Books: Madame de Treymes
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Edith Wharton >> Madame de Treymes
He had felt it in a flash, when, the autumn before, he had run
across her one evening in the dining-room of the Beaurivage at
Ouchy; when, after a furtive exchange of glances, they had
simultaneously arrived at recognition, followed by an eager pressure
of hands, and a long evening of reminiscence on the starlit terrace.
She was the same, but so mysteriously changed! And it was the
mystery, the sense of unprobed depths of initiation, which drew him
to her as her freshness had never drawn him. He had not hitherto
attempted to define the nature of the change: it remained for his
sister Nannie to do that when, on his return to the Rue de Rivoli,
where the family were still sitting in conclave upon their recent
visitor, Miss Durham summed up their groping comments in the phrase:
"I never saw anything so French!"
Durham, understanding what his sister's use of the epithet implied,
recognized it instantly as the explanation of his own feelings. Yes,
it was the finish, the modelling, which Madame de Malrive's
experience had given her that set her apart from the fresh
uncomplicated personalities of which she had once been simply the
most charming type. The influences that had lowered her voice,
regulated her gestures, toned her down to harmony with the warm dim
background of a long social past--these influences had lent to her
natural fineness of perception a command of expression adapted to
complex conditions. She had moved in surroundings through which one
could hardly bounce and bang on the genial American plan without
knocking the angles off a number of sacred institutions; and her
acquired dexterity of movement seemed to Durham a crowning grace. It
was a shock, now that he knew at what cost the dexterity had been
acquired, to acknowledge this even to himself; he hated to think
that she could owe anything to such conditions as she had been
placed in. And it gave him a sense of the tremendous strength of the
organization into which she had been absorbed, that in spite of her
horror, her moral revolt, she had not reacted against its external
forms. She might abhor her husband, her marriage, and the world to
which it had introduced her, but she had become a product of that
world in its outward expression, and no better proof of the fact was
needed than her exotic enjoyment of Americanism.
The sense of the distance to which her American past had been
removed was never more present to him than when, a day or two later,
he went with his mother and sisters to return her visit. The region
beyond the river existed, for the Durham ladies, only as the
unmapped environment of the Bon Marche; and Nannie Durham's
exclamation on the pokiness of the streets and the dulness of the
houses showed Durham, with a start, how far he had already travelled
from the family point of view.
"Well, if this is all she got by marrying a Marquis!" the young lady
summed up as they paused before the small sober hotel in its
high-walled court; and Katy, following her mother through the
stone-vaulted and stone-floored vestibule, murmured: "It must be
simply freezing in winter."
In the softly-faded drawing-room, with its old pastels in old
frames, its windows looking on the damp green twilight of a garden
sunk deep in blackened walls, the American ladies might have been
even more conscious of the insufficiency of their friend's
compensations, had not the warmth of her welcome precluded all other
reflections. It was not till she had gathered them about her in the
corner beside the tea-table, that Durham identified the slender dark
lady loitering negligently in the background, and introduced in a
comprehensive murmur to the American group, as the redoubtable
sister-in-law to whom he had declared himself ready to throw down
his challenge.
There was nothing very redoubtable about Madame de Treymes, except
perhaps the kindly yet critical observation which she bestowed on
her sister-in-law's visitors: the unblinking attention of a
civilized spectator observing an encampment of aborigines. He had
heard of her as a beauty, and was surprised to find her, as Nannie
afterward put it, a mere stick to hang clothes on (but they _did_
hang!), with a small brown glancing face, like that of a charming
little inquisitive animal. Yet before she had addressed ten words to
him--nibbling at the hard English consonants like nuts--he owned the
justice of the epithet. She was a beauty, if beauty, instead of
being restricted to the cast of the face, is a pervasive attribute
informing the hands, the voice, the gestures, the very fall of a
flounce and tilt of a feather. In this impalpable _aura_ of grace
Madame de Treymes' dark meagre presence unmistakably moved, like a
thin flame in a wide quiver of light. And as he realized that she
looked much handsomer than she was, so while they talked, he felt
that she understood a great deal more than she betrayed. It was not
through the groping speech which formed their apparent medium of
communication that she imbibed her information: she found it in the
air, she extracted it from Durham's look and manner, she caught it
in the turn of her sister-in-law's defenseless eyes--for in her
presence Madame de Malrive became Fanny Frisbee again!--she put it
together, in short, out of just such unconsidered indescribable
trifles as differentiated the quiet felicity of her dress from
Nannie and Katy's "handsome" haphazard clothes.
Her actual converse with Durham moved, meanwhile, strictly in the
conventional ruts: had he been long in Paris, which of the new plays
did he like best, was it true that American _jeunes filles_ were
sometimes taken to the Boulevard theatres? And she threw an
interrogative glance at the young ladies beside the tea-table. To
Durham's reply that it depended how much French they knew, she
shrugged and smiled, replying that his compatriots all spoke French
like Parisians, enquiring, after a moment's thought, if they learned
it, _la bas, des negres_, and laughing heartily when Durham's
astonishment revealed her blunder.
When at length she had taken leave--enveloping the Durham ladies in
a last puzzled penetrating look--Madame de Malrive turned to Mrs.
Durham with a faintly embarrassed smile.
"My sister-in-law was much interested; I believe you are the first
Americans she has ever known."
"Good gracious!" ejaculated Nannie, as though such social darkness
required immediate missionary action on some one's part.
"Well, she knows _us_," said Durham, catching in Madame de Malrive's
rapid glance, a startled assent to his point.
"After all," reflected the accurate Katy, as though seeking an
excuse for Madame de Treymes' unenlightenment, "_we_ don't know
many French people, either."
To which Nannie promptly if obscurely retorted: "Ah, but we couldn't
and _she_ could!"
IV
Madame de Treymes' friendly observation of her sister-in-law's
visitors resulted in no expression on her part of a desire to renew
her study of them. To all appearances, she passed out of their lives
when Madame de Malrive's door closed on her; and Durham felt that
the arduous task of making her acquaintance was still to be begun.
He felt also, more than ever, the necessity of attempting it; and in
his determination to lose no time, and his perplexity how to set
most speedily about the business, he bethought himself of applying
to his cousin Mrs. Boykin.
Mrs. Elmer Boykin was a small plump woman, to whose vague prettiness
the lines of middle-age had given no meaning: as though whatever had
happened to her had merely added to the sum total of her
inexperience. After a Parisian residence of twenty-five years, spent
in a state of feverish servitude to the great artists of the rue de
la Paix, her dress and hair still retained a certain rigidity in
keeping with the directness of her gaze and the unmodulated candour
of her voice. Her very drawing-room had the hard bright atmosphere
of her native skies, and one felt that she was still true at heart
to the national ideals in electric lighting and plumbing.
She and her husband had left America owing to the impossibility of
living there with the finish and decorum which the Boykin standard
demanded; but in the isolation of their exile they had created about
them a kind of phantom America, where the national prejudices
continued to flourish unchecked by the national progressiveness: a
little world sparsely peopled by compatriots in the same attitude of
chronic opposition toward a society chronically unaware of them. In
this uncontaminated air Mr. and Mrs. Boykin had preserved the purity
of simpler conditions, and Elmer Boykin, returning rakishly from a
Sunday's racing at Chantilly, betrayed, under his "knowing" coat and
the racing-glasses slung ostentatiously across his shoulder, the
unmistakeable cut of the American business man coming "up town"
after a long day in the office.
It was a part of the Boykins' uncomfortable but determined
attitude--and perhaps a last expression of their latent
patriotism--to live in active disapproval of the world about them,
fixing in memory with little stabs of reprobation innumerable
instances of what the abominable foreigner was doing; so that they
reminded Durham of persons peacefully following the course of a
horrible war by pricking red pins in a map. To Mrs. Durham, with her
gentle tourist's view of the European continent, as a vast Museum in
which the human multitudes simply furnished the element of costume,
the Boykins seemed abysmally instructed, and darkly expert in
forbidden things; and her son, without sharing her simple faith in
their omniscience, credited them with an ample supply of the kind of
information of which he was in search.
Mrs. Boykin, from the corner of an intensely modern Gobelin sofa,
studied her cousin as he balanced himself insecurely on one of the
small gilt chairs which always look surprised at being sat in.
"Fanny de Malrive? Oh, of course: I remember you were all very
intimate with the Frisbees when they lived in West Thirty-third
Street. But she has dropped all her American friends since her
marriage. The excuse was that de Malrive didn't like them; but as
she's been separated for five or six years, I can't see--. You say
she's been very nice to your mother and the girls? Well, I daresay
she is beginning to feel the need of friends she can really trust;
for as for her French relations--! That Malrive set is the worst in
the Faubourg. Of course you know what _he_ is; even the family, for
decency's sake, had to back her up, and urge her to get a
separation. And Christiane de Treymes--"
Durham seized his opportunity. "Is she so very reprehensible too?"
Mrs. Boykin pursed up her small colourless mouth. "I can't speak
from personal experience. I know Madame de Treymes slightly--I have
met her at Fanny's--but she never remembers the fact except when she
wants me to go to one of her _ventes de charite_. They all remember
us then; and some American women are silly enough to ruin themselves
at the smart bazaars, and fancy they will get invitations in return.
They say Mrs. Addison G. Pack followed Madame d'Alglade around for a
whole winter, and spent a hundred thousand francs at her stalls; and
at the end of the season Madame d'Alglade asked her to tea, and when
she got there she found _that_ was for a charity too, and she had to
pay a hundred francs to get in."
Mrs. Boykin paused with a smile of compassion. "That is not _my_
way," she continued. "Personally I have no desire to thrust myself
into French society--I can't see how any American woman can do so
without loss of self-respect. But any one can tell you about Madame
de Treymes."
"I wish you would, then," Durham suggested.
"Well, I think Elmer had better," said his wife mysteriously, as Mr.
Boykin, at this point, advanced across the wide expanse of Aubusson
on which his wife and Durham were islanded in a state of propinquity
without privacy.
"What's that, Bessy? Hah, Durham, how are you? Didn't see you at
Auteuil this afternoon. You don't race? Busy sight-seeing, I
suppose? What was that my wife was telling you? Oh, about Madame de
Treymes."
He stroked his pepper-and-salt moustache with a gesture intended
rather to indicate than conceal the smile of experience beneath it.
"Well, Madame de Treymes has not been like a happy country--she's
had a history: several of 'em. Some one said she constituted the
_feuilleton_ of the Faubourg daily news. _La suite au prochain
numero_--you see the point? Not that I speak from personal
knowledge. Bessy and I have never cared to force our way--" He
paused, reflecting that his wife had probably anticipated him in the
expression of this familiar sentiment, and added with a significant
nod: "Of course you know the Prince d'Armillac by sight? No? I'm
surprised at that. Well, he's one of the choicest ornaments of the
Jockey Club: very fascinating to the ladies, I believe, but the
deuce and all at baccara. Ruined his mother and a couple of maiden
aunts already--and now Madame de Treymes has put the family pearls
up the spout, and is wearing imitation for love of him."
"I had that straight from my maid's cousin, who is employed by
Madame d'Armillac's jeweller," said Mrs. Boykin with conscious
pride.
"Oh, it's straight enough--more than _she_ is!" retorted her
husband, who was slightly jealous of having his facts reinforced by
any information not of his own gleaning.
"Be careful of what you say, Elmer," Mrs. Boykin interposed with
archness. "I suspect John of being seriously smitten by the lady."
Durham let this pass unchallenged, submitting with a good grace to
his host's low whistle of amusement, and the sardonic enquiry: "Ever
do anything with the foils? D'Armillac is what they call over here a
_fine lame_."
"Oh, I don't mean to resort to bloodshed unless it's absolutely
necessary; but I mean to make the lady's acquaintance," said Durham,
falling into his key.
Mrs. Boykin's lips tightened to the vanishing point. "I am afraid
you must apply for an introduction to more fashionable people than
_we_ are. Elmer and I so thoroughly disapprove of French society
that we have always declined to take any part in it. But why should
not Fanny de Malrive arrange a meeting for you?"
Durham hesitated. "I don't think she is on very intimate terms with
her husband's family--"
"You mean that she's not allowed to introduce _her_ friends to
them," Mrs. Boykin interjected sarcastically; while her husband
added, with an air of portentous initiation: "Ah, my dear fellow,
the way they treat the Americans over here--that's another chapter,
you know."
"How some people can _stand_ it!" Mrs. Boykin chimed in; and as the
footman, entering at that moment, tendered her a large coronetted
envelope, she held it up as if in illustration of the indignities to
which her countrymen were subjected.
"Look at that, my dear John," she exclaimed--"another card to one of
their everlasting bazaars! Why, it's at Madame d'Armillac's, the
Prince's mother. Madame de Treymes must have sent it, of course. The
brazen way in which they combine religion and immorality! Fifty
francs admission--_rien que cela!_--to see some of the most
disreputable people in Europe. And if you're an American, you're
expected to leave at least a thousand behind you. Their own people
naturally get off cheaper." She tossed over the card to her cousin.
"There's your opportunity to see Madame de Treymes."
"Make it two thousand, and she'll ask you to tea," Mr. Boykin
scathingly added.
V
In the monumental drawing-room of the Hotel de Malrive--it had been
a surprise to the American to read the name of the house emblazoned
on black marble over its still more monumental gateway--Durham found
himself surrounded by a buzz of feminine tea-sipping oddly out of
keeping with the wigged and cuirassed portraits frowning high on the
walls, the majestic attitude of the furniture, the rigidity of great
gilt consoles drawn up like lords-in-waiting against the tarnished
panels.
It was the old Marquise de Malrive's "day," and Madame de Treymes,
who lived with her mother, had admitted Durham to the heart of the
enemy's country by inviting him, after his prodigal disbursements at
the charity bazaar, to come in to tea on a Thursday. Whether, in
thus fulfilling Mr. Boykin's prediction, she had been aware of
Durham's purpose, and had her own reasons for falling in with it; or
whether she simply wished to reward his lavishness at the fair, and
permit herself another glimpse of an American so picturesquely
embodying the type familiar to French fiction--on these points
Durham was still in doubt.
Meanwhile, Madame de Treymes being engaged with a venerable Duchess
in a black shawl--all the older ladies present had the sloping
shoulders of a generation of shawl-wearers--her American visitor,
left in the isolation of his unimportance, was using it as a shelter
for a rapid survey of the scene.
He had begun his study of Fanny de Malrive's situation without any
real understanding of her fears. He knew the repugnance to divorce
existing in the French Catholic world, but since the French laws
sanctioned it, and in a case so flagrant as his injured friend's,
would inevitably accord it with the least possible delay and
exposure, he could not take seriously any risk of opposition on the
part of the husband's family. Madame de Malrive had not become a
Catholic, and since her religious scruples could not be played on,
the only weapon remaining to the enemy--the threat of fighting the
divorce--was one they could not wield without self-injury.
Certainly, if the chief object were to avoid scandal, common sense
must counsel Monsieur de Malrive and his friends not to give the
courts an opportunity of exploring his past; and since the echo of
such explorations, and their ultimate transmission to her son, were
what Madame de Malrive most dreaded, the opposing parties seemed to
have a common ground for agreement, and Durham could not but regard
his friend's fears as the result of over-taxed sensibilities. All
this had seemed evident enough to him as he entered the austere
portals of the Hotel de Malrive and passed, between the faded
liveries of old family servants, to the presence of the dreaded
dowager above. But he had not been ten minutes in that presence
before he had arrived at a faint intuition of what poor Fanny meant.
It was not in the exquisite mildness of the old Marquise, a little
gray-haired bunch of a woman in dowdy mourning, or in the small neat
presence of the priestly uncle, the Abbe who had so obviously just
stepped down from one of the picture-frames overhead: it was not in
the aspect of these chief protagonists, so outwardly unformidable,
that Durham read an occult danger to his friend. It was rather in
their setting, their surroundings, the little company of elderly and
dowdy persons--so uniformly clad in weeping blacks and purples that
they might have been assembled for some mortuary anniversary--it was
in the remoteness and the solidarity of this little group that
Durham had his first glimpse of the social force of which Fanny de
Malrive had spoken. All these amiably chatting visitors, who mostly
bore the stamp of personal insignificance on their mildly sloping or
aristocratically beaked faces, hung together in a visible closeness
of tradition, dress, attitude and manner, as different as possible
from the loose aggregation of a roomful of his own countrymen.
Durham felt, as he observed them, that he had never before known
what "society" meant; nor understood that, in an organized and
inherited system, it exists full-fledged where two or three of its
members are assembled.
Upon this state of bewilderment, this sense of having entered a room
in which the lights had suddenly been turned out, even Madame de
Treymes' intensely modern presence threw no illumination. He was
conscious, as she smilingly rejoined him, not of her points of
difference from the others, but of the myriad invisible threads by
which she held to them; he even recognized the audacious slant of
her little brown profile in the portrait of a powdered ancestress
beneath which she had paused a moment in advancing. She was simply
one particular facet of the solid, glittering impenetrable body
which he had thought to turn in his hands and look through like a
crystal; and when she said, in her clear staccato English, "Perhaps
you will like to see the other rooms," he felt like crying out in
his blindness: "If I could only be sure of seeing _anything_ here!"
Was she conscious of his blindness, and was he as remote and
unintelligible to her as she was to him? This possibility, as he
followed her through the nobly-unfolding rooms of the great house,
gave him his first hope of recoverable advantage. For, after all, he
had some vague traditional lights on her world and its antecedents;
whereas to her he was a wholly new phenomenon, as unexplained as a
fragment of meteorite dropped at her feet on the smooth gravel of
the garden-path they were pacing.
She had led him down into the garden, in response to his admiring
exclamation, and perhaps also because she was sure that, in the
chill spring afternoon, they would have its embowered privacies to
themselves. The garden was small, but intensely rich and deep--one
of those wells of verdure and fragrance which everywhere sweeten the
air of Paris by wafts blown above old walls on quiet streets; and as
Madame de Treymes paused against the ivy bank masking its farther
boundary, Durham felt more than ever removed from the normal
bearings of life.
His sense of strangeness was increased by the surprise of his
companion's next speech.
"You wish to marry my sister-in-law?" she asked abruptly; and
Durham's start of wonder was followed by an immediate feeling of
relief. He had expected the preliminaries of their interview to be
as complicated as the bargaining in an Eastern bazaar, and had
feared to lose himself at the first turn in a labyrinth of "foreign"
intrigue.
"Yes, I do," he said with equal directness; and they smiled together
at the sharp report of question and answer.
The smile put Durham more completely at his ease, and after waiting
for her to speak, he added with deliberation: "So far, however, the
wishing is entirely on my side." His scrupulous conscience felt
itself justified in this reserve by the conditional nature of Madame
de Malrive's consent.
"I understand; but you have been given reason to hope--"
"Every man in my position gives himself his own reasons for hoping,"
he interposed with a smile.
"I understand that too," Madame de Treymes assented. "But still--you
spent a great deal of money the other day at our bazaar."
"Yes: I wanted to have a talk with you, and it was the readiest--if
not the most distinguished--means of attracting your attention."
"I understand," she once more reiterated, with a gleam of amusement.
"It is because I suspect you of understanding everything that I have
been so anxious for this opportunity."
She bowed her acknowledgement, and said: "Shall we sit a moment?"
adding, as he drew their chairs under a tree: "You permit me, then,
to say that I believe I understand also a little of our good Fanny's
mind?"
"On that point I have no authority to speak. I am here only to
listen."
"Listen, then: you have persuaded her that there would be no harm in
divorcing my brother--since I believe your religion does not forbid
divorce?"
"Madame de Malrive's religion sanctions divorce in such a case as--"
"As my brother has furnished? Yes, I have heard that your race is
stricter in judging such _ecarts_. But you must not think," she
added, "that I defend my brother. Fanny must have told you that we
have always given her our sympathy."
"She has let me infer it from her way of speaking of you."
Madame de Treymes arched her dramatic eyebrows. "How cautious you
are! I am so straightforward that I shall have no chance with you."
"You will be quite safe, unless you are so straightforward that you
put me on my guard."
She met this with a low note of amusement.
"At this rate we shall never get any farther; and in two minutes I
must go back to my mother's visitors. Why should we go on fencing?
The situation is really quite simple. Tell me just what you wish to
know. I have always been Fanny's friend, and that disposes me to be
yours."
Durham, during this appeal, had had time to steady his thoughts; and
the result of his deliberation was that he said, with a return to
his former directness: "Well, then, what I wish to know is, what
position your family would take if Madame de Malrive should sue for
a divorce." He added, without giving her time to reply: "I naturally
wish to be clear on this point before urging my cause with your
sister-in-law."
Madame de Treymes seemed in no haste to answer; but after a pause of
reflection she said, not unkindly: "My poor Fanny might have asked
me that herself."
"I beg you to believe that I am not acting as her spokesman," Durham
hastily interposed. "I merely wish to clear up the situation before
speaking to her in my own behalf."