Mademoiselle de Maupin

XVI

It was already more than a fortnight since D'Albert had laid his amorous epistle on Theodore's table, and yet there seemed to be no change in the manner of the latter. D'Albert did not know how to account for this silence; one would have imagined that Theodore had had no knowledge of the letter; the rueful D'Albert thought that it had gone astray or been lost; yet this was difficult of explanation, for Theodore had re-entered his room a moment afterwards, and it would have been very extraordinary if he had not perceived a large paper placed quite by itself in the middle of a table so as to attract the notice of the most inattentive.

Or was Theodore perhaps really a man and not a woman at all, as D'Albert had imagined to himself? or, supposing her a woman, had she so decided a feeling of aversion to him, or such a contempt for him that she would not condescend even to take the trouble of giving him a reply? The poor young man who had not, like ourselves, the advantage of searching the portfolio of Graciosa, the confidante of the fair Mademoiselle de Maupin, was not in a position to decide any of these important questions either in the affirmative or in the negative, and he was mournfully wavering in the most wretched irresolution.

One evening he was in his room, his brow pressed with melancholy against the window-pane, and was looking, without seeing them, at the already bare and reddened chestnut trees in the park. The distance was bathed in a thick mist, a grey rather than black night was falling, and cautiously placing its velvety feet on the summits of the trees; a large swan was amorously dipping and redipping its neck and shoulders in the steaming water of the river, and its whiteness made it appear in the shadow like a large star of snow. It was the only living thing to give a little animation to the gloomy landscape.

D'Albert was thinking as sadly as a disappointed man can think at five o'clock on a misty autumn evening with a somewhat sharp north wind for music, and the wigless skeleton of a forest for a prospect.

He thought of throwing himself into the river, but the water seemed very black and cold to him, and the swan's example only half persuaded him; of blowing his brains out, but he had neither pistol nor powder, and he would have been very sorry to have had them; of taking a new mistress, or, sinister resolution, even two! but he knew none who would suit him-even none who would not suit him. In his despair he went so far as to wish to resume his connection with women who were perfectly insupportable to him, and whom he had had horsewhipped out of his house by his footman. He ended by resolving upon something much more frightful, — to write a second letter.

O sextuple booby!

He was at this stage in his meditations, when he felt a hand place itself on his shoulder, like a little dove descending on a palm-tree. The comparison halts somewhat inasmuch as D'Albert's shoulder bore a very slight resemblance to a palm-tree; but all the same, we shall keep it in a spirit of pure Orientalism.

The hand was at the extremity of an arm which corresponded to a shoulder forming part of a body, which was nothing else but Theodore-Rosalind, Mademoiselle d'Aubigny, or Madelaine de Maupin, to call her by her real name.

Who was astonished? Neither I nor yon, for you and I had long been prepared for this visit; but D'Albert who had not been expecting it in the least. He gave a little cry of surprise half-way between oh! and ah! Nevertheless I have the best reasons for believing that it was more like ah! than oh!

It was indeed Rosalind, so beautiful and radiant that she lit up the whole room, with her strings of pearls in her hair, her prismatic dress, her laces, her red-heeled shoes, her handsome fan of peacock's plumes, such, in short, as she had been on the day of the performance. Only, — and this was an important and decisive difference, — she wore neither gorget, nor chemisette, nor ruff, nor anything that effectually hid those two charming unfriendly brothers, who, alas! have only too often a tendency to become reconciled.

A lovely, panting bosom, white, transparent, like an ancient marble, of the purest and most exquisite cut, projected boldly from a very low corsage, and seemed to challenge kisses. It was a most reassuring sight; accordingly D'Albert was very quickly reassured, and he abandoned himself in all confidence to his most disorderly emotions.

“Well! Orlando, do you not recognize your Rosalind?” said the fair one with the most charming smile; “or have you, perhaps, left your love hanging with your sonnets on some bushes in the forest of Arden? Are you really cured of the sickness for which you requested a remedy from me with such earnestness? I am very much afraid so.”

“Oh no! Rosalind, I am more sick than ever. I am in extremity; I am dead, or very nearly!”

“You have not a bad appearance for a dead man; many living persons do not look so well.”

“What a week I have spent! You cannot imagine it, Rosalind. I hope that it will be equivalent to a thousand years of purgatory to me in the next world. But if I dare ask you, why did you not reply to me sooner?”

“Why? I scarcely know, unless it be just because I did not. However, if this motive does not appear a valid one to you, here are three others not nearly so good, from which you shall choose: first, because carried away by your passion you forgot to write legibly, and it took me more than a week to make out what your letter was about; next, because my modesty could not reconcile itself in a shorter time to such an absurd idea as to take a dithyrambic poet for a lover; and then because I was not sorry to see whether you would blow your brains out, or poison yourself with opium, or hang yourself with your garter. There!”

“Naughty banterer! I assure you that you have done well to come to-day, for perhaps you would not have found me to-morrow.”

“Really! poor fellow! Do not assume such a doleful air, for I should also be affected, and that would make me more stupid in myself alone than all the animals that were in the ark with the deceased Noah. If once I open the sluice for my sensibility, I warn you that you will be drowned. Just now I gave you three bad reasons, I now offer you three good kisses; will you accept them, on the condition that you forget the reasons for the kisses? I owe you quite as much as that and more.”

As she uttered these words the fair infanta advanced towards the mournful lover, and threw her beautiful bare arms round his neck. D'Albert kissed her effusively on the cheeks and mouth. This last kiss had a longer duration than the others, and might have been counted as four. Rosalind saw that all that she had done until then had been only pure childishness. Her debt discharged, she sat down, still greatly moved, on D'Albert's knees, and, passing her fingers through his hair, she said to him:

“All my cruelties are exhausted, sweet friend; I took the fortnight to satisfy my natural ferocity; I will confess to you that I found it long. Don't become a coxcomb because I am frank, but it is true. I place myself in your hands, revenge yourself for my past harshness. If you were a fool I should not say this, or even anything else to you, for I do not like fools. It would have been very easy for me to make you believe that I was prodigiously shocked by your boldness, and that all your Platonic sighs and your most quintessential nonsense were not sufficient to procure your forgiveness for a thing of which I was very glad; I might, like another, have bargained with you for a long time and retailed to you what I am now granting you freely and at once; but I do not think that this would have increased your love for me by the thickness of a single hair.

“I do not ask of you an oath of. eternal love nor any exaggerated protestation. Love me as much as heaven ordains-I will do as much on my side. I will not call you a traitor or a wretch when you have ceased to love me. You will also have the kindness to spare me the corresponding odious titles, should I happen to leave you. I shall be merely a woman who has ceased to love you, — nothing more. It is not necessary to hate each other all through life because of a night or two passed together. Whatever may happen, and wherever destiny may drive me, I swear to you, and this is a promise that can be kept, that I shall always preserve a charming recollection of you, and, that if I am no longer your mistress, I shall be your friend as I have been your comrade. For you I have laid aside my male attire to-night; I shall resume it to-morrow for all. Think that I am only Rosalind at night, and that throughout the day I am and can be only Theodore de Serannes-

The sentence she was about to utter was stifled by a kiss followed by many others, which were no longer counted and of which we shall not give an exact catalogue, because it would certainly be rather tedious and perhaps very immoral-for some people; as to ourselves, we think nothing more moral and sacred under heaven than the caresses of man and woman, when both are handsome and young.

As D'Albert's importunities became more amorous and eager, Theodore's beautiful face, instead of being smiling and radiant, assumed an expression of proud melancholy which caused her lover some disquiet

“Why, dear sovereign, have you the chaste and serious air of an antique Diana now, when we should rather have the smiling lips of Venus rising from the sea?”

“You see, D'Albert, it is because I am more like the huntress Diana than anything else. When very young I assumed man's attire for reasons which it would be tedious and useless to tell you. You alone have divined my sex, and, if I have made conquests, they have only been over women, — very superfluous conquests, which have embarrassed me more than once. In a word, although it is an incredible and ridiculous thing, I am virgin, — as virgin as the snow on Himalaya, as the Moon before she had affiliated with Endymion, and I am grave as every one is when about to do a thing on which it is impossible to go back. It is a metamorphosis, a transformation that I am about to undergo: to change the name of girl into the name of woman, to no longer have to-morrow what I had yesterday; something that I did not know and that I am going to learn, an important page turned in the book of life. It is for that reason that I look sad, my friend, and not on account of any fault of yours.”

As she said this she parted the young man's long hair with her two beautiful hands, and laid her softly puckered lips upon his pale forehead.

D'Albert, singularly moved by the gentle and solemn tone in which she uttered this long speech, took her hands and kissed the fingers one after another; then very delicately broke the lacing of her dress so that the corsage opened and the two white treasures appeared in all their splendor: upon the bosom which was as sparkling and as clear as silver bloomed the two beautiful roses of paradise. He pressed their vermilion points lightly in his mouth, and thus went over the whole outline. Rosalind submitted with exhaustless complaisance, and tried to return his caresses as exactly as possible.

“You must find me very awkward and cold, my poor D'Albert; but I scarcely know how to set about it. You will have a great deal to do to teach me, and really I am imposing a very, laborious task upon you.

D'Albert made the simplest reply, he did not reply at all; and, straining her in his arms with fresh passion, he covered her bare shoulders and breast with kisses. The hair of the half-swooning infanta became loosened, and her dress fell to her feet as though by enchantment. She remained quite upright like a white apparition in a simple chemise of the most transparent linen. The blissful lover knelt down, and had soon thrown the two pretty little red-heeled shoes into an opposite corner of the apartment; the stockings with embroidered clocks followed close after them.

The chemise, gifted with a happy spirit of imitation, did not remain long behind the dress; it first slipped from the shoulders without there being any thought of checking it; then, taking advantage of a moment when the arms were perpendicular, it very cleverly came off them and rolled as far as the hips whose undulating outline partially checked it. Rosalind then perceived the perfidiousness of her last garment, and raised her knee a little to prevent it from falling altogether. In this pose she was exactly like those marble statues of goddesses whose intelligent drapery, sorry to cover up so many charms, envelops them with regret, and by a happy piece of treachery stops just below the part that it is intended to conceal. But, as the chemise was not of marble and its folds did not support it, it continued its triumphant descent, sank down altogether upon the dress, and lay round about its mistress's feet like a large white greyhound.

There was certainly a very simple means of preventing all this disorder, namely, to check the fugitive with the hand: this idea, natural as it was, did not occur to our modest heroine.

She remained, then, without any covering, her fallen garments forming a sort of pedestal for her, in all the diaphanous splendor of her beautiful nakedness, beneath the soft light of an alabaster lamp which D'Albert had lighted.

D'Albert, who was dazzled, gazed upon her with rapture.

“I am cold,” she said, crossing her hands upon her shoulders.

“Oh! pray! one minute more!”

Rosalind uncrossed her hands, leant the tip of her finger upon the back of an easy-chair and stood motionless; she gave a slight movement to her hips in such a way as to bring out all the richness of the waving line; she did not appear at all embarrassed, and the imperceptible rose of her cheeks was not a shade deeper: only the somewhat quickened beating of her heart caused the outline of her left breast to tremble.

The young enthusiast for beauty could not sufficiently feast his eyes on such a spectacle; we must say, to Rosalind's boundless praise, that this time the reality was beyond his dream, and that he did not experience the slightest deception.

Everything was united in the beautiful form standing before him-delicacy and strength, grace and color, the lines of a Greek statue of the best period and the tone of a Titian. There he saw, palpable and crystallized, the cloudy chimera that he had so often vainly sought to stay in its flight; he was not obliged, in the manner he used to complain of to his friend Silvio, to limit his gaze to a certain fairly well-formed part and not stray beyond it, on pain of seeing something frightful, and his amorous eye passed down from the head to the feet and ascended again from the feet to the head, and was ever sweetly soothed by a correct and harmonious form.

The limbs were proudly and superbly turned, the knees were admirably pure, the ankles elegant and slender, the arms and shoulders of the most magnificent character, the skin as lustrous as an agate, the bosom enough to make gods come down from heaven to kiss it; a torrent of beautiful brown hair slightly crisped, such as we see on the heads by the old masters, fell in little waves along an ivory back whose whiteness it brought out in wonderful relief.

The painter satisfied, the lover resumed the ascendancy; for, whatever love a man may have for art, there are things that he cannot long be satisfied with looking at.

He took up the fair one in his arms and bore her to the couch.

Our fair reader would possibly pout at her lover if we revealed to her the sum total of the lessons imparted by D'Albert's love, assisted by Rosalind's curiosity. Let her recall the best occupied and most charming of her nights, the night which would be remembered a hundred thousand days, did not death come before; let her lay her book aside and compute on the tips of her pretty white fingers how many times she was loved by him who loved her most, and thus fill up the void left by us in this glorious history.

Rosalind was prodigiously apt, and made enormous progress in that single night. The ingenuousness of body which was astonished at everything, and the rakishness of mind which was astonished at nothing, formed the most piquant and adorable contrast. D'Albert was ravished, distracted, transported, and would have wished the night to last forty-eight hours, like that in which Hercules was conceived. However, towards morning, in spite of a multitude of kisses, caresses, and the most amorous endearments in the world, well adapted to keep one awake, he finally found himself obliged to take some little repose. A soft and voluptuous sleep touched his eyes with the tip of its wing, his head drooped, and he slumbered between the breasts of his beautiful mistress. The latter contemplated him for some time with an air of melancholy and profound thought; then, as the dawn shot its whitish rays through the curtains, she gently raised him, laid him beside her, stood up, and passed lightly over his body.

She went to her clothes and dressed again in haste, then returned to the bed, leaned over D'Albert who was still asleep, and kissed both his eyes on their long and silky lashes. This done, she withdrew backwards, still looking at him.

Instead of returning to her own room she entered Rosette's. What she there said and did I have never been able to ascertain, although I have made the most conscientious researches. Neither in Graciosa's papers, nor in those belonging to D'Albert and Silvio, have I found anything having relation to this visit. Only, a maid of Rosette's informed me of the following singular circumstance: although her mistress had not slept with her lover that night, the bed was disturbed and tossed and bore the impress of two bodies. Further, she showed me two pearls, exactly similar to those worn in his hair by Theodore when acting the part of Rosalind. She had found them in the bed when making it I leave this remark to the reader's sagacity, and give him liberty to draw thence any inferences that he likes; for myself, I have made a thousand conjectures about it, each more unreasonable than the rest, and so absurd that I really dare not write them even in the most virtuously periphrastic style.

It was quite noon when Theodore left Rosette's room. He did not appear at dinner or supper. D'Albert and Rosette did not seem at all surprised at this. He went to bed very early, and the following morning, as soon as it was light, without giving notice to any one, he saddled his page's horse and his own, and left the mansion, telling a footman that they were not to wait dinner for him, and that he might perhaps not return for a few days.

D'Albert and Rosette were extremely astonished, and did not know how to account for this strange disappearance, especially D'Albert, who decidedly thought that his behavior on the first night had entitled him to a second. Towards the end of the week, the unhappy, disappointed lover received from Theodore a letter, which we shall transcribe. I am afraid that it will satisfy neither my male nor my female readers; but the letter was in truth none other than that which follows, and this glorious romance will have no other conclusion.