“Charlotte started up from the sofa like a frightened doe, trembling like a leaf, gave me one of those looks in which women forgo all their dignity, all their modesty, their refinement, and even their grace, the sparkling glitter of a hunted viper’s eye when driven into a corner, and said, ‘And I have loved this man! I have struggled! I have – ’ On this last thought, which I leave you to guess, she made the most impressive pause I ever heard. – ‘Good God!’ she cried, ‘how unhappy are we women! we never can be loved. To you there is nothing serious in the purest feelings. But never mind; when you cheat us you still are our dupes!’ – ‘I see that plainly,’ said I, with a stricken air; ‘you have far too much wit in your anger for your heart to suffer from it.‘ – This modest epigram increased her rage; she found some tears of vexation. ‘You disgust me with the world and with life.’ she said; ‘you snatch away all my illusions; you deprave my heart.’
“She said to me all that I had a right to say to her, and with a simple effrontery, an artless audacity, which would certainly have nailed any man but me on the spot. – ‘What is to become of us poor women in a state of society such as Louis XVIII.‘s charter made it?’ – (Imagine how her words had run away with her.) – ‘Yes, indeed, we are born to suffer. In matters of passion we are always superior to you, and you are beneath all loyalty. There is no honesty in your hearts. To you love is a game in which you always cheat.’ – ‘My dear,’ said I, ‘to take anything serious in society nowadays would be like making romantic love to an actress.’ – ‘What a shameless betrayal! It was deliberately planned!’ – ‘No, only a rational issue.’ – ‘Good-bye, Monsieur de Marsay,’ said she; ‘you have deceived me horribly.’ – ‘Surely,’ I replied, taking up a submissive attitude, ‘Madame la Duchesse will not remember Charlotte’s grievances?’ – ‘Certainly,’ she answered bitterly. – ‘Then, in fact, you hate me?’ – She bowed, and I said to myself, ‘There is something still left!’
“The feeling she had when I parted from her allowed her to believe that she still had something to avenge. Well, my friends, I have carefully studied the lives of men who have had great success with women, but I do not believe that the Maréchal de Richelieu, or Lauzun, or Louis de Valois ever effected a more judicious retreat at the first attempt. As to my mind and heart, they were cast in a mould then and there, once for all, and the power of control I thus acquired over the thoughtless impulses which make us commit so many follies gained me the admirable presence of mind you all know.”
“How deeply I pity the second!” exclaimed the Baronne de Nucingen.
A scarcely perceptible smile on de Marsay’s pale lips made Delphine de Nucingen color.
“How we do forget!” said the Baron de Nucingen.
The great banker’s simplicity was so extremely droll, that his wife, who was de Marsay’s “second,” could not help laughing like every one else.
“You are all ready to condemn the woman,” said Lady Dudley. “Well, I quite understand that she did not regard her marriage as an act of inconstancy. Men will never distinguish between constancy and fidelity. – I know the woman whose story Monsieur de Marsay has told us, and she is one of the last of your truly great ladies.”
“Alas! my lady, you are right,” replied de Marsay. “For very nearly fifty years we have been looking on at the progressive ruin of all social distinctions. We ought to have saved our women from this great wreck, but the Civil Code has swept its leveling influence over their heads. However terrible the words, they must be spoken: Duchesses are vanishing, and marquises too! As to the baronesses – I must apologize to Madame de Nucingen, who will become a countess when her husband is made a peer of France – baronesses have never succeeded in getting people to take them seriously.”
“Aristocracy begins with the viscountess,” said Blondet with a smile.
“Countesses will survive,” said de Marsay. “An elegant woman will be more or less of a countess – a countess of the Empire or of yesterday, a countess of the old block, or, as they say in Italy, a countess by courtesy. But as to the great lady, she died out with the dignified splendor of the last century, with powder, patches, high-heeled slippers, and stiff bodices with a delta stomacher of bows. Duchesses in these days can pass through a door without any need to widen it for their hoops. The Empire saw the last of gowns with trains! I am still puzzled to understand how a sovereign who wished to see his drawing-room swept by ducal satin and velvet did not make indestructible laws. Napoleon never guessed the results of the Code he was so proud of. That man, by creating duchesses, founded the race of our ‘ladies’ of to-day – the indirect offspring of his legislation.”
“It was logic, handled as a hammer by boys just out of school and by obscure journalists, which demolished the splendors of the social state,” said the Comte de Vandenesse. “In these days every rogue who can hold his head straight in his collar, cover his manly bosom with half an ell of satin by way of a cuirass, display a brow where apocryphal genius gleams under curling locks, and strut in a pair of patent-leather pumps graced by silk socks which cost six francs, screws his eye-glass into one of his eye-sockets by puckering up his cheek, and whether he be an attorney’s clerk, a contractor’s son, or a banker’s bastard, he stares impertinently at the prettiest duchess, appraises her as she walks downstairs, and says to his friend – dressed by Buisson, as we all are, and mounted in patent-leather like any duke himself – ‘There, my boy, that is a perfect lady.’”
“You have not known how to form a party,” said Lord Dudley; “it will be a long time yet before you have a policy. You talk a great deal in France about organizing labor, and you have not yet organized property. So this is what happens: Any duke – and even in the time of Louis XVIII. and Charles X. there were some left who had two hundred thousand francs a year, a magnificent residence, and a sumptuous train of servants – well, such a duke could live like a great lord. The last of these great gentlemen in France was the Prince de Talleyrand. – This duke leaves four children, two of them girls. Granting that he has great luck in marrying them all well, each of these descendants will have but sixty or eighty thousand francs a year now; each is the father or mother of children, and consequently obliged to live with the strictest economy in a flat on the ground floor or first floor of a large house. Who knows if they may not even be hunting a fortune? Henceforth the eldest son’s wife, a duchess in name only, has no carriage, no people, no opera-box, no time to herself. She has not her own rooms in the family mansion, nor her fortune, nor her pretty toys; she is buried in trade; she buys socks for her dear little children, nurses them herself, and keeps an eye on her girls, whom she no longer sends to school at a convent. Thus your noblest dames have been turned into worthy brood-hens.”
“Alas! it is true,” said Joseph Bridau. “In our day we cannot show those beautiful flowers of womanhood which graced the golden ages of the French Monarchy. The great lady’s fan is broken. A woman has nothing now to blush for; she need not slander or whisper, hide her face or reveal it. A fan is of no use now but for fanning herself. When once a thing is no more than what it is, it is too useful to be a form of luxury.”
“Everything in France has aided and abetted the ‘perfect lady,’” said Daniel d’Arthez. “The aristocracy has acknowledged her by retreating to the recesses of its landed estates, where it has hidden itself to die – emigrating inland before the march of ideas, as of old to foreign lands before that of the masses. The women who could have founded European salons, could have guided opinion and turned it inside out like a glove, could have ruled the world by ruling the men of art or of intellect who ought to have ruled it, have committed the blunder of abandoning their ground; they were ashamed of having to fight against the citizen class drunk with power, and rushing out on to the stage of the world, there to be cut to pieces perhaps by the barbarians who are at its heels. Hence, where the middle class insist on seeing princesses, these are really only ladylike young women. In these days princes can find no great ladies whom they may compromise; they cannot even confer honor on a woman taken up at random. The Duc de Bourbon was the last prince to avail himself of this privilege.”
“And God alone knows how dearly he paid for it,” said Lord Dudley.
“Nowadays princes have lady-like wives, obliged to share their opera-box with other ladies; royal favor could not raise them higher by a hair’s breadth; they glide unremarkable between the waters of the citizen class and those of the nobility – not altogether noble nor altogether bourgeoises,” said the Marquise de Rochegude acridly.
“The press has fallen heir to the Woman,” exclaimed Rastignac. “She no longer has the quality of a spoken feuilleton – delightful calumnies graced by elegant language. We read feuilletons written in a dialect which changes every three years, society papers about as mirthful as an undertaker’s mute, and as light as the lead of their type. French conversation is carried on from one end of the country to the other in a revolutionary jargon, through long columns of type printed in old mansions where a press groans in the place where formerly elegant company used to meet.”
“The knell of the highest society is tolling,” said a Russian Prince. “Do you hear it? And the first stroke is your modern word lady.”
“You are right, Prince,” said de Marsay. “The ‘perfect lady,’ issuing from the ranks of the nobility, or sprouting from the citizen class, and the product of every soil, even of the provinces is the expression of these times, a last remaining embodiment of good taste, grace, wit, and distinction, all combined, but dwarfed. We shall see no more great ladies in France, but there will be ‘ladies’ for a long time, elected by public opinion to form an upper chamber of women, and who will be among the fair sex what a ‘gentleman’ is in England.”
“And that they call progress!” exclaimed Mademoiselle des Touches. “I should like to know where the progress lies?”
“Why, in this,” said Madame de Nucingen. “Formerly a woman might have the voice of a fish-seller, the walk of a grenadier, the face of an impudent courtesan, her hair too high on her forehead, a large foot, a thick hand – she was a great lady in spite of it all; but in these days, even if she were a Montmorency – if a Montmorency would ever be such a creature – she would not be a lady.”
“But what do you mean by a ‘perfect lady’?” asked Count Adam Laginski.
“She is a modern product, a deplorable triumph of the elective system as applied to the fair sex,” said the Minister. “Every revolution has a word of its own which epitomizes and depicts it.”
“You are right,” said the Russian, who had come to make a literary reputation in Paris. “The explanation of certain words added from time to time to your beautiful language would make a magnificent history. Organize, for instance, is the word of the Empire, and sums up Napoleon completely.”
“But all that does not explain what is meant by a lady!” the young Pole exclaimed, with some impatience.
“Well, I will tell you,” said Émile Blondet to Count Adam. “One fine morning you go for a saunter in Paris. It is past two, but five has not yet struck. You see a woman coming towards you; your first glance at her is like the preface to a good book, it leads you to expect a world of elegance and refinement. Like a botanist over hill and dale in his pursuit of plants, among the vulgarities of Paris life you have at last found a rare flower. This woman is attended by two very distinguished-looking men, of whom one, at any rate, wears an order; or else a servant out of livery follows her at a distance of ten yards. She displays no gaudy colors, no open-worked stockings, no over-elaborate waist-buckle, no embroidered frills to her drawers fussing round her ankles. You will see that she is shod with prunella shoes, with sandals crossed over extremely fine cotton stockings, or plain gray silk stockings; or perhaps she wears boots of the most exquisite simplicity. You notice that her gown is made of a neat and inexpensive material, but made in a way that surprises more than one woman of the middle class; it is almost always a long pelisse, with bows to fasten it, and neatly bound with fine cord or an imperceptible braid. The Unknown has a way of her own in wrapping herself in her shawl or mantilla; she knows how to draw it round her from her hips to her neck, outlining a carapace, as it were, which would make an ordinary woman look like a turtle, but which in her sets off the most beautiful forms while concealing them. How does she do it? This secret she keeps, though unguarded by any patent.
“As she walks she gives herself a little concentric and harmonious twist, which makes her supple or dangerous slenderness writhe under the stuff, as a snake does under the green gauze of trembling grass. Is it to an angel or a devil that she owes the graceful undulation which plays under her long black silk cape, stirs its lace frill, sheds an airy balm, and what I should like to call the breeze of a Parisienne? You may recognize over her arms, round her waist, about her throat, a science of drapery recalling the antique Mnemosyne.
“Oh! how thoroughly she understands the cut of her gait – forgive the expression. Study the way she puts her foot forward moulding her skirt with such a decent preciseness that the passer-by is filled with admiration, mingled with desire, but subdued by deep respect. When an Englishwoman attempts this step, she looks like a grenadier marching forward to attack a redoubt. The women of Paris have a genius for walking. The municipality really owed them asphalt footwalks.
“Our Unknown jostles no one. If she wants to pass, she waits with proud humility till some one makes way. The distinction peculiar to a well-bred woman betrays itself, especially in the way she holds her shawl or cloak crossed over her bosom. Even as she walks she has a little air of serene dignity, like Raphael’s Madonnas in their frames. Her aspect, at once quiet and disdainful, makes the most insolent dandy step aside for her.
“Her bonnet, remarkable for its simplicity, is trimmed with crisp ribbons; there may be flowers in it, but the cleverest of such women wear only bows. Feathers demand a carriage; flowers are too showy. Beneath it you see the fresh unworn face of a woman who, without conceit, is sure of herself; who looks at nothing, and sees everything; whose vanity, satiated by being constantly gratified, stamps her face with an indifference which piques your curiosity. She knows that she is looked at, she knows that everybody, even women, turn round to see her again. And she threads her way through Paris like a gossamer, spotless and pure.
“This delightful species affects the hottest latitudes, the cleanest longitudes of Paris; you will meet her between the 10th and 110th Arcade of the Rue de Rivoli; along the line of the Boulevards from the equator of the Passage des Panoramas, where the products of India flourish, where the warmest creations of industry are displayed, to the Cape of the Madeleine; in the least muddy districts of the citizen quarters, between No. 30 and No. 130 of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. During the winter, she haunts the terrace of the Feuillants, but not the asphalt pavement that lies parallel. According to the weather, she may be seen flying in the Avenue of the Champs-Élyseés, which is bounded on the east by the Place Louis XV., on the west by the Avenue de Marigny, to the south by the road, to the north by the gardens of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Never is this pretty variety of woman to be seen in the hyperborean regions of the Rue Saint-Denis, never in the Kamtschatka of miry, narrow, commercial streets, never anywhere in bad weather. These flowers of Paris, blooming only in Oriental weather, perfume the highways; and after five o’clock fold up like morning-glory flowers. The women you will see later, looking a little like them, are would-be ladies; while the fair Unknown, your Beatrice of a day, is a ‘perfect lady.’