Chapter V (1)
The pillaging of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, the fact that it now bore the legend “Mairie of the Fourth Arrondissement” upon its doors had, of course, no direct effect on Horatia—beyond teaching her of what the Paris mob was capable, and how exiguous were the titles to respect of the Laffitte ministry, already on its deathbed. Her places of worship lay elsewhere—the Embassy chapel in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, or that of the Reverend Lewis Way in the Avenue de Neuilly. For the Hon. and Rev. Stephen Grenville, if he wished to keep his daughter faithful to the Church of her baptism, had done a very shrewd thing when he extracted from her a promise to attend Morning Prayer every Sunday, when possible, and, if not, to read it herself. Horatia kept her promise faithfully. However bright the day, however alluring the prospect of going out with Armand, she resisted the temptation, and set forth, rather scandalised at the crowd of pleasure-seekers in the Tuileries gardens or elsewhere.
On the whole the service was pleasant to her, chiefly because it was a link with all things English, and in particular with her home. However commonplace and familiar “Dearly beloved brethren” might sound in English sunoundings, Horatia found that it had power greatly to stir her heart in a foreign land. It gave her, too, a sort of happy sadness to displace the Evangelical minister by her father, and his chapel (which had been a café) by Compton church.
Armand could not accompany Horatia to church, nor could she go with him—if he ever went there. This separation she had, of course, anticipated from the first, and it did not seem really to be of great importance. It mattered more to her that he did not care so much about the things of the past as she did—a discovery which she was gradually making, and which appeared to her all the more disconcerting because he, by his ancestors, belonged to that past in a way that she never could. But it interested him infinitely less, convinced and even fanatical Legitimist that he was.
She saw the thing clearly at last on the day that he drove her to Versailles in his smart phaeton lined with blue flower-dotted piqué, wherein, however, as a “fashionable” should, he sat upon so high a seat that it was extremely difficult to talk to him. Besides, there was the ridiculous little tiger behind, in his overcoat to the ankles, his gaiters and his shiny hat, who could, Horatia imagined, hear everything that they said. But she enjoyed the drive exceedingly, and looked forward with keen pleasure to seeing the palace. Yet, when they got there, Armand displayed small concern as to which part of the great pile had stood in the days of Louis the Just, and which had been built by the Grand Monarque, or on what balcony the King and Queen had showed themselves to the mob on that wild day in October, 1789. She could not but be disappointed, for she regarded her husband, quite justly, as the scion of a long line of devoted royalists, and she remembered how he had spoken, in England, of the Lilies. To her the deserted palace, abandoned for want of means to keep it up and shortly, it was said, to be converted into a museum, was heart-rending in its associations of fallen glory. And Armand’s ancestors had been among the very people who had moved, gay and gallant, upon its wide terraces; in no point would he have disgraced the cohort himself. But it was evident that the empty basins of the royal fountains, the forlorn bosquets, roused in him no pleasurable melancholy, and that the Allée d’Apollon was merely a place where he could tell her, undisturbed, how charming she looked, and laugh at her sad face. In the end he took her away before she had seen all she desired, lest the drive back should not be accomplished without rain, “and your pretty dress be spoiled.”
(2)
Horatia had reason to remember that day at Versailles, because of what occurred on the following morning.
She was paying her accustomed visit to her grandmother-in-law. The Duchesse was sitting propped up in bed, looking unusually grim, and not by any means beautified by the wrap in which she was enveloped.
“My dear,” said the old lady, after some desultory conversation, “I have something to say to you which you probably will not like. You really must not see so much of Armand.”
“Not... not see so much of Armand!” gasped Horatia, stupefied. “Not see so much of my husband!”
“No,” replied Madame de la Roche-Guyon emphatically, and the flaps on her lace cap waggled. “You are always about with him, and it is not convenable. I hear that you spent the whole day together at Versailles yesterday.”
“But, Madame,” ejaculated Horatia, scarcely believing her ears, “I don’t under——what can you possibly mean? If I cannot spend the day with Armand——”
“Now listen, ma fille,” said the Duchesse, not unkindly. “I do not know how it may be with the bourgeoisie, but in our world it is not the thing for a husband to be always dancing attendance on his wife. A man who does so, after the first few weeks of marriage, is looked on as a nincompoop, or a bore. He is, in fact, despised. And no one wants to receive husband and wife together at their salons; it is gênant, it destroys all wit and freedom of intercourse. Armand will naturally attach himself to some salon, and you must not expect him to accompany you to those which you frequent—nor, above all, to be constantly seen about with you in public places. It is not the part of a galant homme. And you have, for the present, the chaperon we have provided for you, Eulalie de Beaulieu.”
A red spot came into Horatia’s cheek. “But I do not like Madame de Beaulieu. I do not wish to go about with her.”
Even the snort which the Dowager permitted herself did not destroy the air of cold dignity with which she replied. “You seem to forget the class of society into which you have married. It would be unheard of for a bride to be seen about alone. When her husband does not accompany her—and, as I say, the time for that is already long past—she must be under the escort of her mother or her mother-in-law. You have neither. Did my years and health permit I would myself fulfil the duty, but if you do not wish to have my death at your door you will accept the chaperonage of the Marquise de Beaulieu. When you have been married a year—above all when you have had a child—you will be perfectly free to go where you will, to receive whom you will——”
“Even my own husband!” flashed Horatia.
For a second or two the Duchesse seemed staggered by the interruption and its bitterness; then, for she rather liked spirit, a slow smile revealed the absence of her false teeth.
“Let me tell you, my child,” she riposted, “that if you do not take my advice you will end by making Armand ridiculous. Perhaps—having known him only so short a time—you have not yet discovered that there is nothing in the world that he hates so much. I counsel you to remember this.”
The victory—or at all events the last stroke in battle—undoubtedly remained with Madame de la Roche-Guyon.
(3)
“‘The Tenth Muse’?” asked Horatia. “Who is she?”
The opulent but sentimental-looking lady in purple who sat next her in Madame de Chastenay’s drawing-room lifted up her hands. “Is it conceivable that you have never heard of Mademoiselle Delphine Gay?” she exclaimed. “But I forgot that you were English. Mademoiselle Gay is the literary prodigy of our sex; figure to yourself a young girl already celebrated at eighteen for her verse, pensioned by His Majesty, and crowned at twenty-three in the Capitol, by the Academy of the Tiber!”
“And she is going to read us some of her poems now?”
“To recite them. She has a divine voice and manner.”
Horatia looked round the room wherein, on this March evening, were seated many ladies and a few men, awaiting the intellectual treat in the midst of a light reflected with dazzling effect from the chandeliers, lustres and chimney-ornaments of cut steel, with which the apartment had lately been beautified. A little way off Armand was bending over the chair of a lady whom she did not know; he was evidently laughing. More than a week had passed since Horatia’s passage of arms with the Duchesse. For two days she had refused to go and see her, then, through the agency of old Mademoiselle de la Roche-Guyon—a trembling mediator—a truce was patched up between the combatants. But if the affair appeared to have passed from the Dowager’s mind it had not so quitted Horatia’s. She did not say a word about it to Armand. Once or twice she was tempted to think the whole thing nonsense, the creation of a malicious brain, and certainly this evening it tended so to appear to her, for here was her husband with her at this salon, and a literary salon too. It was the first of this class that Horatia had attended, and devoutly did she hope that it might be the entry, at last, into that heaven where Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, and so many constellations swam in glory.
She was recalled from her musings by a stir. Two ladies entered the room—the elder with an indescribable brio. Madame Gay had been a celebrity of the Empire, and kept about her an extraordinary aroma of those great days, a suggestion of staff-officers, mamelukes, the flash of sabres in the sun and the dust cloud over wheeling squadrons, seeming indeed as if she might at any moment break into “Partant pour la Syrie” or some hymn to Glory and Victory. Mademoiselle Delphine gained by the contrast with her parent. Tall, well-built, with a fine head beautifully set on an equally fine neck, clad in a simple white semi-classical dress wearing no ornaments, and with her abundant fair hair hanging in ringlets, she had something of the air of a sibyl. She looked about twenty-five, but was in reality a little older.
Madame Gay settled herself, and the Tenth Muse was led to a chair apart—an honourable chair, whose horse-hair seat was painted with roses and camellias. She composed herself in a suitable attitude, brought her beautiful bare arms to one side, clasped her hands loosely together, and, looking up at the ceiling, began to recite in a grave, deep, almost languorous voice, her poem on the last days of Pompeii, commemorating the fate of Théora the priestess of Apollo, and the young warrior Paulus, and recounting how, two thousand years after,
“On trouva dans l’enceinte où le temple s’élève
Sur l’autel une lyre... et près du seuil un glaive.”
“Is it not touching!” said the purple lady to Horatia. The green plumes in her headdress quivered, and she dabbed her eyes rather ostentatiously. “Ces pauvres gens.... Ah, she is beginning again!”
This time it was a Hymn to Ste Généviève.
“Patronne de France, amour de nos aieux...”
At the conclusion of this poem, amid the hum of applause, Madame Gay was observed to approach her offspring, and to whisper something into her ear. The poetess shook her head; then, seeming to relent, and smiling, she announced
“Le bonheur d’être belle. Dedicated to Madame
Récamier.”
“Quel bonheur d’être belle, alors qu’on est aimée!
Autrefois de mes yeux je n’étais pas charmée;
Je les croyais sans feu, sans douceur, sans regard;
Je me trouvais jolie un moment par hasard.
Maintenant ma beauté me parait admirable.
Je m’aime de lui plaire, et je me crois aimable....
Il le dit si souvent! Je l’aime, et quand je vois
Ses yeux avec plaisir se reposer sur moi,
Au sentiment d’orgueil je ne suis point rebelle,
Je bénis mes parents de m’avoir fait si belle.
Mais... pourquoi dans mon coeur ces subites alarmes?—
Si notre amour tous deux nous trompait sur mes charmes:
Si j’étais laide enfin? Non... il s’y connaît mieux!
D’ailleurs pour m’admirer je ne veux que ses yeux!—
Bientôt il va venir! bientôt il va me voir!
Comme, en me regardant, il sera beau ce soir!
Le voilà! je l’entends, c’est sa voix amoureuse!
Quel bonheur d’être belle! Oh, que je suis heureuse!”
The extraordinary appropriateness of these verses to Horatia’s own attitude of mind during the past months made her forget to join in the applause which followed their recitation. Yes, it had been exactly her own case; she knew it, and Armand knew it too. He would tease her about them going home. She looked round, with a little half-shy smile, for her husband, but he was nowhere to be seen, and she remembered that since Mademoiselle Gay’s entrance she had been too much occupied to notice his whereabouts.
And then came his voice in her ear, sudden and by no means “amoureuse.”
“For God’s sake let us go!”
Horatia turned round, startled. “Certainly, if you wish it,” she responded, and, the recitation having apparently come to an end, she was able to take her leave almost at once. Her first thought had been that Armand was ill.
“You were bored, I am afraid?” she hazarded, as the carriage started.
“Mon Dieu!” answered her husband, throwing himself back in the corner, “could one be otherwise? It was intolerable—to listen to all that stuff about Pompeii and Ste. Généviève. Madame de Chastenay is preposterous with her female phenomena. Don’t ever ask me to go there again!”
And, had it not been Armand who spoke, Horatia would have thought the voice thoroughly bad-tempered.
“But, my dear Armand,” she protested, putting a hand on his arm, “I would willingly have come away sooner if I had known. I thought you were admiring the poetess; she is very pretty—no, she is beautiful.”
“Entendu. It is a woman’s business to be beautiful, but not to declaim wearisome verses. Don’t ask me to go to any more of these functions with you!”
Horatia turned a little pale and drew back. Could it be true after all, that incredible thing which the Duchess had said, that she would make him ridiculous—that he himself thought it, feared it?
Armand could not but perceive her shrink, and the lover conquered the sulky male. He caught her hand.
“My darling, forgive me! I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know that there is no greater pleasure for me than to be with you, but... I was so bored!”
Impossible to resist the half-humorous, half-pleading tone, and the look in his eyes. As the carriage rolled under their own gateway she bent forward and put a light kiss on his temple.
“I forgive you,” she said.
“Mademoiselle Gay did not then give you the canto of her poem on the Magdalene where the devil, to tempt the saint, takes on the form of Joseph of Arimathea?” inquired the Duchesse that evening. “That must, ma foi, be very striking, and I regret that I have never even read it.”