Books: Cosmopolis, v3

P >> Paul Bourget >> Cosmopolis, v3

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

This etext was produced by David Widger

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them. D.W.]

COSMOPOLIS

By PAUL BOURGET

BOOK 3.

CHAPTER VII

A LITTLE RELATIVE OF IAGO

The remorse which Montfanon expressed so naively, once acknowledged to
himself, increased rapidly in the honest man's heart. He had reason to
say from the beginning that the affair looked bad. A quarrel, together
with assault, or an attempt at assault, would not be easily set right.
It required a diplomatic miracle. The slightest lack of self-possession
on the part of the seconds is equivalent to a catastrophe. As happens in
such circumstances, events are hurried, and the pessimistic anticipations
of the irritable Marquis were verified almost as soon as he uttered them.
Dorsenne and he had barely left the Palais Savorelli when Gorka arrived.
The energy with which he repulsed the proposition of an arrangement which
would admit of excuses on his part, served prudent Hafner, and the not
less prudent Ardea, as a signal for withdrawal. It was too evident to
the two men that no reconciliation would result from a collision of such
a madman with a personage so difficult as the most authorized of
Florent's proxies had shown himself to be. They then asked Gorka to
relieve them from their duty. They had too plausible an excuse in
Fanny's betrothal for Boleslas to refuse to release them. That
retirement was a second catastrophe. In his impatience to find other
seconds who would be firm, Gorka hastened to the Cercle de la Chasse.
Chance willed that he should meet with two of his comrades--a Marquis
Cibo, Roman, and a Prince Pietrapertoso, Neapolitan, who were assuredly
the best he could have chosen to hasten the simplest affair to its worst
consequences.

Those two young men of the best Italian families, both very intelligent,
very loyal and very good, belonged to that particular class which is to
be met with in Vienna, Madrid, St. Petersburg, as in Milan and in Rome,
of foreign club-men hypnotized by Paris. And what a Paris! That of
showy and noisy fetes, that which passes the morning in practising the
sports in fashion, the afternoons in racing, in frequenting fencing-
schools, the evening at the theatre and the night at the gaming-table!
That Paris which emigrates by turns, according to the season, to Monte
Carlo for the 'Tir aux Pigeons', to Deauville for the race week, to Aix-
les-Bains for the baccarat season; that Paris which has its own customs,
its own language, its own history, even its own cosmopolitanism, for it
exercises over certain minds, throughout Europe, so despotic a rule that
Cibo, for example, and his friend Pietrapertoso never opened a French
journal that was not Parisian.

They sought the short paragraphs in which were related, in detail, the
doings of the demi-monde, the last supper given by some well-known
viveur, the details of some large party in such and such a fashionable
club, the result of a shooting match, or of a fencing match between
celebrated fencers! There were between them subjects of conversation of
which they never wearied; to know if spirituelle Gladys Harvey was more
elegant than Leona d'Astri, if Machault made "counters" as rapid as those
of General Garnier, if little Lautrec would adhere or would not adhere to
the game he was playing. Imprisoned in Rome by the scantiness of their
means, and also by the wishes, the one of his uncle, the other of his
grandfather, whose heirs they were, their entire year was summed up in
the months which they spent at Nice in the winter, and in the trip they
took to Paris at the time of the Grand Prix for six weeks. Jealous one
of the other, with the most comical rivalry, of the least occurrence at
the 'Cercle des Champs-Elysees' or of the Rue Royale in the Eternal City,
they affected, in the presence of their colleagues of la chasse, the
impassive manner of augurs when the telegraph brought them the news of
some Parisian scandal. That inoffensive mania which had made of stout,
ruddy Cibo, and of thin, pale Pietrapertoso two delightful studies for
Dorsenne during his Roman winter, made of them terrible proxies in the
service of Gorka's vengeance.

With what joy and what gravity they accepted that mission all those who
have studied swordsmen will understand after this simple sketch, and with
what promptness they presented themselves to confer at nine o'clock in
the morning with their client's adversary! In short, at half-past twelve
the duel was arranged in its slightest detail. The energy employed by
Montfanon had only ended in somewhat tempering the conditions--four balls
to be exchanged at twenty-five paces at the word of command. The duel
was fixed for the following morning, in the inclosure which Cibo owned,
with an inn adjoining, not very far distant from the classical tomb of
Cecilia Metella. To obtain that distance and the use of new weapons it
required the prestige with which the Marquis suddenly clothed himself in
the eyes of Gorka's seconds by pronouncing the name, still legendary in
the provinces and to the foreigner, of Gramont-Caderousse--'Sic transit
gloria mundi'! On leaving that rendezvous the excellent man really had
tears in his eyes.

"It is my fault," he moaned, "it is my fault. With that Hafner we
should have obtained such a fine official plan by mixing in a little of
ours. He offered it to us himself.... Brave Chapron! It is I who have
brought him into this dilemma!.... I owe it to him not to abandon him,
but to follow him to the end.... Here I shall be assisting at a duel, at
my age!.... Did you see how those young snobs lowered their voices when
I mentioned my encounter with poor Caderousse?.... Fifty-two years and a
month, and not to know yet how to conduct one's self! Let us go to the
Rue Leopardi. I wish to ask pardon of our client, and to give him some
advice. We will take him to one of my old friends who has a garden near
the Villa Pamphili, very secluded. We will spend the rest of the
afternoon practising.... Ah! Accursed choler! Yes, it would have been
so simple to accept the other's plan yesterday. By the exchange of two
or three words, I am sure it could have been arranged."

"Console yourself, Marquis," replied Florent, when the unhappy nobleman
had described to him the deplorable result of his negotiations. "I like
that better. Monsieur Gorka needs correction. I have only one regret,
that of not having given it to him more thoroughly.... Since I shall
have to fight a duel, I would at least have had my money's worth!"

"And you have never used a pistol?" asked Montfanon.

"Bah! I have hunted a great deal and I believe I can shoot."

"That is like night and day," interrupted the Marquis. "Hold yourself in
readiness. At three o'clock come for me and I will give you a lesson.
And remember there is a merciful God for the brave!"

Although Florent deserved praise for the cheerfulness of which his reply
was proof, the first moments which he spent alone after the departure of
his two witnesses were very painful.

That which Chapron experienced during those few moments was simply very
natural anxiety, the enervation caused by looking at the clock, and
saying:

"In twenty-four hours the hand will be on this point of the dial. And
shall I still be living?".... He was, however, manly, and knew how to
control himself. He struggled against the feeling of weakness, and,
while awaiting the time to rejoin his friends, he resolved to write his
last wishes. For years his intention had been to leave his entire
fortune to his brother-in-law. He, therefore, made a rough draft of his
will in that sense, with a pen at first rather unsteady, then quite firm.
His will completed, he had courage enough to write two letters, addressed
the one to that brother-in-law, the other to his sister. When he had
finished his work the hands of the clock pointed to ten minutes of three.

"Still seventeen hours and a half to wait," said he, "but I think I have
conquered my nerves. A short walk, too, will benefit me."

So he decided to go on foot to the rendezvous named by Montfanon. He
carefully locked the three envelopes in the drawer of his desk. He saw,
on passing, that Lincoln was not in his studio. He asked the footman if
Madame Maitland was at home. The reply received was that she was
dressing, and that she had ordered her carriage for three o'clock.

"Good," said he, "neither of them will have the slightest suspicion; I am
saved."

How astonished he would have been could he, while walking leisurely
toward his destination, have returned in thought to the smoking-room he
had just left! He would have seen a woman glide noiselessly through the
open door, with the precaution of a malefactor! He would have seen her
examine, without disarranging, all the papers on the table. She frowned
on seeing Dorsenne's and the Marquis's cards. She took from the
blotting-case some loose leaves and held them in front of the glass,
trying to read there the imprint left upon them. He would have seen
finally the woman draw from her pocket a bunch of keys. She inserted one
of them in the lock of the drawer which Florent had so carefully turned,
and took from that drawer the three unsealed envelopes he had placed
within it. And the woman who thus read, with a face contracted by
anguish, the papers discovered in such a manner, thanks to a ruse the
abominable indelicacy of which gave proof of shameful habits of
espionage, was his own sister, the Lydia whom he believed so gentle and
so simple, to whom he had penned an adieu so tender in case he should be
killed--the Lydia who would have terrified him had he seen her thus, with
passion distorting the face which was considered insignificant! She
herself, the audacious spy, trembled as if she would fall, her eyes
dilated, her bosom heaved, her teeth chattered, so greatly was she
unnerved by what she had discovered, by the terrible consequences which
she had brought about.

Had she not written the anonymous letters to Gorka, denouncing to him
the intrigue between Maitland and Madame Steno? Was it not she who had
chosen, the better to poison those terrible letters, phrases the most
likely to strike the betrayed lover in the most sensitive part of his
'amour propre'? Was it not she who had hastened the return of the
jealous man with the certain hope of drawing thus a tragical vengeance
upon the hated heads of her husband and the Venetian? That vengeance,
indeed, had broken. But upon whom? Upon the only person Lydia loved in
the world, upon the brother whom she saw endangered through her fault;
and that thought was to her so overwhelming that she sank into the
armchair in which Florent had been seated fifteen minutes before,
repeating, with an accent of despair: "He is going to fight a duel. He
is going to fight instead of the other!"

All the moral history of that obscure and violent soul was summed up in
the cry in which passionate anxiety for her brother was coupled with a
fierce hatred of her husband. That hatred was the result of a youth and
a childhood without the story of which a duplicity so criminal in a being
so young would be unintelligible. That youth and that childhood had
presaged what Lydia would one day be. But who was there to train the
nature in which the heredity of an oppressed race manifested itself, as
has been already remarked, by the two most detestable characteristics--
hypocrisy and perfidy? Who, moreover, observes in children the truth, as
much neglected in practise as it is common in theory, that the defects of
the tenth year become vices in the thirtieth? When quite a child Lydia
invented falsehoods as naturally as her brother spoke the truth....
Whosoever observed her would have perceived that those lies were all told
to paint herself in a favorable light. The germ, too, of another defect
was springing up within her--a jealousy instinctive, irrational, almost
wicked. She could not see a new plaything in Florent's hands without
sulking immediately. She could not bear to see her brother embrace her
father without casting herself between them, nor could she see him amuse
himself with other comrades.

Had Napoleon Chapron been interested in the study of character as deeply
as he was in his cotton and his sugarcane, he would have perceived, with
affright, the early traces of a sinful nature. But, on that point, like
his son, he was one of those trustful men who did not judge when they
loved. Moreover, Lydia and Florent, to his wounded sensibility of a
demi-pariah, formed the only pleasant corner in his life--were the fresh
and youthful comforters of his widowerhood and of his misanthropy. He
cherished them with the idolatry which all great workers entertain for
their children, which is one of the most dangerous forms of paternal
tenderness; Lydia's incipient vices were to the planter delightful
fancies! Did she lie? The excellent man exclaimed: What an imagination
she has! Was she jealous? He would sigh, pressing to his broad breast
the tiny form: How sensitive she is!.... The result of that selfish
blindness--for to love children thus is to love them for one's self and
not for them--was that the girl, at the time of her entrance at
Roehampton, was spoiled in the essential traits of her character. But
she was so pretty, she owed to the singular mixture of three races an
originality of grace so seductive that only the keen glance of a
governess of genius could have discerned, beneath that exquisite
exterior, the already marked lines of her character. Such governesses
are rare, still more so at convents than elsewhere. There was none at
Roehampton when Lydia entered that pious haven which was to prove fatal
to her, for a reason precisely contrary to that which transformed for
Florent the lawns of peaceful Beaumont into a radiant paradise of
friendship.

Among the pupils with whom Lydia was to be educated were four young girls
from Philadelphia, older than the newcomer by two years, and who, also,
had left America for the first time. They brought with them the
unconquerable aversion to negro blood and that wonderful keenness in
discovering it, even in the most infinitesimal degree, which
distinguishes real Yankees. Little Lydia Chapron, having been entered as
French, they at first hesitated in the face of a suspicion speedily
converted into a certainty and that certainty into an aversion, which
they could not conceal. They would not have been children had they not
been unfeeling. They, therefore, began to offer poor Lydia petty
affronts. Convents and colleges resemble other society. There, too,
unjust contempt is like that "ferret of the woods," which runs from hand
to hand and which always returns to its point of setting out. All the
scornful are themselves scorned by some one--a merited punishment, which
does not correct our pride any more than the other punishments which
abound in life cure our other faults. Lydia's persecutors were
themselves the objects of outrages practised by their comrades born in
England, on account of certain peculiarities in their language and for
the nasal quality of their voices. The drama was limited, as we can
imagine, to a series of insignificant episodes and of which the
superintendents only surprised a demi-echo.

Children nurse passions as strong as ours, but so much interrupted by
playfulness that it is impossible to measure their exact strength.
Lydia's 'amour propre' was wounded in an incurable manner by that
revelation of her own peculiarity. Certain incidents of her American
life recurred to her, which she comprehended more clearly. She recalled
the portrait of her grandmother, the complexion, the hands, the hair of
her father, and she experienced that shame of her birth and of her family
much more common with children than our optimism imagines. Parents of
humble origin give their sons a liberal education, expose them to the
demoralization which it brings with it in their positions, and what
social hatreds date from the moment when the boy of twelve blushes in
secret at the condition of his relatives! With Lydia, so instinctively
jealous and untruthful, those first wounds induced falsehood and
jealousy. The slightest superiority even, noticed in one of her
companions, became to her a cause for suffering, and she undertook to
compensate by personal triumphs the difference of blood, which, once
discovered, wounds a vain nature. In order to assure herself those
triumphs she tried to win all the persons who approached her, mistresses
and comrades, and she began to practise that continued comedy of attitude
and of sentiment to which the fatal desire to please, so quickly leads-
that charming and dangerous tendency which borders much less on goodness
than falseness. At eighteen, submitted to a sort of continual
cabotinage, Lydia was, beneath the most attractive exterior, a being
profoundly, though unconsciously, wicked, capable of very little
affection--she loved no one truly but her brother--open to the invasion
of the passions of hatred which are the natural products of proud and
false minds. It was one of these passions, the most fatal of all, which
marriage was to develop within her--envy.

That hideous vice, one of those which govern the world, has been so
little studied by moralists, as all too dishonorable for the heart of
man, no doubt, that this statement may appear improbable. Madame
Maitland, for years, had been envious of her husband, but envious as one
of the rivals of an artist would be, envious as one pretty woman is of
another, as one banker is of his opponent, as a politician of his
adversary, with the fierce, implacable envy which writhes with physical
pain in the face of success, which is transported with a sensual joy in
the face of disaster. It is a great mistake to limit the ravages of that
guilty passion to the domain of professional emulation. When it is deep,
it does not alone attack the qualities of the person, but the person
himself, and it was thus that Lydia envied Lincoln. Perhaps the analysis
of this sentiment, very subtle in its ugliness, will explain to some a
few of the antipathies against which they have struck in their relatives.
For it is not only between husband and wife that these unavowed envies
are met, it is between lover and mistress, friend and friend, brother and
brother, sometimes, alas, father and son, mother and daughter! Lydia had
married Lincoln Maitland partly out of obedience to her brother's wishes,
partly from vanity, because the young man was an American, and because it
was a sort of victory over the prejudices of race, of which she thought
constantly, but of which she never spoke.

It required only three months of married life to perceive that Maitland
could not forgive himself for that marriage. Although he affected to
scorn his compatriots, and although at heart he did not share any of the
views of the country in which he had not set foot since his fifth year,
he could not hear remarks made in New York upon that marriage without a
pang. He disliked Lydia for the humiliation, and she felt it. The birth
of a child would no doubt have modified that feeling, and, if it would
not have removed it, would at least have softened the embittered heart of
the young wife. But no child was born to them. They had not returned
from their wedding tour, upon which Florent accompanied them, before
their lives rolled along in that silence which forms the base of all
those households in which husband and wife, according to a simple and
grand expression of the people, do not live heart against heart.

After the journey through Spain, which should have been one continued
enchantment, the wife became jealous of the evident preference which
Florent showed for Maitland. For the first time she perceived the hold
which that impassioned friendship had taken upon her brother's heart.
He loved her, too, but with a secondary love. The comparison annoyed her
daily, hourly, and it did not fail to become a real wound. Returned to
Paris, where they spent almost three years, that wound was increased by
the sole fact that the puissant individuality of the painter speedily
relegated to the shade the individuality of his wife, simply, almost
mechanically, like a large tree which pushes a smaller one into the
background. The composite society of artists, amateurs, and writers who
visited Lincoln came there only for him. The house they had rented was
rented only for him. The journeys they made were for him. In short,
Lydia was borne away, like Florent, in the orbit of the most despotic
force in the world--that of a celebrated talent. An entire book would be
required to paint in their daily truth the continued humiliations which
brought the young wife to detest that talent and that celebrity with as
much ardor as Florent worshipped them. She remained, however, an honest
woman, in the sense in which the word is construed by the world, which
sums up woman's entire dishonor in errors of love.

But within Lydia's breast grew a rooted aversion toward Lincoln. She
detested him for the pure blood which made of that large, fair, and
robust man so admirable a type of Anglo-Saxon beauty, by the side of her,
so thin, so insignificant indeed, in spite of the grace of her pretty,
dark face. She detested him for his taste, for the original elegance
with which he understood how to adorn the places in which he lived,
while she maintained within her a barbarous lack of taste for the least
arrangement of materials and of colors. When she was forced to
acknowledge progress in the painter, bitter hatred entered her heart.
When he lamented over his work, and when she saw him a prey to the
dolorous anxiety of an artist who doubts himself, she experienced a
profound joy, marred only by the evident sadness into which Lincoln's
struggles plunged Florent. Never had she met the eyes of Chapron fixed
upon Maitland with that look of a faithful dog which rejoices in the joy
of its master, or which suffers in his sadness, without enduring, like
Alba Steno, the sensation of a "needle in the heart."

The idolatrous worship of her brother for the painter caused her to
suffer still more as she comprehended, with the infallible perspicacity
of antipathy, the immense dupery. She read the very depths of the souls
of the two old comrades of Beaumont. She knew that in that friendship,
as is almost always the case, one alone gave all to receive in exchange
only the most brutal recognition, that with which a huntsman or a master
gratifies a faithful dog! As for enlightening Florent with regard to
Lincoln's character, she had vainly tried to do so by those fine and
perfidious insinuations in which women excel. She only recognized her
impotence, and myriads of hateful impressions were thus accumulated in
her heart, to be summed up in one of those frenzies of taciturn rancor
which bursts on the first opportunity with terrifying energy. Crime
itself has its laws of development. Between the pretty little girl who
wept on seeing a new toy in her brother's hand and the Lydia Maitland,
forcer of locks, author of anonymous letters, driven by the thirst for
vengeance, even to villainy, no dramatic revolution of character had
taken place. The logical succession of days had sufficed.

The occasion to gratify that deep and mortal longing to touch Lincoln on
some point truly sensitive, how often Lydia had sought it in vain, before
Madame Steno obtained an ascendancy over the painter. She had been
reduced by it to those meannesses of feminine animosity to manage, as if
accidentally, that her husband might read all the disagreeable articles
written about his paintings, innocently to praise before him the rivals
who had given him offense, to repeat to him with an air of embarrassment
the slightest criticisms pronounced on one of his exhibits--all the
unpleasantnesses which had the result of irritating Florent, above all,
for Maitland was one of those artists too well satisfied with the results
of his own work for the opinion of others to annoy him very much. On the
other hand, before the passion for the dogaresse had possessed him, he
had never loved. Many painters are thus, satisfying with magnificent
models an impetuosity of temperament which does not mount from the senses
to the heart. Accustomed to regard the human form from a certain point,
they find in beauty, which would appear to us simply animal, principles
of plastic emotion which at times suffice for their amorous requirements.
They are only more deeply touched by it, when to that rather coarse
intoxication is joined, in the woman who inspires them, the refined
graces of mind, the delicacy of elegance and the subtleties of sentiment.

Such was Madame Steno, who at once inspired the painter with a passion as
complete as a first love. It was really such. The Countess, who was
possessed of the penetration of voluptuousness, was not mistaken there.
Lydia, who was possessed of the penetration of hatred, was not mistaken
either. She knew from the first day how matters stood in the beginning,
because she was as observing as she was dissimulating; then, thanks to
means less hypothetic, she had always had the habit of making those
abominable inquiries which are natural, we venture to avow, to nine women
out of ten! And how many men are women, too, on this point, as said the
fabulist. At school Lydia was one of those who ascended to the
dormitory, or who reentered the study to rummage in the cupboards and
open trunks of her companions. When mature, never had a sealed letter
passed through her hands without her having ingeniously managed to read
through the envelope, or at least to guess from the postmark, the seal,
the handwriting of the address, who was the author of it. The instinct
of curiosity was so strong that she could not refrain, at a telegraph
office, from glancing over the shoulders of the persons before her, to
learn the contents of their despatches. She never had her hair dressed
or made her toilette without minutely questioning her maid as to the
goings-on in the pantry and the antechamber. It was through a story of
that kind that she learned the altercation between Florent and Gorka in
the vestibule, which proves, between parentheses, that these espionages
by the aid of servants are often efficacious. But they reveal a native
baseness, which will not recoil before any piece of villainy.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5