“I own I am pursued in this retreat by dreadful regret: I have amused myself all through life, but I have never loved.”
“What an incredible secret!” cried the marquise.
“Ah! my dear,” replied the princess, “such secrets we can tell to ourselves, you and I, but nobody in Paris would believe us.”
“And,” said the marquise, “if we were not both over thirty-six years of age, perhaps we would not tell them to each other.”
“Yes; when women are young they have so many stupid conceits,” replied the princess. “We are like those poor young men who play with a toothpick to pretend they have dined.”
“Well, at any rate, here we are!” said Madame d’Espard, with coquettish grace, and a charming gesture of well-informed innocence; “and, it seems to me, sufficiently alive to think of taking our revenge.”
“When you told me, the other day, that Beatrix had gone off with Conti, I thought of it all night long,” said the princess, after a pause. “I suppose there was happiness in sacrificing her position, her future, and renouncing society forever.”
“She was a little fool,” said Madame d’Espard, gravely. “Mademoiselle des Touches was delighted to get rid of Conti. Beatrix never perceived how that surrender, made by a superior woman who never for a moment defended her claims, proved Conti’s nothingness.”
“Then you think she will be unhappy?”
“She is so now,” replied Madame d’Espard. “Why did she leave her husband? What an acknowledgment of weakness!”
“Then you think that Madame de Rochefide was not influenced by the desire to enjoy a true love in peace?” asked the princess.
“No; she was simply imitating Madame de Beausant and Madame de Langeais, who, be it said, between you and me, would have been, in a less vulgar period than ours, the La Villiere, the Diane de Poitiers, the Gabrielle d’Estrees of history.”
“Less the king, my dear. Ah! I wish I could evoke the shades of those women, and ask them – ”
“But,” said the marquise, interrupting the princess, “why ask the dead? We know living women who have been happy. I have talked on this very subject a score of times with Madame de Montcornet since she married that little Emile Blondet, who makes her the happiest woman in the world; not an infidelity, not a thought that turns aside from her; they are as happy as they were the first day. These long attachments, like that of Rastignac and Madame de Nucingen, and your cousin, Madame de Camps, for her Octave, have a secret, and that secret you and I don’t know, my dear. The world has paid us the extreme compliment of thinking we are two rakes worthy of the court of the regent; whereas we are, in truth, as innocent as a couple of school-girls.”
“I should like that sort of innocence,” cried the princess, laughing; “but ours is worse, and it is very humiliating. Well, it is a mortification we offer up in expiation of our fruitless search; yes, my dear, fruitless, for it isn’t probable we shall find in our autumn season the fine flower we missed in the spring and summer.”
“That’s not the question,” resumed the marquise, after a meditative pause. “We are both still beautiful enough to inspire love, but we could never convince any one of our innocence and virtue.”
“If it were a lie, how easy to dress it up with commentaries, and serve it as some delicious fruit to be eagerly swallowed! But how is it possible to get a truth believed? Ah! the greatest of men have been mistaken there!” added the princess, with one of those meaning smiles which the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci alone has rendered.
“Fools love well, sometimes,” returned the marquise.
“But in this case,” said the princess, “fools wouldn’t have enough credulity in their nature.”
“You are right,” said the marquise. “But what we ought to look for is neither a fool nor even a man of talent. To solve our problem we need a man of genius. Genius alone has the faith of childhood, the religion of love, and willingly allows us to band its eyes. Look at Canalis and the Duchesse de Chaulieu! Though we have both encountered men of genius, they were either too far removed from us or too busy, and we too absorbed, too frivolous.”
“Ah! how I wish I might not leave this world without knowing the happiness of true love,” exclaimed the princess.
“It is nothing to inspire it,” said Madame d’Espard; “the thing is to feel it. I see many women who are only the pretext for a passion without being both its cause and its effect.”
“The last love I inspired was a beautiful and sacred thing,” said the princess. “It had a future in it. Chance had brought me, for once in a way, the man of genius who is due to us, and yet so difficult to obtain; there are more pretty women than men of genius. But the devil interfered with the affair.”
“Tell me about it, my dear; this is all news to me.”
“I first noticed this beautiful passion about the middle of the winter of 1829. Every Friday, at the opera, I observed a young man, about thirty years of age, in the orchestra stalls, who evidently came there for me. He was always in the same stall, gazing at me with eyes of fire, but, seemingly, saddened by the distance between us, perhaps by the hopelessness of reaching me.”
“Poor fellow! When a man loves he becomes eminently stupid,” said the marquise.
“Between every act he would slip into the corridor,” continued the princess, smiling at her friend’s epigrammatic remark. “Once or twice, either to see me or to make me see him, he looked through the glass sash of the box exactly opposite to mine. If I received a visit, I was certain to see him in the corridor close to my door, casting a furtive glance upon me. He had apparently learned to know the persons belonging to my circle; and he followed them when he saw them turning in the direction of my box, in order to obtain the benefit of the opening door. I also found my mysterious adorer at the Italian opera-house; there he had a stall directly opposite to my box, where he could gaze at me in naive ecstasy – oh! it was pretty! On leaving either house I always found him planted in the lobby, motionless; he was elbowed and jostled, but he never moved. His eyes grew less brilliant if he saw me on the arm of some favorite. But not a word, not a letter, no demonstration. You must acknowledge that was in good taste. Sometimes, on getting home late at night, I found him sitting upon one of the stone posts of the porte-cochere. This lover of mine had very handsome eyes, a long, thick, fan-shaped beard, with a moustache and side-whiskers; nothing could be seen of his skin but his white cheek-bones, and a noble forehead; it was truly an antique head. The prince, as you know, defended the Tuileries on the riverside, during the July days. He returned to Saint-Cloud that night, when all was lost, and said to me: ‘I came near being killed at four o’clock. I was aimed at by one of the insurgents, when a young man, with a long beard, whom I have often seen at the opera, and who was leading the attack, threw up the man’s gun, and saved me.’ So my adorer was evidently a republican! In 1831, after I came to lodge in this house, I found him, one day, leaning with his back against the wall of it; he seemed pleased with my disasters; possibly he may have thought they drew us nearer together. But after the affair of Saint-Merri I saw him no more; he was killed there. The evening before the funeral of General Lamarque, I had gone out on foot with my son, and my republican accompanied us, sometimes behind, sometimes in front, from the Madeleine to the Passage des Panoramas, where I was going.”
“Is that all?” asked the marquise.
“Yes, all,” replied the princess. “Except that on the morning Saint-Merri was taken, a gamin came here and insisted on seeing me. He gave me a letter, written on common paper, signed by my republican.”
“Show it to me,” said the marquise.
“No, my dear. Love was too great and too sacred in the heart of that man to let me violate its secrets. The letter, short and terrible, still stirs my soul when I think of it. That dead man gives me more emotions than all the living men I ever coquetted with; he constantly recurs to my mind.”
“What was his name?” asked the marquise.
“Oh!