Books: Madame de Mauves
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Henry James >> Madame de Mauves
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"Your sister's flatteries are all nonsense," she wrote; "the young
lady's far too good for you, mauvais sujet beyond redemption. If you've
a particle of conscience you'll not come and disturb the repose of an
angel of innocence."
The other relative of the subject of this warning, who had read these
lines, made up a little face as she freshly indited the address; but she
laid down her pen with a confident nod which might have denoted that by
her judgement her brother was appealed to on the ground of a principle
that didn't exist in him. And "if you meant what you said," the young
man on his side observed to his grandmother on his first private
opportunity, "it would have been simpler not to have sent the letter."
Put out of humour perhaps by this gross impugnment of her sincerity, the
head of the family kept her room on pretexts during a greater part of
Euphemia's stay, so that the latter's angelic innocence was left all to
her grandson's mercy. It suffered no worse mischance, however, than to
be prompted to intenser communion with itself. Richard de Mauves was the
hero of the young girl's romance made real, and so completely accordant
with this creature of her imagination that she felt afraid of him almost
as she would have been of a figure in a framed picture who should have
stepped down from the wall. He was now thirty-three--young enough to
suggest possibilities of ardent activity and old enough to have formed
opinions that a simple woman might deem it an intellectual privilege to
listen to. He was perhaps a trifle handsomer than Euphemia's rather grim
Quixotic ideal, but a very few days reconciled her to his good looks as
effectually they would have reconciled her to a characterised want of
them. He was quiet, grave, eminently distinguished. He spoke little, but
his remarks, without being sententious, had a nobleness of tone that
caused them to re-echo in the young girl's ears at the end of the day.
He paid her very little direct attention, but his chance words--when he
only asked her if she objected to his cigarette--were accompanied by a
smile of extraordinary kindness.
It happened that shortly after his arrival, riding an unruly horse which
Euphemia had with shy admiration watched him mount in the castle-yard,
he was thrown with a violence which, without disparaging his skill, made
him for a fortnight an interesting invalid lounging in the library with
a bandaged knee. To beguile his confinement the accomplished young
stranger was repeatedly induced to sing for him, which she did with a
small natural tremor that might have passed for the finish of vocal art.
He never overwhelmed her with compliments, but he listened with
unfailing attention, remembered all her melodies and would sit humming
them to himself. While his imprisonment lasted indeed he passed hours in
her company, making her feel not unlike some unfriended artist who has
suddenly gained the opportunity to devote a fortnight to the study of a
great model. Euphemia studied with noiseless diligence what she supposed
to be the "character" of M. de Mauves, and the more she looked the more
fine lights and shades she seemed to behold in this masterpiece of
nature. M. de Mauves's character indeed, whether from a sense of being
so generously and intensely taken for granted, or for reasons which bid
graceful defiance to analysis, had never been so much on show, even to
the very casual critic lodged, as might be said, in an out-of-the-way
corner of it; it seemed really to reflect the purity of Euphemia's pious
opinion. There had been nothing especially to admire in the state of
mind in which he left Paris--a settled resolve to marry a young person
whose charms might or might not justify his sister's account of them,
but who was mistress, at the worst, of a couple of hundred thousand
francs a year. He had not counted out sentiment--if she pleased him so
much the better; but he had left a meagre margin for it and would hardly
have admitted that so excellent a match could be improved by it. He was
a robust and serene sceptic, and it was a singular fate for a man who
believed in nothing to be so tenderly believed in. What his original
faith had been he could hardly have told you, for as he came back to his
childhood's home to mend his fortunes by pretending to fall in love he
was a thoroughly perverse creature and overlaid with more corruptions
than a summer day's questioning of his conscience would have put to
flight. Ten years' pursuit of pleasure, which a bureau full of unpaid
bills was all he had to show for, had pretty well stifled the natural
lad whose violent will and generous temper might have been shaped by a
different pressure to some such showing as would have justified a
romantic faith. So should he have exhaled the natural fragrance of a
late-blooming flower of hereditary honour. His violence indeed had been
subdued and he had learned to be irreproachably polite; but he had lost
the fineness of his generosity, and his politeness, which in the long
run society paid for, was hardly more than a form of luxurious egotism,
like his fondness for ciphered pocket-handkerchiefs, lavender gloves and
other fopperies by which shopkeepers remained out of pocket. In after-
years he was terribly polite to his wife. He had formed himself, as the
phrase was, and the form prescribed to him by the society into which his
birth and his tastes had introduced him was marked by some peculiar
features. That which mainly concerns us is its classification of the
fairer half of humanity as objects not essentially different--say from
those very lavender gloves that are soiled in an evening and thrown
away. To do M. de Mauves justice, he had in the course of time
encountered in the feminine character such plentiful evidence of its
pliant softness and fine adjustability that idealism naturally seemed to
him a losing game.
Euphemia, as he lay on his sofa, struck him as by no means
contradictory; she simply reminded him that very young women are
generally innocent and that this is on the whole the most potent source
of their attraction. Her innocence moved him to perfect consideration,
and it seemed to him that if he shortly became her husband it would be
exposed to a danger the less. Old Madame de Mauves, who flattered
herself that in this whole matter she was very laudably rigid, might
almost have taken a lesson from the delicacy he practised. For two or
three weeks her grandson was well-nigh a blushing boy again. He watched
from behind the Figaro, he admired and desired and held his tongue. He
found himself not in the least moved to a flirtation; he had no wish to
trouble the waters he proposed to transfuse into the golden cup of
matrimony. Sometimes a word, a look, a gesture of Euphemia's gave him
the oddest sense of being, or of seeming at least, almost bashful; for
she had a way of not dropping her eyes according to the mysterious
virginal mechanism, of not fluttering out of the room when she found him
there alone, of treating him rather as a glorious than as a pernicious
influence--a radiant frankness of demeanour in fine, despite an infinite
natural reserve, which it seemed at once graceless not to be
complimentary about and indelicate not to take for granted. In this way
had been wrought in the young man's mind a vague unwonted resonance of
soft impressions, as we may call it, which resembled the happy stir of
the change from dreaming pleasantly to waking happily. His imagination
was touched; he was very fond of music and he now seemed to give easy
ear to some of the sweetest he had ever heard. In spite of the bore of
being laid up with a lame knee he was in better humour than he had known
for months; he lay smoking cigarettes and listening to the nightingales
with the satisfied smile of one of his country neighbours whose big ox
should have taken the prize at a fair. Every now and then, with an
impatient suspicion of the resemblance, he declared himself pitifully
bete; but he was under a charm that braved even the supreme penalty of
seeming ridiculous. One morning he had half an hour's tete-a-tete with
his grandmother's confessor, a soft-voiced old Abbe whom, for reasons of
her own, Madame de Mauves had suddenly summoned and had left waiting in
the drawing-room while she rearranged her curls. His reverence, going up
to the old lady, assured her that M. le Comte was in a most edifying
state of mind and the likeliest subject for the operation of grace. This
was a theological interpretation of the count's unusual equanimity. He
had always lazily wondered what priests were good for, and he now
remembered, with a sense of especial obligation to the Abbe, that they
were excellent for marrying people.
A day or two after this he left off his bandages and tried to walk. He
made his way into the garden and hobbled successfully along one of the
alleys, but in the midst of his progress was pulled up by a spasm of
pain which forced him to stop and call for help. In an instant Euphemia
came tripping along the path and offered him her arm with the frankest
solicitude.
"Not to the house," he said, taking it; "further on, to the bosquet."
This choice was prompted by her having immediately confessed that she
had seen him leave the house, had feared an accident and had followed
him on tiptoe.
"Why didn't you join me?" he had asked, giving her a look in which
admiration was no longer disguised and yet felt itself half at the mercy
of her replying that a jeune fille shouldn't be seen following a
gentleman. But it drew a breath which filled its lungs for a long time
afterwards when she replied simply that if she had overtaken him he
might have accepted her arm out of politeness, whereas she wished to
have the pleasure of seeing him walk alone.
The bosquet was covered with an odorous tangle of blossoming creepers,
and a nightingale overhead was shaking out love-notes with a profusion
that made the Count feel his own conduct the last word of propriety.
"I've always heard that in America, when a man wishes to marry a young
girl, he offers himself simply face to face and without ceremony--
without parents and uncles and aunts and cousins sitting round in a
circle."
"Why I believe so," said Euphemia, staring and too surprised to be
alarmed.
"Very well then--suppose our arbour here to be your great sensible
country. I offer you my hand a l'Americaine. It will make me intensely
happy to feel you accept it."
Whether Euphemia's acceptance was in the American manner is more than I
can say; I incline to think that for fluttering grateful trustful
softly-amazed young hearts there is only one manner all over the world.
That evening, in the massive turret chamber it was her happiness to
inhabit, she wrote a dutiful letter to her mamma, and had just sealed it
when she was sent for by Madame de Mauves. She found this ancient lady
seated in her boudoir in a lavender satin gown and with her candles all
lighted as for the keeping of some fete. "Are you very happy?" the old
woman demanded, making Euphemia sit down before her.
"I'm almost afraid to say so, lest I should wake myself up."
"May you never wake up, belle enfant," Madame de Mauves grandly
returned. "This is the first marriage ever made in our family in this
way--by a Comte de Mauves proposing to a young girl in an arbour like
Jeannot and Jeannette. It has not been our way of doing things, and
people may say it wants frankness. My grandson tells me he regards it--
for the conditions--as the perfection of good taste. Very well. I'm a
very old woman, and if your differences should ever be as marked as your
agreements I shouldn't care to see them. But I should be sorry to die
and think you were going to be unhappy. You can't be, my dear, beyond a
certain point; because, though in this world the Lord sometimes makes
light of our expectations he never altogether ignores our deserts. But
you're very young and innocent and easy to dazzle. There never was a man
in the world--among the saints themselves--as good as you believe my
grandson. But he's a galant homme and a gentleman, and I've been talking
to him to-night. To you I want to say this--that you're to forget the
worldly rubbish I talked the other day about the happiness of frivolous
women. It's not the kind of happiness that would suit you, ma toute-
belle. Whatever befalls you, promise me this: to be, to remain, your own
sincere little self only, charming in your own serious little way. The
Comtesse de Mauves will be none the worse for it. Your brave little
self, understand, in spite of everything--bad precepts and bad examples,
bad fortune and even bad usage. Be persistently and patiently just what
the good God has made you, and even one of us--and one of those who is
most what we ARE--will do you justice!"
Euphemia remembered this speech in after-years, and more than once,
wearily closing her eyes, she seemed to see the old woman sitting
upright in her faded finery and smiling grimly like one of the Fates who
sees the wheel of fortune turning up her favourite event. But at the
moment it had for her simply the proper gravity of the occasion: this
was the way, she supposed, in which lucky young girls were addressed on
their engagement by wise old women of quality.
At her convent, to which she immediately returned, she found a letter
from her mother which disconcerted her far more than the remarks of
Madame de Mauves. Who were these people, Mrs. Cleve demanded, who had
presumed to talk to her daughter of marriage without asking her leave?
Questionable gentlefolk plainly; the best French people never did such
things. Euphemia would return straightway to her convent, shut herself
up and await her own arrival. It took Mrs. Cleve three weeks to travel
from Nice to Paris, and during this time the young girl had no
communication with her lover beyond accepting a bouquet of violets
marked with his initials and left by a female friend. "I've not brought
you up with such devoted care," she declared to her daughter at their
first interview, "to marry a presumptuous and penniless Frenchman. I
shall take you straight home and you'll please forget M. de Mauves."
Mrs. Cleve received that evening at her hotel a visit from this
personage which softened her wrath but failed to modify her decision. He
had very good manners, but she was sure he had horrible morals; and the
lady, who had been a good-natured censor on her own account, felt a deep
and real need to sacrifice her daughter to propriety. She belonged to
that large class of Americans who make light of their native land in
familiar discourse but are startled back into a sense of having
blasphemed when they find Europeans taking them at their word. "I know
the type, my dear," she said to her daughter with a competent nod. "He
won't beat you. Sometimes you'll wish he would."
Euphemia remained solemnly silent, for the only answer she felt capable
of making was that her mother's mind was too small a measure of things
and her lover's type an historic, a social masterpiece that it took some
mystic illumination to appreciate. A person who confounded him with the
common throng of her watering-place acquaintance was not a person to
argue with. It struck the girl she had simply no cause to plead; her
cause was in the Lord's hands and in those of M. de Mauves.
This agent of Providence had been irritated and mortified by Mrs.
Cleve's opposition, and hardly knew how to handle an adversary who
failed to perceive that a member of his family gave of necessity more
than he received. But he had obtained information on his return to Paris
which exalted the uses of humility. Euphemia's fortune, wonderful to
say, was greater than its fame, and in view of such a prize, even a
member of his family could afford to take a snubbing.
The young man's tact, his deference, his urbane insistence, won a
concession from Mrs. Cleve. The engagement was to be put off and her
daughter was to return home, be brought out and receive the homage she
was entitled to and which might well take a form representing peril to
the suit of this first headlong aspirant. They were to exchange neither
letters nor mementoes nor messages; but if at the end of two years
Euphemia had refused offers enough to attest the permanence of her
attachment he should receive an invitation to address her again. This
decision was promulgated in the presence of the parties interested. The
Count bore himself gallantly, looking at his young friend as if he
expected some tender protestation. But she only looked at him silently
in return, neither weeping nor smiling nor putting out her hand. On this
they separated, and as M. de Mauves walked away he declared to himself
that in spite of the confounded two years he was one of the luckiest of
men--to have a fiancee who to several millions of francs added such
strangely beautiful eyes.
How many offers Euphemia refused but scantily concerns us--and how the
young man wore his two years away. He found he required pastimes, and as
pastimes were expensive he added heavily to the list of debts to be
cancelled by Euphemia's fortune. Sometimes, in the thick of what he had
once called pleasure with a keener conviction than now, he put to
himself the case of their failing him after all; and then he remembered
that last mute assurance of her pale face and drew a long breath of such
confidence as he felt in nothing else in the world save his own
punctuality in an affair of honour.
At last, one morning, he took the express to Havre with a letter of Mrs.
Cleve's in his pocket, and ten days later made his bow to mother and
daughter in New York. His stay was brief, and he was apparently unable
to bring himself to view what Euphemia's uncle, Mr. Butterworth, who
gave her away at the altar, called our great experiment of democratic
self-government, in a serious light. He smiled at everything and seemed
to regard the New World as a colossal plaisanterie. It is true that a
perpetual smile was the most natural expression of countenance for a man
about to marry Euphemia Cleve.
III
Longmore's first visit seemed to open to him so large a range of quiet
pleasure that he very soon paid a second, and at the end of a fortnight
had spent uncounted hours in the little drawing-room which Madame de
Mauves rarely quitted except to drive or walk in the forest. She lived
in an old-fashioned pavilion, between a high-walled court and an
excessively artificial garden, beyond whose enclosure you saw a long
line of tree-tops. Longmore liked the garden and in the mild afternoons
used to move his chair through the open window to the smooth terrace
which overlooked it while his hostess sat just within. Presently she
would come out and wander through the narrow alleys and beside the thin-
spouting fountain, and at last introduce him to a private gate in the
high wall, the opening to a lane which led to the forest. Hitherwards
she more than once strolled with him, bareheaded and meaning to go but
twenty rods, but always going good-naturedly further and often
stretching it to the freedom of a promenade. They found many things to
talk about, and to the pleasure of feeling the hours slip along like
some silver stream Longmore was able to add the satisfaction of
suspecting that he was a "resource" for Madame de Mauves. He had made
her acquaintance with the sense, not wholly inspiring, that she was a
woman with a painful twist in her life and that seeking her acquaintance
would be like visiting at a house where there was an invalid who could
bear no noise. But he very soon recognised that her grievance, if
grievance it was, was not aggressive; that it was not fond of attitudes
and ceremonies, and that her most earnest wish was to remember it as
little as possible. He felt that even if Mrs. Draper hadn't told him she
was unhappy he would have guessed it, and yet that he couldn't have
pointed to his proof. The evidence was chiefly negative--she never
alluded to her husband. Beyond this it seemed to him simply that her
whole being was pitched in a lower key than harmonious Nature had
designed; she was like a powerful singer who had lost her high notes.
She never drooped nor sighed nor looked unutterable things; she dealt no
sarcastic digs at her fate; she had in short none of the conscious
graces of the woman wronged. Only Longmore was sure that her gentle
gaiety was but the milder or sharper flush of a settled ache, and that
she but tried to interest herself in his thoughts in order to escape
from her own. If she had wished to irritate his curiosity and lead him
to take her confidence by storm nothing could have served her purpose
better than this studied discretion. He measured the rare magnanimity of
self-effacement so deliberate, he felt how few women were capable of
exchanging a luxurious woe for a thankless effort. Madame de Mauves, he
himself felt, wasn't sweeping the horizon for a compensation or a
consoler; she had suffered a personal deception that had disgusted her
with persons. She wasn't planning to get the worth of her trouble back
in some other way; for the present she was proposing to live with it
peaceably, reputably and without scandal--turning the key on it
occasionally as you would on a companion liable to attacks of insanity.
Longmore was a man of fine senses and of a speculative spirit, leading-
strings that had never been slipped. He began to regard his hostess as a
figure haunted by a shadow which was somehow her intenser and more
authentic self. This lurking duality in her put on for him an
extraordinary charm. Her delicate beauty acquired to his eye the serious
cast of certain blank-browed Greek statues; and sometimes when his
imagination, more than his ear, detected a vague tremor in the tone in
which she attempted to make a friendly question seem to have behind it
none of the hollow resonance of absent-mindedness, his marvelling eyes
gave her an answer more eloquent, though much less to the point, than
the one she demanded.
She supplied him indeed with much to wonder about, so that he fitted, in
his ignorance, a dozen high-flown theories to her apparent history. She
had married for love and staked her whole soul on it; of that he was
convinced. She hadn't changed her allegiance to be near Paris and her
base of supplies of millinery; he was sure she had seen her perpetrated
mistake in a light of which her present life, with its conveniences for
shopping and its moral aridity, was the absolute negation. But by what
extraordinary process of the heart--through what mysterious intermission
of that moral instinct which may keep pace with the heart even when this
organ is making unprecedented time--had she fixed her affections on an
insolently frivolous Frenchman? Longmore needed no telling; he knew that
M. de Mauves was both cynical and shallow; these things were stamped on
his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his voice, his gesture, his step. Of
Frenchwomen themselves, when all was said, our young man, full of nursed
discriminations, went in no small fear; they all seemed to belong to the
type of a certain fine lady to whom he had ventured to present a letter
of introduction and whom, directly after his first visit to her, he had
set down in his note-book as "metallic." Why should Madame de Mauves
have chosen a Frenchwoman's lot--she whose nature had an atmospheric
envelope absent even from the brightest metals? He asked her one day
frankly if it had cost her nothing to transplant herself--if she weren't
oppressed with a sense of irreconcileable difference from "all these
people." She replied nothing at first, till he feared she might think it
her duty to resent a question that made light of all her husband's
importances. He almost wished she would; it would seem a proof that her
policy of silence had a limit. "I almost grew up here," she said at
last, "and it was here for me those visions of the future took shape
that we all have when we begin to think or to dream beyond mere
playtime. As matters stand one may be very American and yet arrange it
with one's conscience to live in Europe. My imagination perhaps--I had a
little when I was younger--helped me to think I should find happiness
here. And after all, for a woman, what does it signify? This isn't
America, no--this element, but it's quite as little France. France is
out there beyond the garden, France is in the town and the forest; but
here, close about me, in my room and"--she paused a moment--"in my mind,
it's a nameless, and doubtless not at all remarkable, little country of
my own. It's not her country," she added, "that makes a woman happy or
unhappy."
Madame Clairin, Euphemia's sister-in-law, might meanwhile have been
supposed to have undertaken the graceful task of making Longmore ashamed
of his uncivil jottings about her sex and nation. Mademoiselle de
Mauves, bringing example to the confirmation of precept, had made a
remunerative match and sacrificed her name to the millions of a
prosperous and aspiring wholesale druggist--a gentleman liberal enough
to regard his fortune as a moderate price for being towed into circles
unpervaded by pharmaceutic odours. His system possibly was sound, but
his own application of it to be deplored. M. Clairin's head was turned
by his good luck. Having secured an aristocratic wife he adopted an
aristocratic vice and began to gamble at the Bourse. In an evil hour he
lost heavily, and then staked heavily to recover himself. But he was to
learn that the law of compensation works with no such pleasing
simplicity, and he rolled to the dark bottom of his folly. There he felt
everything go--his wits, his courage, his probity, everything that had
made him what his fatuous marriage had so promptly unmade. He walked up
the Rue Vivienne with his hands in his empty pockets and stood half an
hour staring confusedly up and down the brave boulevard. People brushed
against him and half a dozen carriages almost ran over him, until at
last a policeman, who had been watching him for some time, took him by
the arm and led him gently away. He looked at the man's cocked hat and
sword with tears in his eyes; he hoped for some practical application of
the wrath of heaven, something that would express violently his dead-
weight of self-abhorrence. The sergent de ville, however, only stationed
him in the embrasure of a door, out of harm's way, and walked off to
supervise a financial contest between an old lady and a cabman. Poor M.
Clairin had only been married a year, but he had had time to measure the
great spirit of true children of the anciens preux. When night had
fallen he repaired to the house of a friend and asked for a night's
lodging; and as his friend, who was simply his old head book-keeper and
lived in a small way, was put to some trouble to accommodate him, "You
must pardon me," the poor man said, "but I can't go home. I'm afraid of
my wife!" Toward morning he blew his brains out. His widow turned the
remnants of his property to better account than could have been expected
and wore the very handsomest mourning. It was for this latter reason
perhaps that she was obliged to retrench at other points and accept a
temporary home under her brother's roof.
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