as to my doings, nor my aversions or friendships with men. Lavish for herself, without being generous, she decidedly made too little distinction between interest and love; whereas, without having tested her, I knew that, to spare me a regret, Henriette would have found for me what she would never have sought for herself. In one of those catastrophes which
