Valentine (13 page)

The marchioness was very lively at dessert. She told stories with the ease and naturalness characteristic of those who have lived much in society, in whom those qualities take the place of wit. Bénédict listened to her in amazement. She spoke a language which he supposed to be entirely unknown in her class and to her sex. She used words which did not offend the ear, she said them in such a simple and unaffected way. She told her stories too with an extraordinary clearness of memory, and displayed admirable presence of mind in sparing
Valentine's ear the obscene passages. At times Bénédict looked up at her in dismay, and the poor child's placid expression showed him so plainly that she had not understood, that he wondered if he had heard aright himself, if his imagination had not carried him beyond the real meaning of the words. In fact, he was confounded, bewildered at the combination of such familiarity with the usages of society and such moral demoralization, of such contempt for principle and such respect for social conventions. The society which the marchioness depicted was to him like a dream in which he refused to believe.

They remained a long while in the garden. Then Bénédict, tried the piano and sang. It was quite late when he took his leave, greatly surprised by his intimacy with Valentine, deeply moved, with no idea of the reason, but dwelling ecstatically upon the image of that sweet and lovely girl, whom it was impossible not to love.

A few days later, Madame de Raimbault was invited by the prefect to a brilliant function which was in preparation in the chief town of the department. It was in honor of the presence of Madame la Duchesse de Berri, who was beginning or bringing to a close one of her rollicking expeditions; an amiable and flighty person, who had succeeded in winning many hearts despite the lowering atmosphere, and who long won forgiveness for her extravagant performances by a smile.

Madame de Raimbault was to be one of the small and 7
select party of ladies who were to be presented to the princess and to have seats assigned them at her table. In her view, therefore, it was impossible for her to decline to take that little journey, and she would not have shirked it for anything on earth.

The daughter of a wealthy tradesman, Mademoiselle de Chignon had aspired to grandeur from her childhood. She had chafed indignantly to see her beauty, her queenly charms, her spirit of intrigue and ambition, languish in the bourgeois atmosphere of a vulgar capitalist. After her marriage to General Comte de Raimbault, she plunged with transports of delight into the eddying whirl of the grandeurs of the Empire; she was just the sort of woman fitted to shine there. Vain, narrow-minded, ignorant, but skilful in the art of crawling at the feet of royalty ; beautiful with that cold, imposing beauty for which the costume of the time seemed to be especially chosen ; quick to learn the canons of etiquette, shrewd in conforming to them, fond of dress, luxury, pomp and ceremony, she had never been able to appreciate the pleasures of domestic life; her proud and empty heart had never realized the joys of home. Louise was ten years old, and well developed for her years, when Madame de Raimbault became her step-mother and awoke dismayed to the fact that her husband's daughter would be a formidable rival within five years. So she relegated her with her grandmother to the château of Raimbault, and made up her mind that she would never present her in society. When, on each occasion that she saw her, she noticed the progress of her beauty, her coldness for the child changed to aversion. At last, as soon as she had an opportunity to upbraid her for an error for which her own neglect of Louise offered some excuse, her aversion became implacable hatred, and she turned her out-of-doors
ignominiously. Some people in society declared that they knew the more proximate cause of this animosity. Monsieur de Neuville, the man who seduced Louise and was afterward killed in a duel by the unfortunate creature's father, had been the countess's lover and her step-daughter's at the same time, they said.

With the Empire, Madame de Raimbault's brilliant existence came abruptly to an end. Honors, fêtes, amusements, flattery, display, all disappeared like a dream, and she awoke one morning, deserted and forgotten in legitimist France. Some others in her position were more adroit, and, having lost no time in saluting the new powers, speedily reascended to the summit of grandeur ; but the countess, who had never had any presence of mind, and in whom first impulses were always exceedingly violent, absolutely lost her head. She allowed those who were her friends and companions to see all the bitterness of her regrets, all her contempt for the
powdered heads,
all her lack of reverence for the rehabilitated fashion of piety. Her friends greeted her blasphemies with horrified cries ; they turned their backs on her as a heretic, and aired their indignation in the dressing-rooms and secret apartments of the royal family, to which they had access, and where their votes disposed of offices and fortunes.

In the allotment of rewards by the crown, the Comtesse de Raimbault was forgotten ; there was not even a
dame d'atours'
berth for her. Compelled to abandon the menial service so dear to the courtier, she retired to her estates in the country, and became a declared Bonapartist. The Faubourg Saint-Germain, with which she had been on friendly terms hitherto, broke with her as being a person with evil opinions. Her equals, the
parvenus,
remained, and she accepted them for lack of anything
better; but she had looked down upon them so in her prosperity, that she could form no substantial attachments among them to console her for what she had lost.

At thirty-five she had been forced to open her eyes to the nothingness of human affairs, and that was a little late for a woman who had wasted her youth, unconscious of its passing, in the intoxication of trivial pleasures. She grew old of a sudden. Not having been cured of her illusions one by one by experience, as is ordinarily the case, she knew nothing of the decline of life save regret and ill humor.

From that time her life was a never-ceasing torment; everything became a subject of envy and irritation to her. To no purpose did she seek to avenge herself by sneers at the absurdities of the Restoration ; in vain did she recall a thousand brilliant memories of the past, in order to disparage by the contrast that new simulacrum of royalty ; ennui was devouring that woman whose life had been a constant holiday, and who was now compelled to vegetate in the obscurity of private life.

The household duties which had always been unfamiliar to her became hateful; her daughter, whom she hardly knew, poured little balm on her wounds. It was necessary to train the child for the future, and Madame de Raimbault could live only in the past. Parisian society, in which such an extraordinary change in manners and morals took place all of a sudden, spoke a new language which she did not understand. Its diversions bored or disgusted her; its solitude filled her with feverish unrest and dismay. Ill with wrath and chagrin, she languished on her couch, no longer surrounded by a fawning secondary court, a miniature of the great court of the sovereign. Her companions in disgrace came to her to groan over their own grievances, and to insult hers by
belittling them. Each one of them claimed a monopoly of the disgrace of the age and the ingratitude of France. They formed a little coterie of outraged victims who fed upon one another.

These selfish recriminations augmented Madame de Raimbault's feverish bitterness.

If, by chance, some more fortunate mortals offered her a friendly hand, and told her that the favors of Louis the Eighteenth had effaced from their minds the memories of the court of Napoleon, she revenged herself for their prosperity by overwhelming them with reproaches, accusing them of treachery to the great man—she, who had not betrayed him in the same way only because she had not had an opportunity! At last, to put the finishing touch to her distress and consternation, the Comtesse de Raimbault discovered, by dint of looking at herself by daylight in her cold, rigid mirrors, sullen and withered, without fine clothes, without rouge and without jewels, that her youth and beauty had come to an end with the Empire.

Now she was fifty years of age, and although her past beauty was no longer written on her features except in hieroglyphics, vanity, which never dies in some women's hearts, caused her more intense suffering than at any time in her life. Her daughter, whom she loved with the instinctive affection which necessity imposes even on the most perverse natures, was to her a constant source of longing for the past and hatred of the present. She introduced her in society with the utmost repugnance, and, when she saw that she was admired, her first feeling was maternal pride, her second, despair.

“Her life as a woman is beginning,” she said to herself; “it is all over with mine!”

So it was that when she found an opportunity to
appear without Valentine, she felt less unhappy. She no longer noticed the awkwardly complimentary glances which seemed to say:

“That is the way you used to look long ago. I can remember you when you Were beautiful.”

She did not carry her coquetry to the point of shutting her daughter up when she went into society; but the moment that Valentine manifested the slightest inclination to stay at home, the countess, perhaps unconsciously, would accept her excuses, start off alone with a lighter heart, and breathe more at her ease in the agitated atmosphere of fashionable salons.

Bound fast to that forgetful and pitiless society which had naught in store for her now but disappointment and mortification, she still allowed herself to be dragged about like a dead body at its chariot wheel. Where was she to live ? How could she kill time during those endless days which were turning her hair gray, and which she regretted as soon as they had passed ? The slaves of fashion, when they are deprived of the enjoyment of self-esteem, when every incentive to passion is taken away, can still take pleasure in the glare of candles and the bustle and buzzing of the crowd. After all the dreams of love and ambition have vanished, there still remains the longing to stir about and make a noise, to keep watch and say: “ I was there yesterday, I shall be there again to-morrow.”—It is a sad spectacle to see those blighted women concealing their wrinkles with flowers and crowning their haggard brows with diamonds and feathers. Everything about them is false: figure, complexion, hair, smile; everything is depressing: costume, paint, merriment. Like spectres from the saturnalia of another age, they seat themselves at the banquets of today as if to give the young a sad lesson in philosophy,
as if to say to them: “The same fate awaits you.” They seem to cling to life as it turns its back on them, and to repel the insults of decrepitude while displaying it in its nakedness to insulting glances. Women deserving of pity, almost all without families or without hearts, whom we see on all festive occasions intoxicating themselves with smoke and memories and noise !

The countess, despite the tedium of that empty, profitless life, could not cut loose from it. Although she said that she had abandoned it forever, she never lost an opportunity to plunge into it anew. When she was invited to that provincial function over which the princess was to preside, she was overjoyed ; but she concealed her joy beneath an air of disdainful condescension. She even flattered herself secretly that she might be taken into favor again, if she could attract the princess's attention and show her how superior she was, both in tone and in familiarity with the ways of good society, to her whole
entourage.
Moreover, her daughter was to marry Monsieur de Lansac, one of the pillars of the legitimate cause. It was high time to take a step toward that aristocracy of name to which her aristocracy of wealth was about to impart new lustre. Madame de Raimbault had hated the nobility only since the nobility had spurned her. Perhaps the time had come when she was to see all those vain creatures become more affable to her at a sign from
Madame.

So she exhumed from the depths of her wardrobe her richest dresses, meditating awhile what she would put upon Valentine to make her seem less tall and well formed than she really was. But during her scrutiny it happened that Valentine, desirous to take advantage of that week of freedom, became more ingenious and keen-witted than she had been as yet. She began to
comprehend that her mother raised those momentous questions of dress, and created those insoluble difficulties, in order to induce her to remain at the château. A few stinging words from the old marchioness on the inconvenience of having a daughter of nineteen to bring out, completed Valentine's enlightenment. She hastened to condemn fashions, festivities, journeys and prefects. Her mother, amazed beyond measure, agreed with her most heartily, and proposed that they should both abandon the journey. The decision was soon made ; but, an hour later, when Valentine had ceased her preparations and was unpacking her boxes, Madame de Raimbault renewed her preparations, saying that she had reflected ; that it would be a breach of propriety and perhaps dangerous for her not to go and pay her respects to the princess ; that she would sacrifice herself to the necessity of taking that step from pure policy, but that she would excuse Valentine.

Valentine, who had become extraordinarily crafty within a week, dissembled her joy.

The next day, as soon as the wheels of the countess's calèche had left their tracks on the gravel of the avenue, Valentine ran and asked her grandmother's permission to pass the day with Athénaïs at the farm. She pretended to have been invited by her young friend to partake of cakes on the greensward. She had no sooner mentioned the subject of cakes than she shuddered with fright, for the old marchioness was at once sorely tempted to join her ; but the distance and the heat led her to abandon the idea.

Valentine rode to within a short distance of the farm, where she dismounted, sent away her groom and her horse, and flew like a turtle-dove along the flowering hedges which lined the road to Grangeneuve.