Chapter III (1)
If Kerfontaine had been to Horatia a kind of fairy castle, the Faubourg St. Germain resembled a land half savage, half enchanted, something between the domains of Haroun al Raschid and the country round the Niger, a place full of the oddest customs, and demanding considerable intrepidity in the explorer. The tribal gathering on New Year’s Day had been alarming, but its members were kinder to her than she had expected. Afterwards, her chief impressions were: of faded dowagers, condescending or cold; of Madame la Marquise de Beaulieu, a cousin of Armand’s and her destined chaperon, a high blonde of thirty-five or so, coiffée à la Minerve, wearing a sky-blue velvet dress encircled at the knees with a row of pink feathers; of a little creeping old lady, as grey as dust, Mlle Claire de la Roche-Guyon, some remote kinswoman of the Duke’s, who lived in the Hôtel; of men, old or middle-aged, and extremely courtly and gallant; of two or three youths, and a small boy of eleven, Claude-Edmond, the “ill-fated” heir, quiet and extraordinarily self-possessed, who, oddly enough, did not live in the house, but boarded with a tutor near the Lycée Louis-le-Grand—and of a tall, grey-haired priest with a young face, Monsignor Prosper de la Roche-Guyon, a striking figure in his cassock touched with purple, though ecclesiastical garb had been unsafe to wear in the streets since the Days of July. Dominating all was the Duchesse in her chair, crowned with a toupée in lustre like sealskin, in hue like the pelt of a fox, accepting graciously the offerings of her descendants—from one, the latest clock, Queen Blanche in gold reclining on a seat, whereon were marked the hours; from another, such an inkpot as Armand had described, in the form of a crocodile; from an undiscriminating but inspired great-nephew, one of the newest parasols with eye-glasses in the handle. And, though the Dowager scarcely ever went out, she was pleased with this gift; while a highly suitable foot-basket, lined with violet velvet and trimmed with chinchilla, drew from her the snorting exclamation, that the donor evidently regarded her as decrepit. It was a thoroughly matriarchal scene...
Ere a couple of weeks had passed, Horatia had both learnt and done many things. She had had, first of all, her visites de noces to pay; the earliest of these had been to the oldest inhabitants of the Faubourg St. Germain, the aged dowagers who never stirred from their armchairs, but whose word was still a power. To them, as to some elders of a tribe, a bride must always be taken for ten minutes’ inspection; by them were the frankest of opinions expressed on her looks and gait, on eyes and teeth. Three of these ancients, in succession, having pronounced of Madame la Comtesse de la Roche-Guyon that “elle était très bien,” Horatia was thenceforward established upon a proper footing.
She soon learnt, also, how many more visits she would have had to pay but for recent political events. (Those events, too, had disposed of the question of her presentation at Court, which would otherwise have taken precedence of all else.) Half the ladies of the Faubourg—or at least of the ultra section of the Faubourg—had shut up their hôtels, countermanded all their orders at the shops, and reclaiming from their maids, so it was said, their last year’s dresses and hats, had gone to endure the martyrdom of a winter in their châteaux in the country, hoping thereby to ruin an ungrateful and disloyal Paris. Of those remaining Horatia found that she might only know the elect, the ultras, the “Carlistes,” the “Dames de la Résistance,” those who, in the expressive phrase of the day, were “sulking”—those who had not and never would bow the knee to Baal in the person of Louis-Philippe and the Orleanist monarchy. One or two former friends of the Duchesse’s were reported to be among the “Dames de l’Attente,” those who waited to see how the wind blew; they had already been scratched off that lady’s visiting list. And one—O horror!—had gone over to the “Dames du Mouvement,” and had been received in the house of Rimmon at the Palais-Royal (for Louis-Philippe had not yet migrated to the Tuileries). Of all objects in any way connected with her—her old visiting-cards, a forgotten pair of gloves, and what not—there had been, so Armand assured his wife, a solemn auto-da-fé in the Dowager’s bedroom.
But some of the receptions which she was allowed to attend were to Horatia rather trying. Not Semiramis nor Catherine of Russia could have presented a more imposing front, nor have swayed a more despotic sceptre, than Madame la Princesse de Ligniville, with her little red-bordered eyes, her false front of fair hair, her dropsical corpulence, who, seated almost immoveably in her green damask armchair in her famous library of lemon wood, and surrounded by a throng of politicians, received her one evening. Madame de Ligniville could never have had any pretensions to beauty, yet for years she had exercised an absolute dominion. She was very well read, by no means religious, lively and sarcastic, and devoured with a passion for politics. Horatia, as well as being somewhat terrified of the great lady herself, felt lost among these political lights, whose names she did not even know. The lemon-wood library was not a salon—it was a throne-room.
There was, indeed, one salon which surprised Horatia by its unlikeness to the rest, that of the Duchesse de Montboissier. Here seven ladies of varying ages, from eighty to eighteen, sat round a table lit by a hanging lamp and did fancy work while they chattered to their guests—and these were some of the bluest blood in France. The conversation was lively, natural, and totally devoid of any intellectual interest, circling round tales of the day and fashions, and interspersed with scandal. The old Comtesse de Montboissier-Saligny, who presided, contributed indeed anecdotes of a kind highly unsuited to the ears of her youngest granddaughter. Horatia commented on this afterwards to the Marquise de Beaulieu, her companion on this occasion.
“Que voulez-vous?” asked that lady. “It was not the fashion to be prudish at the time of the emigration, and the Comtesse, by all accounts, was by no means averse to the society of the gallant abbés and worldly prelates of the days before ’93. But you must not think, ma chère,” she added, “when you hear these old dames telling racy stories, that their own morals are questionable. The more free their tongues, the more irreproachable, probably, their past conduct. One must have some compensation. Our own respected grandmother, for instance, makes even my hair stand on end sometimes. But I am sure she has always been discretion itself.”
Horatia did not like the Marquise de Beaulieu.
(2)
By the beginning of February, Horatia was beginning to feel much more at home in her new surroundings. She knew what milliners to frequent, and frequented them a good deal; she, whom the question of clothes had always rather bored, and whose well-dressed appearance in the past had been due chiefly to her father’s wish and the excellence of her dressmaker, now spent hours in choosing a hat, days in deciding between the attractions of drap d’Algers and soie de chaméléon, between the becomingness, as colours, of Poland earth, wood violet, lie de vin, and souris. Rightly to accompany the fashionable hats, her hair must be more elaborately dressed than Martha’s fingers could accomplish, so Martha made way in this respect for one Joséphine. Armand had admired her pose, the turn of her hand and wrist one afternoon when he had found her doing embroidery, so she gave herself assiduously to embroidery. All these avocations took up an immense amount of time. Her days seemed very full. She never opened a book, nor missed those once-constant companions; the case of them which she had brought with her was not even unpacked. If she had not Armand always to talk to, she had him to dress for, for the hours she spent before her mirror, the afternoons she fleeted in Herbault’s shop, were far, very far, from being ends in themselves.
Horatia’s was indeed the exaggerated fervour of the convert. She looked back now on that blind and self-complacent person who, in the Rectory garden, only a few months ago, had wondered about her married friends “how can they!” Armand had come, and in a moment of time she had realised “how they could.” Like all converts she had turned against her old life, and found nothing good in it at all. She would gladly have burned that which she once adored. For this glorious thing was love, and in her ignorance she had jeered at it; could a life-long repentance and years vowed to the joys she had once derided ever atone for her neglect? Her books, the tastes that she had shared with her father and Tristram, all these things were hollow and useless, for love had called to her, and she had answered. Henceforward she would go singing through the world with Armand, always with Armand. Together they had found and would keep the divine secret.
Together, at least, they saw Paris. He showed her sometimes the Paris of history in general, sometimes the Paris of his own history. For, wonderful and almost terrible as it was to stand on the site of the guillotine in the great Place, to shudder in the narrow cell of the Conciergerie that had held Marie Antoinette, to walk down the street where Henri IV had met his death, it was even more wonderful to think that for twenty-six years this other self of hers had inhabited the fortunate city—and that she had not known it. So her husband, laughing at her, had to show her the haunts of his boyhood, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he had been an externe, the little private pension in the Rue d’Enfer where he had boarded, even the academy at which he had learnt to fence and to ride. Pursuing her researches into this delightful region of the past, she discovered that Armand had previously had a private tutor, who, in order more easily to lead an unruly pupil in the paths of learning, had invented a method of combining amusement and instruction on their walks abroad. Hence the Champs Elysées were sacred to her because here the youthful Armand, taken to watch other children playing at ball, learnt the laws of gravity, and she could not see the old soldiers stooping at bowls under the trees of the Invalides without remembering that this sight had served to illustrate, to his childish mind, the double law governing the movements of a spherical body propelled along the ground.
When they drove or walked together, passers-by sometimes turned smiling to bestow a glance on so much youth and happiness. Horatia was sure that Armand’s good looks were the magnet; he affirmed that it was hers, or the fact that she was English. This she would deny, asserting that she was now indistinguishable from a Frenchwoman. But one day, in a perfumer’s, before she could even open her mouth, the owner of the shop had pushed forward divers bottles of English manufacture, had offered her “Vindsor soap” and Hunt’s blacking, and had shaken out before her a silk handkerchief with a portrait of O’Connell in the middle of it. Armand, delighted at her confusion, immediately led her to a neighbouring pastry-cook’s, displaying the legend “Here is to be had all sorts of English pastry,” and speaking, by notices in its windows, of such insular delicacies as “hot mutton pies,” “oyster patties,” “Devonshire cider,” and “Whitbread’s entire.” “We are suffering from Anglomania at present,” he explained, “and everything English is deemed ‘romantic,’ so you need not, my angel, pretend to be French.”
The magic word brought to Horatia’s memory a young man whom she had seen a few days ago walking gloomily in the garden of the Luxembourg, a young man evidently aspiring to the aspect of “l’homme fatal,” with open shirt collar, tumbled black hair, wild, melancholy eyes, and smile of conscious bitterness, in whom she recognised a product of the new French Byronism. Although she hoped in time to meet some of the adherents of this school, she was secretly glad that Armand was not of its type.
Thus they visited the Jardin des Plantes and the Boulevards, Notre Dame, the still unfinished Arc de Triomphe, the pictures in the Louvre, and (not altogether willingly on Armand’s part) M. Sommerard’s collection of mediæval antiquities in the Rue Mesnars.
(3)
Horatia was destined also to see Paris under a less smiling aspect.
An air as mild as milk, a sun almost of May, saluted her on the morning of the fourteenth of February, as Armand helped her from the family coach outside St. Germain l’Auxerrois. She was going into that church, of name ominous to Protestant ears, to hear her first Mass, and that a Requiem—the Requiem for the Duc de Berry, murdered in 1820, and father of the little boy whom all good Legitimists now regarded as their King. The occasion was therefore gloomy, but it was also exciting; though Horatia was clad in black she had no grief in her heart for an assassinated prince whom she had never seen, and though during the drive she had composed her features to a decent melancholy, she was secretly attacked by mirth at the overpoweringly funereal aspect of the Duchesse. It was an event when that lady left the Hôtel; and she had left it now swathed in crape, a-dangle with jet chains, and—unprecedented mark of mourning—devoid of her toupée. A large black rosary depended from her wrist. Armand and the Marquis sat opposite. Emmanuel had his usual air of sad patience; he was in fact the only one of the four who looked perfectly appropriate to the occasion (since the Dowager was merely ludicrous), yet Horatia knew that his Royalist sentiments were the least strong of all his family. Armand, his head thrown back against the brown silk lining of the vehicle, directed from time to time a glance at Horatia between his half-closed lids. He looked very well in black. From time to time also the Duchesse speculated on the likelihood of there being a riot; it was true that nothing of the sort had occurred on the 21st of January, the anniversary of the death of Louis XVI, when there had also been a Requiem; moreover the Government was forewarned. However, the fact that the ceremony had been forbidden to take place at St. Roch looked, she said with some unction, suspicious. It was plain that the old lady had no objection to the idea of a tumult, and perhaps even pictured herself as a martyr to the throne and the altar.
There were already two rows of emblazoned carriages on either side the church; a few curious sightseers, the usual beggars. The portals were hung with black. The Duchesse, on Emmanuel’s arm, hobbled towards them; the leather door squeaked, Armand caught it from his brother, and they were inside. The Comte dipped his finger in the holy-water stoup and held it out half-smiling to his wife; finding, however, that she had no idea what he intended her to do, he crossed himself carelessly and preceded her up the aisle. The Swiss (whose semi-martial appearance Horatia supposed to be peculiar to this particular ceremony) having found seats for the Dowager and the Marquis, waved them into two chairs just behind.
The church too was hung with black—Horatia had never imagined an effect so gloomy. It was already nearly full of bowed, sable figures. In the middle of the nave was a great black-draped catafalque surrounded by enormous candles; the Bourbon arms glinted on the top, and at the end hung a large wreath of immortelles.
And the Mass began—but Horatia paid small attention to what, after all, she could not follow. Rather she came increasingly to realise that this was history. The old white-haired priest of whom she could catch glimpses at the altar, had, so they said, taken the last consolations of religion forty years ago to the murdered Queen; now he was praying (so she supposed) for the soul of the murdered Prince, her nephew. “Dona ei requiem,” sang the choir, and it became impossible for her not to fancy that the Duc de Berry’s actual body lay under the pall.
(4)
The Mass was finished, or nearly finished, Horatia conjectured, for people were moving their chairs about, when something was passed from hand to hand along the row in front of her—a paper of some kind. The Duchesse, when it came to her, kissed it; the Marquis Emmanuel glanced at it a moment and then, slightly turning, passed it to his brother behind him. And Horatia, looking at it with her husband (and having imagined it to be some holy relic) saw only a coloured lithograph of a boy about ten years of age, wearing a crown and a royal mantle.
“The Duc de Bordeaux—Henri V,” whispered Armand, and he passed it on. Evidently there were other copies going round the congregation, for a moment or two later Horatia saw a young man in the uniform of the National Guard walk up to the catafalque and affix one to the end, just above the wreath of immortelles. A murmur rippled through the congregation then chairs scraped in all directions, and half a dozen ladies heavily veiled, and one or two men, were out of their places detaching the flowers, which, after kissing, they placed in their bosoms or their paroissiens. More came, till the catafalque was the centre of a crowd, and it took Emmanuel a long time to get the flower for which his grandmother asked him. Progress down the church was equally difficult, and Armand and Horatia became separated from their elders, who were in front. At the door there was difficulty in getting out and a sound of loud voices, and when they did at length emerge it was into the midst of a vociferating and hostile crowd.
“Take tight hold of my arm!” said Armand. “No, it is all right—they will not dare to touch us, the canaille!” And indeed they got through to the coach without much difficulty, except for the press of bodies. Threats were flying about, but nothing else, and Horatia was really more thrilled than frightened. Emmanuel was at the door of the coach, and opened it; Horatia, relinquishing Armand’s arm, put her foot on the step. A man, slipping at that moment round the horses’ heads, shouted something almost in her face; startled, she missed her footing on the high step, slipped and half fell into Emmanuel’s arms, and was by him pushed into the coach, but not before she had a glimpse of Armand, white with fury, striking out at the man’s face. The man went down; she stumbled into the coach, saw the Marquis catch his brother by the arm, and somehow, in the midst of cries, the two men also were in, the door was banged and the coach started.
It had all happened in a moment, and here was Armand, with blazing blue eyes, leaning forward with her hands in his, beseeching her to tell him that she was not hurt, that the scoundrel had not really touched her.
“No, no,” reiterated Horatia. “He did not mean to, I am sure. It was my stupidity... I slipped.”
“Take my vinaigrette, child,” said the Duchesse, fumbling among her blackness and beads.
“My sister was not frightened,” observed the Marquis quietly. It was true; but Armand continued to breathe out slaughter all the way home.
“Well, it is over now,” said the Dowager as they turned into the courtyard, “and you need not work yourself into a fever, mon petit.”
But it was not over, it was only beginning. Late that afternoon came the news that the mob was breaking into St. Germain l’Auxerrois and pillaging it, smashing the glass, the statues, the pictures, the confessionals, all to the accompaniment of parodies of the services, in the vestments of the church. The great iron cross with the three fleurs-de-lis, which surmounted the building, was pulled down by order of the mayor of the district, destroying the organ in its fall, and by night one of the chef d’oeuvres of the Renaissance was merely bare walls and a heap of debris. Thus did the people of Paris testify their objection to the Legitimists.
On the Legitimists fell also the displeasure of the government, who, instead of proceeding against the rioters, arrested a prominent Royalist or two and issued warrants against the Archbishop of Paris (who was in hiding) and the curé of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. The Duchesse, not from nervousness, but rather from the joy of battle, ordered the great gates of the Hôtel de la Roche-Guyon to be closed and barricaded. But the Faubourg was quite quiet, though hundreds were howling outside the minister Dupin’s house in the Rue Coq-Héron. And there were rumours that the mob had publicly given itself rendez-vous for the next day outside the Archbishop’s palace.
On the morrow, therefore, Armand, unmoved by his wife’s entreaties, sallied forth to see what was afoot. He was away about an hour and a half, a time that seemed to Horatia as long as the whole day of the wolf-hunt in Brittany. When, to her inexpressible relief, he returned, he announced that there was not a stone left of the Archevêché, that even the iron railings were gone, all the books and furniture in the river, and that the rioters were threatening Notre-Dame itself.
But it passed, that brief sirocco of popular fury, and Paris was gay again—had in fact been gay all the time, after the manner of Paris (seeing it was carnival-tide), though, or perhaps because, the richest ecclesiastical library in France was voyaging down the Seine, and the maskers on the quays were amusing themselves by trying to fish out the Archbishop’s furniture from the stream.