Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 318
Madame Mila thought that a woman so forgetting herself deserved even a worse fate than the boarding-house. Madame Mila, who was quite content that her husband should make a fool of himself about Blanche Souris, or anybody else, so long as he walked arm-in-arm now and then with Des Gommeux, and called him “mon cher,” — was indeed in every iota the true Femme Galante of the 19th century.
The Femme Galante has passed through many various changes, in many countries. The dames of the Decamerone were unlike the fair athlete-seekers of the days of Horace; and the powdered coquettes of the years of Molière, were sisters only by the kinship of a common vice to the frivolous and fragile faggot of impulses, that is called Frou-frou.
The Femme Galante has always been a feature in every age; poets from Juvenal to Musset, have railed at her; artists, from Titian to Winterhalter, have painted her; dramatists, from Aristophanes to Congreve and Dumas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her; satirists, from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavami, have poured out their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of to-day has been missed hitherto.
Frou-frou, who stands for her, is not in the least the true type. Frou-frou is a creature that can love, can suffer, can repent, can die. She is false in sentiment and in art, but she is tender after all; poor, feverish, wistful, changeful morsel of humanity. A slender, helpless, breathless, and frail thing, who, under one sad, short sin, sinks down to death.
But Frou-frou is in no sense the true Femme Galante of her day. Frou-frou is much more a fancy than a fact. It is not Frou-frou that Molière would have handed down to other generations in enduring ridicule, had he been living now. To her he would have doffed his hat with dim eyes; what he would have fastened for all time in his pillory would have been a very different, and far more conspicuous, offender.
The Femme Galante, who has neither the scruples nor the follies of poor Frou-frou, who neither forfeits her place nor leaves her lord; who has studied adultery as one of the fine arts and made it one of the domestic virtues; who takes her wearied lover to her friends’ houses as she takes her muff or her dog, and teaches her sons and daughters to call him by familiar names; who writes to the victim of her passions with the same pen that calls her boy home from school; and who smooths her child’s curls with the same fingers that stray over her lover’s lips; who challenges the world to find a flaw in her, and who smiles serene at her husband’s table on a society she is careful to conciliate; who has woven the most sacred ties and most unholy pleasures into so deft a braid, that none can say where one commences or the other ends; who uses the sanctity of her maternity to cover the lawlessness of her license; and who, incapable alike of the self-abandonment of love or of the self-sacrifice of duty, has not even such poor, cheap honour as, in the creatures of the streets, may make guilt loyal to its dupe and partner.
This is the Femme Galante of the passing century, who, with her hand on her husband’s arm, babbles of her virtue in complacent boast; and ignoring such a vulgar word as Sin, talks with a smile of Friendship. Beside her Frou-frou were innocence itself, Marion de l’Orme were honesty, Manon Lescaut were purity, Cleopatra were chaste, and Faustine were faithful.
She is the female Tartuffe of seduction, the Précieuse Ridicule of passion, the parody of Love, the standing gibe of Womanhood.
CHAPTER V.
THE next day the Duca della Rocca left cards on Lady Hilda and the Comtesse de Caviare; and then for a fortnight never went near either of them except to exchange a few words with them in other people’s houses. M. de St. Louis, who was vastly enamoured of his project, because it was his project (what better reason has anybody?) was irritated and in despair.
“You fly in the face of Fate!” he said, with much impatience.
Della Rocca laughed.
“There is no such person as Fate — she perished with all the rest of the Pagan world when we put up our first gas-lamp. The two I regret most of them all are Faunus and Picus; nowadays we make Faunus into a railway contractor, and shoot Picus for the market-stall.”
“You are very romantic,” said the Duc, with serene contempt. “It is an unfortunate quality; and I confess,” he added, with a sigh, as if confessing a blemish in a favourite horse, “that, perhaps, she is a little deficient in the other extreme, a little too cold, a little too unimpressionable; there is absolutely no shadow of cause to suppose she ever felt the slightest emotion for anyone. That gives, perhaps, a certain hardness. It is not natural.
‘ Une petite faiblesse donne tant de charme.’”
“In a wife, one might dispense with the ‘petite faiblesse’ for anyone else,” said Della Rocca, with a smile; the blemish did not seem much of a fault in his eyes.
“That is a romantic notion,” said the Due, with a little touch of disdain. “In real truth a woman is easier to manage who has had — a past. She knows what to expect. It is flattering to be the first object of passion to a woman. But it is troublesome: she exacts so much!”
“If I were not that, I have seldom cared to be anything,” said Della Rocca.
“That is an Italian amorous fancy. Romeo and Othello are the typical Italian lovers. I never can tell how a northerner like Shakspeare could draw either. You are often very unfaithful; but while you are faithful you are ardent, and you are absorbed in the woman. That is one of the reasons why an Italian succeeds in love as no other man does. ‘L’art de brûler silencieusement le cœur d’une femme” is a supreme art with you. Compared with you, all other men are children. You have been the supreme masters of the great passion since the days of Ovid.”
“Because it is much more the supreme pursuit of our lives than it is with other men. How can Love be of much power where it is inferior to foxhunting, and a mere interlude when there is no other sport to be had, as it is with Englishmen?”
“And with a Frenchman it is always inferior to himself!” confessed the French Duc, with a smile. “At least they say so. But every human being loves his vanity first. ‘Only wounded my vanity?’ poor Lord Strangford used to say. ‘Pray what dearer and more integral part of myself could you wound?’ He was very right. If we are not on good terms with ourselves we can never prevail with others.”
“Yet a vain man seldom succeeds with women?”
“A man who lets them see that he is vain does not: that is another matter. Vanity — ah! there is Miladi, she has plenty of vanity; yet it is of a grandiose kind, and it would only take a little more time and the first grey hair to turn it into dissatisfaction. All kinds of discontent are only superb vanities. Byron’s, Musset’s, Bolingbroke’s—”
A horse nearly knocked the Duc down in the midst of his philosophies as he picked his way delicately amongst the standing and moving carriages to the place where the white great-coats with the black velvet collars of the Lady Hilda’s servants were visible.
The Lady Hilda’s victoria stood in that open square where it is the pleasure of fashionable Floralia to stop its carriages in the course of the drive before dinner.
The piazza is the most unlovely part of the park: it has a gaunt red café and a desert of hard-beaten sand, and in the middle there are some few plants, and a vast quantity of iron bordering laid out in geometrical patterns, with more hard-beaten sand between them, this being the modern Floralian idea of a garden; to which fatal idea are sacrificed the noble ilex shades, the bird-filled cedar groves, the deep delicious dreamful avenues, the moss-grown ways, and the leaf-covered fountains, worthy to shelter Narcissus and to bathe Nausicaa, which their wiser forefathers knew were alike the blessing and the glory of this land of the sun.
Nevertheless — perhaps because it is the last place in the world where anybody would be supposed ever voluntarily to stop a carriage — here motley modern society delights to group its fusing nationalities; and the same people who bored each other in the morning’s calls, and will bore each other in the evening’s receptions, bore each other sedulously in the open air, and would not omit the sacred ceremonial for anything — unless, indeed, it rained.
Perhaps after all Floralia reads aright the generation that visits it. The ilex shadows and the cedar-groves need Virgil and Horace, Tasso and Petrarca, Milton and Shelley.
The Lady Hilda, who never by any chance paused in the piazzone, had stopped a moment there to please Madame Mila, who, in the loveliest Incroyable bonnet, was seated beside her.
The men of their acquaintance flocked up to the victoria. Lady Hilda paid them scanty attention, and occupied herself buying flowers of the poor women who lifted their fragrant basket-loads to the carriage. Madame Mila chattered like the brightest of parrakeets, and was clamorous for news.
“Quid novi?” is the cry in Floralia from morning till night, as in Athens. The most popular people are those who, when the article is not to be had of original growth, can manufacture it. Political news nobody attends to in Floralia; financial news interests society a little more, because everybody has stocks or shares in something somewhere; but ike news is Gossip, — dear delicious perennial ever-blessed gossip, that reports a beloved friend in difficulties, a rival in extremis, a neighbour no better than she should be, and some exalted personage or another caught hiding a king in his sleeve at cards, or kissing his wife’s lady-of-the-bedchamber.
Gossip goes the round of the city in winter as the lemonade stands do in summer.
If you wish to be choyé and asked out every night, learn to manufacture it; it is very easy: take equal parts of flower of malice and essence of impudence, with several pepper-corns of improbability to spice it, some candied lemon-peel of moral reflections, and a few drops of the ammonia of indecency that will make it light of digestion, and the toothsome morsel will procure you welcome everywhere. If you can also chop up any real Paschal lamb of innocence in very fine pieces, so that it is minced and hashed and unrecognisable for ever, serve the mince with the vinegar of malignity, and the fresh mint of novelty, and you will be the very Carême of gossip henceforward. Run about society with your concoctions in and out of the best houses, as fast as you can go, and there will be no end to your popularity. You will be as refreshing to the thirst of the dwellers in them as are the lemonade-sellers to the throats of the populace.
Perhaps Fate still lurked and worked in the Latin land, and had hidden herself under the delicate marabouts of the chapeau Incroyable; at any rate, Madame Mila welcomed the Duc and his companion with eagerness, and engaged them both to dinner with her on the morrow in a way which there was no refusing.
Madame Mila was discontented with the news of the day. All her young men could only tell her of one person’s ruin — poor Victor de Salaris’, which she had always predicted and contributed to cause, and which was therefore certainly the more agreeable — and two scenes between married people whom she knew: one because the brute of a husband would not allow his wife to have her tallest footman in silk stockings; the other because the no less a brute of a husband would not let his wife have — a friendship. Madame Mila scarcely knew which refusal to condemn as the most heartless and the most vulgar.
The Lady Hilda dined with her on the morrow; and the little Comtesse, with the fine instinct at discovering future sympathies of a woman “qui a vécu,” took care that Della Rocca took her cousin in to dinner.
“I would give all I possess to see Hilda attendrie,” she said to herself: as what she possessed just then was chiefly an enormous quantity of unpaid bills, perhaps she would not have lost so very much. But the Lady Hilda was not attendrie: she thought he talked better than most men — at least, differently, — and he succeeded in interesting her, probably because he had been so indifferent in calling upon her. That was all. Besides, his manner was perfect; it was as vieille cour as M. de St. Louis’s, and to the Italian noble alone is given the union of stateliest dignity with easiest grace.
Lady Hilda, who should have been born under Louis Quatorze, had often suffered much in her taste from an age when manner, except in the south, is only a tradition, smothered under cigar-ash, and buried in a gun-case.
As for him, he mused, while he talked to her, on the words of the Duc, who had known her all her life. Was it true that she had never felt even a passing “weakness?” Was it certain that she had always been as cold as she looked?
He wished that he could be sure.
After all, she was a woman of wonderful charm, though she did go about with Madame Mila, smoke cigarettes after dinner, and correct you as to the last mot made on the boulevards. He began to think that this was only the mere cachet of the world she lived in; only the mere accident of contact and habit.
All women born under the Second Empire have it more or less; and, after all, she had but little of it; she was very serene, very contemptuous, very high-bred; and her brilliant languid hazel eyes looked so untroubled that it would have moved any man into a wish to trouble their still and luminous depths.
She seemed to him very objectless and somewhat cynical. It was a pity. Nature had made her perfect in face and form, and gifted her with intelligence, and Fashion had made her useless, tired, and vaguely cynical about everything, as everybody else was in her world; except that yet larger number who resembled Madame Mila — a worse type still, according to his view.
It was a pity that the coldness and corruption of the great world had entered thus deeply into her; so he thought, watching the droop of her long eyelashes, the curve of her beautiful mouth, the even coming and going of her breath under her shining necklace of opals and emeralds.
He began to believe that the Duc was right. There was no “past” in that calmest of indolent glances.
“You smoke, Madame?” he said, a little abruptly to her, after dinner.
She looked at her slender roll of paper.
“It is a habit — like all the rest of the things one does. I do not care about it.”
“Why do it then? Are you not too proud to follow a habit, and imitate a folly?”
She smiled a little, and let the cigarette pale its ineffectual fires and die out.
“They have not known how to deal with her,” he thought to himself; and he sat down and played écarté, and allowed her to win, though he was one of the best players in Europe.
Fate had certainly been under the Incroyable bonnet of Madame Mila. For during the evening she suddenly recalled his villa, and announced her intention of coming to see it. In her little busy brain there was a clever notion that if she only could get her cousin once drawn into what the Duc would call a “petite faiblesse,” she herself would hear no more lectures about Maurice; and lectures are always tiresome, especially when the lecturer has lent you several thousands, that it would be the height of inconvenience ever to be reminded to repay.
A woman who has “petites faiblesses” is usually impatient with one who has none; the one who has none is a kind of standing insolence. Women corrupt more women than men do. Lovelace does not hate chastity in women; but Lady Bellaston does with all her might.
Pretty Madame Mila was too good-natured and also too shallow to hate anything; but if she could have seen her cousin “compromised” she would have derived an exquisite satisfaction and entertainment from the sight. She would also have felt that Lady Hilda would have become thereby more natural, and more comfortable company.
“Dear me, she might have done anything she had liked all these years,” thought Madame Mila; “nobody would have known anything — and nothing would hurt her if it were known, whilst she has all that money.”
For Madame Mila herself, perched on one of the very topmost rungs of the ladder of the world’s greatness, and able therefore to take a bird’s-eye view therefrom of everything, was very shrewd in her way, and knew that society never was known yet to quarrel with the owner of fifty thousand a-year.
So she carried her airy little person, laden this night with gold embroideries on dull Venetian red, until she looked like a little figure made in Lac, over to the écarté table when the écarté was finished, and arranged a morning at Palestrina for the day after to-morrow. He could only express his happiness and honour, and his regrets that Palestrina was little more than an empty shell for their inspection.
The day after the morrow was clear and cloudless, balmy and delicious; such days as the Floralian climate casts here and there generously amidst the winter cold as a foretaste of its paradise of summer. The snow was on the more distant mountains of course, but only made the landscape more lovely, changing to the softest blush colour and rose under the brightness of the noonday sun. The fields were green with the springing cereals’; the pine-woods were filling with violets; the water-courses were brimming and boisterously joyous.
It was winter still; but the sort of winter that one would expect in Fairyland or in the planet Venus.
Madame Mila, clad in the strictest directoire costume, with a wonderful hat on her head that carried feathers, grasses, oleander flowers, and a bird of Dutch Guiana, and was twisted up on one side in a miraculous manner, descended with her Maurice to the Lady Hilda’s victoria, lent her for the day. To drive into the country at all was an act abominable and appalling to all her ideas.
In Paris, except on race days, she never went further than the lake, and never showed her toilettes in the Assembly at Versailles, because of the endless drive necessary as a means to get there.
In country houses she carefully kept her own room till about five o’clock; and, when forced for her health to go to Vichy or St. Moritz, or any such place, she played cards in the mornings, and when she was obliged to go out, looked at the other invalids’ dresses. Mountains were only unpleasant things to be tunnelled; forests were tolerable, because one could wear such pretty Louis Quinze hunting-habits and the curée by torchlight was nice; the sea again was made endurable by bathing costumes, and it was fun to go and tuck up your things and hunt for prawns or pearls in the rock-pools and shallows — it gave rise to many very pretty situations. But merely to drive into the country! — it was only fit occupation for a maniac. Though she had proposed it herself, the patient Maurice had a very mauvais quart-d’heure as they drove.
