Mademoiselle de Maupin

V

“I was wrong. My wicked heart, being incapable of love, had given itself this reason that it might deliver itself from a weight of gratitude which it could not support. I had joyfully seized this idea in order to excuse myself in my own eyes. I had clung to it, but nothing in the world could have been more untrue. Rosette was not playing a part, and if ever a woman was true, it is she. Well! I almost bear her ill-will for the sincerity of her passion, which is one tie the more, and makes a rupture more difficult or less excusable; I would rather have her false and fickle. What a singular position is this! You wish to go away and you remain; you wish to say, 'I hate you,' and you say, 'I love you;' your past impels you onward and prevents you from returning or stopping. You are faithful, and you regret it. An indefinable kind of shame prevents you from giving yourself up entirely to other acquaintances, and makes you compound with yourself. You give to one all that you can take from the other without sacrificing appearances; times and opportunities for seeing each other, which once presented themselves so naturally, are now to be discovered only with difficulty. You begin to remember that you have business of importance.

“Such a situation full of twitchings is most painful, but it is not so much so as mine. When it is a new friendship that takes you away from the old it is easier to get free. Hope smiles sweetly on you from the threshold of the house that contains your young loves. A fairer and more rosier illusion hovers white-winged over the newly-closed tomb of its sister lately dead; another blossom more mature and more balmy, on which there trembles a heavenly tear, has sprung up suddenly from among the withered flower-cups of the old bouquet; fair azure-tinted vistas open up before you; avenues of yoke-elms, discreet and humid, extend to the horizon; there are gardens with a few pale statues, or some bank supported by an ivy-clad wall, lawns starred with daisies, narrow balconies where leaning on your elbow you gaze at the moon, shadows intersected with furtive glimmerings, drawing-rooms with light subdued by ample curtains; all the obscurity and isolation sought by the love which dares not show itself.

“It is like a new youth that comes to you. You have, besides, change of place, habit, and people; you feel, perhaps, a species of remorse, but the desire that hovers and buzzes about your head like a bee in the springtime prevents you from hearkening to its voice; the void in your heart is filled and your memories fade beneath new impressions. But in this case it is different. I love nobody, and it is only from lassitude and weariness of myself rather than of her that I wish that I could break with Rosette.

“My old notions, which had slumbered for a little while, awake more foolish than ever. I am tormented as before with the desire of having a mistress, and as before, in Rosette's very arms, I doubt whether I have ever had one. I see again the fair lady at her window in her park of the time of Louis XIII., and the huntress on her white horse gallops across the avenue in the forest. My ideal beauty smiles at me from the height of her hammock of clouds, I seem to recognize her voice in the song of the birds, or the murmuring of the foliage; I think that I am being called in all directions, and that the daughters of the air touch my face with the fringe of their invisible scarfs. As in the times of my perturbations, I imagine that if I were to post off on the spot and go somewhere, far away and quickly, I should reach a spot where things that concern me are taking place and where my destinies are being decided.

“I feel that I am being waited for impatiently in some corner of the earth, I know not which. A suffering soul that cannot come to me calls eagerly for me and dreams of me; it is this that causes my disquietude, and renders me incapable of remaining where I am; I am drawn violently out of my element. My nature is not one of those that is the centre of others, one of these fixed stars around which other lights gravitate; I must wander over the plains of the sky like an unruly meteor, until I have met with the planet whose satellite I am to be, the Saturn on whom I am to place my ring. Oh! when will this marriage be accomplished? Until then I cannot hope to be in my proper position and at rest, and I shall be like the distracted and vacillating compass-needle when seeking for its pole.

“I have suffered my wings to be caught in this treacherous bird-lime, hoping that I should leave only a feather behind, and believing myself able to fly away when I should think fit to do so. Nothing could be more difficult; I find that I am covered with an imperceptible net more difficult to break than that forged by Vulcan, and the texture of the meshes is so fine and close that there is no aperture admitting of escape. The net, moreover, is large, and it is possible to move about inside it with an appearance of freedom; it can scarcely be perceived, save when an attempt is made to break it, but then it resists and becomes as solid as a wall of brass.

“How much time have I lost, O my ideal! without making the slightest effort to realize thee! How have I slothfully abandoned myself to the voluptuousness of a night! and how little do I deserve to find thee!

“Sometimes I think of forming another connection; but I have no one in view. More frequently I propose, if I succeed in breaking these bonds, never to enter into similar ones again; and yet there is nothing to justify such a resolution, for this affair has been apparently a very happy one, and I have not the least complaint to make against Rosette. She has always been good to me; her conduct could not have been better. Her fidelity to me has been exemplary; she has not occasioned the slightest suspicion. The most vigilant and restless jealousy would have found nothing to say against her, and would have been obliged to fall asleep. A man could have been jealous only for things that were past; although it is true that in that case he would have had abundant reason to be so. But jealousy of this description is a nicety which happily is rather rare; the present is quite enough without going back to search beneath the rubbish of old passions for phials of poison and cups of gall.

“What woman could you love if you thought of all this? You know, in a confused way, that a woman has had several lovers before you; but you say to yourself-so full of tortuous turnings and windings is the pride of man! — that you are the first that she has truly loved, and that it was owing to a concurrence of fatal circumstances that she found herself united to people unworthy of her, or perhaps that it was the vague longing of a heart which was seeking for its own satisfaction, and which changed because it had not found.

“Perhaps it is impossible to really love any one but a virgin-a virgin in body and mind-a frail bud which no zephyr has as yet caressed, and the closed bosom of which has received neither raindrop nor pearly dew, a chaste flower which unfolds its white robe for you alone, a fair lily with silver urn wherein no desire has been quenched, and which has been gilded only by your sun, rocked only by your breath, watered only by your hand. The radiance of noon is not worth the divine paleness of dawn, and all the fervor of a soul that has experience and knowledge of life yields to the heavenly ignorance of a young heart that is waking up to love. Ah! what a bitter and shameful thought is it that you are wiping away the kisses of another, that there is not, perhaps, a single spot on this brow, these lips, this throat, these shoulders, on this whole body which is yours now, that has not been reddened and marked by strange lips; that these divine murmurs coming to the assistance of the tongue, whose words have failed, have been heard before; that these senses, which are so greatly moved, have not learned their ecstasy and their delirium from you, and that deep down, far away in the retirement of one of these recesses of the soul that are never visited, there watches an inexorable recollection which compares the pleasures of former times with the pleasures of to-day!

“Although my natural supineness leads me to prefer high roads to unbeaten paths, and a public drinking-fountain to a mountain-spring, I must absolutely try to love some virginal creature as pure as snow, as trembling as the sensitive plant, who can only blush, and cast down her eyes. Perhaps beneath this limpid flood, into which no diver has yet gone down, I may fish up a pearl of the purest water and fit to be the fellow of Cleopatra's; but to do this I should loose the bond that ties me to Rosette, — for it is not probable that I shall realize my wish with her, — and I do not in truth feel the power to do so.

“And then, if I must confess it, I have at bottom a secret and shameful motive which dares not come forth into the light, and which I must nevertheless mention to you, seeing that I have promised to hide nothing from you, and that a confession to be meritorious must be complete-a motive which counts for much amid all this uncertainty. If I break with Rosette, some time must necessarily elapse before she can be replaced, however compliant may be the kind of woman in whom I shall seek for her successor, and with her I have made pleasure a habit which I should find it painful to interrupt. It is of course possible to fall back upon courtesans-I liked them well enough once, and did not spare them on a like emergency-out now they disgust me horribly, and give me nausea. Having tasted of a more refined though still impure passion, such creatures are not again to be thought of. On the other hand, I cannot endure the idea of being one or two months without a woman for my companion. This is egoism, and of a depraved description; but I believe that the most virtuous, if they would be frank, might make somewhat analogous confessions.

“It is in this respect that I am most surely caught, and were it not for this reason, Rosette and I would have quarrelled irreparably long ago. And then in truth it is so mortally wearisome to pay court to a woman that I have no heart for it. To begin again to say all the charming fooleries that I have said so many times already, to re-enact the adorable, to write notes and to reply to them; to escort beauties in the evening two leagues from your own house; to catch cold in your feet and your head before a window while watching for a beloved shadow; to calculate on a sofa how many superposed tissues separate you from your goddess; to carry bouquets and frequent balls only to arrive at my present position-it is well worth the trouble!

“It were as good to remain in one's rut. Why come out of it only to fall again into one precisely similar, after disquieting one's self and doing one's self much harm? If I were in love, matters would take their own course, and all this would seem delightful to me; but I am not, although I have the greatest wish to be so, for after all there is only love in the world; and if pleasure, which is merely its shadow, has such allurements for us, what must the reality be? In what a flood of unspeakable ecstasy, in what lakes of pure delight must those swim whose hearts have been reached by one of its gold-tipped arrows, and who burn with the kindly ardor of a mutual flame!

“By Rosette's side I experienced that dull calm, and that kind of lazy comfort which results from the gratification of the senses, but nothing more; and this is not enough. Often this voluptuous enervation turns to torpor, and this tranquillity to weariness; and I then fall into purposeless absence of mind, and into a kind of dull dreaming which fatigues me and wears me out. It is a condition that I must get out of at all costs.

“Oh! if I could be like certain of my friends who kiss an old glove with intoxication, who are rendered completely happy by a pressure of the hand, who would not exchange a few paltry flowers, half withered by the perspiration of the ball, for a Sultana's jewel-box, who cover with their tears and sew into their shirts, just over their hearts, a note written in wretched style, and stupid enough to have been copied from the 'Complete Letter Writer,' who worship women with big feet, and excuse themselves for doing so on the ground that they have a beautiful soul!

“If I could follow with trembling the last folds of a dress, and wait for the opening of a door that I might see a dear, white apparition pass into a flood of light; if a whispered word made me change color; if I possessed the virtue to forego dining that I might arrive the sooner at a trysting place; if I were capable of stabbing a rival or fighting a duel with a husband; if, by the special favor of heaven, it were given to me to find wit in ugly women, and goodness in those who are both ugly and foolish; if I could make up my mind to dance a minuet and listen to sonatas played by young persons on a harpsichord or harp; if my capacity could reach to the height of understanding ombre and reversis; if, in short, I were a man, and not a poet, I should certainly be much happier than I am; I should be less wearied and less wearisome.

“Only one thing have I ever asked of women-beauty; I am very willing to dispense with wit and soul. For me a woman who is beautiful has always wit; she has the wit to be beautiful, and I know of none that is equal to this. It would take many brilliant phrases and sparkling flashes to make up the worth of the lightning from a beautiful eye. I prefer a pretty mouth to a pretty word, and a well-modelled shoulder to a virtue, even a theological one; I would give fifty souls for a delicate foot, and all our poetry and poets for the hand of Jeanne d'Aragon or the brow of the Virgin of Foligno. I worship beauty of form above all things; beauty is to me visible divinity, palpable happiness, heaven come down upon earth. There are certain undulating outlines, delicate lips, curved eyelids, inclinations of the head, and extended ovals which ravish me beyond all expression, and engage me for whole hours at a time.

“Beauty the only thing that cannot be acquired, inaccessible for ever to those who are without it at first; ephemeral and fragile flower which grows without being sown, pure gift of heaven! O beauty! the most radiant diadem wherewith chance could crown a brow-thou art admirable and precious like all that is beyond the reach of man, like the azure of the firmament, like the gold of the star, like the perfume of the seraphic lily! We may exchange a stool for a throne; we may conquer the world, and many have done so; but who could refrain from kneeling before thee, pure personification of the thought of God?

“I ask for nothing but beauty, it is true; but I must have it so perfect that I shall probably never find it. Here and there I have seen, in a few women, portions that were admirable accompanied by what was commonplace, and I have loved them for the choice parts that they had, without taking the rest into account; it is, however, a rather painful task and sorrowful operation to suppress half of one's mistress in this way, and to mentally amputate whatever is ugly or ordinary in her by confining one's gaze to whatever goodness she may possess. Beauty is harmony, and a person who is equally ugly throughout is often less disagreeable to look at than a woman who is unequally beautiful. No sight gives me so much pain as that of an unfinished masterpiece, or of beauty which is wanting in something; a spot of oil offends less on a coarse drugget than on a rich material.

“Rosette is not bad; she might pass for being beautiful, but she is far from realizing my dream; she is a statue, several portions of which have been finished to a nicety. The rest has not been wrought so clearly out of the block; there are some parts indicated with much delicacy and charm, and others in a more slovenly and negligent fashion. In the eyes of the vulgar the statue appears entirely finished, and its beauty complete; but a more attentive observer discovers many places where the work is not close enough, and outlines which, to attain to the purity that they sought to possess, would need the nail of the workman to pass and re-pass many more times over them; it is for love to polish this marble and complete it, which is as much as to say that it will not be I who will finish it.

“For the rest I do not limit beauty to any particular sinuosity of lines. Mien, gesture, breath, color, tone, perfume, all that life is enters into the composition of my ideal; everything that has fragrance, that sings, or that is radiant belongs to it as a matter of course. I love rich brocades, splendid stuffs with their ample and powerful folds; I love large flowers and scent boxes, the transparency of spring water, the reflecting splendor of fine armor, thoroughbred horses and large white dogs such as we see in the pictures of Paul Veronese. I am a true pagan in this respect, and I in no wise adore gods that are badly made. Although I am not at bottom exactly what is called irreligious, no one is in fact a worse Christian than I.

“I do not understand the mortification of matter which is the essence of Christianity, I think it a sacrilegious act to strike God's handiwork, and I cannot believe that the flesh is bad, since He has Himself formed it with His own fingers and in His own image. I do not approve much of long dark-colored smock-frocks with only a head and two hands emerging from them, and pictures in which everything is drowned in shadow except a radiant countenance. My wish is that the sun should enter everywhere, that there should be as much light and as little shadow as possible, that there should be sparkling color and curving lines, that nudity should be displayed proudly, and that matter should be concealed from none, seeing that, equally with mind, it is an everlasting hymn to the praise of God.

“I can perfectly understand the mad enthusiasm of the Greeks for beauty; and for my part I see nothing absurd in the law which compelled the judges to hear the pleadings of the lawyers in a dark place, lest their good looks and the gracefulness of their gestures and attitude should prepossess them favorably and incline the scale.

“I would buy nothing of an ugly shop woman; I would be more willing to give to beggars whose rags and leanness were picturesque. There is a little feverish Italian as green as a citron, with large black and white eyes which are half his face-you would think it was an unframed Murillo or Espagnolet exposed for sale by a second-hand dealer on the pavement; he always has a penny more than the others. I would never beat a handsome horse or dog, and I should not like to have a friend or a servant who had not an agreeable exterior.

“It is real torture to me to see ugly things or ugly persons. Architecture in bad taste, a piece of furniture of bad shape, prevent me from taking pleasure in a house, however comfortable and attractive it may otherwise be. The best wine seems almost sour to me in an ill-turned glass, and I confess that I would rather have the most Lacedaemonian broth on an enamel by Bernard de Palissy than the most delicate game in an earthenware plate. Externals have always taken a violent hold on me, and that is-the reason why I avoid the company of old people; it grieves me, and affects me disagreeably, because they are wrinkled and deformed, though some indeed have a beauty of their own; and a good deal of disgust is mingled with the pity that I feel for them. Of all the ruins in the world the ruin of a man is assuredly the saddest to contemplate.

“If I were a painter (and I have always regretted that I am not), I would people my canvases only with goddesses, nymphs, madonnas, cherubs, and cupids. To devote one's brush to the making of portraits, unless they be those of beautiful persons, appears to me high treason against the art; and, far from wishing to double ugly or ignoble faces, and insignificant and vulgar heads, I should be more inclined to have them cut off the originals. Caligula's ferocity turned in this direction would seem to me almost laudable.

“The only thing in the world that I have ever wished for with any consistency is to be handsome. By handsome, I mean as handsome as Paris or Apollo. To be free from deformity, and to have tolerably regular features, i.e. to have one's nose in the middle of one's face, and neither snub nor hooked, eyes neither red nor blood-shot, and a mouth becomingly cut, is not to be handsome. At this rate I should be so, and I am as remote from the idea that I have formed of manly beauty as if I were one of the dock-jacks that strike the hour on the bells; I might have a mountain on each shoulder, legs as crooked as those of a turnspit, and the nose and muzzle of an ape, and yet have as close a resemblance to it.

“I often look at myself in the glass for whole hours, with unimaginable fixity and attention to see whether some improvement has not taken place in my face; I wait for the lines to make a movement and become straighter or round-er with more delicacy and purity, for my eye to light up and swim in a more vivacious fluid, for the sinuosity that separates my forehead from my nose to be filled up, and for my profile thus to assume the stillness and simplicity of the Greek profile, and I am always very much surprised that this does not happen. I am always hoping that some spring or other I shall lay aside the form that I have, as a serpent sheds his old skin.

“To think that I lack so little to be handsome, and that I shall never be so! What! half a line, a hundredth or a thousandth part of a line more or less in one place or another, a little less flesh on this bone, a little more on that-a painter or a statuary would have settled the affair in half an hour. What mattered it to the atoms composing me to crystallize in such or such a way? How did it concern this outline to come out here and to go in there, and where was the necessity that I should be as I am and not different? In truth if I had Chance by the throat I think I should strangle it. Because it has pleased a wretched particle of I know not what to fall I know not where, and to coagulate foolishly into the clumsy countenance that I display, I am to be unhappy forever! Is it not the most foolish and miserable thing in the world? How is it that my soul, with her eager longing for it, cannot let the poor carrion that she keeps upright fall prostrate, and go and animate one of those statues whose exquisite beauty saddens and ravishes her?

“There are two or three persons whom I would assassinate with delight, being careful, however, not to bruise or spoil them, if I were in possession of the word that would effect the transmigration of souls from one body to the other. It has always seemed to me that to do what I wish (and what that is I do not know), I had need of very great and perfect beauty, and I imagine to myself that, if I had it, my life, which is so fettered and tormented, would have been left in peace.

“We see so many beautiful faces in pictures! — why is none of them mine? — so many charming heads hidden beneath the dust and smoke of time in the depths of the old galleries! Would it not be better if they left their frames and came and expanded on my shoulders? Would Raphael's reputation suffer very much if one of the angels that he makes to fly in swarms in the ultramarine of his canvases were to give up his mask to me for thirty years? So many of the most beautiful parts of his frescoes have peeled off and fallen away from old age! No one would heed it. What are these silent beauties, upon which common men bestow scarce a heedless glance, doing around these walls? and why has God or chance not wit enough to do what a man has accomplished with a few hairs fitted on a stick as a handle, and a few pastes of different colors tempered on aboard?

“My first sensation before one of these marvelous heads, whose painted gaze seems to pass through you and extend to the infinite, is a shock, and a feeling of admiration which is not devoid of terror. My eyes grow moist, my heart beats; then, when I become a little more accustomed to it, and have penetrated further into the secret of its beauty, I make a tacit comparison between it and myself; jealousy twists itself at the bottom of my soul in more tangled knots than a viper, and I have all the trouble in the world to refrain from throwing myself upon the canvas and tearing it to pieces.

“To be handsome means to have in one's self so great a charm that every one smiles on you and welcomes you, that before you have spoken everybody is already prepossessed in your favor and disposed to be of your opinion; that you have only to pass through a street or show yourself on a balcony to create friends or mistresses for you in the crowd. To have no need of being amiable in order to be loved, to be exempt from all the expenditure of wit and complaisance to which ugliness compels you, and from the thousand moral qualities which are necessary to make up for the absence of personal beauty;-what a splendid and magnificent gift!

“And if one could unite supreme beauty with supreme strength, and have the muscles of Hercules beneath the skin of Antinous, what more could he wish for? I am sure that with these two things and the soul that I have, I should in less than three years be emperor of the world! Another thing that I have desired almost as much as beauty and strength is the gift of transporting myself with the swiftness of thought from one place to another. With the beauty of an angel, the strength of a tiger and the wings of an eagle, I might begin to find that the world is not so badly organized as I at first believed. A beautiful mask to allure and fascinate its prey, wings to swoop down upon it and carry it off, and claws to rend it;-so long as I have not these I shall be unhappy.

“All the passions and tastes that I have had have been merely these three longings disguised. I like weapons, horses and women: weapons to take the place of the sinews that I lacked; horses to serve me instead of wings; women that I might at least possess in somebody the beauty that was wanting in myself. I sought in preference the most ingeniously murderous weapons, and those which inflicted incurable wounds. I never had an opportunity of making use of a kris or yataghan: nevertheless I like to have them about me; I draw them from the sheath with a feeling of unspeakable security and strength, I fence with them at random with great energy, and if I chance to see the reflection of my face in the glass, I am astonished at its ferocious expression.

“As to horses, I so override them that they must die or tell the reason why. If I had not given up riding Ferragus he would have been dead long ago, and that would have been a pity, for he is a good animal. What Arab horse could have legs so ready and so slender as my desire? In women I have sought nothing but the exterior, and, as those that I have seen up to the present are far from answering to the idea that I have formed of beauty, I have fallen back on pictures and statues;-a resource which is after all pitiful enough when one has senses so inflamed as mine. However, there is something grand and beautiful in loving a statue, in that the love is perfectly disinterested, that you have not to dread the satiety or disgust of victory, and that you cannot reasonably hope for a second wonder similar to the story of Pygmalion. The impossible has always pleased me.

“Is it not singular that I who am still in the fairest months of adolescence, and who, so far from abusing everything, have not even made use of the simplest things, have become surfeited to such a degree that I am no longer tickled by what is whimsical or difficult? That satiety follows pleasure is a natural law and easy to be understood. That a man who has eaten largely of every dish at a banquet should be no longer hungry, and should seek to rouse his sluggish palate with the thousand arrows of spices or irritant wines may be most readily explained; but that a man who has just sat down to table and has scarcely tasted the first viands should be seized with such superb disgust, be unable to touch without vomiting, any dishes but those possessing extreme relish and care only for high-flavored meats, cheeses marbled with blue, truffles and wines with a taste of flint, is a phenomenon which can only result from a peculiar organization; it is as though an infant six months old were to find its nurse's milk insipid and refuse to suck anything but brandy.

“I am as weary as if I had gone through all the prodigalities of Sardanapalus, and yet my life has been, in appearance, tranquil and chaste. It is a mistake to think that possession is the only road which leads to satiety. It can also be reached by desire, and abstinence is more wearing than excess. Desire such as mine fatigues differently from possession. Its glance traverses and penetrates the object which it fain would have, and which is radiant above it, more quickly and deeply than if it touched it. What more can it be taught by use? What experience can be equal to such constant and impassioned contemplation?

“I have passed through so many things, though I have made the circuit of very few, that only the steepest heights any longer tempt me. I am attacked by the malady which seizes nations and powerful men in their old age-the impossible. All that I can do has not the least attraction for ma Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, great Romans of the Empire, O you who have been so misunderstood, and are pursued by the baying of the rhetor's pack, I suffer from your disease and I pity you with all the pity that remains to me! I too would build a bridge across the sea and pave the waves; I have dreamed of burning towns to illuminate my festivals; I have wished to be a woman that I might become acquainted with fresh voluptuousness.

“Thy gilded house, O Nero! is but a miry stable beside the palace that I have raised; my wardrobe is better equipped than thine, Heliogabalus, and of very different splendor. My circuses are more roaring and more bloody than yours, my perfumes more keen and penetrating, my slaves more numerous and better made; I, too, have yoked naked courtesans to my chariot, and I have trodden upon men with a heel as disdainful as yours. Colossuses of the ancient world, there beats beneath my feeble sides a heart as great as yours, and in your place I would have done what you did and perhaps more. How many Babels have I piled up one upon another to reach the sky, slap the stars and spit thence upon creation! Why am I not God, since I cannot be man?

“Oh! I think that a hundred thousand centuries of nothingness will be needed to rest me after these twenty years of life. God of Heaven, what stone will you roll upon me? into what shadow will you plunge me? of what Lethe will you cause me to drink? beneath what mountain will you bury the Titan? Am I destined to breathe a volcano from my mouth and make earthquakes when turning over?

“When I think that I was born of a mother so sweet and so resigned, whose tastes and habits were so simple, I am quite surprised that I did not burst through her womb when she was carrying me. How is it that none of her calm, pure thoughts passed into my body with the blood that she transmitted to me? and why must I be the son of her flesh only and not of her spirit? The dove has produced a tiger which would fain have all creation a prey to his claws.

“I lived amid the calmest and chastest surroundings. It is difficult to dream of an existence so purely enshrined as mine. My years glided away beneath the shadows of my mother's arm-chair, and my little sisters and the housedog. Around me I saw only the worthy, gentle, tranquil heads of old servants who had grown grey in our service and were in a fashion hereditary, and of grave and sententious relatives or friends, clad in black, who would place their gloves the one after the other on the brim of their hats; some aunts of a certain age, plump, tidy, discreet, with dazzling linen, grey skirts, thread mittens, and their hands on their girdles like religious persons; furniture severe even to sadness, bare oak wainscoting, leather hangings, the whole forming an interior of sober and subdued color, such as is represented by certain Flemish masters.

“The garden was damp and dark; the box which marked out the bids, the ivy which covered the walls and a few fir-trees with peeled arms were charged with the representation of verdure and succeeded rather badly in their task; the brick house, with a very lofty roof, though roomy and in good condition, had something gloomy and drowsy about it. Surely nothing could have been more adapted for a separate, austere, and melancholy life than such an abode. It seemed impossible that children brought up in such a house should not end by becoming priests or nuns. Well in this atmosphere of purity and repose, in this shadow and contemplation, I became rotten by degrees, and, without showing any signs of it, like a medlar upon straw. In the bosom of this worthy, pious, holy family I arrived at a horrible degree of depravity. It was not contact with the world, for I had not seen it; nor the fire of passions, for I was chilled by the icy sweat that oozed from those excellent walls. The worm had not crawled from the heart of another fruit into mine. It had been hatched of itself entirely within my own pulp which it had preyed upon and furrowed in every direction: without, there was no appearance and warning that I was spoiled. I had neither spot nor wormhole; but I was completely hollow within, and there was left to me only a slight, brilliantly-colored pellicle which would have been burst by the slightest shock.

“Is it not an inexplicable thing that a child, born of virtuous parents, brought up with care and discretion, and kept away from everything bad, should be perverted of himself to such a degree, and come to be what I am now? I am sure that if you went back as far as the sixth generation you would not find a single atom among my ancestors similar to those of which I am formed. I do not belong to my family; I am not a branch of that noble trunk, but a poisonous toadstool sprung up amid its moss-grown roots some heavy, stormy night; and yet no one has ever had more aspirations and soarings after the beautiful than I, no one has ever tried more stubbornly to spread his wings; but each attempt has made my fall the greater, and I have been lost through what ought to have saved me.

“Solitude is worse for me than society, although I wish for the first more than for the second. Everything that takes me out of myself is wholesome for me; companionship wearies me, but it snatches me away perforce from the vain dreaming, whose spiral I ascend and descend with bended brow and folded arms. Thus, since the tete-a-tete has been broken off, and there have been people here with whom I am obliged to put some constraint upon myself, I have been less liable to give myself up to my gloomy moods, and have been less tormented by the inordinate desires which swoop upon my heart like a cloud of vultures as soon as I am unoccupied for a moment.

“There are some rather pretty women, and one or two young fellows who are amiable enough and very gay; but in all this country swarm I am most charmed by a young cavalier who arrived two or three days ago. He pleased me from the very first, and I took a fancy to him, merely on seeing him dismount from his horse. It would be impossible to be more graceful; he is not very tall, but he is slender and has a good figure; there is something soft and undulating in his walk and gestures which is most agreeable; many women might envy him with his hands and feet. The only fault that he has is that he is too beautiful, and has too delicate features for a man. He is provided with a pair of the finest and darkest eyes in the world, which have an indefinable expression, and whose gaze it is difficult to sustain; but as he is very young and has no appearance of a beard, the softness and perfection of the lower part of his face tempers somewhat the vivacity of his eagle eyes; his brown and lustrous hair flows over his neck in great ringlets, and gives a peculiar character to his head.

“Here, then, is at last one of the types of beauty that I dreamed of realized and walking before me f What pity it is that he is a man, or rather that I am not a woman! This Adonis, who to his beautiful face unites a very lively and far-reaching wit, enjoys the further privilege of being able to utter his jests and pleasantries in silvery and thrilling tones which it is difficult to hear without emotion. He is truly perfect.

“He appears to share my taste for beautiful things, for his clothes are very rich and refined, his horse very frisky and thorough-bred; and, that everything might be complete and harmonious, he had a page fourteen or fifteen years old mounted on a pony behind him, fair, rosy, as pretty as a seraph, half asleep, and so fatigued with his ride, that his master was obliged to lift him off the saddle and carry him in his arms to his room. Rosette received him very kindly, and I think that she intends to make use of him to rouse my jealousy and in this way bring but the little flame that sleeps beneath the ashes of my extinguished passion. Nevertheless, formidable as such a rival may be, I am little disposed to be jealous of him, and I fed so drawn towards him that I would willingly enough abandon my love to have his friendship.”

Mlle. de Maupin and The Pretty Page