CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY t/ S. Vniiii RSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RSITY OF CALIFORNIA /ft) vk) "^ LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA > ^^m^m ^SyC^^^I RSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER Translated from the French Privately Prinfed THEOPHILE GAUTIER. F the group of writers whose work marked the final development of Romanticism in French literature, and who, composing what has been called " the school of 1830," revered Victor Hugo as their god, the premier place, after the great master himself, is held by the author of " Mademoiselle de Maupin." Whatever of richness or of beauty could be compassed by the methods pursued by himself and his fellow-workers reaches its culminat- ing point in his writings, which contain, as it were, the last utterance of the romantic school before the change inaugurated by Flaubert, and continued with such success by those who have followed him. Th^ophile Gautier was a native of the South of France, and was born at Tarbes on the 30th of August, 181 1. His father, who held an appointment in a public office, was a man of liter- ary tastes and accomplishments, and his son was nstslow later on to acknowledge all that he owed to him. " If I possess any knowledge and talent it is to him that they are due," Th^ophile wrote in after years, and so again, when referring to his school days in Paris whither his parents had removed while he was quite a child, he speaks of his father as having been in reality his only master. His hours of recreation were devoted to drawing and painting, and such was his love and talent for these that he even entered the studio of the painter Rioult for the purpose of studying that branch of art to which he believed i^ 3^^?/^3 viii THEOPHILE GAUTIER. himself called. But the brush was soon to be laid aside for the pen. When in his nineteenth year, he was introduced by his intimate friend, Gerard de Nerval to Victor Hugo, then at the zenith of his early fame. The interview was a turning point in Gautier's life, for it decided his career. The encouragement given to him by " the master " was such that he renounced his intentions of becoming a painter, and resolved to consecrate himself to literature. Gautier's loyalty to Victor Hugo remained unshaken to the end, and on one occasion was subjected to a practical test. When " Hernani " was revived at the Comedie Frangaise in 1867, Gautier wrote a most flattering notice of the performance for the official "Moniteur," to the staff of which he belonged. This unqualified praise of the poet who in " Les Chatiments " had poured out such wrath against the Man of December, was by no means calculated to gratify the Imperial Government, and Gautier was requested to modify his praises. He at once wrote out his resignation, and, placing it with his article before the Minister of the Interior, desired him to choose between them. The article was inserted without the alteration of a single line. Gautier's first published work, " Poesies de Thdophile Gau- tier," appeared in 1830, on the very day on which the Revolu- tion of that year broke out. It was followed three years later by his poem " Albertus," and the volume of humorous romances entitled " Les Jeunes-France." The success obtained by the latter work led its publisher to request a novel from the same pen. It was in this way that " Mademoiselle de Maupin " came to be written. As we read this remarkable book, and note its apparent spontaneity, its continuity of thought, and its consistent fluency of expression, it is impossible not to marvel at the complete non-betrayal of the somewhat peculiar circumstances attending its production. Already a successful poet, eager to enjoy to the full all the social prestige that his reputation was bringing him, and affecting moreover to look contemptuously on prose as an unworthy vehicle for the forthsetting of his ideas, Gautier THEOPHILE GAUTIER. ix might, perhaps, never have finished what he had begun had it not been for the pressure brought to bear upon him by his ordinarily most indulgent father. It is amusing to read how Pierre Gautier, profoundly convinced of his son's literary powers, and anxious for their due exercise, used to lock Th^ophile into his room in order to compel him to his task. " You shall not come out," he would call through the keyhole, •* until you have written ten pages of ' Maupin,' " and then in the serene con- sciousness of a duty performed he would walk away, leaving his son, sometimes indeed to resignedly prosecute his ungrateful labors, but frequently — when his mother's surreptitious assist- ance was not forthcoming — to make a joyous escape through the window. In due course, however, the book was finished, and in 1836 it was given to the world. If we are to have a right comprehension ot " Mademoiselle de Maupin," if, when reading it, we are to successfully place our- selves at the author's point of view and sympathetically enter into his promptings, we must be prepared to recognize and ac- cept without reserve the nature of his genius and of his ideal. Otherwise, in spite of rich poetic coloring, and an altogether continuous choiceness of phrase and stimulus of feeling, we shall find much in the book that is incomprehensible, if not positively repellent. In order to appreciate Gautier, we must be content to take him frankly as he is. We must be satisfied to accept his limitations as well as his gifts, and to concen- trate our attention upon that comparatively circumscribed area within which he is an acknowledged king. And if this narrow- ness of vision be attainable, it will not be without its reward. Gautier, then, possesses before and above all things else, the instincts of a painter. Of this he was himself so fully conscious as to believe that he had mistaken his vocation, and to con- stantly regret that he had not adhered to his original purpose. He rejoices exceedingly in form, light, color, and, as a writer, in the language that is adequate for the expression of these. The keenness of his pictorial sense will serve to explain that "unshrinking contemplation of our physical surfaces" — to bor- row a felicitous phrase from Mr. Henry James — which is X THEOPHILE GAUTIER. characteristic of him. He aimed at a closer connection be* - tween literature and the sister arts of painting and sculpture. " It is credible," he says, in one of the conversations preserved for us by M. Ernest Feydeau, " that what is admitted, sought after, praised, solicited, encouraged, and recognized as inno- cent in the plastic arts, ought to be equally so in the art of literature." His requirements are, in fact, the requirements of a painter. And here he stops. If these may be yielded, he rests content. The problems which lie beneath externals he leaves untouched. It has been made a reproach against him that when he travelled he saw only the stocks and stones, so to speak, of the country through which he was passing, and showed himself devoid of insight into humanity. His demands were, indeed, limited to the surface of things. For politics, social development, religious problems, science, progress, he does not care one straw. They have nothing in common with his ideal ; nay, their tendency, as he tells us in his witty, para- doxical, wonderful preface to this book is rather to obstruct its realization. No deep teaching, therefore, is to be looked for in him, no discovery of new truth, or fresh presentation of old. His ideal is simply Beauty, and as he seeks so he gives no more than this. What he does give is of such exquisiteness, as to force us to the acknowledgment that his loss in range is atoned for by increase in power, and that his restrictions have been a real gain to art. In none of Gautier's works is the peculiar nature of his genius more strikingly displayed than in "Mademoiselle de Maupin." Professedly a novel, it possesses none of a novel's distinctive characteristics. It affords us no picture of men and manners. We should turn to it in vain for subtle delineation of character. The pjot is of the slightest, and portions of it are, in certain lights, almost absurd. But to make these facts a basis for adverse criticism would be to strangely misconceive the nature and scope of the book. It is simply an exquisite lyric in prose, a glorious song in praise of the author's ideal — Beauty. And to bestow upon this song such praise as would be fitting is nearly impossible. Charles Baudelaire was right THEOPHILE GAUTIER. xi for once when, in his essay on Gautier, he declared that of the feelings, admiration was the most difficult to express. After all, the lengthiest of panegyrics could only amount to this, that those who, willing to take Gautier for what he is, can en- joy his art for the art's sake alone, will derive from his pages a delight as choice as it is rare. Soon after the publication of" Mademoiselle de Maupin," the elder Gautier received an appointment at Passy, and Th^ophile, leaving the paternal roof, settled down in lodgings with two or three chosen friends. He now began to write for the " Presse," while, at the invitation of Balzac, whose admiring notice had been attracted by the young author's latest effort, he also be- came a contributor to the " Revue de Paris," in which several of his novels appeared. About the same time he published in the " Figaro" a novel which, originally named " L* Eldorado" was in 1838 reprinted under the title of " Fortunio." The appearance of his "Com^die de la Mort" in the same year served to show that the poet was not being lost in the novelist and the critic. From this time to. almost the very day of his death Gautier wrote unceasingly for the press. It is astounding to reflect that the various articles on literature, art, and the drama, written by him during his thirty years of toil, would fill no fewer than three hundred volumes. And these would represent only a portion of his literary achievement. His works published in book form, including those which appeared after his death, amount in all to nearly sixty volumes. Of these we may, perhaps, single out the brilliant "Voyage en Espagne," the thoroughly characteristic " Caprices et Zigzags," the " Emaux et Cam^es," the most choicely finished of his poems, nearly all of which were composed in or about the year 1849, " Le Capitaine Fracasse," a novel written in the French of the sixteenth century, and often regarded as his masterpiece in prose, the "Roman de la Momie," an Egyptian romance, largely due to the suggestion of M. Feydeau, and the singularly graceful " Tableaux de Si^ge," written and published just after the storm of 1 870-1 had swept across Paris. Gautier's capacity for xii THEOPHILE GAUTIER. work was in fact as extraordinary as Balzac's. M. Bergerat, his son-in-law and biographer, tells us that he used to read all night long, and that when he did not go out, the day was spent in a similar fashion. His knowledge was encyclopedic, and his powers of recollection so prompt as to render him in conver- sation more than a match for specialists whether in science or in art. These powers, coupled with a marvellous capacity for self-isolation, enabled him to work at any time or place. His " Voyage en Russie " was written four years after his visit to the country, and without the assistance of so much as a single note. His " Italia " was committed to paper amid all the dis- tracting noises of a printing office, and without a line for the refreshment of his memory, while " Le Capitaine Fracasse," to which allusion has already been made, was written off-hand on a counter in Charpentier's establishment, according as it was re- quired for the " Revue Nationale." To Gautier, indeed, compo- sition was altogether effortless. His rich and catholic vocabulary invariably supplied the right word in the right place, so that his manuscripts remained wholly free from erasures or correc- tions. " He had but to let his pen run," says one critic, " and there fell from it nothing but pearls ready threaded." This superlative aptness made him fond of asserting the exhaustless resources of language. "He whom the most complex thought or the most apocalyptic vision surprises without words for its realization is no writer." Such was one of his most frequently uttered maxims. It is sufficienly mournful that all this wonderful productive- ness was stimulated by necessity. His early works, though gaining him reputation in those circles in which alone he valued it, did not command the support of the general public. Their beauty, their delicate aroma, and their paradoxical wit were lost on the crowd, and those who did not regard their author as a dangerous man refused to take him seriously, and looked upon him as little better than a clever fool. It was thus that he was driven to write for the papers, and it adds no little to his reputation that notwithstanding the restrictions laid upon him by those for whom he wrote — restrictions against which he THEOPHILE GAUTIER. , xiU secretly chafed but in which he was compelled by circum- stances to acquiesce — and notwithstanding the extraordinary ease with which he used the pen, his articles were uniformly distinguished by good sense, sound knowledge, and artistic merit. His unremitting exertions at last bore fruit. But no sooner had he come to be tolerably easy in his circumstances, and be- gun to look forward to a speedy emancipation from the drudgery he abhorred, than the revolution of 1848 carried off his small fortune, and left him with a family to support and creditors to satisfy. There was nothing for it but renewed hard work, and with rarely indomitable courage he set himself steadily and manfully to restore what had been so rudely shattered. The burden of his fate was nevertheless greviously felt. "They oblige me to write dramatic notices," he once said bitterly, " because I know how ; it is fortunate that I cannot saw wood or they would make me do that. ... I am an animal tied to the post of journalism, and I must browse the bitter herbage oiih&feuilletott" After long and painful effort he succeeded in repairing his losses, and in making some provision for his old age. Then came the September Revolution of 1870, and he found himself impoverished once more. It was still necessary to labor on, and he did so bravely, if hopelessly. But the end was at hand. In 1871 he was found to be suffering from dis- ease of the heart, and from the autumn of that year his condition changed rapidly for the worse. The privations which he had undergone during the siege of Paris seemed to have told heavily upon his constitution. The heart-complaint became compli- cated with other disorders, his former exuberant gayety and robustness of enjoyment nearly disappeared, his keenness of thought and utterance was gradually dulled by the lethargy that was almost insensibly settling upon him. He died on the 23rd of October, 1872. As an accomplished artist he deserves that his name should be held in grateful remembrance. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. PREFACE. NE of the greatest burlesques of the glorious epoch at which we have the good fortune to live, is un- questionably the rehabilitation of virtue undertaken by all the journals of every hue, red, green, or tri- colored. Virtue is assuredly very respectable, and we have no wish to fail in respect to her, God forbid ! good and worthy woman that she is ! We think that her eyes are brilliant enough through their spectacles, that her leg is neatly gartered, that she takes her snuff in her gold box with all imaginable grace, that her little dog bows like a dancing-master. We think all this. We will even acknowledge that for her age, she is, in point of fact, not so much amiss, and that she carries her years as well as can be. She is a very agreeable grandmother — but she is a grandmother. It seems to me natural, especially at twenty years of age, to prefer some little immorality, very spruce and coquettish, and very good-natured, with her hair a little un- curled, her skirt short rather than long, an enticing foot and eye, her cheek lightly kindled, laughter on her lips, and her heart in her hand. The most monstrously virtuous journalists lO MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. cannot be of a different opinion, and if they say the contrary, it is very probable that they do not think it. To think one thing and write another happens every day, especially in the case of virtuous people. I remember the jokes launched before the Revolution (that of July, I mean) against the unfortunate and virginal Viscount Sosth^ne de La Rochefoucauld, who lengthened the skirts of the dancers at the Opera, and with his own patrician hands ap- plied a modest plaster to the middle of all the statues. Viscount Sosthene de La Rochefoucauld has been far surpassed. Modesty has been greatly improved upon since that time, and we now indulge in refinements which he would not have dreamed of. For my own part, not being accustomed to look at statues in certain places, I thought, like other people, that the vine leaf carved by the chisels of the superintendent of the fine arts was the most ridiculous thing in the world. It appears that I was wrong, and that the vine leaf is among the most meritorious of institutions. I have been told — I refused to believe it, so singular did it seem to me — that people existed, who, standing before Michael Angelo's " Last Judgment," saw nothing in it but the episode of the licentious prelates, and veiled their faces, as they cried out against the abomination of the desolation ! Such people, too, know nothing of the romance of Rodrigo save the verse about the snake. If there is any nakedness in a picture or a book they go straight to it, like swine to the mire, without troubling themselves about the full-blown flowers, or the beautiful golden fruit which hang in every direction. I confess that I am not virtuous enough for that. The impu- dent abigail Dorine may safely display her plump breast before me. I shall certainly not take out my pocket-handkerchief to cover the bosom that cannot be seen. I shall look at her breast as at her face, and, if it is white and well-formed, I shall take pleasure in it ; but I shall not try whether Elmire's dress is soft, nor push her in a saintly way towards the edge of the table, as did the pitiful Tartuffe. PREFACE. II The great affectation of morality which reigns at present would be very laughable, if it were not very tiresome. Every feuilleton becomes a pulpit, every journalist a preacher, and nothing but the tonsure and the little collar is wanting. Rainy weather and homilies are the order of the day ; we protect ourselves from the one by not going out except in a carriage, and from the other by reading Pantagruel again with bottle and pipe. Good heavens ! what exasperation ! what fury ! Who has bitten you ? Who has stung you ? What the deuce is the mat- ter with you, that you make such an outcry, and what has this poor vice done to you, that he has so much of your ill-will, he who is such a good fellow and so easy-going, and who only asks to amuse himself without annoying other people, if that be possible ? Do with vice as Serre did with the gendarme : embrace each other, and let all this come to an end. Believe me, it will do you good. Why, good heavens ! worthy preach- ers, what would you do without vice ? You would be re- duced to beggary from to-morrow, if people became virtuous to-day. The theatres would be closed this evening. What subjects would you have for your feuilletons ? No more balls at the opera-house to fill your columns ; no more novels to cut up ; for balls, novels, and comedies are veritable pomps of Satan, if we are to believe our Holy Mother, the Church. The actress would send away her lover, and could no longer pay you for your praise. People would cease to subscribe to your papers ; they would read Saint Agustine, and go to church and tell their beads. That might perhaps be all very well, but most cer- tainly you would gain nothing by it. If people were virtuous, what would you do with your tirades against the immorality of the century ? You see that vice is good for something after all. But it is the fashion now to be virtuous and Christian ; people have taken a turn for it. They affect Saint Jerome as formally they affected Don Juan ; they are pale and macerated, they wear their hair apostle-wise, they walk with clasped hands 12 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. and with eyes fixed on the ground ; they have a Bible open on the mantelpiece, and a crucifix and some consecrated box-wood by the bed ; they swear no longer, smoke little, and scarcely chew at all. Then they are Christians, and speak of the sacredness of art, the lofty mission of the artist, the poetry of Catholicism, Mon- sieur de Lamennais, the painters of the Angelic school, the Council of Trent, progressive humanity, and a thousand other fine things. Some infuse a little Republicanism into their re- ligion, and these are not the least curious. They couple Robes- pierre and Jesus Christ in the most jovial fashion, and, with a seriousness worthy of praise, amalgamate the Acts of the Apos- tles and the decrees of the holy Convention, to use the sacra- mental epithet ; others, as a last ingredient, add a few Saint- Simonian ideas. Such persons are complete down to the ground ; they cannot be excelled. It is not given to human absurdity to go further — has ultra metas, etc., they are the pillars of Hercu- les of burlesque. Christianity is so much in vogue, owing to the prevalent hypocrisy, that neo-Christianity itself enjoys a certain favor. They say that it even possesses an adept, including Monsieur Drouineau, An extremely curious variety of the moral journalist, prop- erly so-called, is the female-family journalist. He pushes chaste susceptibility as far as anthropophagy, or to within little of it. His manner of procedure, though simple and easy at first sight, is none the less facetious and superlatively diverting, and I think that it is worth preserving for posterity — for our chil- dren's children, as the perukes of the so-called •' grand century " would say. First, in order to pose as a journalist of this species, a few little preparatory utensils are needful — such as two or three wedded wives, a few mothers, as many sisters as possible, a complete assortment of daughters, and female cousins with- out number. Next there is required a theatrical piece or a novel, a pen, ink, paper, and a printer. It might, perhaps, be PREFACE. 1 2 as well to have an idea and several subscribers, but with a good deal of philosophy and shareholders* money, it is possible to do without them. When you have all this you may set up as a moral journalist. The two following recipes, suitably varied, are sufficient for the editing : — Models of Virtuous Articles on a First Performance. " After the literature of blood, the literature of mire ; after the Morgue and the galleys, the alcove and the lupanar ; after rags stained by murder, rags stained by debauchery ; after, etc. (according to necessity and the space available, this strain may be continued from six lines up to fifty or more) — this is justice. See whither forgetfulness of wholesome doctrine and romantic licentiousness lead us : the theatre has become a school for prostitution, into which it is impossible to venture, without trembling, in the company of a woman you respect. You come trusting to an illustrious name, and you are obliged to withdraw at the third act, with your young daughter, quite dis- concerted and out of countenance. Your wife hides her blushes behind her fan ; your sister, your female cousin, etc." (The titles of relationship may be diversified ; it is enough if they are those of females.) Note, — There is one who has pushed his morality so far as to say : " I will not go to see this drama with my mistress." That man I admire and love ; I carry him in my heart, as Louis XVIII carried the whole of France in his bosom ; for he has had the most triumphant, colossal, irregular, and luxorian idea that has entered the brain of man, out of all the numerous droll ideas conceived in this blessed nineteenth century. The method of giving an account of a book is very expedi- tious, and within the reach of every capacity : — " If you wish to read this book, shut yourself up carefully at home ; do not let it lie about on the table. If your wife or your daughter were to open it, she would be lost. It is a 14 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. dangerous book, and it counsels vice. It would, perhaps, have had a great success in the time of Crebillon, in the petites maisons, at the delicate suppers of the duchesses ; but now that morals are purified, that the hand of the people has overthrown the worm-eaten structure of the aristocracy, etc., etc., that that that there must be in every work an idea a religious and moral idea, which a view, lofty and profound, answering to the needs of humanity ; for it is deplorable that young writers should sacrifice the most holy things to success, and employ an otherwise estimable talent in lewd pictures which would make a captain of dragoons blush. (The virginity of the captain of dragoons is the finest discovery, next to that of America, which has been made for a long time.) The novel we are reviewing recalls ' Therdse Philosophe,' ' Fdicia,* ' Com- pare Mathieu,' and the 'Contes de Gr^court.' " The virtuous journalist has immense erudition in the matter of filthy novels. It would be curious to know why. It is frightful to think that, by order of the newspapers, there are many honest manufacturers who have only these two recipes to live on, they and the numerous family that they employ. Apparently I am the most enormously immoral personage to be found in Europe or elsewhere, for I see nothing more liceatious in the novels and comedies of to-day than in the novels and comedies of former times, and I cannot well under- stand why the ears of the gentlemen of the press should have suddenly become so Jansenically delicate. I do not think that the most innocent journalist dare say that Pigault-Lebrun, the younger Crebillon, Louvet, Voisenon, Marmontel, and all other makers of romances and novels, do not surpass in immorality, since immorality there is, the most disordered and licentious productions of Messrs. So-and-so, whom I do not mention by name out of regard for their modesty. It would need the most signal bad faith not to acknowl- edge it. Let it not be objected that I have here adduced names little PREFACE. ,5 or imperfectly known. If I have not alluded to illustrious and monumental names, it is not that they do not support my asser- tion with their great authority. Except for the difference in merit, the romances and tales of Voltaire are assuredly not much more susceptible of being given as prizes to little boarding-school Misses than are the immoral tales of our friend the lycanthropist, or even the moral tales of the mealy-mouthed Marmontel. What do we see in the comedies of the great Moli^re 1 The holy institution of marriage (to adopt the style of catechism and journalists) mocked and turned into ridicule in every scene. The husband is old, ugly, and eccentric ; he wears his wig awry, his coat has gone out of fashion, he has a bill-headed cane, his nose is daubed with snuff, his legs are short, and his abdomen is as big as a budget. He sputters, speaks only folly, and acts suitably to his words ; he sees nothing and hears noth- ing ; his wife is kissed to his very beard, and he does not know what is going on. This lasts until he has been well and duly proved a cuckold in his own eyes and in the eyes of the whole highly edified house, which applauds enthusiastically. Those who applaud the most are those who are married the most. I Marriage in Moli^re is called George Dandin or Sganarelle. Adultery, Damis, or Clitandre ; there is no name sweet and charming enough for it. The adulterer is always young, handsome, well-made, and a marquis, at the least. He enters humming the latest couranto in an aside ; he makes one or two steps onthe stage with the most deliberate and triumphant air in the world ; he scratches his ear with the rosy nail of his coquettishly opened little finger ; he combs his beautiful fair hair with his tortoise-shell comb, and adjusts the legs of his trousers, which are of great size. His doublet and hose are hidden beneath aigulets and bows of rib- bon, his neck-band, is by the best maker ; his gloves smell better than benjamin and civet ; his plumes have cost a louis the spray. 1 6 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. How fiery his eye and how blooming his cheek ! how smiling his mouth ! how white his teeth ! how soft and well-washed his hands ! He speaks, and we have nothing but madrigals and perfumed gallantries delivered in a fine affected style, and with the best air ; he has read romances and knows poetry ; he is valiant and ready to draw ; he scatters gold with open hand. Thus Ange- lique, Agnes, and Isabella, can scarcely restrain themselves from leaping upon his neck, well-bred and great ladies though they be, and the husband is duly deceived in the fifth act, fortu- nate if he has not been so from the first. This is the manner in which marriage is treated by Moliere, one of the loftiest and weightiest geniuses that have ever lived. Do people think that there is anything stronger in the speeches in " Indiana " or " Valentine " ? Paternity is still less respected, if that be possible. Look at Orgon, look at Geronte, look at all of them. How they are robbed by their sons and beaten by their valets ! How are exposed, without pity for their age, their avarice, and their obstinacy, and their imbecility ! What jest- ings ! what mystifications ! How they are shouldered out of life, these poor old men who are slow about dying, and will on no account give up their money ! How the eternity of parents is spoken of! What speeches against heredity, and how much more convincing they are than all the Saint-Simonian declama- tions ! A father is an ogre, an Argus, a jailer, a tyrant, a something which at the very most is only good for delaying a marriage, during three acts, until the final denouement. A father is as ridiculous as the most ridiculous husband. A son is never ridiculous in Moliere, for Moliere, like all authors of all possible times, paid court to the youthful generation at the expense of the old. And the Scapins, with their cloaks striped in Neapolitan fashion, their cap on their ear, and their feather sweeping the flies— are they not very pious people, very chaste, and deserving of canonization ? The galleys are full of worthy people, who PREFACE. 1 7 have not clone a quarter of what they do. The cheatings of Trialph are petty in comparison with theirs. And the Lisettes and Martons, what wantons, ye gods, are they ! The courte- sans of the streets are far from being so sharp as they are, so ready to give a smutty reply. How well they understand how to deliver a note ! how well they keep watch during a ren- dezvous ! They are, on my word, precious girls, and give ex- cellent advice. 'Tis a charming society that moves and walks through these comedies and imbroglios. Duped guardians, cuckolded hus- bands, libertine attendants, cunning valets, young ladies madly in love, debauched sons, adulterous wives — are they not all quite equal to the melancholy young beaux, and the poor, weak, oppressed, and impassioned young women of the dramas and novels by our fashionable authors ? And withal the denouements, minus the final dagger-blow and minus the necessary cup of poison, are as happy as those in fairy tales, and everybody, even the husband himself, is always as pleased as possible. In Moli^re virtue is always disgraced and thrashed ; it wears the horns, and offers its back to Mas- carille ; morality may just, perhaps, put in a single appearance at the end of the piece, under the somewhat homely personifi- cation of police-officer Loyal. In all that we have just said we have had no intention of chipping the corners of Moli^re's pedestal ; we are not foolish enough to try to shake this bronze colossus with our puny arms ; we simply wished to demonstrate to the pious journal- ists, who are shocked by recent romantic works, that the ancient classics, which every day they recommend us to read and im- itate, far surpass them in wantonness and immorality. With Moli^re we might easily join both Marivaux and La Fontaine, those two very opposite expressions of the French character, and Regnier, and Rabelais, and Marot, and many others. But our intention is not to construct here, d propos of morality, a course of literature for the use of the virgins of the feuilleton. 2 1 8 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. It seems to me that they should not make so much ado abo.ut so little. We are, happily, no longer in the time of the fair Eve, and we cannot in conscience be as primitive and patriarchal as they were in the Ark. We are not little girls preparing for their first communion, and when we play at Crambo we do not answer " cream-tart." Our artlessness is tolerably knowing, and our virginity has been about town for a long time. These are among the things which we cannot have twice, and do what Vv'e may, we cannot recover them ; for there is nothing in the world that goes more quickly than a virginity which departs and an illusion which takes to flight. Perhaps after all there is no great harm done, and the knowl- edge of everything is preferable to the ignorance of everything. It is a question that I leave to be discussed by those who are more learned than I. The .world has, at all events, passed the age when we can counterfeit modesty and bashfulness, and I think it too old a gray-beard to be able to play the child and virgin without making itself ridiculous. Since her marriage with civilization, society has lost the right of being ingenuous and bashful. There are certain blushings which are still admissible at bed-time on the part of the bride, and which can be of no further service on the morrow ; for the young woman perhaps remembers the young girl no longer, or, if she does, it is a very indecent thing, and seriously compromises her husband's reputation. When I chance to read one of the fine sermons which have taken the place of literary criticism in the public prints, I am sometimes seized with great remorse and apprehension, I who have on my conscience sundry small jokes somewhat too highly spiced, such as a young man with life and spirit may have to reproach himself with. Beside these Bossuetsof the Caf^ de Paris, these Bourdaloues of the balcony at the Opera, these Catos at so much a line, who scold the century in such fine fashion, I, in fact, look upon myself as the most terrible rascal that has ever polluted the face of the earth, and yet, heaven knows, the nomenclature of my sins, capital as well as venial, with the margins and spaces PREFACE. jg strictly observed, would scarcely, in the hands of the most skil- ful bookseller, make up one or two octavo volumes a day, which is little enough for one who makes no pretension of go- ing to paradise in the next world, and of winning the Monthyon prize or of carrying off the rose in this. Then, when I think that I have met with rather a large num- ber of these dragons of virtue beneath the table, and even else- where,! get a better opinion of myself, and estimate that, with all the faults that I may have, they have another, which is, in my eyes the very greatest and worst of all, and that is hy- pocrisy. If we looked carefully, we might perhaps find another little vice to add, but it is one so hideous, that in truth I scarcely dare name it. Come close, and I will whisper its name into your ear : it is envy. Envy, and nothing else. It is this that goes creeping and winding through all these paternal homilies. However careful it may be to conceal itself, it may from time to time be seen gleaming above metaphors and figures of rhetoric with its little flat viper's head ; it may be surprised licking its venom-blued lips with its forked tongue ; it may be heard hissing softly in the shade of an insidious epithet. I know perfectly well that it is insufferable conceit to pretend that you are envied, and that it is almost as nauseous as a cox- comb vaunting his good fortune. I am not so boastful as to be- lieve that I am hated and envied ; that is a happiness which is not given to everybody, and it will probably be long before I have it. Thus I shall speak freely and unreservedly, as one quite disinterested in the matter. One thing which is certain and easy of demonstration to those who might doubt its existence, is the natural antipathy of the critic to the poet, of him who makes nothing to him who makes something, of the drone to the bee, of the gelding to the stal- lion. You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet. 20 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. Before descending to the melancholy office of taking care of the cloaks, and noting the strokes like a billiard-marker or a ser- vant at the tennis-court, you long courted the Muse and sought to win her virginity ; but you had not sufficient vigor to do so, your breath failed you, and you fell back pale and worn to the foot of the holy mountain. I can understand this hatred. It is painful to see another sit down at a banquet to which you have not been invited, and sleep with a woman who would have nothing to say to you. With all my heart, I pity the poor eunuch who is obliged to be present at the diversions of the Grand Seignior. He is admitted into the most secret depths of the Oda ; he conducts the Sultanas to the bath ; he sees their beautiful bodies glistening beneath the silver water of the great reser- voirs, streaming with pearls and smoother than agates ; the most hidden beauties are unveiled to him. His presence is no re- straint — he is a eunuch. The Sultan caresses his favorite before him, and kisses her on her pomegranate lips. His position is, in truth, a very false one, and he must feel greatly em- barrassed. It is the same wnth the critic who sees the poet walking in the garden of poesy with his nine fair odalisques, and disporting idly in the shade of large green laurels. It is difficult for him not to pick up the stones on the highway to cast them at him, and, if he be skilful enough to do so, wound him behind his own wall. The critic who has produced nothing is a coward, like an Abb^ who courts the wife of a layman. The latter can neither retaliate nor fight with him. I think that the history of the different ways of depreciating any work for a month past would be at least as curious as that of Teglath-Phalasar or Gemmagog who invented pointed shoes. There are materials enough for fifteen or sixteen folios, but we will take pity on the reader and confine ourselves to a few lines — a benefit for which we expect more than eternal gratitude. At a very remote epoch, which is lost in the mist PREFACE. 21 of ages, very nearly three weeks ago, the romance of the middle ages flourished principally in Paris and the suburbs. The coat of arms was held in great honor ; head-dresses, a la Hennin, were not despised, parti-colored trousers were esteemed ; the dagger was beyond all price ; the pointed shoe was worshipped like a fetich. There was nothing but ogives, turrets, little columns, colored glass, cathedrals, and strong castles ; there was nothing but damozels and squires, pages and varlets, vagrants and veterans, gallant knights and fierce castellans ; all being things which were certainly more innocent than innocent pastimes, and which did nobody any harm. The critic had not waited for the second romance in order to begin his work of depreciation. No sooner had the first appeared than he had wrapped himself up in his cloth of camel's hair, poured a bushel of ashes on his head, and then, assuming that loud and doleful tone of his, begun to cry out : — "Still the middle ages, always the middle ages! who will deliver me from the middle ages, from these middle ages that are not the middle ages ? Middle ages of card- board and baked clay, which have nothing of the middle ages but their name. O the iron barons in their iron armor, with their iron hearts in their iron breasts ! O the cathe- drals with their ever full-blown roses, and their flowered glass, their lacework of granite, their open trefoils, their gables cut like a saw, their stone chasubles embroidered like a bride's veil, their tapers, their chants, their glittering priests, their kneeling people, their droning organs, and their angels hovering and flapping their wings beneath the vaulted roofs ! How have they spoiled my middle ages, my middle ages so delicate and bright ! How have they hidden them beneath a coating of coarse badigeon ! What loud over-color- ing ! Ah ! ignorant daubers, who think that you have produced color by laying red upon blue, white upon black, and green upon yellow ; you have seen nothing of the middle ages but their shell, you have not divined the soul of the middle ages, no blood cir- culates beneath the skin with which you clothe your phantoms. 22 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. there is no heart in your corselets of steel, there are no legs in your, trousers of wool, there is neither body nor breast behind your emblazoned skirts. They are garments having human form, and that is all. Then away with the middle ages, as they have been made by the fabricators (the word is out ! the fabricators !) The middle ages are unsuitable now ; we want something else." And the public, seeing the journalists barking against the middle ages, was seized with a great passion for these poor mid- dle ages, which they pretended that they had slain at a blow. The middle ages invaded everything, assisted by the obstruction of the papers ; dramas, melodramas, romances, novels, poems, there were even vaudevilles of the middle ages, and Momus re- peated feudal jollities. By the side of the romance of the middle ages sprouted the carrion romance, a very agreeable kind, largely consumed by nervous women of fashion and blase cooks. The journalists very soon scented it out, as crows do the quarry, and with the beaks of their pens they dismembered and wickedly put to death this poor species of romance, which only sought to prosper and putrefy peaceably on the greasy shelves of circulat- ing libraries. What did they not say ? What did they not write ? Literature of the Morgue or the galleys, nightmare of the hangman, hallucination of drunken butchers and hot-fevered convict-keepers ! They benignly gave us to understand that the authors were assassins and vampires, that they had con- tracted the vicious habit of killing their fathers and mothers, that they drank blood in skulls, used tibias instead of forks, and cut their bread with a guillotine. And yet, seeing that they had often breakfasted with them, no one knew better than they did that the authors of these charming butcheries were honorable men of family, gentle, and mixing in good society, white gloved, fashionably short-sighted, more ready to feed on beef-steaks than on human cutlets, and more accustomed to drink Bordeaux than the blood of young girls or new-born infants. And from having seen and touched their manuscripts, they knew perfectly well that they were PREFACE. 23 written with most virtuous ink upon English paper, and not with blood from the guillotine upon the skin of a Christian flayed alive. But do or say what they might, the age was disposed for carrion, and the charnel-house pleased it better than the boudoir ; the reader could only be captured by a hook baited with a little corpse beginning to turn blue. A very conceivable thing ; put a rose at the end of your line, and spiders will have time enough to spin their webs in the bend of your arm — you will not take the smallest fry ; but fasten on a worm or a bit of old cheese, and carp, barbel, perch, and eels will leap three feet out of the water to snap it. Men are not so different from fish as people seem generally to believe. You would have thought that the journalists had become Quakers, Brahmins, Pythagoreans, or bulls, they had suddenly taken such a horror to redness and blood. Never had they been seen so melting, so emollient ; it was like cream and whey. They admitted two colors only, sky-blue, and apple- green. Pink was only tolerated, and they would have led the public, had it allowed them, to feed on spinach on the banks of the Lignon side by side with the sheep of Amaryllis. They had changed their black dress-coat for the turtledove-colored jacket of Celadon or Silvander, and surrounded their goose- quills with tufts of roses and favors after the fashion of the pastoral crook. They allowed their hair to flow down like a child's, and they had manufactured virginities, according to Marion Delorme's recipe, in which they had succeeded as well as she did. They applied to literature the article of the Decalogue : "Thou shalt not kill." The smallest dramatic murder was no longer permitted, and the fifth act had become impossible. They deemed the dagger extravagant, poison monstrous, and the axe without excuse. They would have had dramatic heroes live to the age of Melchisedec, although it had been recognized from time immemorial that the end of all tragedy is to kill, in the last scene, a poor devil of a great man who cannot help ^4 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. himself, just as the end of all comedy is to unite matrimonially two fools of lovers each about sixty years of age. It was about this time that I threw into the fire (after taking duplicates, as is always done) two superb and magnificent dramas of the middle ages, one in verse and the other in prose, the heroes of which were quartered and boiled in the middle of the stage — an incident which would have been very jovial and somewhat unprecedented. In order to conform to their ideas, I have since composed an ancient tragedy, in five acts, called " Heliogabalus," the hero of which throws himself into the water-closet, an extremely novel situation which has the advantage of introducing a decoration not as yet seen on the stage. I have also written a modern drama far superior to " Antony," " Arthur, or the Fatal Man," in which the providential idea occurs in the shape of a Stras- burg/^^', have near the body a large tuft, out of which the stripped stem shoots up to heaven like a second tree planted in the first ; you would think that they formed the foreground of an artificial landscape, or the side scenes of a theatrical decora- tion, so curiously deformed are they ; while ivy passing from one to the other and suffocating them in its embrace, mingles its dark hearts with the green leaves and looks like their shadows. Nothing in the world could be more picturesque. The stream widens at this spot so as to form a little lake, and its shallow- 124 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ness allows the beautiful aquatic plants, which carpet its bed, to be seen beneath the transparent water. These are nympha- ceae and lotuses floating carelessly in the purest crystal, with the reflections of the clouds and ot the weeping-willows that lean over on the bank. The mansion is on the other side, and this little skiff", painted apple-green and light red, will save you going rather a long round to reach the bridge. " It is a collection of buildings, constructed at different epochs, with uneven gables, and a crowd of little bell-turrets. This pavilion is of brick, with corners of stone ; this main building is of a rustic order, full of embossments and vermiculations. This other pavilion is quite modern ; it has a flat roof, after the Italian fashion, with vases and a balustrade of tiles, and a vestibule of ticking in the shape of a tent. The windows are all of different sizes, and do not correspond ; they are of all kinds. We find even trefoils and ogives, for the chapel is Gothic. Certain portions are latticed, like Chinese houses, with trellis-work painted in different colors, whereon climb woodbines, jessamines, nasturtiums, and virginian creepers, the long sprays of which enter the rooms familiarly, and seem to stretch out a hand to you and bid you good-morning. " In spite of this want of regularity, or rather by reason of it, the appearance of the building is charming. It has at least not all been seen at once, you can make a choice, and you are always bethinking yourself of something that had not been noticed. This dwelling, which I did not know of, as it is at a distance of twenty leagues, pleased me at the very first, and I was most grateful to Rosette for having had the triumphant idea of choosing such a nest for our loves. " We arrived there at the close of day ; and being fatigued, had nothing more urgent, after supping with great appetite, than to go to bed — separately, be it understood — for we intended to sleep seriously. " I was dreaming some rose-colored dream, full of flowers, perfumes, and birds, when I felt a warm breath on my forehead, and a kiss descending upon it with throbbing wings. A delicate noise of lips, and a soft moisture on the place that was touched. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 125 made me think that I was not dreaming. I opened my eyes, and the first thing that I saw was the fresh white neck of Rosette, who was bending down over the bed to kiss me. I threw my arms around her form, and returned her kiss more amorously than I had done for a long time. " She went away to draw the curtain and open the window, then came back and sat down on the edge of my bed, holding my hand between both of hers and playing with my rings. Her attire was most coquettishly simple. She was without corset or petticoat, and had absolutely nothing on her but a large dressing-gown of cambric, as white as milk, very ample and with broad folds ; her hair was drawn up on the top of her head with a little white rose, of the kind that has only three or four leaves ; her ivory feet played in slippers worked in brilliant and variegated colors, as delicate as possible, though still too large, and with no quarter like those of the young Roman ladies. As I looked at her I regretted that I was her lover, and had not to become so. " The dream that I had at the moment when she came to awake me in so agreeable a manner was not very remote from the reality. My room looked upon the little lake that I have just described. My window was framed with jessamine, which was shaking its stars in silver rain upon the floor. Large foreign flowers were poising their urns beneath my balcony as though to cense me ; a sweet and undecided odor, formed of a thousand different perfumes, penetrated to my bed, whence I could see the water gleaming and scaling into millions of spangles ; the birds were jargoning, warbling, chirping, and piping. It was a harmonious noise, and confused like the hum of a festival. Opposite, on a sunlit hill, stretched a lawn of golden green, on which some large oxen, scattered here and there, were feeding under the care of a little boy. Quite alone, and further away, might be seen immense squares of forest of a darker green, from which the bluish smoke of the charcoal kilns curled spirally upwards. '• Everything in this picture was calm, fresh, and smiling, and in whatever direction I turned my eyes, I saw nothing 126 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. that was not fair and young. My room was hung in chintz, with mats on the floor ; blue Japanese pots, with round bodies and tapering necks, and filled with singular flowers, were artis- tically arranged on the whatnots and on the dark-blue marble chimneypiece which was also filled with flowers ; there were frieze-panels of gay color and delicate design, representing scenes from rural or pastoral nature, and sofas and divans in every corner, and then — a beautiful and youthful woman all in white, her flesh giving a tender rose tint to her transparent dress where it touched it. It would be impossible to imagine any- thing better ordered for the gratification alike of soul and eye. " Thus my contented and careless glance would pass with equal pleasure from a magnificent pot strewn with dragons and mandarins to Rosette's slipper, and from that to the corner of her shoulder which shone beneath the cambric ; it would pause at the trembling stars of the jessamine and the white tresses of the willows on the bank, cross the water and wander on the hill, and then come back into the room, to be fixed on the rose- colored bows on the corset of some shepherdess. " Through the slashes in the foliage the sky was opening thousands of blue eyes ; the water prattled softly, and I, plunged in tranquil ecstasy, without speaking, and with my hand still between Rosette's two little ones, gave myself up to all this joy. " Do what we may, happiness is pink and white ; it can scarcely be represented otherwise. Delicate colors suit it as a matter of course. On its palette it has only water-green, sky- blue, and straw-yellow. Its pictures are all bright like those of the Chinese painters. Flowers, light, perfumes, a soft and silken skin which touches yours, a veiled harmony coming you know not whence, with these there is perfect happiness, and there is no means of living happy in a different way. For myself, I, who have a horror of the common-place, who dream but of strange adventures, strong passions, delirious ecstasies, and odd and difficult situations, I must be foolishly happy in the manner I have indicated, and, for all my efforts, I have never been able to discover any other method of being so. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 1 27 " I would have you know that I made none of these reflec- tions then ; it was after the event and when writing to you that they occurred to me ; at the moment in question I was occupied only in enjoying — the sole occupation of a reasonable man. " I will not describe to you the life that we are leading here ; it may easily be imagined. There are walks in the great woods, violets and strawberries, kisses and little blue flowers, luncheons on the grass, readings and books forgotten beneath the trees ; parties on the water with the end of a scarf or a white hand dipping in the current, long songs and long laughter repeated by the echo on the bank ; the most Arcadian life that could be imagined ! " Rosette overwhelms me with caresses and attentions ; cooing more than a dove in the month of May, she rolls herself about me and encircles me in her folds ; she strives that I may have no other atmosphere than her breath, and no other horizon than her eyes ; she invests me very carefully, and suffers nothing whatever to enter or come forth without permission ; she has built a little guard-house beside my heart, whence she keeps watch over it night and day. She says charming things to me ; she makes me the kindest madrigals ; she sits at my feet and behaves before me quite like a humble slave before her lord and master — behavior which suits me well enough, for I like these little submissive ways, and I have an inclination towards oriental despotism. She never does the smallest thing without taking my advice, and she seems completely to have renounced whim and wish ; she tries to divine my thought and to anticipate it; she is wearisome with wit, tenderness, and kindness ; she is perfect enough to be thrown out of the window. How in the devil can I give up so adorable a woman without seeming a monster ? It would be enough to discredit my heart forever. " Oh ! how I long to find her in fault, and to discover some- thing wrong against her ! how impatiently I wait for an oppor- tunity for a quarrel ! but there is no danger that the rogue will furnish me with one ! When I speak abruptly, and in a harsh tone to her, in order to bring about an alercation, she gives me 128 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. such soft answers, in such silvery tones, with such moist eyes, and with such a sad and loving mien that I seem to myself something worse than a tiger, or else a crocodile at the very least, and, in spite of my rage, am obliged to ask her pardon. " She literally murders me with love ; she puts me to the torture, and every day brings the planks, between which I am caught, a notch closer. She probably wants to drive me into telling her that I detest her, that she wearies me to death, and that, if she does not leave me at peace, I will cut her face with a horsewhip. By heavens ! she will succeed, and, if she con- tinues to be so amiable, the devil take me but it will be before long. "In spite of all these fair appearances, Rosette has had enough of me as I of her ; but as she has committed glaring follies on my account, she will not, by a rupture, put herself in the wrong in the eyes of the worthy corporation of womankind. Every great passion pretends to be eternal, and it is very con- venient to avail one's self of its advantages without being sub- jected to its drawbacks. Rosette reasons in this manner : ' Here is a young man who has only a remnant of liking for me, and being artless and gentle, he does not dare to show it openly, and is at his wit's end ; it is clear that I weary him, but he will die with the trouble of it rather than take it upon himself to leave me. As he is a sort of poet, he has his head full of fine phrases about love and passion, and believes himself obliged, as a matter of conscience, to play the part of a Tristan or an Amadis. Hence, as nothing in the world is more in- tolerable than the caresses of one whom you are beginning to love no longer (and to love a woman no longer means to hate her violently), I am going to lavish them on him sufficiently to give him a fit of indigestion, and he will be obliged at any rate to send me to all the devils, or else begin to love me again as he did the first day, which he will carefully abstain from doing.' " Nothing could be better conceived. Is it not charming to act the deserted Ariadne ? People pity you and admire you, and cannot find sufficient imprecations for the wretch who has MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 129 been monstrous enough to forsake so adorable a creature. You assume a resigned and mournful air, you rest your chin on your hand and your elbow on your knee in such a way as to bring out the pretty blue veins of your wrist. You wear more streaming hair, and for some time adopt dresses of a darker hue. You avoid uttering the name of the ungrateful one, but you make indirect allusions to it, heaving little admirably modulated sighs. " A woman so good, so beautiful, so impassioned, who has made such great sacrifices, who is absolutely free from reproach, a chosen vessel, a pearl of love, a spotle^ mirror, a drop of milk, a white rose, an ideal essence for the perfume of a life — a woman who should have been worshipped on bended knees, and who, after her death, ought to be cut in small pieces for the purpose of relics — to abandon her iniquitously, fraudulently, villainously ! Why, a corsair would not do worse ! To give her her death-blow ! — for she will assuredly die of it ! A man must have a paving-stone in his body instead of a heart to be- have in such a way. *♦ O men ! men ! " I say this to myself ; but perhaps it is not true. " Excellent hypocrites as women naturally are, I can scarcely believe that they could go so far as this ; are not Rosette's demonstrations after all only the accurate expression of her feelings towards me ? However this may be, the continuation of the tite-d-tete is no longer possible, and the fair chatelaine has at last just sent off invitations to her acquaintances in the neighborhood. We are busy making preparations to receive these worthy country people. Good-bye, dear friend." V. 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 con- tains your young loves. A fairer and more rosier illusion MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. J3, 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 lean- ing on your elbow you gaze at the moon, shadows intersected with furtives 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 spring-time 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 idea 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 scarves. 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. 132 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. " 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 re- maining 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 dis- tracted 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 slothfuUy 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 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 133 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 jeal- ousy of this description is a nicety which happily is rather rare ; the present is quite enough without going back to search be- neath 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 con- currence of fatal circumstances that she found herself united to people unworthy of her, or perhaps that it was the vague long- ing 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 had as yet caressed, and the closed bosom of which has received neither raindrop nor pearly dew, a chaste flower which un- folds 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 igno- rance 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 ecstacy and their delirium from you, and 134 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 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 — bur now they disgust me horribly, and give me nausea. Hence they are not to be thought of, and I am so enervated by volupt- uousness, the poison has crept so deeply into my bones, that I cannot endure the idea of being one or two months without a woman. This is egoism, and of the dirtiest 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. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 135 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 posttion — 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 disquiet- ing one's-self greatly 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 experience 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 ' Com- plete Letter Writer,' who worship women with big feet, and excuse themselves for doing so on the ground that they have a beautiful soul ! 136 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. "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 hus- band : 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 ; it I could make up my mind to dance a minuet and to listen to sonatas played by young persons on 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 to 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 eye- lids, 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 forever 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 men. like the azure of the firma- ment like the gold of the star, like the perfume of the seraphic MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 137 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 con- fining one's gaze to whatever goodness she may possess. Beauty is harmony, and a person who is equally ugly through- out 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 m a more slovenly and negligent fashion. In the eyes of the vulgar the statue appears entirely finished, and its beauty com- plete ; 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 ought 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, walk, breath, color, tone, perfume, all that life is enters into the composition of my ideal ; every- thing that has fragrance, that sings, or that is radiant belongs 138 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 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 L " 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 grace- fulness of their gestures and attitude should preposess them favorably and incline the scale, " I would buy nothing of an ugly shopman ; 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, MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 139 Architecture in bad taste, a piece of furniture of bad shape, prevent me from taking pleasure in a house, however comfort- able 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 contem- plate. " 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 wish- ing 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 de- formity, 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 bloodshot, and a mouth becom- ingly 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 clock-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 improve- I40 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ment has not taken place in my face ; I wait for the lines to make a movement and become straighter or rounder with more deli- cacy 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 want so little to be handsome, and that I shall never be so ! What ! half a line, a hundredth or a thousand 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 crystalize in such or such a way ? How did it concern this outline to come out here and 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 statutes whose exquisite beauty saddens and ravishes her ? " There are two or there 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 wished (and what that is I do not know), I had need of very great and perfect beauty, and I imagined 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 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 141 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 a board ? " My first sensation before one of these marvellous 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 expen- diture 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 142 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. of Antinoiis, 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 liked 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 mur- derous 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 a 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 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 14^ 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 lam 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 the taste of flint, is a phenomenon which can only result from a peculiar organiza- tion ; it is 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 me. Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, great Romans of the Empire, O you who have been so misunderstood, and are pursued by the baying of the 144 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. rhetors' 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 epuipped than thine, Heliogabalus, and of very different splendor. My circuses are more roaring and more bloody than yours, my perfumes more keen and penetrating, 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 nothing- ness 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, with my little sisters and the house-dog. Around me I MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 145 saw only the worthy, gentle, tranquil heads of old servants who had grown gray 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, gray skirts, thread mittens, and their hands on their girdles like religious per- sons ; 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 beds, 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 con- dition, 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 ot 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 itselt 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 worm- hole ; 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 to 146 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 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 tite-d-tite 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 aimable 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 dis- mount 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 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 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. H7 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 ! 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 thoroughbred : and, that everything might be complete and har- monious, 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 out 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 feel so drawn towards him that I would willingly enough abandon my love to have his friendship.'* VI. T this point, if the gentle reader will permit us, we shall for a time leave to his dreams the worthy personage who, up to the present, has monopolized the stage and spoken for himself alone, and go back to the ordinary form of romance, without, however, prohibiting ourselves from taking up the dramatic form, if necessary, later on, and reserving to ourselves the right of drawing further on the species of epistolary confession ad- dressed by the said young man to his friend, being persuaded that, however penetrating and full of sagacity we may be, we must know far less in this matter than he does himself. , . . The little page was so worn out that he slept in his master's arms, his little head all dishevelled, swaying to and fro as though he were dead. It was some distance from the flight of steps to the room which had been assigned to the new arrival, and the servant who showed him the way offered to carry the child in his turn ; but the young cavalier, to whom, moreover, the burden seemed but a feather, thanked him and would not relinquish it. He laid him down very gently on the couch, taking a thousand precautions not to awake him ; a mother could not have done better. When the servant had retired and the door was shut, he knelt down in front of him and tried to draw off his boots ; but the little feet, which were swelled and painful, rendered this operation somewhat difficult, and the pretty sleeper from time to time heaved vague and inarticulate sighs like one about to wake ; then the young MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 149 cavalier would stop and wait until sleep had again overpowered him. The boots yielded at last, this was the most important ; the stockings offered only a slight resistance. This operation accomplished, the master took both the child's feet and laid them beside each other on the velvet of the sofa ; they were quite the most adorable pair of feet in the world, as small as could be, as white as new ivory and a little rosy from the pressure of the boots in which they had been imprisoned for seventeen hours — feet too small for a woman, and which looked as though they had never walked ; what was seen of the leg was round, plump, smooth, transparent, veiny, and most exquisitely delicate ; a leg worthy of the foot. The young man, who was still on his knees, regarded these two little feet with loving and admiring attention ; he bent down, took the left one and kissed it, then the right and kissed it also ; and then with kisses after kisses he went back along the leg as far as the place where the cloth began. The page raised his long eyelash a little, and cast upon his master a kind and drowsy look in which no surprise was apparent. •' My belt is uncomfortable," he said, passing his finger beneath the ribbon, and fell asleep again. The master unfastened the belt, raised the page's head with a cushion, and touching his feet which, burn- ing as they were before, had become rather cold, wrapped them up carefully in his cloak, took an easy-chair and sat down as close as possible to the sofa. Two hours passed in this way the young man looking at the sleeping child and following the shadows of his dreams upon his brow. The only noise that was heard in the room was his regular breathing and the tick- tack of the clock. It was certainly a very graceful picture. There was a means for effect in the contrast of these two kinds of beauty that a skilful painter would have turned to good account. The master was as beautifulas a woman, the page as beautiful as a young girl. The round and rosy head, set thus in its hair looked like a peach beneath its leaves ; it was as fresh and as velvet, though the fatigue of the journey had robbed it of a little of its usual brilliance ; the half-opened mouth showed little teeth of milky Ijo MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. whiteness, and beneath his full and glossy temples a network of azure veins crossed one another ; his eyelashes, which were like the golden threads that are spread round the heads of virgins in the missals, reached nearly to the middle of his cheeks ; his long and silky hair resembled both gold and silver — gold in the shade and silver in the light ; his neck was at once fat and frail, and had nothing of the sex that was indicated by his dress ; two or three buttons, unfastened to facilitate respiration, allowed a. lozenge of plump and rounded flesh of wonderful whiteness to be seen through the hiatus in a shirt of fine Holland linen, as well as the beginning of a certain curving line difficult of explanation on the bosom of a young boy ; looking carefully at him it might also have been found that his hips were a little too much developed. The reader may draw his own conclusion ; we are offering him mere conjectures. We know as little of the matter as he does, but we hope to know more after a time, and we promise to faithfully keep him aware of our discoveries. If the reader's sight is better than ours, let his glance penetrate beneath the lace on that shirt and decide conscientiously whether the outline is too prominent or not prominent enough ; but we warn him that the curtains are drawn, and that a twilight scarcely favorable for investigations of the kind reigns in the room. The cavalier was pale, but of a golden paleness full of vigor and life ; his pupils swam in a blue, crystalline humor ; his straight and delicate nose imparted wonderful pride and energy to his profile, and its flesh was so fine that at the edge of the outline it suffered the light to pierce through ; his mouth had, at certain moments, the sweetest of smiles, but usually it was arched at the corners, inwards rather than outwards, like some of the heads that we see in the pictures of the old Italian masters ; and this gave him a little look of adorable disdain, a most piquant smorfia, an air of childish pouting and ill-humor, which was very singular and very charming. What were the ties uniting master to page and page to master ? There was assuredly something more between them MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 15I than the affection which may exist between master and servant. Were they two friends or two brothers ? If so, why this dis- guise ? It would at all events have been difficult for any one who had witnessed the scene that we have just described, to believe that these two personages were in reality only what they appeared to be. " The dear angel, how he sleeps ! " said the young man in a low voice ; " I don't think that he has ever travelled so far in his life. Twenty leagues on horseback, he who is so delicate ! I am afraid that he will be ill from fatigue. But no, it will be nothing ; there will be no sign of it to-morrow ; he will have recovered his beautiful color, and be fresher than a rose after rain. How beautiful he is, so ! If I were not afraid of awaking him, I would eat him up with caresses. What an adorable dimple he has on his chin ! what delicacy and white- ness of skin ! Sleep well, dear treasure. Ah ! I am truly jealous of your mother and I wish that I had made you. He is not ill .'' No ; his breathing is regular, and he does not stir. But I think some one knocked " And indeed two tittle taps had been given as softly as possible on the panel of the door. The young man rose, and, fearing that he was mistaken, de- layed opening until there should be another knock. Two other taps, a little more accentuated, were heard again, and a woman's soft voice said in a very low tone : " It is I, Theodore." Theodore opened the door, but with less eagerness than is usual with a young man opening to a young woman with a gentle voice who comes scratching mysteriously at his door towards nightfall. The folding door, being half-opened, gave passage to whom, think you ? — to the mistress of the perplexed D'Albert, the Princess Rosette in person, rosier than her name, and her bosom as moved as was ever that of a woman enter- ing at evening the room of a handsome cavalier. " Theodore ! " said Rosette. Theodore raised his finger and laid it on his lips, so that he looked like a statue of silence, and, showing her the sleeping child, conducted her into the next room. 152 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. "Theodore," resumed Rosette, who seemed to find singular pleasure in repeating the name, and to be seeking at the same time to collect her ideas. " Theodore," she continued, without releasing the hand which the young man had offered to her to lead her to an easy-chair, "so you have at last come back to us ? What have you been doing all this time ? where have you been ? Do you know that I have not seen you for six months ? Ah ! Theodore, that is not well ; some consideration and some pity is due to those who love us, even though we do not love them." " Theodore — " What have I been doing ? I do not know. I have come and gone, slept and waked, wept and sung, I have been hungry and thirsty, too hot and too cold, I have been weary, I have less money, and am six months older. I have been living and that is all. And you, what have you been doing ?" Rosette — "I have been loving you." Theodore — " You have done nothing else ? " Rosette — " Absolutely nothing else. I have been employ- ing my time badly, have I not ? " Theodore — " You might have employed it better, my poor Rosette ; for instance, in loving some one who could return your love." Rosette — " I am disinterested in love, as I am in every- thing, I do not lend love on usury ; I give it as a pure gift." Theodore — " That is a very rare virtue, and one which can only spring up in a chosen soul. I have often wished to be able to love you, at least in a way that you would like ; but there is an insurmountable obstacle between us which I cannot explain to you. Have you had another lover since I left you ? " Rosette—" I have had one whom I have still." Theodore — " What sort of man is he ? " Rosette—" A poet." Theodore — " The devil ! what kind of poet, and what has he written ? " Rosette — " I do not quite know ; a sort of volume that MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 53 nobody is acquainted with, and that I tried to read one even- ing." Theodore — " So you have an unknown poet for your lover. That must be curious. Has he holes at his elbows, dirty linen, and stockings like the screw of a press ? " Rosette — " No ; he dresses pretty well, washes his hands and has no inkspots on the tip of his nose. He is a friend of C 's ; I met him at Madame de Th^mines's house ; you know a big woman who acts the child and puts on little innocent airs." Theodore — "And might one know the name of this glo- rious personage ? " Rosette—" Oh, dear, yes ! He is called the Chevalier d'Albert." Theodore—" The Chevalier d'Albert ! It seems to me that he is the young man who was on the balcony when I was dis- mounting." Rosette — " Exactly." Theodore—" And who looked at me with such attention." Rosette — " Himself." Theodore—" He is well enough. — And he has not caused me to be forgotten ? " Rosette — " No. You are unfortunately not one of those who can be forgotten." Theodore — " He is very fond of you, no doubt ? " Rosette — " I am not quite sure. There are times when you would think that he loved me very much ; but in reality he does not love me, and he is not far from hating me, for he bears me ill-will because of his inability to love me. He has acted like many others more experienced than he ; he mistook a keen liking for passion, and was quite surprised and disappointed when his desire was satisfied. It is a mistake to think that people must worship each other because they have gone to bed together." Theodore—" And what do you intend to do with this said lover, who is not in love ? " Rosette — " What is done with the old quarters of the moon, 154 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. or with last year's fashions. He is not strong enough to leave me the first, and, although he does not love me in the true sense of the word, he is attached to me by a habit of pleasure, and such habits are the most difficult to break. If I do not assist him he is capable of wearying himself conscientiously with me until the day of the last judgment, and even beyond it ; for he has the germ of every noble quality in him ; and the flowers of his soul seek only to blossom in the sunshine of ever- lasting love. Really, I am sorry that I was not the ray for him. Of all my lovers that I did not love, I love him the most ; and if I were not so good as T am I should not give him back his liberty, and should keep him still. I shall not do so : I am at this moment finishing with him." Theodore—" How long will that last ? " Rosette — '• A fortnight or three weeks, but certainly a shorter time than it would have lasted had you not come. I know that I shall never be your mistress. For this, you say, there is a secret reason to which I would submit if you were permitted to reveal it to me. All hope must therefore be forbidden me in this respect and yet I cannot make up my mind to be the mistress of another when you are present : it seems to me that it is a profanation, and that I have no longer any right to love you." Theodore — "Keep him for the love of me." Rosette — " If it gives you pleasure I will do so. Ah ! if you could have been mine, how different would my life have been from what it has been ! The world has a very false idea of me, and I shall pass away without any one suspecting what I was — except you, Theodore, who alone have understood me, and have been cruel to me. I have never desired anyone but you for my lover, and I have not had you. If you had loved me, Theodore ! I should have been virtuous and chaste, I should have been worthy of you. Instead of that I shall leave behind me (if any one remembers me) the reputation of a gay woman, a sort of courtesan who differed from the one of the gutter only in rank and fortune. I was born with the loftiest inclinations ; but nothing corrupts like not being loved. Many MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 155 despise me without knowing what I must have suffered in order to come to be what I am. Being sure that I should never belong to him whom I preferred above all others, I abandoned myself to the stream, I did not take the trouble to protect a body that could not be yours. As to my heart nobody has had it, or ever will have it. It is yours, though you have broken it ; and, unlike most of the women who think themselves virtuous, pro- vided that they have not passed from one bed into another, though I have prostituted my flesh I have always been faithful in soul and heart to the thought of you. " I have at least made some persons happy. I have sent fair illusions dancing round some pillows. I have innocently deceived more than one noble heart ; I was so wretched at being repulsed by you that I was always terrified at the idea of subjecting anyone to similar torture. That was the only motive for many adventures which have been attributed to a pure spirit of libertinism ! I ! libertinism ! O world ! If you knew, Theodore, how profoundly painful it is to feel that you have missed your life, and passed your happiness by, to see that everyone is mistaken concerning you and that it is impos- sible to change the opinion that people have of you, that your finest qualities are turned into faults, your purest essences into black poisons, and that what is bad in you has alone trans- pired ; to find the doors always open to your vices and always closed to your virtues, and to be unable to bring a single lily or rose to good amid so much hemlock and aconite ! — you do not know this, Theodore." Theodore — " Alas ! alas ! what you say. Rosette, is the his- tory of everyone ; the best part of us is that which remains within us, and which we cannot bring forth. It is so with poets. Their finest poem is one that they have not written ; they carry away more poems in their coffins than they leave in their libraries." Rosette — " I shall carry my poem away with me." Theodore — " And I, mine. Who has not made one in his lifetime ? Who is so happy or so unhappy that he has not com- posed one of his own in his head or his heart ? Executioners 156 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. perhaps have made some that are moist with the tears of the tenderest sensibility ; and poets perhaps have made some which would have been suitable for executioners, so red and monstrous are they." Rosette — " Yes. They might put white roses on my tomb. I have had ten lovers — but I am a virgin, and shall die one. Many virgins, upon whose tombs there falls a perpetual snow of jessamine and orange blossom, were veritable Messalinas." Theodore — " I know your worth. Rosette." Rosette — "You are the only one in the world who has seen what I am ; for you have seen me under the blow of a very true and deep love, since it is without hope ; and one who has not seen a woman in love cannot tell what she is ; it is this that comforts me in my bitterness." Theodore — " And what does this young man think of you who, in the eyes of the world, is at present your lover ? " Rosette — "A lover's thought is a deeper gulf than the Bay of Portugal, and it is very difficult to say v^hat there is at bottom in a man ; you might fasten the sounding-lead to a cord a hundred thousand fathoms long, and reel it off to the end, and it would still run without meeting anything to stop it. Yet in his case I have occasionally touched the bottom at places, and the lead has brought back sometimes mud and sometimes beautiful shells, but oftenest mud with fragments of coral mingled together. As to his opinion of me it has greatly varied ; he began at first where others end, he despised me ; young people who possess a lively imagination are liable to do this. There is always a tremendous downfall in the first step that they take, and the passage of their chimera into reality cannot be accomplished without a shock. He despised me, and I amused him ; now he esteems me, and I weary him. "In the first days of our union he saw only my vulgar side, and I think that the certainty of meeting with no resistance counted for much in his determination. He appeared extremely eager to have an affair, and I thought at first that it was one of those plenitudes of heart which seek but to overflow, one of those vague loves which people have in the May- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 157 month of youth, and which lead them, in the absence of women, to encircle the trunks of trees with their arms, and kiss the flowers and grass in the meadows. But it was not that ; he was only passing through me to arrive at something else. I was a road for him, and not an end. Beneath the fresh appearance of his twenty years, beneath the first dawn of adolescence, he concealed profound corruption. He was worm- eaten at the core ; he was a fruit that contained nothing but ashes. In that young and vigorous body there struggled a soul as old as Saturn's, — a soul as incurable unhappy as ever there existed. *• I confess to you, Theodore, that I was frightened and was almost seized with giddiness as I leaned over the dark depths of that life. Your griefs and mine are nothing in comparison with his. Had I loved him more I should have killed him. Something that is not of this world nor in this world attracts him, and calls him, and will take no denial ; he cannot rest by night or by day ; and, like a heliotrope in a cellar, he twists himself that he may turn towards the sun that he does not see. He is one of those men whose soul was not dipped completely enough in the waters of Lethe before being united to his body ; from the heaven whence it comes it preserves recollections of eternal beauty which harass and torment it, and it remembers that it once had wings, and now has only feet. If I were God, the angel guilty of such negligence should be deprived of poetry, for two eternities. Instead of having to build a castle of bril- liantly colored cards to shelter a fair young fantasy for a single spring, a tower should have been built more lofty than the eight superposed temples of Belus. I was not strong enough, I ap- peared not to have understood him, I let him creep on his pinions and seek for a summit whence he might spring into the immensity of space, " He believes that I have seen nothing of all this because I have lent myself to all his caprices without seeming to suspect their aim. Being unable to cure him, I wished, and I hope that this will be taken into account some day before God, to give him at least the happiness of believing that he had been 158 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. passionately loved. He inspired me with sufficient pity and interest to enable me to assume with him tones and manners tender enough to delude him. I played my part like a con- summate actress ; I was sportive and melancholy, sensitive and voluptuous ; I feigned disquiet and jealousy ; I shed false tears, and called to my lips swarms of affected smiles. I attired this puppet of love in the richest stuffs ; I made it walk in the avenues of my parks; I invited all my birds to sing as it passed, and all my dahlias and daturas to salute it by bending their heads ; I had it cross my lake on the silvery back of my darling swan ; I concealed myself within, and lent it my voice, my wit, my beauty, my youth, and gave it so seductive an appearance that the reality was not so good as my falsehood. *' When the time comes to shiver this hollow statue I shall do it in such a way that he will believe all the wrong to be on my side, and will be spared remorse. I shall myself give the prick of the pin through which the air that fills this balloon will escape. Is this not holy prostitution and honorable deception ? I have a crystal urn containing a few tears which I collected at the moment when they were about to fall. They are my jewel- box and diamonds, and I shall present them to the angel who comes to take me away to God." Theodore — ** They are the most beautiful that could shine on a woman's neck. The ornaments of a queen have less value. For my part I think that the liquid poured by Mag- dalene upon the feet of Christ was made up of the former tears of those whom she had comforted, and I think, too, that it is with such tears as these that the Milky Way is strewn, and not, as was pretended, with Juno's milk. Who will do for you what you have done for him ? " Rosette — " No one, alas ! since you cannot." Theodore — " Ah ! dear soul ! to think that I cannot ! But do not lose hope. You are still beautiful, and very young. You have many avenues of flowering limes and acacias to traverse before you reach the damp road bordered with box and leafless trees, which leads from the porphyry tomb where your beautiful dead MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 1 59 years will be buried, to the tomb of rough and moss-covered stone into which they will hastily thrust the remains of what was once you, and the wrinkled, tottering spectres of the days of your old age. Much of the mountain of life is still left for you to climb, and it will be long ere you come to the zone of snow. You have only arrived at the region of aromatic plants, of limpid cascades wherein the iris hangs her tri-colored arch, of beautiful green oaks and scented larches. Mount a little higher, and from there, on the wider horizon which will be displayed at your feet, you shall perhaps see the bluish smoke rising from the roof where sleeps the man who is to love you. Life must not be despaired of at the very beginning ; vistas of what we had ceased to look for are opened up thus in our destiny. " Man in his life has often reminded me of a pilgrim following the snail-like staircase in a Gothic tower. The long granite ser- pent winds its coils in the darkness, each scale being a step. After a few circumvolutions the little light that came from the door is extinguished. The shadow of the houses that are not passed as yet, prevents the air-holes from letting in the sun. The walls are black and oozy ; it is more like going down into a dungeon never to come forth again than ascending to the turret which from below appeared to you so slender and fine, and covered with laces and embroideries as though it were setting out for a ball. " You hesitate as to whether you ought to go higher, this damp darkness weighs so heavily on your brow. The staircase makes some further turns and more frequent lutherns cut out their golden trefoils on the opposite wall. You begin to see the indented gables of the houses, the sculptures in the entablatures, and the whimsical shapes of the chimneys ; a few steps more and the eye looks down upon the entire town ; it is a forest of spires, steeples and towers which bristle up in every direction, indented slashed, hollowed, punched and allowing the light to appear through their thousand cuttings. The domes and cupolas are rounded like the breast of some giantess or the skulls of Titans. The islets of houses and places stand out in shaded or luminous slices. A few steps more and you will be on the l6o MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. platform ; and then, beyond the town walls, you will see the ver- dant cultivation, the blue hills and the white sails on the clouded ribbon of the river. " You are flooded with dazzling light, and the swallows pass and repass near you, uttering little joyous cries. The distant sound of the city reaches you like a friendly murmur, or the buzzing of a hive of bees ; all the bells strip their necklaces of sonorous pearls in the air ; the winds waft to you the scents from the neighboring forest and from the mountain flowers ; there is nothing but light, harmony and perfume. If your feet had become weary, or if you had been seized with discouragement and had remained seated on a lower step, or if you had gone down again altogether, this sight would have been lost to you. *' Sometimes, however, the tower has only a single opening in the middle or above. The tower of your life is constructed in this way ; then there is need of more obstinate courage, of perseverance armed with nails that are more hooked, so as to cling in the shadow to the projections of the stones and reach the resplendent trefoil through which the sight may escape over the country ; or perhaps the loop-holes have been filled up, or the making of them has been forgotten, and then it is necessary to ascend to the summit; but the higher you mount without seeing, the more immense seems the horizon, and the greater is the pleasure and the surprise." Rosette — " Oh Theodore, God grant that I may soon come to the place where the window is ! I have been following the spiral for a long time through the profoundest night ; but I am afraid that the opening has been built up and that I must climb to the summit ; and what if this staircase with its countless steps were only to lead to a walled-up door or a vault of freestone ? " Theodore — " Do not say that, Rosette ; do not think it. What architect would construct a staircase that should lead to nothing ? Why suppose the gentle architect of the world more stupid and improvident than an ordinary architect ? God does not mistake, and He forgets nothing. It is incredible that He should amuse Himself by shutting you up in a long stone tube MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. i6i without outlet or opening, in order to play you a trick. Why do you think that He should grudge poor ants such as we are their wretched happiness of a minute, and the imperceptible grain of millet that falls to them in this broad creation ? To do that He should have the ferocity of a tiger or a judge ; and, if we were so displeasing to Him, He would only have to tell a comet to turn a little from its path and strangle us with a hair of its tail. Why the deuce do you think that God would divert Himself by threading us one by one on a golden pin, as the Emperor Domitian used to treat flies ? God is not a portress, nor a churchwarden, and although He is old He has not yet fallen into childishness. All such petty viciousness is beneath Him, and He is not silly enough to try to be witty with us and play pranks with us. Courage, Rosette, courage ! If you are out of breath, stop a little to recover it, and then continue your ascent ; you have, perhaps, only twenty steps to climb in order to reach the embrasure whence you will see your happiness." Rosette — " Never ! oh, never ! and if I come to the sum- mit of the tower, it will be only to cast myself from it." Theodore — " Drive away, poor afflicted one, these gloomy thoughts which hover like bats about you, and shed the opaque shadow of their wings upon your brow. If you wish me to love you, be happy, and do not weep." (He draws her gently to him and kisses her on the eyes). Rosette — " What a misfortune it is to me to have known you ! and yet, were it to be done over again, I should still wish to have known you. Your severity has been sweeter to me than the passion of others ; and, although you have caused me much suffering, all the pleasure that I have had has. come to me from you ; through you I have had a glimpse of what I might have been. You have been a lightning-flash in my night, and you have lit up many of the dark places of my soul ; you have opened up vistas in my life that are quite new. To you I owe the knowledge of love, unhappy love, it is true ; but there is a deep and melancholy charm in loving without being loved, and, it is good to remember those who forget us. It is a happiness to be able to love even when you are the only one who loves, and II 1 62 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. many die without having experienced it, and often the most to be pitied are not those who love." Theodore — " They suffer and feel their wounds, but at least they live. They hold to something ; they have a star around which they gravitate, a pole to which they eagerly tend. They have something to wish for , they can say to themselves : * If I arrive there, if I have that, I shall be happy.' They have frightful agonies, but when dying they can at least say to themselves : ' I die for him.' To die thus is to be born again. The really, the only irreparably unhappy ones are those whose foolish embrace takes in the entire universe, those who wish for everything and wish for nothing, and who, if angel or fairy were to descend and say suddenly to them : * Wish for some- thing and you shall have it,' would be embarrassed and mute." Rosette — " If the fairy came, I know what I should ask her." Theodore — " You do. Rosette, and in that respect you are more fortunate than I, for I do not. Vague desires stir within me which blend together, and give birth to others which after- wards devour them. My desires are a cloud of birds whirling and hovering aimlessly ; your desire is an eagle who has his eyes on the sun, and who is prevented by the lack of air from rising on his outstretched wings. Ah ! if I could know what I want ; if the idea which pursues me would extricate itself clear and precise from the fog that envelops it ; if the fortunate or fatal star would appear in the depths of my sky ; if the light which I am to follow, whether perfidious will-o'-the-wisp or hospitable beacon, would come and be radiant in the night ; if my pillar of fire would go before me, even though it were across a desert without manna and without springs ; if I knew whither I am going, though I were only to come to a precipice ! — I would rather have the mad riding of accursed huntsmen through quagmires and thickets than this absurd and monotonous movement of the feet. To live in this way is to follow a calling like that of those horses which turn the wheel of some well with bandaged eyes, and travel thousands of leagues without seeing anything or changing their situation. I have been turning for a long time, and the bucket should have quite come up.* MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 163 Rosette — " You have many points of resemblance with D'Albert, and when you speak it seems to me sometimes as though he were the speaker. I have no doubt that when you are further acquainted with him you will become much attached to him ; you cannot fail to suit each other. He is harassed as you are by these aimless flights ; he loves immensely without knowing what, he would ascend to heaven, for the earth appears to him a stool scarcely good enough for one of his feet, and he has more pride than Lucifer had before his fall." Theodore — " I was at first afraid that he was one of those numerous poets who have driven poetry from the earth, one of those stringers of sham pearls who can see nothing in the world but the last syllables of words, and who when they have rhymed glade with shade, flame with name, and God with trod, con- scientiously cross their legs and arms and suffer the spheres to complete their revolution." Rosette — " He is not one of those. His verses are inferior to him and do not contain him. What he has written would give you a very false idea of his own person ; his true poem is him- self, and I do not know whether he will ever compose an- other. In the recesses of his soul he has a seraglio of beauti- ful ideas which he surrounds with a triple wall, and of which he is more jealous than was ever sultan of his odalisques. He only puts those into his verses which he does not care about or which have repulsed him ; it is the door through which he drives them away, and the world has only those which he will keep no longer." Theodore — " I can understand this jealousy and shame. In the same way many people do not acknowledge the love they had until they have it no longer, nor their mistresses until they are dead." Rosette — " It is so difficult to alone possess a thing in this world ! every torch attracts so many butterflies, and every treas- ure so many thieves ! I like those silent ones who carry their idea into their grave, and will not surrender it to the foul kisses and shameless touches of the crowd. I am delighted with the lovers who do not write their mistress's name on any bark, nor J 64 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. confide it to any echo, and who, when sleeping, are pursued by the dread lest they should utter it in a dream. I am one of the number ; I have never spoken my thought, and none shall know my love — but see, it is nearly eleven o'clock, my dear Theodore, and I am preventing you from taking the rest that you must need. When I am obliged to leave you, I always feel a heaviness of heart, and it seems to me the last time that I shall see you. I delay the parting as much as possible ; but one must part at last. Well, good-bye, for I am afraid that D'Albert will be looking for me ; dear friend, good-bye." Theodore put his arm about her waist, and led her thus to the door ; there he stopped following her for a long time with his gaze ; the corridor was pierced at wide intervals with little narrow-paned windows, which were lit up by the moon, and made a very fantastic alternation of light and shade. At each window Rosette's white, pure form shone like a silver phantom ; then it would vanish to reappear with greater brilliance a little further off ; at last it disappeared altogether. Theodore, seemingly lost in deep thought, remained motion- less for a few minutes with folded arms ; then he passed his hand over his forehead and threw back his hair with a move- ment of his head, re-entered the room, and went to bed after kissing the brow of the page who was still asleep. VII. S soon as it was light at Rosette's, D'Albert had himself announced with a promptness that was not usual with him. "Here you are," said Rosette, "and I should say you are early, if you could ever come early. And so, to reward you for your gallantry, I grant you my hand to kiss." And from beneath the lace-trimmed sheet of Flanders linen, she drew the prettiest little hand that was ever seen at the end of a round, plump arm. D'Albert kissed it with compunction. " And the other one, its little sister, are we not to kiss it as well ? " " Oh, dear, yes ! nothing more feasible. I am in my Sunday humor to-day ; here." And, bringing her other hand out of the bed, she tapped him lightly on the mouth. " Am I not the most accommodating woman in the world ? " " You are grace itself, and should have white marble temples raised to you in myrtle groves. Indeed I am much afraid that there will happen to you what happened to Psyche, and that Venus will become jealous of you," said D'Albert joining both the hands of the fair one and carrying them together to his lips. " How you deliver all that in a breath ! One would say that it was a phrase you had learnt by heart " said Rosette with a delicious little pout. " Not at all : you are quite worthy of having a phrase turned expressly for you, and you are made to pluck the virginity of madrigals," retorted D'Albert. "Oh, indeed ! really— what makes you so lively to day ? Are 1 66 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. you ill that you are so polite ? I fear that you will die. Do you know that it is a bad sign when anyone changes his character all at once with no apparent reason ? Now, it is an established fact, in the eyes of all the women who have taken the trouble to love you, that you are usually as cross as you can be, and it is no less certain that at this moment you are as charming as one can be, and are displaying most inexplicable amiability. There, I do think that you are looking pale, my poor D'Albert ; give me your arm, that I may feel your pulse." And she drew up his sleeve and counted the beats with comical gravity. " No, you are as well as possible, without the slightest symptom of fever. Then I must be furiously pretty this morning ! Just get me my mirror, and let me see how far your gallantry is right or wrong." D'Albert took up a little mirror that was on the toilet-table and laid it on the bed. " In point of fact," said Rosette, " you are not altogether wrong. Why do you not make a sonnet on my eyes, sir poet ? You have no reason for not doing so. Just see how unfortunate I am ! to have eyes like that and a poet like this, and yet to be in want of sonnets, as though I were one-eyed with a water-carrier for my lover ! You do not love me, sir ; you have not even written me an acrostic sonnet. And what do you think of my mouth ? Yet I have kissed you with that mouth, and shall, perhaps, do so again, my handsome gloomy one ; and, indeed, it is a favor that you scarcely deserve (this is not meant for to-day, for you deserve everything) ; but not to be always talking about myself, you have unparalleled beauty and fresh- ness this morning, you look like a brother of Aurora ; and although it is scarcely light you are already dressed and got up as though you were going to a ball. Perchance you have designs upon me ? would you deal a treacherous blow at my virtue ? do you wish to make a conquest of me ? But I forgot that that was done already, and is now ancient history." " Rosette, do not jest in that way ; you know very well that I love you." " Why that depends, I don't know it very well ; and you ? " MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 1 67 " Perfectly ; and so true is it that if you were so kind as to forbid your door to everybody, I should endeavor to prove it to you, I venture to flatter myself, in a victorious fashion." " As for that, no ; however much I may wish to be con- vinced, my door shall remain open ; I am too pretty to have closed doors ; the sun shines for everybody, and my beauty shall be like the sun to-day, if you have no objection." " But I have, on my honor ; however, act as though I thought it excellent. I am your very humble slave, and I lay my wishes at your feet." " That is quite right ; continue to have sentiments of the kind, and leave the key in your door this evening." " The Chevalier Theodore de S^rannes," said a big negro's head, smiling and chubby-faced, appearing between the leaves of the folding-door, " wishes to pay his respects to you and entreats you to condescend to receive him." " Ask the chevalier to come in," said Rosette drawing up the sheet to her chin. Theodore first went up to Rosette's bed and made her a most profound and graceful bow, to which she returned a friendly nod, and then turned towards D'Albert, and saluted him also with a free and courteous air. " Where were you ? " said Theodore. " I have perhaps inter- rupted an interesting conversation. Pray continue, and acquaint me with the subject of it in a few words." •* Oh, no ! " replied Rosette with a mischievous smile ; " we were talking of business." Theodore sat down at the foot of Rosette's bed, for D'Albert had placed himself beside the pillow, as being the first arrival ; the conversation wandered for some time from subject to sub- ject, and was very witty, very gay and very lively, which is the reason why we shall not give any account of it ; we should be afraid that it would lose too much if transcribed. Mien, accent, fire in speech and gesture, the thousand ways of pronouncing a word, all the spirit of it, like the foam of champagne which sparkles and evaporates immediately, are things that it is im- possible to fix and reproduce. It is a lacuna which we leave to 1 68 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. be filled up by the reader, and with which he will assuredly deal better than we ; let him here imagine five or six pages filled with everything of the most delicate, most capricious, most curi- ously fantastical, most elegant and most glittering description. We are aware that we are here employing an artifice which tends to recall that of Timanthes who, despairing of his ability to adequately represent Agamemnon's face, threw a drapery over his head ; but we would rather be timid than imprudent. It might perhaps be to the purpose to inquire into the motives which had prompted D'Albert to get up so early in the morning, and the incentive which had induced him to visit Rosette as early as if he had been still in love with her. It looked as though it were a slight impulse of secret and unacknowledged jealousy. He was certainly not much attached to Rosette, and he would even have been very glad to get rid of her, but he wished at least to give her up himself and not to be given up by her, a thing which never fails to wound a man's pride deeply, however well extinguished his first flame may otherwise be. Theodore was such a handsome cavalier that it was difficult to see him appearing in a connection without being appre- hensive of what had, in fact, often happened already, apprehen- sive, that is, lest all eyes should be turned upon him and all hearts follow the eyes ; and it was a singular thing that, although he had carried off many women, no lover had ever maintained towards him the lasting resentment which is usually entertained towards those who have supplanted you. In all his ways there was such a conquering charm, such natural grace, and some- thing so sweet and proud, that even men were sensible of it. D'Albert, who had come to see Rosette with the intention of speaking to Theodore with tartness, should he meet him there, was quite surprised to find himself free from the slightest im- pulse of anger in his presence, and so ready to receive the ad- vances that were made to him. At the end of half-an-hour you would have thought them friends from childhood, and yet D'Albert had an intimate con- viction that if Rosette was ever to love, it would be this man, and he had every reason to be jealous at least for the future, for as MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 1 69 to the present, he had as yet no suspicion ; what would it have been had he seen the fair one in a white dressing-gown gliding like a moth on a moon-ray into the handsome youth's room, and not coming out until three or four hours afterwards with mysterious precautions ? He might truly have thought himself more unfortunate than he was, for one of the things that we scarcely ever see is a pretty amorous woman, coming out of the chamber of an equally pretty cavalier exactly as she went in. Rosette listened to Theodore with great attention, and in the way that people listen to someone whom they love ; but what he said was so amusing and varied, that this attention seemed only natural and was easy of explanation. Accordingly D'Al- bert did not take umbrage at it. Theodore's manner towards Rosette was polished and friendly, but nothing more. " What shall we do to-day, Theodore ? " said Rosette ; " suppose we take a sail ? what do you think ? or we might go hunting ? " " Let us go hunting, it is less melancholy than gliding over the water side by side with some languid swan, and bending the leaves of the water-lilies right and left, — is that not your opinion, D'Albert ?" " I might perhaps prefer to flow along in the boat with the current of the stream to galloping desperately in pursuit of a poor beast ; but I will go where you go. We have now only to let Madame Rosette get up, and assume a suitable costume." Rosette gave a sign of assent, and rang to have herself dressed. The two young men went off arm-in-arm, and it was easy to guess, seeing them so friendly together, that one was the formal lover and the other the beloved lover of the same person. Everyone was soon ready. D'Albert and Theodore were already mounted in the first court when Rosette appeared in a riding-habit, on the top of the flight of steps. She had a little sprightly and easy air in this costume which became her very well. She leaped upon the saddle with her usual agility, and gave a switch to her horse which started off like an arrow, D'Albert struck in both his spurs and soon rejoined her, I70 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. Theodore allowed them to get some way ahead, being sure of catching them up as soon as he wished to do so. He seemed to be waiting for something, and often looked round towards the mansion. " Theodore, Theodore, come on ! are you riding a wooden horse ? " cried Rosette. Theodore gave his animal a gallop, and diminished the dis- tance separating him from Rosette, without, however, causing it to disappear. He again looked towards the mansion of which they were beginning to lose sight ; a little whirlwind of dust, in which some- thing that could not yet be discerned was in very hasty motion, appeared at the end of the road. In a few moments it was at Theodore's side, and opening up, like the classic clouds in the Iliad, displayed the fresh and rosy face of the mysterious page. '• Theodore, come along ! " cried Rosette a second time, " give your tortoise the spur and come up beside us." Theodore gave the rein to his horse which was pawing and rearing with impatience, and in a few seconds he was several heads in advance of D'Albert and Rosette. " Whoever loves me will follow me," said Theodore, leaping a fence four feet high. " Well, sir poet," he said, when he was on the other side, " you do not jump ? Yet your mount has wings, so people say." " Faith ! I would rather go round ; I have only one head to break after all ; if I had several I should try," replied D'Albert, smiling. "Nobody loves me then, since nobody follows me," said Theodore drawing down the arched corners of his mouth even more than usual. The little page raised his large blue-eyes towards him with a look of reproach, and brought his heels against his horse's sides. The horse gave a prodigious bound. " Yes ! somebody," he said to him on the other side of the fence. Rosette cast a singular look upon the child and blushed up to her eyes ; then, giving a furious stroke with her whip on the MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 1 71 neck of her mare, she crossed the bar of apple-green wood which fenced the avenue. "And I, Theodore, do you think that I do not love you ?" The child cast a sly side-glance at her, and drew close to Theodore. D'Albert was already in the middle of the avenue, and saw nothing of all this ; for, from time immemorial, fathers, hus- bands and lovers have been possessed of the privilege of seeing nothing. " Isnabel," said Theodore, "you are mad, and so are you Rosette ! Isnabel, you did not take sufficient room for the leap, and you. Rosette, nearly caught your dress in the posts. You might have killed yourself. " " What matter ? " replied Rosette with an accent so sad and melancholy that Isnabel forgave her for having leaped the fence as well. They went on for some time and reached the cross-roads where they were to find huntsmen and pack. Six arches cut in the thickness of the forest led to a little stone tower with six sides, on each of which was engraved the name of the road that terminated there. The trees rose to such a height that it seemed as if they wished to card the fleecy, flaky clouds sailing over their heads before a somewhat strong breeze ; close, high grass and impenetrable bushes afforded retreats and fortresses to the game, and the hunt promised to be a success. It was a genuine old-world forest, with ancient oaks more than a century old, such as are to be seen no longer now that we plant no more trees, and have not patience enough to wait until those that are planted have grown up ; a hereditary forest planted by great- grandfathers for the fathers, and by the fathers for the grand- sons, with avenues of prodigious breadth, an obelisk surmounted by a ball, a rock-work fountain, the indispensable pond, and white-powdered keepers in yellow leather breeches and sky-blue coats ; one of those dark, bushy forests wherein stand out in admirable relief the white satiny cruppers of the great horses of Wouvermans, and the broad flags on the Dampierre horns, which Parrocelli loves to display radiant on the huntsmen's backs. 172 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. A multitude of dog's tails, like pruning knives or hedge-bills, were curled friskily in a dusty cloud. The signal was given, the dogs, which were straining hard enough at the leash to strangle themselves were uncoupled, and the hunt began. We shall not describe very minutely the turnings and windings of the stag through the forest ; we do not even know with exactitude whether it was a full grown stag, and in spite of all our researches we have not been able to ascertain, which is really distressing. Nevertheless we think that only full-grown stags could have been found in such a forest, so ancient, so shady, and so lordly, and we see no reason why the animal after which the four principal characters of this illustrious romance were galloping on horses of different colors and non passibus acquis, should not have been one. The stag ran like the true stag that he was, and the fifty dogs at his heels were no ordinary spur to his natural swiftness. The run was so quick that only a few rare bays were to be heard. Theodore, being the best mounted and the best horseman, followed hard on the pack with incredible eagerness. D' Albert was close behind him. Rosette and the little page Isnabel came after, separated by an interval which was increasing every minute. The interval was soon so great as to take away all hope of restoring an equilibrium. " Suppose we stop for a little, " said Rosette, " to give our horses breath ? The hunt is going in the direction of the pond, and I know a cross-road which will take us there as soon as they. " Isnabel drew the bridle of his little mountain horse which, shaking the hanging locks of his mane over his eyes, bent his head, and began to scrape the sand with his hoofs. This little horse formed the most perfect contrast with Rosette's : he was as black as night, the other as white as satin : he was quite shaggy and dishevelled, the other had its mane plaited with blue, and its tail curled and crisped. The second looked like a unicorn, and the first like a barbet. The same antithetical difference was to be remarked in the MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 173 masters as in the steeds. Rosette's hair was as dark as Isnabel's was fair ; her eyebrows were very neatly traced and in a very apparent manner ; the page's were scarcely more vigorous than his skin and resembled the down on a peach. The color of the one was brilliant and strong like the light of noon ; the complexion of the other had the transparencies and blushings of the dawn of day. " Suppose we try to catch up the hunt now ? " said Isnabel to Rosette ; " the horses have had time to take breath." " Come along ! " replied the pretty amazon, and they started off at a gallop down a rather narrow, transverse avenue which led to the pond ; the two animals were abreast and took up nearly the whole breadth. On Isnabel's side a great branch projected like an arm from a twisted and knotted tree, which seemed to be shaking its fist at the riders. The child did not see it. " Take care ! " cried Rosette, " bend down on your saddle ! you will be unhorsed ! " The warning had been given too late ; the branch struck Isnabel in the middle of the body. The violence of the blow made him lose his stirrups, and, as his horse continued to gal- lop and the branch was too strong to bend, he found himself lifted out of the saddle and fell heavily behind. The child lay senseless from the blow. Rosette, greatly frightened, threw herself from her horse, and hastened to the page who showed no signs of life. His cap had fallen off, and his beautiful fair hair streamed on all sides in disorder on the sand. His little open hands looked like hands of wax, so pale were they. Rosette knelt down beside him and tried to restore him. She had neither salts nor flask about her, and her perplexity was great. At last she noticed a tolerably deep rut in which the rain-water had collected and become clear ; she dipped her finger into it, to the great terror of a little frog who was the naiad of this sea, and shook a few drops upon the bluish temples of the young page. He did not appear to feel them, and the water-pearls rolled along his white cheeks like a sylphid's tears along the 174 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. leaf of a lily. Rosette, thinking that his clothes might distress him, unfastened his belt, undid the buttons of his tightly-fitting coat and opened his shirt that his breast might have freer play. Rosette there saw something which to a man would have been one of the most agreeable surprises in the world, but which seemed to be very far from giving her pleasure — for her eyebrows drew close together, and her upper lip trembled slightly — namely, a very white bosom, scarcely formed as yet, but which gave admirable promise, and was already fulfilling much of it ; a , round, polished ivory bosom — to speak like the Ronsardizers — delicious to see, and more delicious to kiss. " A woman ! " she said, "a woman ! ah ! Theodore ! " Isnabel — for we shall continue to give him this name, although it was not his — began to breathe a little, and languidly raised his long eyelashes ; he had not been wounded in any way, but only stunned. He soon sat up, and with Rosette's assistance was able to stand up on his feet and remount his horse, which had stopped as soon as he had felt that his rider was gone. They proceeded at a slow pace as far as the pond, where they did in fact meet again with the rest of the hunt. Rosette, in a few words, related to Theodore what had taken place. The latter changed color several times during Rosette's narration, and kept his horse beside Isnabel's for the remainder of the way. They came back very early to the mansion ; the day which had commenced so joyously ended rather sadly. Rosette was pensive, and D'Albert seemed also to be plunged in deep thought. The reader will soon know what had occa- sioned this. VIII. 0, my dear Silvio, no, I have not forgotten you ; I am not one of those who pass through life without ever throwing a look behind ; my past follows me and invades my present, and almost my future ; your friendship is one of the sun-lit spots which stand out most clearly on the horizon quite blue as it already is of my later years ; often do I turn to contemplate it, from the summit I have reached, with a feeling of unspeakable melancholy. " Oh ! what a glorious time was that, when we were pure as angels ! Our feet scarcely touched the ground ; we had as it were wings upon our shoulders, our desires swept us away, and in the breeze of springtime there trembled about our brows the golden glory of adolescence. " Do you remember the little island planted with poplars at that part where the river branches off ? — To reach it, it was necessary to cross a somewhat long and very narrow plank which used to bend strangely in the middle ; a real bridge for goats, and one, indeed, which was scarcely used but by them : it was delicious. Short thick grass wherein the forget-me-not blink- ingly opened its pretty little blue eyes, a path as yellow as nankeen which formed a girdle for the island's green robe and clasped its waist, while an ever-moving shade of aspens and poplars were not the least of the delights of this paradise. There were great pieces of linen which the women would come to spread out to bleach in the dew ; you would have thought them squares of snow ; — and that little girl so brown and sun- burnt whose large wild eyes shone with such brilliant splendor beneath the long locks of her hair, and who used to run after I rj(y MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. the goats threatening them and shaking her osier rod when they made as though they would walk over the linens that were under her care — do you remember her ? " And the sulphur-colored butterflies with unequal and quivering flight, and the king-fisher which we so often tried to catch and which had its nest in that alder thicket ? and those paths down to the river, with their rudely hewn steps and their posts and stakes all green below, which were nearly always shut in by screens of plants and boughs ? How limpid and mirror- like was the water ! how clearly could we seethe bed of golden gravel ! and what a pleasure it was, seated on the bank, to let the tips of our feet dangle in it ! The golden-flowered water- lilies spreading gracefully upon it looked like green hair flowing over the agate back of some bathing nymph. The sky looked at itself in this mirror with azure smiles and most exquisite trans- parencies of pearl-gray, and at all hours of the day there were turquoises, spangles, wools and moires in exhaustless variety. How I loved those squadrons of little ducks with the emerald necks which used to sail incessantly from one bank to the other making wrinkles across the pure glass ! " How well were we suited to be the figures in that land- scape ! how well adapted were we to that sweet calm nature, and how readily did we harmonize with it ! Spring without, youth within, sun on the grass, smiles on our lips, flakes of blossoms on all the bushes, fair illusions full-blown in our souls, modest blushes on our cheeks and on the eglantine, poetry singing in our heart, unseen birds warbling in the trees, light, cooings, perfumes, a thousand confused murmurs, the heart beating, the water stirring a pebble, a grass-blade or a thought upspringing, a drop of water flowing along a flower-cup, a tear overflowing along an eyelash, a sigh of love, a rustling of leaves .... what evenings we spent there walking slowly, and so close to the edge that we had often one foot in the water and the other on the ground ! " Alas ! this lasted but a short time, with me, at least, for you have been able, while acquiring the knowledge of the man, to preserve the purity of the child. The germ of corruption MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 177 that was in me has developed very quickly, and the gangrene has pitilessly devoured all of me that was pure and holy. Nothing good is left to me but my friendship for you. " I am accustomed to con«eal nothing from you, neither actions nor thoughts. The most secret fibres of my heart I have laid bare before you ; however whimsical, ridiculous, and eccentric the impulses of my soul may be, I must describe them to you ; but, in truth, what I have experienced for some time is so strange, that I scarcely dare to acknowledge it to myself. I told you somewhere that I feared lest, from seeking the beautiful and disquieting myself to attain it, I should at last fall into the impossible or monstrous. I have almost come to this ; oh, when shall I emerge from all these currents which conflict together and draw me to left and right : when will the deck ot my vessel cease to tremble beneath my feet and be swept by the waves of all these storms ? where shall I find a harbor where I may cast anchor, and a rock immovable and beyond the reach of the billows where I may dry myself and wring the foam from my hair. " You know the eagerness with which I have sought for physical beauty, the importance that I attach to external form, and the love of the visible world that possesses me. I cannot be otherwise ; I am too corrupted and surfeited to believe in moral beauty, and to pursue it with any consistency. I have completely lost the knowledge of good and evil, and from sheer depravity have almost returned to the ignorance of the savage or the chikd. In truth, nothing appears to me worthy of praise or blame, and the strangest actions astonish me but little. My conscience is deaf and dumb. Adultery appears to me the most innocent thing in the world : I deem it quite a simple matter that a young girl should prostitute herself ; it seems to me that I would betray my friends without the least remorse, and that I should not have the slightest scruple about kicking people who annoyed me down a precipice if I were walking with them along the edge. I would look with coolness on the most atrocious sights, and there is something in the sufferings and misfortunes of humanity which is not displeasing to me. 1 experience at 12 178 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. the sight of some calamity falling upon the world the same feeling of acrid and bitter voluptuousness that is experienced by a man who at last avenges an old affront. " O world, what hast thou done to me that I should hate thee thus ? Who has filled me so with gall against thee ? what was I expecting from thee that I should preserve such rancor against thee for having deceived me ? to what lofty hope hast thou been false ? What eaglet wings hast thou shorn ? What doors wast thou to open which have remained closed and which of us has failed in respect of the other ? " Nothing touches me, nothing moves me ; I no longer feel, on hearing the recital of heroic deeds, those sublime quiverings which at one time would run through me from head to foot. AH this even appears to me to be somewhat silly. No accent is deep enough to bite the slackened fibres of my heart and cause them to vibrate : I see the tears of my fellow-creatures flow with as indifferent an eye as the rain, unless indeed they be of fine water, and the light be reflected in them in pictur- esque fashion and they flow over a beautiful cheek. For ani- mals, and for them almost alone, I have a feeble residue of pity. I would suffer a peasant or a servant to be beaten without mercy and could not patiently endure to have the same treatment given in my presence to a horse or a dog ; yet I am not wicked — I have never done, and probably shall never do, any harm to anybody in the world ; but this is rather a result of my indif- ference and the sovereign contempt which I have for all persons who do not please me, and which does not allow me to be oc- cupied with them even to do them any injury. " I abhor the whole world in a body, and in the whole col- lection I scarcely deem one or two worthy of a special hatred. To hate anyone is to disquiet yourself as much about him as though you loved him ; to distinguish him, isolate him from the crowd ; to be in a violent condition on account of him ; to think of him by day and dream of him by night ; to bite your pillow and grind your teeth at the thought that he exists ; what more could you do for one you loved ? Would you bestow the same trouble and activity on pleasing a mistress as on ruining an MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. j^g enemy ? I doubt it — in order to really hate anybody, we must love another. Every great hatred serves as a counter- weight to a great love ; and whom could I hate, I who love nobody ? " My hate, like my love, is a confused and general feeling, which seeks to fasten upon something and cannot ; I have a treasure of hate and love within me which I cannot turn to account, and which weighs horribly upon me. If I can find no means of pouring forth one or other of them, or both, I shall burst, and break asunder like bags crammed too full of money which rupture themselves and rip their seams. Oh ! if I could abhor somebody, if one of the stupid people with whom I live could insult me in such a way as to make my old viper blood boil in my icy veins and rouse me from the dull somnolence wherein I stagnate ; if thou couldst bite me on the cheek with thy rat-like teeth and communicate thy venom and thy rage to me, old sorceress with palsied head ; if someone's death could be my life ; if the last heart's throb of an enemy writhing beneath my foot could impart delicious quiverings to my hair, and the odour of his blood become sweeter to my parched nostrils than the aroma of flowers, oh ! how readily would I abandon love, and how happy would I esteem myself ! " Mortal embraces, tiger-like bitings, boa entwinings, ele- phant feet pressed on a cracking and flattening breast, steeled tail of the scorpion, milky juice of the euphorbia, curling kris of Java, blades that glitter in the night and are extinguished in blood, you it is that, with me, shall take the place of leafless roses, humid kisses and the entwinings of love ! " I have said that I love nothing ; alas ! I. am now afraid of loving something. It were ten thousand times better to hate than so to love ! I have found the type of beauty that I dreamed of so long. I have discovered the body of my phantom ; I have seen it, it has spoken to me, I have touched its hand, it exists : it is not a chimera. I well knew that I could not be mistaken, and that my presentiments never lied. Yes, Silvio, I am by the side of my life's dream ; its room is there and mine is here. I can see the trembling of the curtain l8o MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. at its window and thetlight of its lamp. Its shadow has just passed across the curtain. In an hour we shall sup together. " The beautiful Turkish eyelashes, the deep and limpid gaze, the warm color of pale amber, the long and lustrous black hair, the nose finely cut and proud, the joints and slender delicate extremities after the manner of Parmeginiano, the dainty curves, the purity of oval, which give so much elegance and aristocracy to a face, all that I wished for, and that I should have been happy to find disseminated in five or six persons, I have found united in one ! " What I most adore of all things in the world is a pretty hand. If you saw this one ! what perfection ! what vivacious whiteness ! what softness of skin ! what penetrating moisture ! how admirably tapering the extremity of the fingers ! how clear the oval markings on the nails ! what polish and what splendor ! you would compare them to the inner leaves of a rose, — the hands of Anne of Austria, so vaunted and celebrated, are in comparison but those of a turkey-bird or of a scullery- maid. And then what grace is there and what art in the slightest movements of this hand ! how gracefully does this little finger curve and keep itself a little apart from its tall brothers ! The thought of this hand maddens me, and causes my lips to quiver and burn. I close my eyes that I may see it no longer ; but with the tips of its delicate fingers it takes my eyelashes and opens the lids, and causes a thousand visions of ivory and snow to pass before me. "Ah ! it is Satan's claw, no doubt, that is gloved beneath this satin skin ; — it is some jesty demon who is befooling me, — there is some sorcery here. It is too monstrously impossible. This hand — I shall set out for Italy to see the pictures of the great masters, to study, compare, draw, and in short be- come a painter that I may represent it as it is, as I see it, as I feel it ; it will perhaps be a means of ridding myself of this species of possession. " I wished for beauty ; I knew not what I asked. It is to be desirous of looking without eyelids at the son, to be desirous of touching fire. I suffer horribly. To be unable to assimilate MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. igi this perfection, to be unable to pass into it and have it pass into me, to have no means of representing it and making it felt ! When I see something beautiful I wish to touch it with the whole of myself, everywhere and at the same time. I wish to sing it, and paint it, to sculpture it and write it, to be loved by it as I love it : I wish what is, and ever will be, impossible. " Your letter has done me harm, much harm — forgive me for saying so. All the calm, pure happiness that you enjoy, the walks in the reddening woods, the long talks so tender and in- timate which end with a chaste kiss upon the brow ; the sepa- rate and serene life ; the days so quickly spent that the night seems to advance, make me find the internal perturbations in which I live more tempestuous still. So you are to be married in two months ; all the obstacles are removed, and you are now sure of belonging to each other forever. Your present felicity is increased by all your future felicity. You are happy and you have the certainty of being still happier soon. What a lot is yours ! Your loved one is beautiful, but what you love in her is not lifeless and palpable beauty, material beauty, but the beauty that is invisible and eternal, the beauty that never grows old, the beauty of the soul. She is full of grace and purity ; she loves you as such souls know how to love. You did not seek to know whether the gold of her hair approached in tone the tresses of Rubens and Giorgione ; but it pleased you because it was hers. And I will wager, happy lover that you are, that you do not even know whether your mistress's type is Greek or Asiatic, English or Italian. O Silvio ! how rare are the hearts that are satisfied with love pure and simple and desire neither a hermitage in the forests, nor a garden on an island in Lake Maggiore. " If I had the courage to tear myself from here, I would go and spend a month with you ; it might be that I should be purified in the air that you breathe, and that the shadows of your avenues would shed a little freshness on my burning brow ; but no, it is a paradise wherein I must not set my foot. Scarcely should I be permitted to gaze from a distance over the wall at the two beautiful angels walking in it, hand in hand and 1 82 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. eye to eye. The demon cannot enter into Eden save in the form of a serpent, and, dear Adam, for all the happiness in heaven, I would not be the serpent to your Eve. " What fearful work has been wrought in my soul of late ? who has turned my blood and changed it into venom ? Mon- strous thought, spreading thy pale green branches and thy hemlock umbels in the icy shadow of my heart, what poisoned wind has lodged there the germ whence thou art sprung ? It was this then that was reserved for me, it was to this that all the paths, so desperately essayed, were to lead me ! O fate, how thou dost mock us ! All the eagle-flights towards the sun, the pure flames aspiring to heaven, the divine melancholy, the love deep and restrained, the religion of beauty, the fancy so curious and graceful, the exhaustless and ever-mounting flood from the internal spring, the ecstasy ever open-winged, the dreaming that bore more blossoms than the hawthorn in May, all the poetry of my youth, all these gifts so beautiful and rare, were only to succeed in placing me beneath the lowest of mankind ! " I wished to love. I went like a madman calling and in- voking love ; I writhed with rage beneath the feeling of my impotence ; I fired my blood, and dragged my body to the sloughs of pleasure ; I clasped to suffocation against my arid heart a fair young woman who loved me ; I pursued the passion that fled from me. I prostituted myself, and acted like a virgin going into an evil place in the hope of finding a lover among those brought thither by debauchery, instead of waiting patiently in discreet and silent shadow until the angel reserved for me by God should appear to me with radiant penumbra, a flower from heaven ready to my hand. All the years that I have wasted in childish disquietude, hastening hither and thither, and trying to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation in striving to render myself worthy of being loved ; that would have been wisely done ; but I had scales before my eyes and I walked straight to the precipice. Already I have one foot suspended over the void, anid I believe that I shall soon raise the other. My resistance is in vain, I MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 183 feel it, I must roll to the bottom of the new abyss which has just opened up within me. " Yes, it was indeed thus that I had imagined love. I now feel that of which I had dreamed. Yes, here is the charming and terrible sleeplessness in which the roses are thistles and the thistles roses ; here is the sweet grief and the wretched happiness, the unspeakable trouble which surrounds you with a golden cloud and, like drunkenness, causes the shape of objects to waver before you, the buzzings in the ear wherein there ever rings the last syllable of the well-beloved's name, the paleness, the flushings, the sudden quiverings, the burning and icy sweat : it is indeed thus ; the poets do not lie. " When I am about to enter the drawing-room in which we usually meet, my heart beats with such violence that it might be seen through my dress, and I am obliged to restrain it with both my hands lest it should escape. If I perceive this form at the end of an avenue or in the park, distance is straightway effaced, and the road passes away I know not where ; the devil must carry it off or I must have wings. Nothing can divert my attention from it : I read, and the same image comes between the book and my eyes ; I ride, I gallop, and I still believe that I can feel in the whirlwind its long hair mingling with mine, and hear its hurried respiration and its warm breath passing lightly over my cheek. This image possesses and pursues me everywhere, and I never see it more than when I see it not. " You pitied me for not loving, pity me now for loving, and above all for loving whom I love. What a misfortune, what a hatchet-stroke upon my life that was already so mutilated ! what senseless, guilty, odious passion has laid hold upon me ! It is a shame whose blush will never fade from my brow. It is the most lamentable of all my aberrations, I cannot understand it, I cannot comprehend it at all, everything is confused and upset within me ; I can no longer tell who I am or what others are, I doubt whether I am a man or woman, I have a horror of myself, I experience strange and inexplicable emotions, and there are moments when it seems to me as if my reason were 1 84 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. departing, and when the feeling of my existence forsakes me altogether. For a long time I could not believe what was ; I listened to myself and watched myself attentively. I strove to unravel the confused skein that was entangled in my soul. At last, through all the veils which enveloped it, I discovered the frightful truth. Silvio, I love — Oh ! no, I can never tell you — I love a man!" IX. T is so. I love a man, Silvio. I long sought to delude myself; I gave a different name to the feeling that I experienced ; I clothed it in the garment of pure and disinterested friendship ; I believed that it was merely the admiration which I entertain for all beautiful persons and things ; for several days I walked in the treacherous, pleasant paths that wander about every waking passion ; but I now recognize the profound and terrible road to which I am pledged. There is no means of concealment : I have examined myself thoroughly, and coldly weighed all the circumstances ; I have accounted to myself for the smallest detail ; I have explored my soul in every direction with the certainty which results from the habit of self-investiga- tion ; I blush to think and write about it ; but the fact, alas ! is only too certain, I love this young man not from friendship but from love ;— yes, from love. " You whom I have loved so much, Silvio, my good, my only comrade, you have never inspired me with a similar feeling, and yet, if ever there was under heaven a close and lively friendship, if ever two souls, though different, understood each other perfectly, it was our friendship and our two souls. What winged hours have we spent together ! what talks without end and always too soon terminated ! how many things have we said to each other which people have never said to themselves ! We had towards each other in our hearts the window which Momus would have liked to open in man's bosom. How proud 1 86 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. I was of being your friend, I who was younger than you, I so insane and you so full of reason ! " What I feel towards this young man is truly incredible ; no woman has ever troubled me so singularly. The sound of his clear, silvery voice affects my nerves and agitates me in a strange manner ; my soul hangs on his lips, like a bee on a flower, to drink in the honey of his words. I cannot brush him as I pass without quivering from head to foot, and when, in the evening, as we are separating, he gives me his soft, satin- like, adorable hand, all my life rushes to the spot that he has touched, and an hour afterwards I still feel the pressure of his fingers. " This morning I gazed at him for a long time without his seeing me. I was concealed behind my curtain. He was at his window which is exactly opposite to mine. This part of the mansion was built at the end of Henri IV's reign ; it is half brick, half ashlar, according to the custom of the time ; the window is long and narrow, with a lintel and balcony of stone. Theodore — for you have no doubt already guessed that it is he who is in question — was resting his elbow on the parapet with a melancholy air, and appeared to be in a profound reverie. A drapery of red, large-flowered damask, which was half caught up, fell in broad folds behind him and served him as a back- ground. How handsome he was, and how marvellously his dark and pale head was set off by the purple tint ! Two great clusters of black, lustrous hair, like the grape-bunches of the ancient Erigone, hung gracefully down his cheeks, and framed in a most charming manner the correct delicate oval of his beautiful face. His round, plump neck was entirely bare, and he had on a dressing-gown with broad sleeves which was toler- ably like a woman's dress. In his hand he held a yellow tulip, picking it pitilessly to pieces in his reverie and throwing the fragments to the wind. " One of the luminous angles traced by the sun on the wall chanced to be projected against the window, and the picture was gilded with a warm, transparent tone which would have made Giorgione's most brilliant canvas envious. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 187 " With his long hair stirred softly by the breeze, his marble neck thus uncovered, his ample robe clasped around his waist, and his beautiful hands issuing from their ruffles like the pistils of a flower from the midst of their petals, he looked not the handsomest of men but the most beautiful of women, and I said in my heart — ' It is a woman, oh ! it is a woman ! ' Then I suddenly remembered the nonsense which, as you know, I wrote to you a long time ago, respecting my ideal and the manner in which I should assuredly meet with it : the beautiful lady in the Louis XIII park, the red and white mansion, the large terrace, the avenues of old chestnut trees, and the interview at the window ; I once gave you all these details. It was just so, — what I saw was the exact realization of my dream. It was just the style of architecture, the effect of light, the description of beauty, the color and the character, that I had desired ; — nothing was wanting, only the lady was a man ; — but I con- fess to you that for the moment I had completely forgotten this. " Theodore must be a woman disguised ; the thing is im- possible otherwise. Such beauty, even for a woman, is not the beauty of a man, were he Antinoiis, the friend of Adrian ; were he Alexis, the friend of Virgil. It is a woman, by heaven, and I was very foolish to torment myself in such a manner. In this way everything is explained in the most natural fashion in the world, and I am not such a monster as I believed. "Would God put those long, dark silken fringes on the coarse eyelids of a man ? Would he dye our ugly blubber- lipped and hair-bristling mouths with carmine so delicate and bright ? Our bones, hewn into shape as with blows of a hedge- bill and coarsely fitted together, are not worthy of being swaddled in such white and tender flesh ; our indented skulls are not made to be bathed in floods of such wonderful hair. *' O beauty ! we were created pnly to love thee and worship thee on our knees, if we have found thee, and to seek thee eternally through the world, if this happiness has not been given to us ; but to possess thee, to be thyself, is possible only to angels and to women. Lovers, poets, painters and sculptors, we all seek to raise an altar to thee, the lover in his mistress, the 1 88 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. poet in his song, the painter in his canvas, the sculptor in his marble ; but it is everlasting despair to be unable to give palpability to the beauty that you feel, and to be enshrouded in a body w^hich in no way realizes the body which you know to be yours. '• I once saw a young man who had robbed me of the form that I ought to have had. The rascal was just such as I should have wished to be. He had the beauty of my ugliness, and beside him I looked like a rough sketch of him. He was of my height, but more slender and vigorous ; his figure resembled mine, but had an elegance and nobility that I do not possess. His eyes were not of a different color than my own, but they had a look and a brilliancy that mine will never have. His nose had been cast in the same mould as mine, but it seemed to have been retouched by the chisel of a skilful statuary ; the nostrils were more open and more impassioned, the flat parts more cleanly cut, and there was something heroic in it which is altogether wanting to that respectable portion of my individuality : you would have said that nature had first tried in my person to make this perfected self of mine. " I looked like the erased and shapeless draught of the thought whereof he was the copy in fair, moulded writing. When I saw him walk, stop, salute the ladies, sit and lie down with the perfect grace which results from beauty of proportion, I was seized with sadness and frightful jealousy, such as must be felt by the clay model drying and splitting obscurely in a corner of the studio, while the haughty marble statue, which would not have existed without it, stands proudly on its sculptured socle, and attracts, the attention and praises of the visitors. For the rogue is, after all, only my own self which has succeeded a little better, and been cast with less rebellious bronze, that has made its way more exactly into the hollows of the mould. I think that he has great hardihood to strut in this way with my form and to display as much insolence as though he were an original type : he is, when all is said, only a plagiar- ism from me, for I was born before him, and without me nature could not have conceived the idea of making him as he is. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 189 '* When women praised his good manners and personal charms, I had every inclination in the world to rise and say to them — * Fools that you are, just praise me directly, for this gentleman is myself and it is uselessly circuitous to transmit to him what is destined to come back to me.' At other times I itched horribly to strangle him and to turn his soul out of the body which belonged to me, and I would prowl about him with compressed lips and clenched fists like a lord prowling around his palace in which a family of ragamuffins has established it- self in his absence, and not knowing how to cast them out. For the rest, this young man is stupid, and succeeds all the better for it. And sometimes I envy him his stupidity more than his beauty. " The Gospel saying about the poor in spirit is not com- plete : ' They shall have the kingdom of Heaven ' ; I know nothing about that, and it is a matter of indifference to me ; but they most certainly have the kingdom of the earth, — they have the money and the beautiful women, in other words the only two desirable things in the world. Do you know a sensi- ble man who is rich, or a fellow with heart and some merit who has a passable mistress ? Although Theodore is very handsome, I nevertheless have not wished for his beauty, and I would rather he had it than L *♦ Those strange loves of which the elegies of the ancient poets are full, which surprised us so much and which we could not understand, are probable, therefore, and possible. In the translations that we used to make of them we substituted the names of women for those which were actually there. Juven- tius was made to terminate as Juventia, Alexis was changed into lanthe. The beautiful boys became beautiful girls, we thus reconstructed the monstrous seraglio of Catullus, Tibullus, Martial, and the gentle Virgil. It was a very gallant occupation which only proved how little we had comprehended the ancient genius. " I am a man of the Homeric times ; the world in which I live is not mine, and I have no comprehension of the society which surrounds me. Christ has not come for me ; I am as much a pagan as were Alcibiades and Phidias. I have never 190 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. gone to pluck passion flowers upon Golgotha, and the deep river which flows from the side of the Crucified One and forms a red girdle round the world has not bathed me in its floods. My rebellious body will not recognize the supremacy of the soul, and my flesh does not admit that it should be mortified. I deem the earth as fair as heaven, and I think that correctness of form is virtue. Spirituality does not suit me, I prefer a statue to a phantom, and noon to twilight. Three things please me : gold, marble and purple, splendor, solidity and color. My dreams are composed of them, and all my chimerical palaces are constructed of these materials. •* Sometimes I have other dreams, — of long cavalcades of perfectly white horses, without harness or bridle, ridden by beautiful naked youths who defile across a band of dark blue color as on the friezes of the Parthenon, or of theories of young girls crowded with bandelets, with straight-folded tunics and ivory sistra, who seem to wind around an immense vase. Never mist or vapor, never anything uncertain or wavering. My sky has no clouds, or, if there be any, they are solid chisel-carved clouds, formed with the marble fragments fallen from the statue of Jupiter. Mountains with sharp-cut ridges indent it abruptly on the borders, and the sun, leaning on one of the loftiest sum- mits, opens wide his lion-yellow eye with its golden lashes. The grasshopper cries and sings, the corn-ear cracks ; the shadow, vanquished and exhausted by the heat, rolls itself up and collects itself at the foot of the trees : everything is radiant, shining, resplendent. The smallest detail becomes firm and is boldly accentuated ; every object assumes a robust form and color. There is no room for the softness and dreaming of Chris- tian art. " Such a world is mine. The streams in my landscapes fall in a sculptured tide from a sculptured urn ; through the tall green reeds, sonorous as those of the Eurotas, may be seen glistening the round, silvery hip of some nymph with glaucous hair. Here is Diana passing through this dark oak forest with her quiver at her back, her flying scarf, and her buskins with intertwining bands. She is followed by her pack and her MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. j^j nymphs with harmonious names. My pictures are painted with four tints, like the pictures of the primitive painters, and often they are only colored basso-relievos ; for I love to touch what I have seen with my finger and to pursue the roundness of the outlines into its most fugitive windings ; I view each thing from every side and go around it with a light in my hand. " I have looked upon love in the light of antiquity and as a more or less perfect piece of sculpture. How is this arm ? Pretty well. The hands are not wanting in delicacy. What do you think of this foot ? I think that the ankle is without nobility, and that the heel is commonplace. But the breast is well placed and of good shape, the serpentine line is sufficiently undulating, the shoulders are fat and of a handsome character. This woman would be a passable model, and it would be pos- sible to cast several portions of her. Let us love her. " I have always been thus. I look upon women with the eyes of a sculptor and not of a lover. I have all my life been troubled about the shape of the flagon, never about the quality of its contents. I might have had Pandora's box in my hand, and I believe that I should not have opened it. Just now I said that Christ had not come for me ; Mary, star of the modern Heaven, sweet mother of the glorious babe, has not come either. " For a long time and very often I have stopped beneath the stone foliage in cathedrals, in the trembling brightness from the windows at an hour when the organ was moaning of itself, when an invisible finger touched the keys and the wind breathed in the pipes, and I have plunged my eyes deep into the pale azure of the long eyes of the Madonna. I have fol- lowed piously the wasted oval of her face, arid the scarcely indicated arch of her eyebrows ; I have admired her smooth and luminous brow, her chastely transparent temples, her cheek-bones shaded with a sober virginal color, tenderer than the blossom of the peach ; I have counted one by one the beautiful golden lashes casting their palpitating shadow ; through the half-tint which bathes her I have distinguished the fleeting lines of her frail and modestly bended neck ; I have even, with rash hand, raised the folds of her tunic and con- 1^2 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. templated unveiled the virgin, milk-distended bosom which was never pressed but by lips divine ; I have pursued its delicate blue veins into their most imperceptible ramifications, I have laid my finger upon it that I might cause the celestial drink to spring forth in white streams ; I have touched with my mouth the bud of the mystic rose. " Well ! I confess that all this immaterial beauty, so winged and vaporous that one feels that it is about to take its flight, has affected me very moderately. I prefer the Venus Ana- dyomene a thousand times. The antique eyes turned up at the corners, the lips so pure and so firmly cut, so amorous and so inviting for a kiss, the low full brow, the hair undulating like the sea and knotted carelessly behind the head, the firm and lustrous shoulders, the back with its thousand charming curves, the small and gently swelling bosom, all the well-rounded shapes, the breadth of hips, the delicate strength, the expression of superhuman vigor in a body so adorably feminine, ravish and enchant me to a degree of which you can form no idea, you who are a Christian and discreet. " Mary, in spite of the humble air which she affects, is far too proud for me ; scarcely does even the tip of her foot, in its encircling white bandelets, touch the surface of the globe which is already growing blue and on which the old serpent is writh- ing. Her eyes are the most beautiful in the world, but they are always turned towards heaven or cast down ; they never look you in the face and have never reflected a human form. And then, I do not like the nimbuses of smiling cherubs which circle her head in a golden vapor. I am jealous of the tall pubescent angels with floating robes and hair who are so am- orously eager in her assumptions ; the hands entwined to sup- port her, the wings in motion to fan her, displeased and annoy me. These heavenly coxcombs, so coquettish and triumphant, with their tunics of light, their perukes of golden thread, and their handsome blue and green feathers, seem too gallant to me, and if I were God I should take care not to give such pages to my mistress. *' Venus emerges from the sea to land upon the world — MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 1^3 as is fitting in a divinity that loves men— quite naked and quite alone. She prefers the earth to Olympus, and has more men than gods for her lovers ; she does not enwrap herself in the languorous veils of mysticism ; she stands erect, her dolphin behind her, her foot on her couch of mother of pearl ; the sun strikes upon her polished body, and with her white hand she holds up in the air the flood of her beautiful hair on which old Father Ocean has strewn his most perfect pearls. You may look at her : she conceals nothing, for modesty was made for the ugly alone, and is a modern invention, daughter of the Christian contempt for form and matter. " O ancient world ! so all that thou has revered is scorned ; so thy idols are overthrown in the dust ; wasted anchorites, clad in rags that are full of holes, and blood-covered martyrs, with shoulders torn by the tigers in thy circuses, have perched them- selves upon the pedestals of thy beautiful, charming gods : Christ has wrapped the world in his shroud. Beauty must blush at itself and assume a winding sheet. Beautiful youths with oil- rubbed limbs who wrestle in lyceum or gymnasium, beneath the brilliant sky, in the full light of the Attic sun, before the astonished crowd ; young Spartan girls who dance the bibasis, and run naked to the summit of Taygetus, resume your tunics and your chlamydes : your reign is past. And you, shapers of marble, Prometheuses of bronze, break your chisels : there are to be no more sculptors. The palpable world is dead. A dark and lugubrious thought alone fills the immensity of the void. Cleomene goes to the weavers to see what folds are made by cloth or linen. " Virginity, bitter plant, born on a soil steeped with blood, whose etiolated and sickly flower opens painfully in the dark shade of cloisters, beneath a coldlustral rain ; — scentless rose all bristling with thorns, thou hast taken the place, with us, of the beautiful, joyous roses bathed in spikenard and Falernian of the dancing women of Sybaris ! "The ancient world did not know thee, fruitless flower; never didst thou enter into its wreaths of intoxicating fra- grance ; in that vigorous and healthy society thou wouldst have 13 194 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. been trampled scornfully underfoot. Virginity, mysticism, melancholy, — three unknown words, — three new maladies brought in by Christ. Pale spectres who flood our world with your icy tears and who, with your elbow on a cloud and your hand in your bosom, can only say — ' O death ! O death ! ' you could not have set foot in that world so well peopled with indulgent and wanton gods ! "I consider woman, after the manner of the ancients, as a beautiful slave designed for our pleasure. Christianity has not rehabilitated her in my eyes. To me she is still something dissimilar and inferior that we worship and play with, a toy which is more intelligent than if it were of ivory or gold, and which gets up of itself if we let it fall. I have been told, in con- sequence of this, that I think badly of women ; I consider, on the contrary, that it is thinking very well of them. " I do not know, in truth, why women are so anxious to be regarded as men. I can understand a person wish to be a boa, a lion or an elephant ; but that anyone should wish to be a man is something quite beyond my comprehension. If I had been at the Council of Trent when they discussed the important question of whether a woman is a man, I should certainly have given my opinion in the negative. " I have written some love-verses during my lifetime, or, at least, some which assumed to pass for such. I have just read a portion of them again. They are altogether wanting in the sentiment of modern love. If they were written in Latin distichs instead of in French rhymes, they might be taken for the work of a bad poet of the time of Augustus. And I am astonished that the women, for whom they were written, were not seriously angry, instead of being quite charmed with them. It is true that women know as little about poetry as cabbages and roses, which is quite natural and plain, being themselves poetry, or, at least, the best instruments for poetry : the flute does not hear nor understand the air that is played upon it. " In these verses nothing is spoken of but golden or ebony hair, marvellous delicacy of skin, roundness of arm, smallness of foot, and shapely daintiness of hand, and the whole termi- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ig^ nates with a humble supplication to the divinity to grant the enjoyment of all these beautiful things as speedily as possible. In the triumphant passages there is nothing but garlands hung upon the threshold, torrents of flowers, burning perfumes, Catullian addition of kisses, sleepless and charming nights, quarrels with Aurora, and injunctions to the same Aurora to return and hide herself behind the saffron curtains of old Tithonus ; — brightness without heat, sonorousness without vibration. They are accurate, polished, written with consistent elaboration ; but through all the refinements and veils of expres- sion you may divine the short, stern voice of the master trying to be mild while speaking to the slave. There is no soul, as in the erotic poetry written since the Christian era, asking another soul to love it because it loves ; there is no azure-tinted, smil- ing lake inviting a brook to pour itself into its bosom that they may reflect the stars of heaven together ; there is no pair of doves spreading their wings at the same time to fly to the same nest. *' Cynthia, you are beautiful ; make haste. Who knows whether you will be alive to-morrow ? Your hair is blacker than the lustrous skin of an Ethiopian virgin. Make haste ; a few years hence, slender silver threads will creep into its thick clusters ; these roses smell sweet to-day, but to-morrow they will have the odor of death, and be but the corpses of roses. Let us inhale thy roses while they resemble thy cheeks ; let us kiss thy cheeks while they resemble thy roses. When you are old, Cynthia, no one will have anything more to do with you, — not even the lictor's servants when you would pay them, — and you will run after me whom now you repulse. Wait until Saturn " with his nail has scratched this pure and shining brow, and you will see how your threshold, so besieged, so entreated, so warm with tears and so decked with flowers, will be shunned, and cursed, and covered with weeds and briars. Make haste, Cynthia ; the smallest wrinkle may serve as a grave for the greatest love. " Such is the brutal and imperious formula in which all ancient elegy is contained : it always comes back to it ; it is its greatest, its strongest reason, the Achilles of its arguments. 196 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. After this it has scarcely anything to say, and, when it has promised a robe of twice-dyed byssus and a union of equal- sized pearls, it has reached the end of its tether. And it is also nearly the whole of what I find most conclusive in a similar emergency. " Nevertheless I do not always abide by so scanty a pro- gramme, but embroider my barren canvas with a few differently colored silken threads picked up here and there. But these pieces are short or are twenty times renewed, and do not keep their places well on the groundwork of the woof. I speak of love MHth tolerable elegance because I have read many fine things about it. It only needs the talent of an actor to do so. With many women this appearance is enough ; my habitual writing and imagination prevent me from being short of such materials, and every mind that is at all practiced may easily arrive at the same result by application ; but I do not feel a word of what I say, and I repeat in a whisper like the ancient poet : Cynthia, make haste. " I have often been accused of deceit and dissimulation. Nobody in the world would be so pleased as myself to speak freely and pour forth his heart ! but, as I have not an idea or a feeling similar to those of the people who surround me, — as, at the first true word that I let fall, there would be a hurrah and a general outcry, I have preferred to keep silence, or, if speaking, to discharge only such follies as are admitted and have rights of citizenship. I should be welcome if I said to the ladies what I have just written to you ! I do not think that they would have any great liking for my manner of seeing and ways of looking upon love. " As for men, I am equally unable to tell them to their face that they are wrong not to go on all fours ; and that is in truth the most favorable thought that I have with respect to them. I do not wish to have a quarrel at every word. What does it matter, after all, what I think or do not think ; or if I am sad when Lseem gay, and joyous when I have an air of melancholy ? I cannot be blamed for not going naked : may I not clothe my countenance as I do my body ? Why should a mask be MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. igy more reprehensible than a pair of breeches, or a lie than a corset ? ** Alas ! the earth turns round the sun, roasted on one side and frozen on the other. A battle takes place in which six hundred thousand men cut each other to pieces ; the weather is as fine as possible ; the flowers display unparalleled coquetry, and impudently open their luxuriant bosoms beneath the very feet of the horses. To-day a fabulous number of good deeds have been performed ; it is pouring fast, there is snow and thunder, lightning and hail ; you would think that the world was coming to an end. The benefactors of humanity are muddy to the waist and as dirty as dogs, unless they have carriages. Creation mocks pitilessly at the creature, and shouts keen sarcasms at it every minute. Everything is indifferent to everything, and each lives or vegetates in virtue of its own law. What difference does it make to the sun, to the beetroots, or even to men, whether I do this or that, live or die, suffer or rejoice, dis- semble or be sincere ? " A straw falls upon an ant and breaks its third leg at the second articulation ; a rock falls upon a village and crushes it : I do not believe that one of these misfortunes draws more tears than the other from the golden eyes of the stars. You are my best friend, if the expression is not as hollow as a bell ; but were I to die, it is very evident that, mourn as you might, you would not abstain from dining for even two days, and would, in spite of such a terrible catastrophe, continue to play trick- track very pleasantly. Which of my friends or mistresses will know my name and Christian names twenty years hence, or would recognize me in the street if I were to appear with a coat out at elbows ? Forgetfulness and nothingness are the whole of man. " I feel myself as perfectly alone as is possible, and all the threads passing from me to things and from things to me have been broken one by one. There are few examples of a man who, preserving a knowledge of the movements that take place within him, has arrived at such a degree of brutishness. I am like a flagon of liqueur which has been left uncorked and 198 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. whose spirit has completely evaporated. The beverage has the same appearance and color ; but taste it and you will find in it nothing but the insipidity of water. " When I think of it, I am frightened at the rapidity of this decomposition ; if it continues I shall be obliged to salt myself, or I shall inevitably grow rotten, and the worms will come after me, seeing that I have no longer a soul, and that the latter alone constitutes the difference between a body and a corpse. One year ago, not more, I had still something human in me ; I was disquieted, I was seeking. I had a thought cherished above all others, a sort of aim, an ideal ; I wanted to be loved and I had the dreams that come at that age, — less vaporous, less chaste, it is true, than those of ordinary youths, but yet contained with- in just limits. " Little by little the incorporeal part was withdrawn and dissipated, and there was left at bottom of me only a thick bed of coarse slime. The dream became a nightmare, and the chimera a succubus ; the world of the soul closed its ivory gates against me ; I now understand only what I touch with my hands ; my dreams are of stone ; everything condenses and hardens about me, nothing floats, nothing wavers, there is neither air nor breath ; matter presses upon me, encroaches upon me and crushes me ; I am like a pilgrim who, having fallen asleep with his feet in the water on a summer's day, has awaked in winter with his feet locked fast in the ice. I no longer wish for anybody's love or friendship ; glory itself, that brilliant aureola which I had so desired for my brow, no longer inspires me with the slightest longing. Only one thing, alas ! now palpitates within me, and that is the horrible desire which draws me towards Theodore. You see to what all my moral notions are reduced. What is physically beautiful is good, all that is ugly is evil. I might see a beautiful woman who, to my own knowledge, had the most villainous soul in the world, and was an adulteress and a poisoner, and I confess that this would be a matter of indifference to me and would in no way prevent me from taking delight in her, if the shape of her nose suited me. ♦♦ This is the way in which I picture to myself supreme happi- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 199 ness : there is a large square building, without any windows looking outward ; a large court surrounded by a white marble colonnade, a crystal fountain in the centre with a jet of quick- silver after the Arabian fashion, and boxes of orange and pome- granate trees placed alternately ; overhead, a very blue sky and a very yellow sun ; large greyhounds with pike-like noses should be sleeping here and there ; from time to time barefooted negroes with rings of gold on their legs, and beautiful white, slender serving-women, clothed in rich and capricious garments, should pass through the hollow arcades, a basket on their arm or an amphora on their head. For myself, I should be there, motionless and silent, beneath a magnificent canopy, surrounded with piles of cushions, having a huge tame lion supporting my elbow and the naked breast of a young slave like a stool be- neath my foot, and smoking opium in a large jade pipe. " I cannot imagine paradise differently ; and, if God really wishes me to go there after my death, he will build me a little kiosk on this plan in the corner of some star. Paradise, as it is commonly described, appears to me much too musical, and I confess, with all humility that I am perfectly incapable of enduring a sonata which would last for merely ten thousand years. " You see the nature of my Eldorado, of my promised land : it is a dream like any other ; but it has this special feature, that I never introduce any known countenance into it ; that none of my friends has crossed the threshold of this imaginary palace ; and that none of the women that I have possessed has sat down beside me on the velvet of the cushions : I am there alone in the midst of phantoms. I have never conceived the idea of loving all the women's faces, and graceful shadows of young girls with whom I people it ; I have never supposed one of them in love with me. In this fantastic seraglio I have created no favorite sultana. There are negresses, mulattoes, Jewesses with blue skin and red hair, Greeks and Circassians, Spaniards and Englishwomen ; but they are to me only symbols of color and feature, and I have them just as a man has all kinds of wines in his cellar, and every species of humming-bird in his 200 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. collection. They are machines for pleasure, pictures which have no need of a frame, statues which come to you when you call them and wish to look at them closely. A woman possesses this unquestionable advantage over a statue, that she turns of herself in the direction that you wish, whereas you are obliged to walk round the statue and place yourself at the point of sight — which is fatiguing. "You must see that with such ideas I cannot remain in these times nor in this world of ours ; for it is impossible to exist thus by the side of time and space. I must find something else. " Such thoughts lead simply and logically to this conclusion. As only satisfaction of the eye, polish of form, and purity of feature are sought for, they are accepted wherever they are found. This is the explanation of the singular aberrations in the love of the ancients. "Since the time of Christ there has not been a single human statue in which adolescent beauty has been idealized and repre- sented with the care that characterizes the ancient sculptors. Woman has become the symbol of moral and physical beauty : man has really fallen from the day that the infant was born at Bethlehem. Woman is the queen of creation ; the stars unite in a crown upon her head, the crescent of the moon glories in waxing beneath her foot, the sun yields his purest gold to make her jewels, painters who wish to flatter the angels give them women's faces, and, certes, I shall not be the one to blame them. " Previous to the gentle and worthy narrator of parables, it was quite the opposite ; gods or heroes were not made feminine when it was wished to make them charming ; they had their own type, at once vigorous and delicate, but always male, however amor- ous their outline might be, and however smooth and destitute of muscles and veins the workman might have made their divine legs and arms. He was more ready to bring the special beauty of women into accordance with this type. He enlarged the shoulders, attenuated the hips, gave more promi- nence to the throat, and accentuated the joints of the arms and thighs more strongly. There is scarcely any difference between MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 20I Paris and Helen. And so the hemaphrodite was one of the most eagerly cherished chimeras of idolatrous antiquity. " This son of Hermes and Aphrodite is, in fact, one of the sweetest creations of Pagan genius. Nothing in the world can be imagined more ravishing than these two bodies, harmo- niously blended together and both perfect, these two beauties so equal and so different, forming but one superior to both, be- cause they are reciprocally tempered and improved. To an ex- clusive worshipper of form, can there be a more delightful un- certainty than that into which you are thrown by the sight of the back, the ambiguous loins, and the strong, delicate legs, which you are doubtful whether to attribute to Mercury ready to take his flight or to Diana coming forth from the bath ? The torso is a compound of the most charming monstrosities : on the bosom, which is plump and quite pubescent, swells with strange grace the breast of a young maiden ; beneath the sides, which are well covered and quite feminine in their softness, you may divine the muscles and the ribs, as in the sides of a young lad ; the belly is rather flat for a woman, and rather round for a man, and in the whole habit of the body there is something cloudy and undecided which it is impossible to de- scribe, and which possesses quite a peculiar attraction. Theo- dore would certainly be an excellent model for this kind of beauty ; nevertheless, I think, that the feminine portion prevails with him, and that he has preserved more of Salmacis than did the Hermaphrodite of the Metamorphoses. " It is a singular thing that I have nearly ceased to think about his sex, and that I love him in perfect indifference to it. Sometimes I seek to persuade myself that such love is abomi- nable, and I tell myself so as severely as possible ; but it only comes from my lips — it is a piece of reasoning which I go through but do not feel : it really seems to me as if it were the simplest thing in the world and as if any one else would do the same in my place. '* I see him, I listen to him speaking or singing — for he sings admirably — and taken an unspeakable pleasure in doing so. He produces the impression of a woman upon me to such an extent 202 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. that one day, in the heat of conversation, I inadvertently called him Madame, v^hich made him laugh in what appeared to me to be a somewhat too constrained manner. " Yet, if it were a woman, what motives could there be for this disguise ? I cannot account for them in any way. It is comprehensible for a very young, very handsome and perfectly beardless cavalier to disguise himself as a woman ; he can thus open a thousand doors which would have remained obstinately shut against him, and the ^wz^/r^ quo may involve him in quite a labyrinthine and jovial complication of adventures. You may in this manner, reach a woman who is strictly guarded, or realize a piece of good fortune under favor of the surprise. " But I am not very clear as to the advantages to be derived by a young and beautiful woman from rambling about in man's clothes. A woman ought not to give up in this way the pleas- ure of being courted, madrigalized and worshipped ; she should rather give up her life, and she would be right, for what is a woman's life without all this ? Nothing or something worse than death. And I am always astonished that women who are thirty years old, or have the small-pox, do not throw themselves down from the top of a steeple. " In spite of all this, something stranger than any reasoning cries to me that it is a woman, and that it is she of whom I have dreamed, she whom alone I am to love, and by whom I alone am to be loved. Yes, it was she, the goddess with eagle glance and beautiful royal hands, who used to smile with con- descension upon me from the height of her throne of clouds. She has presented herself to me in this disguise to prove me, to see whether I should recognize her, whether my amorous gaze would penetrate the veils which enwrap her, as in those won- drous tales where the fairies appear at first in the forms of beg- gars, and then, suddenly stand out resplendent with gold and precious stones. " I have recognized thee, O my love ! At the sight of thee my heart leaped within my bosom as did St. John in the womb of St. Anne, when she was visited by the Virgin ; a blazing light was shed through the air ; I perceived, as it were, an odor of MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 203 divine ambrosia ; I saw the trail of fire at thy feet, and I straight- way understood that thou wert not a mere mortal. " The melodious sounds of St. Cecilia's viol, to which the angels listen with rapture, are harsh and discordant in com- parison with the pearly cadences which escape from thy ruby lips : the Graces, young and smiling, dance a ceaseless roundel about thee ; the birds, warbling, bend their little variegated heads to see thee better as thou passest through the woods, and pipe to thee their prettiest refrains ; the amorous moon rises earlier to kiss thee with her pale silver lips, for she has forsaken her shepherd for thee ; the wind is careful not to efface the delicate print of thy charming foot upon the sand ; the fountain becomes smoother than crystal when thou bendest over it, fearing to wrinkle and destroy the reflection of thy celestial countenance ; the modest violets themselves open up their little hearts to thee and display a thousand coquetries before thee ; the jealous strawberry is piqued to emulation and strives to equal the divine carnation of thy mouth ; the imperceptible gnat hums joyously and applauds thee with the beating of its wings : all nature loves and admires thee, who art her fairest work ! " Ah ! now I live ; — until this moment I was but a dead man : now I am freed from the shroud, and stretch both my wasted hands out of the grave towards the sun ; my blue, ghastly color has left me ; my blood circulates swiftly through my veins. The frightful silence which reigned around me is broken at last. The black, opaque vault which weighed heavy on my brow is illumined. A thousand mysterious voices whisper in my ear ; charming stars sparkle above me, and sand the windings of my path with their spangles of gold ; the daisies laugh sweetly to me, and the bell-flowers murmur my name with their little restless tongues. I understand a multitude of things which I used not to understand, I discover affinities and marvellous sympathies, I know the language of the roses and nightingales and I read with fluency the book which once I could not even spell. " I have recognized that I had a friend in the respectable old oak all covered with mistletoe and parasitic plants, and that the 204 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. frail and languid periwinkle, whose large blue eye is ever run- ning over with tears, had long cherished a discreet and re- strained passion for me. It is love, it is love that has opened my eyes and given me the answer to the enigma. Love has come down to the bottom of the vault where my soul cowered numb and somnolent ; he has taken it by the finger-tips and has brought it up the steep and narrow staircase leading with- out. All the locks of the prison were picked, and for the first time this poor Psyche came forth from me in whom she had been shut up. " Another life has become mine. I breathe with the breast of another, and a blow wounding him would kill me. Before this happy day I was like those gloomy Japanese idols which look down perpetually at their own bellies. I was a spectator of myself, the audience of the comedy that I was playing ; I looked at myself living, and I listened to the oscillations of my heart as to the throbbing of a pendulum. That was all. Images were portrayed on my heedless eyes, sounds struck my inattentive ear, but nothing from the external world reached my soul. The existence of any one else was not necessary to me ; I even donated any existence other than my own, concern- ing which again I was scarcely sure. It seemed to me that I was alone in the midst of the universe, and that all the rest was but vapors, images, vain illusions, fleeting appearances destined to people this nothingness. What a difference ! " And yet what if my presentiment is deceiving me, and Theodore is really a man, as every one believes him to be ! Such marvellous beauties have sometimes been seen, and great youth assists such an illusion. It is something that I will not think of and that would drive me mad : the seed fallen yester- day into the sterile rock of my heart has already pierced it in every direction with its thousand filaments ; it has clung vigor- ously to it, and to pluck it up would be impossible. It is already a. blossoming and green-growing tree with twisting muscular roots. If I came to know with certainty that Theodore is not a woman, I do not know, alas ! whether I should not still love him. " X. |Y fair friend, you were quite right in dissuading me from the plan that I had formed of seeing men and studying them thoroughly before giving my heart to any among them. I have forever extinguished love within me, and even the possibility of love. " Poor young girls that we are, brought up with so much care, surrounded in such maidenly fashion with a triple wall of reticence and precaution, who are allowed to understand nothing, to suspect nothing, and whose principal knowledge is to know nothing, in what strange errors do we live, and what treacherous chimeras cradle us in their arms! " Ah ! Graciosa, thrice cursed be the minute when the idea of this disguise occurred to me ; what horrors, infamies, brutal- ities have I been forced to witness or to hear ! what a treasure of chaste and precious ignorance have I dissipated in but a short time ! " It was in a fair moonlight, do you remember ? we were walking together, at the very bottom of the garden, in that dull, little-frequented alley, terminated at one end by a statue of a flute-playing Faun which has lost its nose, and whose whole body is covered with a thick leprosy of blackish moss, and at the other by a counterfeit view painted on the wall, and half- effaced by the rain. " Through the yet spare foliage of the yoke-elm we could here and there see the twinkling of the stars and the curved crescent of the moon. A fragrance of young shoots and fresh plants reached us from the parterre with the languid breath of 2o6 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. a gentle breeze ; a hidden bird was piping a languorous and whimsical tune ; we, like true young girls, were talking of love, wooers, marriage, and the handsome cavalier that we had seen at mass ; we were exchanging our few ideas of the world and things ; we were turning over an expression that we had chanced to hear and whose meaning seemed obscure and singular to us, in a hundred different ways ; we were asking a thousand of those absurd questions which only the most perfect innocence can imagine. What primitive poetry and what adorable foolishness were there in those furtive conver- sations between two little simpletons who had but just left a boarding-school ! " You wished to have for your lover a bold, proud young fellow, with black moustache and hair, large spurs, large feathers, and a large sword — a sort of bully in love, and you indulged to the full in the heroic and triumphant : you dreamed of nothing but duels and escalades, and miraculous devotion, and you would have been ready to throw your glove into the lions* den that your Esplandian might follow to fetch it. It was very comical to see you, a little girl as you were then, blonde, blush- ing, and yielding to the faintest blast, delivering yourself of such generous tirades all in a breath, and with the most martial air in the world. " For myself, although I was only six months older than you, I was six years less romantic : one thing chiefly disquieted me, and this was to know what men said among themselves and what they did after leaving drawing-rooms and theatres ; I felt that there were many faulty and obscure sides to their lives, which were carefully veiled from our gaze, and which it was very important that we should know. Sometimes hidden behind a curtain, I would watch from a distance the gentlemen who came to the house, and it seemed to me then as if I could distinguish something base and cynical in their manner, a coarse carelessness or a wild preoccupied look, which I could no longer discern in them as soon as they had come in, and which they seemed to lay aside, as by enchantment, on the threshold of the room. All, young as well as old, appeared to me to have uniformly MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 207 adopted conventional masks, conventional opinions and conven- tional modes of speech when in the presence of women. " From the corner of the drawing-room, where I used to sit as straight as a doll, without leaning back in my easy-chair, I would listen and look as I rolled my bouquet between my fingers ; although my eyes were cast down I could see to right and to left, before me and behind me : like the fabulous eyes of the lynx my eyes could pierce through walls, and I could have told what was going on in the adjoining room. " I had also perceived a noteworthy difference in the way in which they spoke to married women ; they no longer used dis- creet, polished, and childishly embellished phrases such as were addressed to myself or my companions, but displayed bolder sprightliness, less sober and more disembarrassed manners, open reticence, and the ambiguity that quickly comes from a corruption which knows that it has similar corruption before it : I was quite sensible that there existed an element in common between them which did not exist between us, and I would have given anything to know what this element was. "With what anxiety and furious curiosity I would follow with eye and ear the laughing, buzzing groups of young men, who, after making a halt at some points in the circle, would resume their walk, talking and casting ambiguous glances as they passed. On their scornfully puffed-up lips hovered incredulous sneers ; they looked as though they were scoffing at what they had just said, and were retracting the compliments and adora- tion with which they had overwhelmed us. I could not hear their words ; but I knew from the movements of their lips that they were uttering expressions in a language with which I was unacquainted, and of which no one had ever made use in my presence. " Even those who had the most humble and submissive air would raise their heads with a very perceptible shade of revolt and weariness ; a sigh of breathlessness, like that of an actor who has reached the end of a long couplet, would escape from their bosoms in spite of themselves, and when leaving us they would make a half turn on their heels in an eager, hurried man- 2o8 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ner which denoted a sort of internal satisfaction at their release from the hard task of being polite and gallant. " I would have given a year of my life to listen, without being seen, to an hour of their conversation. I could often under- stand, by certain attitudes, indirect gestures and side-glances, that I was the subject of their conversation, and that they were speaking of my age or my face. Then I would be on burning coals ; the few subdued words and partial scraps of sentences reaching me at intervals would excite my curiosity to the highest degree, without being capable of satisfying it, and I would indulge in strange perplexities and doubts. " Generally, what was said seemed to be favorable to me, and it was not this that disquieted me : I did not care very much about being thought beautiful ; it was the slight observations dropped into the hollow of the ear, and nearly always followed by long sneers and singular winkings of the eye, that is what I should have liked to hear ; and I would have cheerfully aban- doned the most flowery and perfumed conversation in the world to hear one of such expressions as are whispered behind a cur- tain or in the corner of a doorway. *' If I had had a lover I should have greatly liked to know the way in which he spoke of me to another man, and the terms in which, with a little wine in his head and both elbows on the table-cloth, he would boast of his good fortune to the compan- ions of his orgie. " I know this now, and in truth I am sorry that I know it. It is always so. " My idea was a mad one, but what is done is done, and what is learned cannot be unlearned. I did not listen to you, my dear Graciosa, and I am sorry for it ; but we do not always listen to reason, especially when it comes from such pretty lips as yours, for, from some reason or other, we can never imagine advice to be wise unless it is given by some old head that is hoary and gray, as though sixty years of stupidity could make one intelligent. " But all this was too much torment, and I could not stand it ; I was broiling in my little skin like a chestnut on the pan. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 209 The fatal apple swelled in the foliage above my head, and I was obliged to end by giving it a bite, being free to throw it away afterwards, if the flavor seemed bitter to me. " I acted like fair Eve, my very dear great-grandmother, and bit it. " The death of my uncle, the only relation left to me, giving me freedom of action, I put into practice what I had dreamed of for so long. My precautions were taken with the greatest care to prevent any one from suspecting my sex. I had learned how to handle a sword and fire a pistol ; I rode perfectly, and with a hardihood of which few horsemen would have been capable ; I carefully studied the way to wear my cloak and make my riding-whip clack, and in a few months I succeeded in transforming a girl who was thought rather pretty into a far more pretty cavalier, who lacked scarcely anything but a mous- tache. I realized my property, and left the town, determined not to return without the most complete experience. " It was the only means of clearing up my doubts : to have had lovers would have taught me nothing, or would at least have afforded me but incomplete glimpses, and I wished to study man thoroughly, to anatomize him with inexorable scalpel fibre by fibre, and to have him alive and palpitating on my dis- secting table ; to do this it would be necessary to see him at home, alone and undressed, and to follow him when he went out walking, and visited the tavern or other places. With my disguise I could go everywhere without being remarked ; there would be no concealment before me, all reserve and constraint would be thrown aside, I would receive confidences, and would give false ones to provoke others that were true. Alas ! women have read only man's romance and never his history. " It is a frightful thing to think of, and one which is not thought of, how profoundly ignorant we are of the life and con- duct of those who appear to love us, and whom we are going to marry. Their real existence is as completely unknown to us as if they were inhabitants of Saturn or of some other planet a hundred million leagues from our sublunary ball : one would think that they were of a different species, and that there is 14 2IO MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. not the slightest intellectual link between the two sexes ; the virtues of the one are the vices of the other, and what excites admiration for a man brings disgrace upon a woman. " As for us, our life is clear and may be pierced at a glance. It is easy to follow us from our home to the boarding-school, and from the boarding-school to our home ; what we do is no mystery to anybody ; every one may see our bad stump-draw- ings, our water-color bouquets composed of a pansy and a rose as large as a cabbage, and with the stalk tastefully tied with a bright-colored ribbon : the slippers which we embroider for our father's or grandfather's birthday have nothing very occult and disquieting in them. Our sonatas and ballads are gone through with the most desirable coldness. We are well and duly tied to our mother's apron strings, and at nine or ten o'clock at the latest we retire into our little white beds at the end of our discreet and tidy cells, wherein we are virtuously bolted and padlocked until next morning. The most watchful and jealous susceptibility could find nothing to complain of. " The most limpid crystal does not possess the transparency of such a life. " The man who takes us knows what we have done from the minute we were weaned, and even before it if he likes to pursue his researches so far. Our life is not a life, it is a species of vegetation like that of mosses and flowers ; the icy shadow of the maternal stem hovers over us, poor, stifled rosebuds who dare not bloom. Our chief business is to keep ourselves very straight, well laced, and well brushed, with our eyes becomingly cast down, and for immobility and stiffness to surpass manikins and puppets on springs. " We are forbidden to speak, or to mingle in the conversation, except to answer yes or no if we are asked a question. As soon as anybody is going to say something interesting we are sent away to practice the harp or harpsichord, and our music-masters are all at least sixty years old, and take snuff horribly. The models hung up in our rooms have a very vague and evasive anatomy. Before the gods of Greece can present themselves in a young ladies' boarding-school they must first purchase very MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN, 2 1 1 ample box-coats at an old-clothes shop and get themselves engraved in stippling, after which they look like porters or cab- men, and are little calculated to inflame the imagination. " In the anxiety to prevent us from being romantic we are made idiots. The period of our education is spent not in teaching us something, but in preventing us from learning something. " We are really prisoners in body and mind ; but how could a young man, who has freedom of action, who goes out in the morning not to return until the next morning, who has money, and who can make it and spend it as he pleases, how could be justify the employment of his time ? what man would tell his sweetheart all that he did day and night ? Not one, even of those who are reputed the most pure. " I had sent my horse and my garments to a little grange of mine at some distance from the town. I dressed, mounted, and rode off, not without a singular heaviness of heart. I re- gretted nothing, for I was leaving nothing behind, neither relations nor friends, nor dog nor cat, and yet I was sad, and almost had tears in my eyes ; the farm which I had visited only five or six times had no particular interest for me, and it was not the liking that we take for certain places and that affects us when leaving them which prompted me to turn round two or three times to see again from a distance its spiral of bluish smoke ascending amid the trees. " There it was that I had left my title of woman with my dresses and petticoats ; twenty years of my life were locked up in the room where I had made my toilet, years which were to be counted no longer, and which had ceased to concern me. * Here lies Madelaine de Maupin ' might have been written on the door, for I was, in fact, no longer Madelaine de Maupin but Theodore de S^rannes, and no one would call me any more by the sweet name of Madelaine. "The drawer which held my henceforth useless dresses ap- peared to me like the coffin of my fair illusions ; I was a man, or, at least, had the appearance of one : the young girl was dead. " When I had completely lost sight of the chestnut trees which surround the grange, it seemed to me as if I were no longer 212 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. myself but another, and I looked back to my former actions as to the actions of a stranger which I had witnessed, or the beginning of a romance which I had not read through to the end. ** I recalled complacently a thousand little details, the childish simplicity of which brought an indulgent, and sometimes a rather scornful smile to my lips, like that of a young libertine listening to the arcadian and pastoral confidences of a third-form school- boy ; and, just as I was separating myself from them forever, all the 'puerilities of my childhood and girlhood ran along the side of the road making a thousand signs of friendship to me and blowing me kisses from the tips of their white tapering fingers. " I spurred my horse to rid myself of these enervating emotions ; the trees sped rapidly past me on either side ; but the wanton swarm, buzzing more than a hive of bees, began to run on the sidewalks and call to me, ' Madelaine ! Madelaine ! ' "I struck my animal's neck smartly with my whip, which made him redouble his speed. So rapidly was I riding, that my hair was nearly straight behind my head, and my cloak was horizontal, as though its folds were sculptured in stone ; once I looked behind, and I saw the dust raised by my horse's hoofs like a little white cloud far away on the horizon. " I stopped for a while. " I perceived something white moving in a bush of eglantine at the side of the road, and a little clear voice as sweet as silver fell upon my ear : • Madelaine, Madelaine, where are you going so far away, Madelaine ? I am your virginity, dear child ; that is why I have a white dress, a white crown, and a white skin. But why are you wearing boots, Madelaine ? Methought you had a very pretty foot. Boots and hose, and a large plumed hat like a chevalier going to the wars ! Wherefore, pray, this long sword beating and bruising your thigh ? You have a strange equip- ment, Madelaine, and I am not sure whether I should go with you.' '"If you are afraid, my dear, return home, go water my flowers and care for my doves. But, in truth, you are wrong ; you would be safer in these garments of good cloth than in your MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 213 gauze and flax. My boots prevent it being seen whether I have a pretty foot ; this sword is for my defence, and the feather waving in my hat is to frighten away all the nightingales who would come and sing false love-songs in my ear.' " I continued my journey : in the sighs of the wind I thought I could recognize the last phrase of the sonata which I had learned for my uncle's birthday, and in a large rose lifting its full-blown head above a little wall, the model of the big rose from which I had made so many water-color drawings ; passing before a house I saw the phantom of my curtains moving at a window. All my past seemed to be clinging to me to prevent me from advancing snd attaining to a new future. " I hesitated two or three times and turned my horse's head in the opposite direction. "But the little blue snake of curiosity hissed softly to me insidious words, and said : ' Go on, go on, Theodore ; the opportunity for instruction is a good one ; if you do not learn to-day, you will never know. Will you give your noble heart to chance, to the first appearance of honesty and passion ? Men hide many extraordinary secrets from us, Theodore ! ' " I resumed my gallop. "The hose was on my body, but not in my disposition ; I felt a sort of uneasiness, and, as it were, a shudder of fear, to give it its proper name, at a dark part of the forest ; the report of a poacher's gun nearly made me faint. If it had been a robber, the pistols in my holsters and my formidable sword would certainly have been of little assistance to me. But by degrees I became hardened, and paid no more attention to it. " The sun was sinking slowly beneath the horizon, like the lustre in a theatre which is turned down when the performance is over. Rabbits and pheasants crossed the road from time to time ; the shadows became longer, and the distance was tinted with red. Some portions of the sky were of a very sweet and softened lilac color, others resembled the citron and orange ; the night-birds began to sing, and a crowd of strange sounds issued from the wood : the little light that remained died away, 214 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. and the darkness became complete, increased, as it was, by the shade cast by the trees. " I, who had never gone out alone at night, in a large forest at eight o'clock in the evening ! Can you imagine such a thing, Graciosa, I who used to be dying of fear at the end of the garden ? Terror seized me more than ever, and my heart beat terribly ; I confess that it was with great satisfaction that I saw the lights of the town to which I was going, peeping and sparkling at the back of a hill. As soon as I saw those brilliant specks, like little terrestrial stars, my fright completely left me. It seemed to me as if these indifferent gleams were the open eyes of so many friends who were watching for me. " My horse was no less pleased than I was myself, and, in- haling a sweet stable odor more agreeable to him than the scents of the daisies and strawberries in the woods, he hastened straight to the Red Lion Hotel. " A golden gleam shone through the leaden casement of the inn, the tin signboard of which was swinging right and left, and moaning like an old woman, for the north wind was begin- ning to freshen. I entrusted my horse to a groom, and entered the kitchen. " An enormous fire-place opened its red and black jaws in the background, swallowing up a faggot at each mouthful, while at either side of the andirons two dogs, seated on their haunches and nearly as high as a man, were toasting themselves with all the phlegm in the world, contenting themselves with lifting their paws a little and heaving a sort of sigh when the heat be- came too intense ; but they would certainly have let themselves be reduced to cinders rather than have retired a step. " My arrival did not appear to please them ; and it was in vain that I tried to become acquainted with them, by stroking their heads now and then ; they cast stealthy looks at me which imported nothing good. This surprised me, for animals come readily to me. "The inn-keeper came up and asked me what I wished for supper. " He was a paunch-bellied man, with a red nose, wall eyes, MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 2 1 5 and a smile that went round his head. At every word he uttered he displayed a double row of teeth, which were pointed and separated like an ogre's. The large kitchen-knife which hung by his side had a dubious appearance, and looked as if it might serve several purposes. When I had told him what I wanted he went up to one of the dogs and gave him a kick somewhere. The dog rose, and proceeded towards a sort of wheel which he entered with a cross and pitiful look, casting a glance of reproach at me. At last, seeing that no mercy was to be hoped for, he began to turn his wheel, and with it the spit on which the chicken for my supper was broached. I inwardly promised to throw him the remains of it for his trouble, and began to look round the kitchen until it should be ready. " The ceiling was crossed by broad oaken joists, all blistered and blackened by the smoke from the hearth and candles. Pewter dishes brighter than silver, and white crockery-ware, with blue nosegays on it, shone in the shade on the dressers. Along the walls were numerous files of well-scoured pans, not unlike the ancient bucklers which were hung up in a row along the Grecian or Roman triremes (forgive me, Graciosa, for the epic magnificence of this comparison). One or two big servant- girls were busy about a large table moving plates and dishes and forks, the most agreeable of all music when you are hungry, for then the hearing of the stomach becomes keener than that of the ear. " In short, notwithstanding the money-box mouth and saw- like teeth of the inn-keeper, the inn had quite an honest and jovial look ; and if the inn-keeper's smile had been a fathom longer, and his teeth three times as long and as white, still the rain was beginning to patter on the panes, and the wind to howl in such a fashion as to take away all inclination to leave, for I know nothing more lugubrious than such wailings on a dark and rainy night. " An idea occurred to me and made me smile, and it was this, — that nobody in the world would come to look for me where I was. •• Who, indeed, would have thought that little Madelaine, 2i6 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. instead of being in her warm bed with her alabaster night-lamp beside her, a novel under her pillow, and her maid in the adjoining room ready to hasten to her at the slightest nocturnal alarm, would be balancing herself on a rush-bottom chair at a country inn twenty leagues from her home, her booted feet resting on the andirons, and her hands swaggeringly thrust into her pockets ? " Yes, Madelinette did not remain like her companions, idly resting her elbow on the edge of the balcony among the bind- weed and jessamine at the window, and watching the violet fringes on the horizon at the end of the plain, or some little rose-colored cloud rounded by the May breeze. She did not strew lily leaves through mother-of-pearl palaces wherein to house her chimeras ; she did not, like you, fair dreamers, clothe some hollow phantom with all imaginable perfections ; she wished to be acquainted with men before giving herself to a man ; she forsook everything, her beautiful brilliant robes of velvet and silk, her necklaces, bracelets, birds and flowers ; she voluntarily gave up adoration, prostrate politeness, bouquets and madrigals, the pleasure of being considered more beautiful and better dressed than you, her sweet woman's name and all that she was, and departed, quite alone, like a brave girl, to learn the great science of life throughout the world. " If this were known, people would say that Madelaine is mad. You have said it yourself, my dear Graciosa ; but the truly mad are those who fling their souls to the wind, and sow their love at random on stone and rock, not knowing whether a single ear will germinate. " O Graciosa ! there is a thought that I have never had with- out terror ; the thought of loving some one unworthy of being loved ! of laying your soul bare before impure eyes, and letting profanity penetrate into the sanctuary of your heart ! of rolling your limpid tide for a time with a miry wave ! However per- fect the separation may be, something of the slime always remains, and the stream cannot recover its former transparency. " To think that a man has kissed you and touched you ; that he has seen your person ; that he can say : She is like this or MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 217 that ; she has such a mark in such a place ; she has such a shade in her soul ; she laughs at this and weeps at that ; her dream is of this description ; here is a feather from her chimera's wing in my portfolio ; this ring is plaited with her hair ; a piece of her heart is folded up in this letter ; she used to caress me after such a fashion, and this was her usual expression of fondness ! " Ah ! Cleopatra, I can now understand why in the morning you had killed the lover with whom you had spent the night. Sublime cruelty, for which formerly I could not find sufficient imprecations ! Great voluptuary, how well you knew human nature, and what penetration was shown in this barbarity ! You would not suffer any living being to divulge the mysteries of your bed ; the words of love which had escaped your lips should not be repeated. Thus you preserved your pure delu- sion. Experience came not to strip piecemeal the charming phantom that you had cradled in your arms. You preferred to be separated from him by sudden blow of axe rather than by slow distaste. " What torture, in fact, it is to see the man whom you have chosen false every minute to the idea you had formed of him ; to discover a thousand littlenesses in his character which you had not suspected ; to perceive that what had appeared so beautiful to you through the prism of love is really very ugly, and that he whom you took for a true hero of romance is, after all, only a prosaic citizen who wears dressing-gown and slippers ! " I have not Cleopatra's power, and if I had, I should as- suredly not possess the energy to make use of it. Hence, being unable or unwilling to cut off the heads of my lovers as they leave my couch, and being, further, indisposed to endure what other women endure, I must look twice before taking one ; I shall do so three times rather than twice if I feel any inclina- tion in that direction, which is doubtful enough after what I have seen and heard ; unless, in some happy unknown land, I meet with a heart like my own, as' the romances say — a virgin heart and pure, which has never loved, and which is capable 2i8 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. of doing so in the true sense of the word, — by no means an easy matter. "Several gentlemen entered the inn ; the storm and darkness had prevented them from continuing their journey. They v^ere all young, and the eldest was certainly not more than thirty. Their dress showed that they belonged to the upper classes, and without their dress the insolent ease of their manners would have readily made this understood. One or two of them had interesting faces ; the others all displayed, to a greater or less degree, that species of brutal joviality and careless good-nature which men have among themselves, and which they lay aside completely when in our presence. •' If they could have suspected that the frail young man, half asleep in his chair at the corner of the fireplace, was anything but what he appeared to be, and was really a young girl, and fit for a king, as they say, they would certainly have quickly changed their tone, and you would immediately have seen them bridling up and making a display. They would have approached with many bows, their legs cambered, their elbows turned out, and a smile in their eyes, on their lips, in their nose, in their hair, and in their whole bodily appearance ; they would have boned the words they made use of, and spoken to me only in velvet and satin phrases ; at the least movement, on my part, they would have looked like stretching themselves over the floor after the manner of a carpet, lest the delicacy of my feet should be offended by its unevenness ; all their hands would have been advanced to support me ; the softest seat would have been pre- pared in the best place — but I looked like a pretty boy, and not like a pretty girl. " I confess that I was almost ready to regret my petticoats when I saw what little attention they paid to me. For a minute I was quite mortified ; for, from time to time, I forgot that I was wearing man's clothes, and had to think of the fact in order to prevent myself from growing cross. " There I was, not speaking a word, my arms folded, looking apparently with great attention at the chicken, which was assuming a more and more rosy-tinted complexion, and the MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 219 unfortunate dog which I had so unluckily disturbed, and which was striving in its wheel like several devils in the same holy-water basin. " The youngest of the set came up, and, giving me a clap on the shoulder, which, upon my word, hurt me a good deal, and drew a little involuntary cry from me, asked me whether I would not rather sup with them than quite by myself, seeing that the drinking would go on all the better for plenty of com- pany. I replied that this was a pleasure I should not have dared to hope for, and that I should be very happy to do so. Our covers were then laid together, and we sat down to table. " The panting dog, after snapping up an enormous porringer- ful of water with three laps of his tongue, went back to his post opposite the other dog, which had not stirred any more than if he had been made of porcelain, the new-comers, by Heaven's special grace, not having asked for a chicken. " From some words which they let drop, I learned that they were repairing to the court, which was then at , where they were to join other friends of theirs. I told them that I was a gentleman's son who was leaving the university and going to some relations in the country by the regular pupil's road, namely, the longest he could find. This made them laugh, and after some remarks about my innocent and candid looks they asked me whether I had a mistress. I replied that I did not know, and they laughed still more. The bottles followed one another with rapidity ; although I was careful to to leave my glass nearly always full, my head was somewhat heated, and not losing sight of my purpose, I brought the con- versation round to women. This was not difficult ; for, next to theology and aesthetics, they are the subject on which men are the readiest to talk when drunk. " My companions were not precisely drunk, — they carried their wine too well for that, — but they began to enter into moral discussions at random, and to put their elbows uncere- moniously on the table. One of them had even passed his arm around the thick waist of one of the serving-women, and was nodding his head in very amorous fashion. Another swore 220 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. that he would instantly burst, like a toad that had been given snuff, if Jeannette would not let him talce a kiss on each of the big red apples which served her for cheeks ; and Jeannette, not wishing him to burst like a toad, presented them to him with a very good grace, and did not even arrest a hand that audaciously found its way through the folds of her neckerchief into the moist valley of her bosom, which was very imperfectly guarded by a little golden cross, and it was only after a short whispered parley that he let her go and take away the dish. " Yet they belonged to the court, and had elegant manners, and unless I had seen it, I should certainly never have thought of accusing them of such familiarities with the servants of an inn. Probably they had just left charming mistresses to whom they had sworn the finest oaths in the world. In truth, I should never have dreamed of charging my lover not to sully the lips on which I had laid my own along the cheeks of a trollop. " The rogue appeared to take great pleasure in this kiss, neither more nor less than if he had embraced Phyllis or Ariadne. It was a big kiss, solidly and frankly applied, which left two little white marks on the wench's flaming cheek, and the trace of which she wiped away with the back of the hand that had just washed the plates and dishes. I do not believe that he ever gave so naturally tender a one to his heart's pure deity. This was apparently his own thought, for he said in an undertone, with quite a scornful movement of his elbow — " ' To the devil with lean women and lofty sentiments ! ' " This moral appeared to suit the company, and they all wagged their heads in token of assent. " ' Upon my word,' said the other, following out his idea, ' I am unfortunate in everything. Gentlemen, I must confide to you under the seal of the greatest secrecy, that I, I who am speaking to you, have at this moment a Hame.' " *0h ! oh !' said the others, 'a flame ! That is lugubrious to the last degree. And what do you do with a flame ? ' " 'She is a virtuous woman, gentlemen, you must not laugh, gentlemen ; for, after all, why should I not have a virtuous MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 22 1 woman ? Have I said anything ridiculous ? Here ! you over there ! I v^ill throw the house at your head if you are not quiet.' " ' Well ! what next ? ' " * She is mad about me. She has the most beautiful soul in the world ; in point of souls, I understand them, — I under- stand them at least as well as I do horses, and I assure you that it is a soul of the first quality. There are elevations, ecstasies, devotions, sacrifices, refinements of tenderness, everything you can think of that is most transcendent ; but she has scarcely any bosom, she has none at all, even, like a little girl of fifteen at most. She is otherwise pretty enough ; her hand is delicate, and her foot small ; she has too much mind and not enough flesh, and I often think of leaving her in the lurch. The devil ! One can't go to bed with minds. I am very unfortunate ; pity me, my dear friends.' And, affected by the wine that he had drunk, he began to weep bitterly. " ' Jeannette will console you for the misfortune of going to bed with sylphids,' said his neighbor, pouring him out a bumper ; ' her soul is so thick that you might make bodies of it for other people, and she has flesh enough to clothe the carcasses of three elephants.' " O pure and noble woman ! didst thou but know what is said at random of thee, in a tavern, and in the presence of strangers, by the man whom thou lovest best in the world, and to whom thou has sacrificed everything ! how he strips thee without shame, and impudently surrenders thee in thy naked- ness to the drunken gaze of his comrades, whilst thou art mourn- ful yonder, thy chin in thy hand, and thine eyes turned towards the road by which he is to return ! " Had some one come and told thee that thy lover, twenty- four hours perhaps after leaving thee, was courting a base servant-girl, and had arranged to pass the night with her, thou wouldst have maintained that it was impossible, and wouldst have refused to believe it ; scarcely wouldst thou have trusted thine eyes and ears. Yet it was so. " The conversation lasted some time longer, and was the maddest and most shameless in the world ; but through all the 222 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. facetious exaggeration and the often filthy jests, there was ap- parent a deep and genuine feeling of perfect contempt for women, and I learned more during that evening than by read- ing twenty cart-loads of moralists. " The monstrous and unheard-of things that I was listening to imparted a tinge of sadness and severity to my face, which the rest of the guests perceived, and about which they teased me good-naturedly ; but my gayety could not return. I had, indeed, suspected that men were not such as they appear to us, but yet I did not think that they were so different from their masks, and my disgust was not greater than my surprise. " It should require only half an hour of such conversation to cure a romantic young girl forever ; it would do her more good than any maternal remonstrances. " Some boasted of having as many women as they pleased, and that to do so cost them only a word ; others communicated recipes for procuring mistresses, or enlarged upon the tactics to be pursued when laying siege to virtue ; others again ridiculed the women whose lovers they were, and proclaimed themselves the most arrant fools on earth to be attached, in this way, to such trulls. They all made light of love. " These, then, are the thoughts which they conceal from us beneath all their fair appearances ! Who would ever think it, to see them so humble, so cringing, so ready to do anything } Ah ! how hardily they raise their heads after their conquest, and insolently set their heel of their boot on the brow which they used to worship at a distance on their knees ! what ven- geance they take for their passing abasement ! how dearly must their politeness be paid for ! and through what many insults they repose after the madrigals they made ! What mad brutality of language and thought ! what inelegance of manners and deportment ! It is a complete change, and one which certainly is not to their advantage. However far my previsions might reach, they fell far short of the reality. " Ideal, blue flower with heart of gold, blooming all pearly with dew beneath the sky of spring, in the scented breath of soft dreamings, whose fibrous roots, a thousand times more MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 223 slender than fairies* silken tresses, sink into the depths of our souls with their thousand hair-covered heads to drink in thence the purest substance ; flower so sweet and so bitter, we cannot pluck thee forth without causing the heart to bleed in all its recesses ; from the broken stem ooze red drops which, falling one by one into the lake of our tears, serve to measure for us the limping hours of our death-watch by the bedside of expiring Love. " Ah ! cursed flower, how thou hadst sprung up in my soul ! thy branches had multiplied more than nettles in a ruin. The young nightingales came to drink from thy cup and sing beneath thy shade : diamond butterflies, with emerald wings and ruby eyes, hovered and danced about thy frail gold- powdered pistils ; swarms of flaxen bees sucked thy poisonous honey without mistrust ; chimeras folded their swan-like wings and crossed their lion claws beneath their beauteous throats to rest beside thee. The tree of the Hesperides was not better guarded ; sylphids gathered the tears of the stars in the urns of the lilies, and watered thee each night with their magic watering- vessels. " Plant of the ideal, more venomous than the manchineel or the upas tree, what it costs me, despite thy treacherous blossom and the poison inhaled with thy perfume, to uproot thee from my soul ! Neither the cedar of Lebanon, nor the gigantic baobab, nor the palm a hundred cubits high, could together fill the place which thou didst occupy quite alone, little blue flower with heart of gold 1 " Supper came to an end at last, and we contemplated going to bed ; but, as the number of sleepers was double that of the beds, it naturally followed that we must go to bed in turn or else two together. It was a very simple matter for the rest of the company, but not so by any means for me, taking into account certain protuberances which were disguised con- veniently enough beneath vest and doublet, but which a simple shirt would have betrayed in all their damnable roundness ; and I was certainly little disposed to disclose my incognito in favor of any of these gentlemen who at that moment appeared 224 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. to me veritable and ingenuous monsters, though I afterwards found them very decent fellows, and worth at least as much as any of their species. " He with whom I was to share a bed was fairly drunk. He threw himself on the mattress, with one leg and arm hanging to the ground, and at once went to sleep, not the sleep of the just, but a sleep so profound that if the angel of the last judg- ment had come and blown his clarion in his ear he would have failed to wake him. Such a sleep greatly simplified the diffi- culty ; I took off nothing but my doublet and boots, strode over the sleeper's body, and stretched myself on the sheets at the edge of the bed. " So I was in bed with a man ! It was not a bad beginning ! I confess that, in spite of all my assurance, I was singularly moved and troubled. The situation was so strange, so novel, that I could scarcely admit that it was not a dream. The other slept his best, but I could not close an eye the whole night. " He was a young man, about twenty-four years of age, with rather a handsome face, dark eyelashes, and a nearly blonde mustache ; his long hair rolled around his head like the waves from the inverted urn of a river-god, a light blush passed beneath his pale cheeks like a cloud beneath the water, his lips were half open and smiling with a vague and languid smile. "I raised myself upon my elbow, and remained along time watching him by the flickering light of a candle, of which the tallow had nearly all run down in broad 'sheets, and the wick was laden with black wasters. " We were separated by a considerable interval. He occu- pied one extreme edge of the bed, while I, as an additional precaution, had thrown myself quite on the other. "What I had heard was assuredly not of a nature to predis- pose me to tenderness and voluptuousness : I held men in abomination. Nevertheless I was more disquieted and agitated than I ought to have been : my body did not share in the repugnance of my mind so completely as it should have done MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 225 My heart was beating violently, I was hot, and on whatever side I turned I could not find repose. "The most profound silence reigned in the inn ; you could only hear at wide intervals the dull noise caused by the hoof of some horse striking the stone-floor in the stable, or the sound of a drop of water falling upon the ashes through the shaft of the chimney. The candle, reaching the end of the wick, went out in smoke. " The densest darkness fell like a curtain between us. You cannot conceive the effect which the sudden disappearance ctf the light had upon me. It seemed to me as if all were ended, and I were never more to see clearly in my life. For a moment I wished to get up ; but what could I have done ? It was only two o'clock in the morning, all the lights were out, and I could not wander about like a phantom in a strange house. I was obliged to remain where I was and wait for daylight. " There I was on my back, with both hands crossed, striving to think of something, and always coming back to this : that I was in bed with a man. I even went so far as to wish that he would awake and perceive that I was a woman. No doubt the wine that I had drunk, though sparkingly, had something to do with this extraordinary idea, but I could not help recurring to it. I was on the point of stretching out my hand towards him, to wake him and tell him what I was. A fold in the bed-clothes which checked my arm was what prevented me from going through with it. Time was thus given me for reflection, and while I was freeing my arm, my senses, which I had altogether lost, came back to me, not entirely, perhaps, but sufficiently to restrain me. "How curious it would have been, if I, scornful beauty as I was, I who wished to be acquainted with ten years of a man's life before giving him my hand to kiss, had surrendered myself on a pallet in an inn to the first comer ! and upon my word I was nearly doing it. "Can a sudden eff'ervescence, a boiling of the blood, so com- pletely subdue the most superb resolves ? Does the voice of the body speak in higher tones than the voice of the mind ? 15 226 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. Whenever my pride sends too many puffs heavenwards I bring the recollection of that night before its eyes to recall it to earth. I am beginning to be of man's opinion ; what a poor thing is woman's virtue ! on what, good heavens, does it depend ! " Ah ! it is vain to seek to spread one's wings, they are laden with too much clay ; the body is an anchor which holds back the soul to earth : fruitlessly does she open her sails to the wind of the loftiest ideas the vessels remains motionless, as though all the remoras of the ocean were clinging to the keel. Na- ture takes pleasure in such sarcasms at our expense. When she sees a thought standing on its pride as on a lofty column, and nearly touching heaven with its head, she whispers to the red fluid to quicken its pace and crowd at the gates of the arteries ; she commands the temples to sing and the ears to tingle, and, behold giddiness seizes the proud idea. All images are blended and confused, the earth seems to undulate like the deck of a bark in a storm, the heavens turn round, and the stars dance a saraband ; the lips which used to utter only austere maxims are wrinkled and put forward as though for kisses ; the arms so firm to repel grow soft, and become more supple and entwining than scarves. Add to this contact with an epidermis and a breath across your hair, and all is lost. '• Often even less is sufficient. A fragrance of foliage coming to you from the fields through your half-opened window, the sight of two birds billmg each other, an opening daisy, an old love-song which returns to you in your own despite and which you repeat without understanding its meaning, a warm wind which troubles and intoxicates you, the softness of your bed or divan — one of these circumstances is sufficient ; even the soli- tude of your room makes you think that it would be comfort- able for two, and that no more charming nest could be found for a brood of pleasures. The drawn curtains, the twilight, the silence, all bring back to you the fatal idea which brushes you with its dove-like wings and coos so sweetly about you. The tissues which touch you seem to caress you, and cling with amorous folds along your body. Then the young girl opens her arms to the first footman with whom she finds herself alone ; MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 227 the philosopher leaves his page unfinished, and, with his head in his mantle, runs in all haste to the nearest courtesan. " I certainly did not love the man who was causing me such strange perturbations. He had no other charm than that he was not a woman, and, in the condition in which I found myself, this was enough ! A man ! that mysterious thing which is concealed from us with so much care, that strange animal, of whose history we know so little, that demon or god who alone can realize all the dreams of vague voluptuousness wherewith the spring-time flatters our sleep, the sole thought that we have from fifteen years of age ! "A man ! The confused notion of pleasure floated through my dulled head. The little that I knew of it kindled my desire still more. A burning curiosity urged me to clear up once for all the doubts which perplexed me, and were forever recur- ring to my mind. The solution of the problem was over the leaf; it was only necessary to turn it, the book was beside me. A handsome cavalier, a narrow bed, a dark night ! — a young girl with a few glasses of champagne in her head ! what a sus- picious combination ! Well ! the result of it all was but a very virtuous nothingness. " On the wall, upon which I kept my eyes fixed, I began, in the diminishing darkness to distinguish the position of the window ; the panes became less opaque, and the gray light of dawn, glancing behind them, restored their transparency ; the sky brightened by degrees : it was day. You cannot imagine the pleasure given me by that pale ray of light on the green dye of the Aumale serge which surrounded the glorious battlefield whereon my virtue had triumphed over my desires ! It seemed to me as though it were my crown of victory. " As to my companion, he had fallen out on to the ground. " I got up, adjusted my dress as quickly as possible, and ran to the window ; I opened it, and the morning breeze did me good. I placed myself before the looking-glass in order to comb my hair, and was astonished at the paleness of my countenance, which I had believed to be purple. 228 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. "The others came in to see whether we were still asleep, and pushed their friend with their feet, who did not appear much surprised at finding himself where he was. " The horses were saddled, and we set out again, " But this is enough for to-day. My pen will not write any more, and I do not want to mend it ; another time I will tell you the rest of my adventures ; meanwhile, love me as I love you, well-named Graciosa, and do not, from what I have just told you, form too bad an opinion of my virtue." XI. [ANY things are tiresome. It is tiresome to pay back the money you have borrowed and become accustomed to look on as your own ; it is tiresome to fondle to-day the woman you loved yesterday ; it is tiresome to go to a house at the dinner-hour and find that the owners left for the country a month ago ; it is tiresome to write a novel, and more tiresome to read one ; it is tiresome to have a pimple on your nose and cracked lips on the day that you visit the idol of your heart ; it is tiresome to wear facetious boots which smile on the pavement from every seam, and, above all, to harbor a vacuum behind the cobwebs in your pocket ; it is tiresome to be a door-porter ; it is tiresome to be an emperor ; it is tiresome to be yourself, and even to be some one else ; it is tiresome to go on foot be- cause it hurts your corns, on horseback because it skins the antithesis of the front, in a coach because a big man in- fallibly makes a pillow of your shoulder, on the packet because you are sea-sick and vomit your entire self; it is tiresome to have winter because you shiver, and summer because you perspire ; but the most tiresome thing on earth, in hell, or in heaven is assuredly a tragedy, unless it be a drama or a comedy. " It really makes my heart ache. What could be more silly and stupid ? Are not the great tyrants with voices like bulls, who stride across the stage from one wing to the other, making their hairy arms go like the wings of a windmill, and imprisoned in flesh-colored stockings, but sorry counter- 230 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. feits of Bluebeard or Bogey ! Their rodomontades might make any one who could keep awake burst out laughing. " Women who are unfortunate in love are no less ridiculous. It is diverting to see them advance, clad in black or white, with their hair weeping on their shoulders, sleeves weeping on their hands, and their bodies ready to leap from the corset like a fruit-stone pressed betv^^een the fingers ; looking as if they were dragging the floor by the sole of their satin slippers, and, in their great impulses of passion, spurning their trains backward with a little kick from their heel. The dialogue, composed exclusively of Oh ! and Ah ! which they cluck as they display their feathers, is truly agreeable food and easy of digestion. Their princes are also very charming ; they are only somewhat dark and melancholy, which does not, however, prevent them from being the best companions in the world or elsewhere. " As to comedy which is to correct manners, and which fortunately acquits itself badly enough of its task, the sermons of fathers and iterations of uncles are, to my mind, as weari- some on the stage as in real life. I am not of opinion that the number of fools should be doubled by the representation of them ; there are quite enough of them as it is, thank heaven, and the race is not likely to come to an end. Where is the necessity of portraying somebody who has a pig's snout or ox's muzzle, and of gathering together the trash of a clown whom you would throw out of the window if he came into your house ? The image of a pedant is no more interesting than the pedant himself, and his reflection in a mirror does not make him the less a pedant. An actor who succeeded in imitating the atti- tudes and manners of cobblers to perfection would not amuse me more than a real cobbler. " But there is a theatre which I love, a fantastic, extravagant, impossible theatre, in which the worthy public would pitilessly hiss from the first scene, for want of understanding a single word. " It is a singular theatre. Glow-worms take the place of Argand lamps, and ascarabaeus, beating time with his antenna, MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 231 is placed at the desk. The cricket takes his part : the nightingale is first flute ; little sylphs issuing from the peas- blossom hold bassc3 of citron-peel between their pretty legs which are whiter than ivory, and with mighty power of arm move their bows, made with a hair from Titania's eyelash, over strings of spiders' thread : the little wig with its three hammers, which the scarabseus conductor wears, quivers with pleasure and diffuses about it a luminous dust, so sweet is the harmony and so well executed the overture ! " A curtain of butterflies' wings, more delicate than the interior pellicle of an egg, rises slowly after the three indis- pensable raps. The house is full of the souls of poets seated in stalls of mother-of-pearl, and watching the performance through dewdrops set on the golden pistils of lilies. These are their opera-glasses. " The scenery is not like any known scenery ; the country which it represents is as strange as was America before its discovery. The palette of the richest painter has not half the tones with which it is diapered. All is painted in odd and singular colors. The verditer, the blue-ash, the ultramarine, and the red and yellow lake are in profusion. " The sky, which is of a greenish-blue, is striped zebra-wise with broad flaxen and tawny bands ; in the middle distance spare and slender trees wave their scanty foliage the color of dried roses ; the distance, instead of being drowned in its azure- tinted vapor, is of the most beautiful apple-green and here and there escape spirals of golden smoke. A wandering ray hangs on the portal of a ruined temple or the spire of a tower. Towers full of bell-turrets, pyramids, domes, arcades, and ramps, are seated on the hills and reflected in crystal lakes ; large trees with broad leaves, deeply carved by the chisels of the fairies, inextricably entwine their trunks and branches to form the wings. Over their heads the clouds of heaven collect like snow-flakes, through their interstices the eyes of dwarfs and gnomes are seen to sparkle, and their tortuous roots sink into the soil like the finger of a giant-hand. The woodpecker keeps time as he taps them with his horny beak, 232 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. and emerald lizards bask in the sun on the moss at their foot. "The mushroom looks on at the comedy with his hat on his head, like the insolent follow that he is. The dainty violet stands up on her little tiptoes between two blades of grass, and opens her blue eyes wide to see the hero pass. " The bullfinch and the linnet lean down at the end of the boughs to prompt the actors in their parts. •' Through the tall grasses, the lofty purple thistles and the velvet-leaved burdocks, wind, like silver snakes, brooks that are formed with the tears of stags at bay. At wide intervals anemones are seen shining on the turf like drops of blood, and daisies, like veritable duchesses, carrying high their heads laden with crowns of pearls. " The characters are of no time or country ; they come and go without our knowing why or how ; they neither eat nor drink, they dwell nowhere and have no occupation ; they possess neither lands nor incomes, nor houses ; only sometimes they carry under their arm a little box full of diamonds as big as pigeon's eggs ; as they walk they do not shake a single drop of rain from the heads of the flowers nor raise a single grain of the dust on the roads. " Their dress is the most extravagant and fantastical in the world. Pointed steeple-shaped hats with brims as broad as a Chinese parasol and immoderate plumes plucked from the tails of the bird of paradise and the phoenix ; cloaks striped with brilliant colors, doublets of velvet and brocade letting the satin or silver-cloth lining be seen through their gold- laced slashings ; hose puffed and swollen like balloons ! scarlet stockings, with embroidered clocks, shoes with high heels and large rosettes ; little slender swords, with the point in the air and the hilt depressed, covered with cords and ribbons— so for the men. " The women are no less curiously accoutred. " The drawings of Delia Bella and Romain de Hooge might serve to represent Ihe character of their attire. There are stuffed undulating robes with great folds, whose colors MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 233 play like those on the necks of turtle-doves, and reflect all the changing tints of the iris, large sleeves v^hence other sleeves emerge, ruffs of open-slashed lace rising higher than the head which they serve to frame, corsets laden with knots and em- broideries, aiglets, strange jewels, crests of heron plumes^ necklaces of big pearls, fans formed from the peacock's tail with mirrors in the centre, little slippers and pattens, garlands ot artificial flowers, spangles, wire-worked gauzes, paint, patches, and everything that can add flavor and piquancy to a theatri- cal toilette. ' It is a style which is not precisely English, nor German, nor French, nor Turkish, nor Spanish, nor Tartar, though it partakes somewhat of all these, and is one which has adopted what is most graceful and characteristic from every country. Actors dressed in this manner may say what they will without doing violence to probability. Fancy may rove in all direc- tions, style may at its ease unroll its diapered rings like a snake basking in the sun ; the most exotic conceits may fearlessly spread their singular flower-cups and diff"use around them their perfume of amber and musk. Nothing hinders it, — neither places, nor names, nor costume. " How amusing and charming are their utterances ! They are not such actors as contort their mouths and make their eyes start out of their heads in order to despatch their tirade with effect like our dramatic howlers ; they, at least, have not the appearance of workmen at their task, or of oxen yoked to the action and hastening to get done with it ; they are not plastered with chalk and rouge half an inch thick ; they do not carry tin daggers nor keep a pig's bladder filled with the chicken's blood in reserve beneath their cloaks ; they do not trail the same oil- stained rags through entire acts. " They speak without hurry or clamor, like well-bred people who attach no great importance to what they are doing ; the lover makes his declaration with the easiest air in the world ; he taps his thigh with the tip of his white glove, or adjusts the leg of his trousers while he is speaking ; the lady carelessly shakes the dew from her bouquet and exchanges wit- 234 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ticisms with her attendant ; the lover takes very little trouble to soften his cruel fair : his principal business is to drop clusters of pearls and bunches of roses from his lips, and to scatter poetic gems like a true spendthrift ; often he effaces himself entirely, and lets the author court his mistress in his stead. Jealousy is no fault of his, and he is of the most accommodating disposi- tion. With his eyes raised to the flies and friezes of the theatre, he complacently waits until the poet has finished saying what has taken his fancy, to resume his part and place himself again upon his knees. '< All is woven and unwoven with admirable carelessness : effects have no causes, and causes no effects ; the most witty character is he who says most absurdities ; the most foolish says the wittiest things ; young girls talk in a way that would make courtesans blush, and courtesans utter maxims of morality. The most unheard of adventures follow one after another without any explanation ; the noble father arrives from China in a bamboo junk expressly to recognize a little girl who has been carried off ; gods and fairies do nothing but ascend and descend in their machines. The action plunges into the sea beneath the topaz dome of the waves, traversing the bottom of the ocean through forests of coral and madrepore, or rises to heaven on the wings of lark and griffin. " The dialogue is most universal : the lion contributes a vig- orously uttered oh ! oh ! — the wall speaks through its chinks, and provided that he has a witticism, rebus, or pun to interpose, any one is free to interrupt the most interesting scene ; the ass's head of Bottom is as welcome as the golden head of Ariel ; the author's mind may be discerned beneath every form, and all these contradictions are like so many facts which reflect its different aspects while imparting to it the colors of the prism. " This apparent pell-mell and disorder succeeds after all in representing real life with more exactness in its fantastic pres- entations than the most minutely studied drama of manners. Every man comprises the whole of humanity within himself, and by writing what comes into his head, he succeeds better MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 235 than by copying through a magnifying glass objects which are external to him. " What a glorious family ! young romantic lovers, roaming damsels, serviceable attendants, caustic buffoons, artless valets and peasants, gracious kings, whose names and kingdoms are unknown to historian and geographer ; motley graciosos, clowns with sharp repartees and miraculous capers ; O you who give utterance to free caprice through your smiling lips, I love you and adore you among and above all others : Perdita, Rosalind, Celia, Pandarus, Parolles, Silvio, Leander, and the rest, all those charming types, so false and so true, who, in the checkered wings of folly soar above gross reality, and in whom the poet personifies his joy, his melancholy, his love, and his most in- timate dream beneath the most frivolous and flippant appear- ances. " Among these plays which were written for the fairies, and should be performed by the light of the moon, there is one piece which principally delights me — a piece so wondering, so vagrant, with so vaporous a plot and such singular characters, that the author himself, not knowing what title to give it, has called it ' As You Like It,' an elastic name which satisfies every requirement. "When reading this strange piece, you feel that you are transported into an unknown world, of which, however, you have some vague recollection : you can no longer tell whether you are dead or alive, dreaming or awake ; pleasant faces smile sweetly on you, and give as they pass you a kindly good-day ; you feel moved and troubled at the sight of them, as though at the turn of a road you had suddenly met with your ideal, or the forgotten phantom of your first mistress had suddenly stood before you. Springs flow murmuring half- subdued complaints ; the wind stirs the old trees of the ancient forest over the head of the aged exiled duke with compassionate sighs ; and, when the melancholy Jacques gives his philosophic griefs to the stream with the leaves of the willow, it seems to you as though you were yourself the speaker, and the most obscure and secret thoughts of your heart were illumined and revealed. 236 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. " O young son of the brave knight Rowland des Bois, so ill- used by fate ! I cannot but be jealous of thee ; thou hast still a faithful servant, the good Adam, whose old age is so green beneath the snow of his hair. Thou art banished but not at least until thou hast wrestled and triumphed ; thy wicked brother robs thee of all thine estate, but Rosalind gives thee the chain from her neck ; thou art poor, but thou art loved ; thou leavest thy country, but the daughter of thy persecutor follows thee beyond the seas. " The dark Ardennes open their great arms of foliage to receive thee and conceal thee ; the good forest, in the depths of its grottos, heaps its most silky moss to form thy couch ; it stoops its arches above thy brow to protect thee from rain and sun ; it pities thee with the tears of its springs and the sighs of its belling fawns and deer ; it makes of its rocks kindly desks for thy amorous epistles ; it lends thee thorns from its bushes where- with to hang them, and commands the satin bark of its aspen trees to yield to the point of thy stiletto when thou wouldst grave thereon the character of Rosalind. " If only it were possible, young Orlando, to have like thee a great and shady forest that one might retire and be alone in his pain, and, at the turning of a walk meet the sought for she, recognizable though disguised ! But alas ! the world of the soul has no verdant Ardennes, and only in the garden of poetry bloom the wild, capricious little flowers whose perfume gives complete forgetfulness. In vain do we shed tears : they form not those fair silvery, cascades ; in vain do we sigh : no kindly echo troubles to return us our complaints graced with asson- ances and conceits. Vainly do we hang sonnets on the prickles of every bramble ; Rosalind never gathers them, and it is for nothing that we gash the bark of the trees with amorous characters. " Birds of the sky lend me each a feather, swallow no less than eagle, and humming bird than roc, that I may make me a pair of wings to fly high and fast through regions unknown, where I may find nothing to bring back to my recollection the city of the living, where I may forget that I am myself, and live MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 237 a life strange and new, farther than America, than Africa, than Asia, than the last island of the world, through the ocean of ice, beyond the pole where trembles the aurora borealis, in the impalpable kingdom whither the divine creations of the poets and the types of supreme beauty take their flight. " How is it possible to sustain ordinary conversations in clubs and drawing-rooms after hearing thee speak, sparkling Mercutio, whose every phrase bursts in gold and silver rain like a firework shall beneath a star-strewn sky ? Pale Desdemona, what pleasure wouldst thou have us take in any terrestrial music after the romance of the Willow ? What women seem not ugly beside your Venuses, ancient sculptors, poets in marble strophes ? " Ah ! despite the furious embrace with which I wished to clasp the material world for lack of the other, I feel that I have an evil nature, that life was not made for me, and that it repulses me ; I cannot concern myself with anything : what- ever road I follow I go astray ; the smooth alley and the stony path alike lead me to the abyss. If I wish to take my flight the air condenses about me, and I am caught with my wings spread and unable to close them. lean neither walk nor fly ; the sky attracts me when I am on earth, and the earth when I am in the sky ; above, the north wind tears away my plumes ; below, the pebbles wound my feet. My soles are too tender to walk upon the broken glass of reality ; my wings of too short a span to soar above things, and rise from circle to circle into the azure depths of mysticism, even to the inaccessible summits of eternal love ; I am the most unfortunate hippogriff", the most wretched heap of heterogeneous pieces that ever existed, since ocean first loved the moon and man was deceived by woman : the monstrous Chimaera slain by Bellerophon, with its maiden's head, lion's paws, goat's body, and dragon's tail, was an animal of simple composition in comparison with me. " In my frail breast dwell together the violet-strewn dreamings of the chaste young girl and the mad burnings of revelling courtesans : my desires go, like lions, sharpening their claws in the shade and seeking for something to devour ; my thoughts, 238 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. more feverish and restless than goats, cling to the most menac- ing crests ; my hatred, poison-puffed, twists its scaly folds in inextricable knots, and drags itself at length through ruts and ravines. " A strange land is my soul, a land flourishing and splendid in appearance, but more saturated with putrid and deleterious nuisances than the land of Batavia : the least ray of sunshine on the slime causes reptiles to hatch and mosquitoes to swarm ; the large yellow tulips, the nagassaris and the angsoka flowers pompously veil unclean carrion. The amorous rose opens her scarlet lips, and smiling shows her little dewdrop teeth to the wooing nightingales who repeat madrigals and sonnets to her : nothing could be more charming ; but the odds are a hundred to one that there is a dropsical toad in the grass beneath the bushes, crawling on limping feet snd silvering his path with his slime. " There are springs more limpid and clear than the purest diamond ; but it would be better for you to draw the stag- nant water of the marsh beneath its cloak of rotten rushes and drowned dogs than to dip your cup in such a wave. A serpent is hidden at the bottom, and wheels round with frightful quickness as he discharges his venom. " You planted wheat, and there springs up asphodel, henbane, darnel, and pale hemlock with verdigris branches. Instead of the root which you had buried, you are astonished to see emerging from the earth the hairy, twisted limbs of the dark mandragora. " If you leave a souvenir, and should come to take it again some time afterwards, you will find it greener with moss and more abounding with woodlice and disgusting insects than a stone placed on the dank floor of a cave. "Seek not to cross its dark forests ; they are more im- practicable than the virgin forests of America or the jungles of Java. Creepers, strong as cables, run from one tree to another ; plants bristling and pointed like spear-heads obstruct every passage ; the grass itself is covered with scorching down like that of the nettle. To the arches of foliage gigantic MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 239 bats of the vampire kind cling by their claws ; scarabees of enormous size shake their threatening horns and lash the air with their quadruple wings ; monstrous and fantastic animals, such as are seen passing in nightmares, advance painfully breaking the reeds before them. There are troops of elephants crushing the flies between the wrinkles of their dried skin or rubbing their flanks along the stones and trees, rhinoceroses with rugose carapace, hippopotami with swollen muzzle and bristling hair, which, as they go, knead the mud and detritus of the forest with their broad feet. " In the glades, yonder where the sun thrusts in a luminous ray like a wedge of gold, across the dank humidity, at the place where you would have wished to seat yourself, you will always find some family of tigers carelessly couched, breathing the air through their nostrils, winking their sea- green eyes and glossing their velvety fur with their blood- red, papillae-covered tongues ; or, it may be, a knot of boa serpents half asleep and digesting the bull they swallowed last. " Dread everything — grass, fruit, water, air, shadow, sun, everything is mortal. " Close your ear to the chatter of the little paroquets, with golden beak and emerald neck, which descend from the trees and come and perch on your finger with throbbing wings ; for the little emerald-necked paroquets will finish by prettily put- ting out your eyes with their golden beaks at the moment that you are bending down to kiss them. So it is ! " The world will have none of me ; it repulses me as a spectre escaped from the tombs, and I am nearly as pale as one. My blood refuses to believe that I am alive, and will not color my skin ; it creeps slowly through my veins like stagnant water in obstructed canals. My heart beats for noth- ing which causes the heart of man to beat. My griefs and joys are not those of my fellow-creatures. I have vehemently desired what nobody desires ; I have scorned things which are madly longed for. I have loved women when they did not love me, and I have been loved when I would fain have been 240 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. hated. Always too soon or too late, more or less, on this side or on that ; never what ought to have been ; either I have not arrived, or I have been too far. I have flung my life through the windows, or concentrated it upon a single point, and from the restless activity of the ardelio I have come to the dull somno- lence of the teriaki and the stylite on his column. " What I do has always the appearance of a dream ; my ac- tions seem to be the result rather of somnambulism than of a free-will ; there is something within me which I feel vaguely at a great depth, and which causes me to act without my own participation and always independently of general laws ; the simple and natural side of things is never revealed to me until after all the others, and at first I always fasten upon what is eccentric and odd. However slightly the line may slant I soon make it into a spiral more twisted than a serpent ; outlines, if they are not fixed in the most precise manner, become confused and distorted. Faces assume a supernatural air, and look at you with frightful eyes. " Thus, by a species of instinctive reaction, I have always clung desperately to matter, to the external silhouette of things, and in art have always given a very important place to the plastic. I understand a statue perfectly, while I cannot understand a man ; where life begins, 1 stop and shrink back affrighted, as though I had seen Medusa's head. The phenomenon of life causes me an astonishment which I cannot overcome. No doubt I shall make an excellent dead man, for I am a very poor living one, and the sense of my existence completely escapes me. The sound of my voice surprises me to an unimaginable degree, and I might be tempted sometimes to take it for the voice of another. When I wish to stretch forth my arm, and my arm obeys me, the fact seems quite a pro- digious one to me, and I sink into the profoundest stupefac- tion. " On the other hand, Silvio, I have a perfect comprehen- sion of the unintelligible ; the most extravagant notions seem quite natural to me, and I enter into them with singular facility. I can find with ease the connection of the most MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. * 24 1 capricious and disordered nightmare. This is the reason why the kind of pieces I was just speaking to you about pleases me beyond all others. " We have great discussions on this subject with Theodore and Rosette. Rosette has little liking for my system, she is for the true truth ; Theodore gives more latitude to the poet, and admits a conventional and optical truth ; for my part, I main- tain that the author must have a clear stage and that fancy should reign supreme. " Many of the company grounded their arguments chiefly on the fact that such pieces were, as a general rule, independ- ent of theatrical conditions and could not be performed ; I replied that this was true in one sense and false in another, like nearly everything that is said, and that the ideas enter- tained respecting scenic possibilities and impossibilities appear- ed to me to be wanting in exactness, and to be the result rather of prejudices than of reason. Among other things, I said that the piece ' As You Like It ' was assuredly most presentable, especially for people in society who were not practiced in other parts. " This suggested the idea of performing it. The season is advancing, and we have exhausted every description of amuse- ment : we are tired of hunting, and of parties on horseback, or on the water ; the chances of boston, varied as they are, have not piquancy enough to fill up an evening, and the pro- posal was received with universal enthusiasm. " A young man who knew how to paint volunteered to make the scenery ; he is working at it now with much ardor, and in a few days it will be finished. The stage is erected in the orangery, which is the largest hall in the mansion, and I think that everything will turn out well. I am taking the part of Orlando, and Rosette was to have played Rosalind, — which was a most proper arrangement. As my mistress, and the mistress of the house, the part fell to her of right ; but owing to a caprice singular enough in her, prudery not being one of her faults, she would not disguise herself as a man. Had I not been sure of the contrary, I should have believed that her legs were badly 16 242 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. shaped. Actually none of the ladies of the party would show herself less scrupulous than Rosette, and this nearly caused the failure of the piece ; but Theodore, who had taken the part of the melancholy Jaques, offered to replace her, seeing that Rosalind is a cavalier nearly the whole time, except in the first act where she is a woman, and that with paint and corset, and dress, he will be able to effect the illusion sufficiently well, having as yet no beard, and being of a very slight figure. " We are engaged in learning our parts, and it is something curious to see us. In every solitary nook in the park you are sure to find some one, paper in hand, muttering phrases in a whisper, raising his eyes to heaven, suddenly casting them down, and repeating the same gesture seven or eight times. If it were not known that we are to perform a comedy, we should assuredly be taken for a houseful of lunatics or poets (which is almost a pleonasm). •' I think that we shall soon know enough to have a rehearsal. I am expecting something very singular. Perhaps I am wrong. I was afraid for a moment that instead of playing by inspiration our actors would endeavor to reproduce the attitudes and voice- inflections of some fashionable performer ; but fortunately they have not watched the stage with sufficient accuracy to fall into this inconvenience, and it is to be expected that, through the awkwardness of people who have never trod the boards, they will display precious flashes of nature and that charming ingenu- ousness which the most consummate talent cannot reproduce. " Our young painter has truly wrought wonders. It would be impossible to give a stranger shape to the old trunks of trees and the ivy which entwines them ; he has taken pattern by those in the park, accentuating and exaggerating them as is necessary for the stage. Everything is expressed with admi- rable boldness and caprice ; stones, rocks, clouds, are of a mysteriously grimacing form ; mirror-like reflections play on the trembling waters which are less stable than quicksilver, and the ordinary coldness of the foliage is marvellously relieved by saffron tints dashed in by the brush of autumn ; the forest varies from emerald green to cornelian purple ; the warmest and MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 243 the freshest tones show harmoniously together, and the sky itself passes from the softest blue to the most burning colors. " He has designed all the costumes after my instructions, and they are of the handsomest description. At first the performers cried that they could not be produced in silk or velvet nor in any known material, and I nearly saw the moment when troubadour costume was to be generally adopted. The ladies said that such glaring colors would eclipse their eyes. To which we replied that their eyes were stars which were perfectly inextinguishable, and that on the contrary it was their eyes that would eclipse the colors, and even, if need were, the Argand lamps, the lustre, and the sun. They had no reply to this ; but there were other objections which kept springing up in a bristling crowd like the Lernean hydra ; no sooner was the head of one cut off than another more obstinate and more stupid would arise. " * How do you think this will keep together ? * — ' It is all very well on paper, but it is another matter when on one's back ; I shall never be able to get into that ! ' — ' My petticoat is at least four finger-lengths too short ; I shall never dare to show myself in that disguise ! ' — ' This ruff is too high ; I look as if I were a hunchback and had no neck.' — ' This headdress makes me look intolerably old.* " ' With starch, pins, and good-will, everything will hold.' — ' You are joking ! a waist like yours, more frail than a wasp's, and one which would go through the ring on my little finger ! I will wager twenty-five louis to a kiss that it will be necessary to take in this bodice ! ' — ' Your petticoat is very far from being too short, and if you knew what an adorable leg you have, you would most certainly be of my opinion.' — ' On the contrary, your neck stands out and is admirably set off by its aureola of lace.' — ' This headdress does not make you look old in the least, and, even if you appeared to be a few years older, you are so extremely young that this ought to be a matter of perfect indif- ference to you ; indeed, you would give us grounds for strange suspicions if we did not know where the pieces of your last doll are ' — etc. 244 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. " You cannot imagine what a prodigious quantity of madri- gals we were obliged to dispense in order to compel our ladies to put on charming costumes which were most becoming to them. " We found it equally troublesome to induce them to place their patches in an appropriate manner. What a devil of a taste women have ! and what Titanic obstinacy possesses a vaporish, foppish woman who believes that glazed straw-yellow suits her better than jonquil or bright rose-color. I am sure that if I had devoted to public affairs half the artifices and intrigues that I have employed in order to have a red feather placed on the left and not on the right, I should be a minister of state or emperor at the least. " What a pandemonium ! what an enormous and inextric- able rout must a real theatre be ! " From the time that the performance of a comedy was first spoken of, everything here has been in the most complete disorder. All the drawers are opened, all the wardrobes emptied ; it is genuine pillage. Tables, easy-chairs, consoles, everything is littered, and a person does not know where to set his foot. Trailing about the house are prodigious quantities of dresses, mantelets, veils, petticoats, cloaks, caps, and hats ; and when you think that all these are to be arranged on the bodies of seven or eight persons, you involuntarily think of those mountebanks at the fair who wear eight or ten coats one over another, and you find it impossible to conceive that the whole of this heap will only furnish one costume for each. " The servants are constantly coming and going ; there are always tv/o or three on the road from the mansion to the town, and if this continues all the horses will become broken-winded. " A theatrical manager has no time to be melancholy, and I have seldom been so for some time past. I am so deafened and overwhelmed that I am beginning to lose all understanding of the piece. As I support the character of impresario as well as that of Orlando, my task is a twofold one. When any diffi- culty arises recourse is had to me, and as my decisions are not MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 245 always listened to as oracles, they degenerate into interminable discussions. " If what is called living is to be always on one's legs, to be equal to twenty persons, to go up and down stairs and not to think for a minute during the day, I have never lived so much as during this week. Nevertheless, I have a smaller share in this animation than might be believed. The agitation is very shallow, and the stagnant, unflowing water might be found a few fathoms below ; life does not penetrate me so readily as that, and my vitality is even the smallest when I seem to be working and engaging in what is going on. Action dulls and fatigues me to an extent which is inconceivable ; when I am not employed actively, I think or at least dream, and this is a sort of existence, but I lose it as soon as I emerge from my porcelain-image repose. " Up to the present I have done nothing, and I do not know whether I shall ever do anything. I cannot check my brain, which is all the difference between a man of talent and a man of genius ; it is an endless boiling, wave urging wave ; I can- not master this species of internal jet which rises from my heart to my head, and, for want of outlets, drowns all my thoughts. I can produce nothing, owing not to sterility, but to superabundance ; my ideas spring up so thick-set and close that they are stifled and cannot ripen. Never will execution, however rapid and impetuous it may be, attain to such velocity. When I write a phrase, the thought which it represents is already as far distant from me as though a century had elapsed instead of a second, and it often happens that in spite of myself I mingle with it something of the thought which has taken its place in my head. " This is why I cannot live, whether as a poet or as a lover. I can only give out the ideas which have left me ; I have women only when I have forgotten them, and am loving others ; — a man, how can I bring forth my wish to the light since, hasten as I may, I lose the consciousness of what I do, and act only in accordance with a feeble reminiscence ? " To come upon a thought in a vein of your brain, to take it 246 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. out rude at first like a block of marble as it is got from the quarry, to set it before you and, with a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, to knock, cut, and scrape from morning till evening, and then carry off at night a pinch of dust to throw upon your writing — that is what I shall never be able to do. " In idea I can separate the slender form from the coarse block very well, and have a very clear vision of it ; but there are so many angles to knock away, so many splinters to make fly, so many strokes of rasp and hammer to be given in order to come near to the shape and lay hold on the just sinuosity of the contour, that my hands become blistered, and I let my chisel fall to the ground. "If I persevere, the fatigue reaches such a degree of intensity that my inmost sight is totally darkened, and I can no longer distinguish through the cloud of marble the fair divinity which is concealed within its thickness. Then I pursue her at ran- dom and in groping fashion ; I bite too deeply into one place, and do not go far enough into another ; I take away what ought to have been a leg or an arm, and leave a compact mass where there ought to have been a void ! instead of a goddess I make a grotesque, and sometimes even less, and the magnifi- cent block drawn at so great expense and with so much toil from the entrails of the earth, hammered, cut, and hollowed out in all directions, looks more as if it had been gnawed and perforated by polyps to make a hive than fashioned by a statuary after a settled design. " How dost thou contrive, Michael Angelo, to cut the marble in slices as a child carves a chestnut ? of what steel were thine unconquered chisels formed ? and what sturdy sides sus- tained you, all ye fertile artists and workers, whom no matter can resist, and who can cause your dream to flow entire into color and bronze ? " It is in a fashion an innocent and permissible vanity, after the cruel things that I have just told you of myself, and you will not be one to blame me for it, O Silvio ! — but, though the universe be destined to know nothing of it, and my name be MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 247 beforehand devoted to oblivion, I am a poet and a painter ! I have had as beautiful ideas as any poet in the world ; I have created types as pure and as divine as those that are most admired in the masters. I see them there before me as clear and as distinct as though they were really depicted, and were I able to open up a hole in my head, and place a glass in it to be looked through, there would be the most marvellous picture gallery that was ever seen. No earthly king can boast the pos- session of such a one. There are Rubenses as flaming and bright as the purest at Antwerp ; my Raphaels are in the best state of preservation, and his Madonnas have no more gracious smiles ; Buonarotti cannot contort a muscle in bolder and more terrible fashion ; the sun of Venice shines upon this canvas as though it were signed ' Paulus Cagliari ' ; the shadows of Rem- brandt himself are heaped in the background of that frame where in the distance there trembles a pale star of light ; the pictures wrought in the manner peculiar to myself would as- suredly be scorned by none. " I am quite aware that it looks strange for me to say this, and that I shall appear giddy with the coarse intoxication of the most foolish pride ; but it is so, and nothing will shake my con- viction of it. No one doubtless will share it ; what then ? Every one is born marked with a black or a white seal. Mine apparently is black. " Sometimes, even, I have difficulty in covering up my thought sufficiently in this respect ; it often happens that I speak too familiarly of these lofty geniuses whose footsteps should be adorned, and whose statues should be contemplated from afar and on the knees. Once I forgot myself so far as to say ' We.' Happily it was before a person who did not notice it, else I should infallibly have been taken for the most enormous cox- comb that ever lived. " I am a poet and a painter, Silvio ; am I not ? " It is a mistake to believe that all those who have passed for having genius were really greater men than others. It is un- known how much was contributed to Raphael's reputation by the pupils and obscure painters whom he employed in his 248 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. works ; he gave his signature to the soul and talents of many — that is all. " A great painter or a great writer occupies and fills by him- self a whole century ; his only care is to invade all styles at once, so that if a rival should start up he may accuse him at the very outset of plagiarism and check him at the first step in his care£r. These are well-known tactics, and though not new, succeed none the less every day. " It may happen that a man who is already celebrated has precisely the same sort of talent that you would have had. Under penalty of being thought to copy him, you are obliged to turn aside your natural inspiration and cause it to take a differ- ent direction. You were born to blow full-mouthed on the heroic clarion or to evoke the wan phantoms of times that are no more, and you are obliged to play your fingers on the seven- holed flute or to make knots on a sofa in the recesses of some boudoir, simply because your father did not take the trouble to cast you in a mould eight or ten years sooner, and the world does not understand that two men may cultivate the same field. " It is in this way that many noble intellects have been forced to take wittingly a path which is not theirs, and to keep for- ever along the borders of their own domain from which they have been banished, happy still to cast a glance by stealth over the hedge, and to see on the other side blooming in the sun the beautiful variegated flowers which they possess as seeds but cannot sow for lack of soil. " As regards myself, I do not know whether, — apart from the greater or less opportuneness of circumstances, the greater or less amount of air and sun, the door which has remained closed and which ought to have been opened, the meeting lost, the somebody whom I ought to have known and whom I have not known, — I should have ever attained to anything. " I have not the necessary degree of stupidity to become what is absolutely called a genius, nor the enormous obstinacy which is afterwards defined under the fine name of ' will,' when the great man has arrived at the radiant mountain-top, and which is indispensable for reaching the latter ; I am too well acquainted MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 249 with the hollowness of all things and the rottenness that is in them, to cling for very long to any one of them and pursue it eagerly and solely through thick and thin. " Men of genius are very narrow-minded, and it is on this account that they are men of genius. The want of intelligence prevents them from perceiving the obstacles which separate them from the object which they desire to reach ; they go, and in two or three strides devour the intermediate spaces. As their minds are obstinately closed to certain courses, and they notice only such things as are the most immediately connected with their projects, they make a much smaller outlay of thought and action. Nothing distracts them, nothing turns them aside, they act rather by instinct than otherwise, and many when taken out of their special groove are mere ciphers in a way that it is difficult to understand. "The making of good verses is assuredly a rare and charm- ing gift ; few people take more pleasure than I do in matters of poetry ; but yet I cannot limit and circumscribe my life within the twelve feet of an Alexandrine ; there are a thousand things which disquiet me as much as a hemistich. It is not the condi- tion of society and the reforms that should be made; I care little enough whether the peasants know how to read or not, and whether men eat bread or browse on grass ; but a hundred thousand visions pass through my head in an hour which ha\;e not the least connection with caesura or rhyme, and it is this which causes me to execute so little, although I have more ideas than certain poets who might be burnt with their own works. " I worship beauty and feel it ; I can express it as well as the most amorous statuaries can comprehend it, and yetl sculpture nothing. The ugliness and imperfection of the rough sketch revolt me ; I cannot wait until, by dint of polishing and repol- ishing, the work finally succeeds ; if I could make up my mind to leave certain things in my work alone, whether in verse or in painting, I might perhaps in the end produce a poem or a pic- ture that would make me famous, and those who love me (if there is anyone in the world who takes the trouble to do so) would not be obliged to believe in me on trust, and would have 250 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. a triumphant reply to the sardonic sneerings of the detractors of that great but unknown genius — myself. " I see many men who will take palette and pencils and cover their canvas without any great anxiety concerning what caprice is producing at the extremity of their brush, and others who will write a hundred verses one after another without making an erasure or once raising their eyes to the ceiling. I always admire themselves, even if I sometimes fail to admire their pro- ductions ; from my heart I envy the charming intrepidity and happy blindness which prevent them from seeing even their mcst palpable faults. As soon as I have drawn anything wrong I see it at once, and am pre-occupied with it beyond measure ; and as I am far more accomplished in theory than in practice, it very often happens that I am unable to correct a mistake of which I am conscious. In that event I turn the canvas with its face to the wall and never go back to it again. "The idea of perfection is so present with me, that I am instantly seized with distaste for my work and prevented from carrying it on. " Ah ! when I compare its ugly pout on canvas or paper with the soft smiles of my thought, when I see a frightful bat pass- ing in place of the beautiful dream that spread its long wings ©flight upon the bosom of my nights, when I see a thistle springing up from the idea of a rose, and hear an ass's bray where I looked for the sweetest melodies of the nightingale, I am so horribly disappointed, so angry with myself, so furious at my own impotence that I resolve never again to write or speak a single word of my life rather than thus commit crimes of high treason against my thoughts. " I cannot even succeed in writing such a letter as I should wish. I often say something quite different ; some portions are excessively developed, others dwindle away so as to become imperceptible, while frequently the idea which I intended to express is absent, or present only in a postscript. " When commencing to write to you I had certainly no intention of telling you one-half of what I have said. I was merely going to inform you that we were about to act a play ; MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 25 1 but a word leads to a phrase ; parentheses are big with other little parentheses which again contain others ready to be brought forth. There is no reason why such writing should come to an end, and should not extend to two hundred folio volumes, — which would assuredly be too much. " As soon as I take up my pen a buzzing and a rustling of wings begin in my brain as though multitudes of cockchafers were set free within it. There is a knocking against the sides of my skull, a turning, ascending and descending with horrible noise ; it is my thoughts which are fain to fly away, and are seeking for an outlet ; they all endeavor to come forth at once ; more than one breaks its legs and tears the crape of its wing in the attempt : sometimes the door is so blocked up that not one can cross the threshold and reach the paper. " Such is my nature. Not an excellent one doubtless, but what can I do ? The fault rests with the gods and not with me, poor helpless devil that I am. I have no need to entreat your indulgence, my dear Silvio ; I have it beforehand, and you are so kind as to read my illegible scrawlings, my headless and tailless dreamings, through to the end. However uncon- nected and absurd they may be they have always interest for you because they come from me, and anything that is myself, even if it be not good, is not altogether without value in your eyes. " I may let you see what is most revolting to the generality of men — sincere pride. But a truce for a while to all these fine things, and since I am writing to you about the piece that we are to perform, let us return to it and say something about it. " The rehearsal took place to-day. I was never so confused in my life, not owing to the embarrassment inseparable from reciting anything before so many people, but from another cause. We were in costume and ready to begin ; Theodore alone had not yet arrived. A message was sent to his room to know what was keeping him ; he replied that he was just ready and was coming down. " He came in fact. I heard his step in the corridor long 252 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. before he appeared, and yet no one in the world has a lighter step than Theodore ; but the sympathy which I feel with him is so powerful that I can in a measure divine his movements through the walls, and, when I knew that he was about to lay his hand on the handle of the door, I was seized with a kind of trembling, and my heart beat with horrible violence. It seemed to me that something of importance in my life was about to be decided, and that I had reached a solemn and long expected moment. " The door opened slowly and closed in the same way. " There was a general cry of admiration. The men applauded, and the women grew scarlet. Rosette alone became extremely pale and leaned against the wall, as though a sudden revelation were passing through her brain. She made in a contrary di- rection, the same movement as I did. I always suspected her of loving Theodore. " No doubt she at that moment believed as I did that the pretended Rosalind was really nothing less than a young and beautiful woman, and the frail card-castle of her hope all at once gave way, while mine rose upon its ruins ; at least this is what I thought : I may, perhaps, be mistaken, for I was scarcely in a condition to make accurate observations. " There were three or four pretty women present, without counting Rosette ; they appeared to be revoltingly ugly. By the side of this sun the star of their beauty was suddenly eclipsed, and everyone was asking how it had been possible to think even passable. Men who previously would have esteemed them- selves most fortunate to have them as mistresses, would scarcely have been willing to take them as servants. " The image which, till then, had shown itself only feebly and with vague outlines, the phantom that I had worshipped and vainly pursued was there before my eyes, living, palpable, no longer in twilight and vapor, but bathed in floods of white light ; not in a vain disguise, but in its real costume ; no longer in the derisive form of a young man, but with the features of the most charming woman. •' I experienced a sensation of enormous comfort, as though MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPLN. 253 a mountain or two had been lifted otf my breast. I felt my self-horror vanishing, and was released from the pain of regard- ing myself as a monster. I came again to conceive quite a pastoral opinion of myself, and all the violets of spring bloomed once more in my heart. " He, or rather she (for I wish henceforth to forget that I had the stupidity to take her for a man) remained motionless for a minute on the threshold of the room, as though to give the gathering time to utter its first exclamation, A bright ray lit her up from head to foot, and on the dark background of the corridor which receded far into the distance behind, the carved door-case serving her as a frame, she shone as though the light had emanated from her instead of being merely reflected, and she might rather have been taken for a marvellous production of the brush than for a human creature made of flesh and bone. " Her long brown hair, intermingled with strings of great pearls, fell in natural ringlets along her lovely cheeks ! her shoulders and breast were uncovered, and I had never seen any in the world so beautiful ; the sublimest marble cannot come near to such exquisite perfection. To see the life coursing beneath the clouded transparency ! how white and yet so ruddy the flesh ! how happily the harmonious golden tints effect the transition from skin to hair ! what entrancing poems in the soft undulations of these outlines, more supple and velvety than the neck of a swan ! Were there words to express what I feel I would give you a description fifty pages long ; but languages were made by some scoundrels or other who had never gazed attentively on a woman's back or bosom, and we do not possess half of the most indispensable terms. " I decidedly believe that I must become a sculptor, for to see such beauty and to be unable to express it in one way or another is sufficient to make a man furious and mad. I have made twenty sonnets to these shoulders but that is not enough : I should like something which I could touch with my finger and which would be exactly like ; verses express only the phan- tom of beauty and not beauty itself. The painter attains to a more accurate semblance, but it is only a semblance. Sculpture 254 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. has all the reality that anything completely false can possess : it has a multiple aspect, casts a shadow and may be touched. Your sculptured differs from your veritable mistress only in this that she is a little harder and does not speak — two very trifling defects ! " Her dress was made of a stuff of varying color, azure in the light, and golden in the shade ; a well and close fitting boot was on a foot which, apart from this, was excessively small, and stockings of scarlet silk wound amorously round a most shapely and enticing leg ; her arms, which were bare to the elbows and emerged from a cluster of lace, were round, plump, and white, as splendid as polished silver, and with unimaginably delicate line- aments ; her hands, which were laden with jewellery, weie softly swaying a large fan of singularly variegated feathers, which looked like a little pocket rainbow. " She advanced into the room, her cheeks slightly kindled with a red which was not paint, and everyone was in raptures, crying out and asking whether it was really possible that it could be he, Theodore de S^rannes, the daring rider, the demon duellist, the determined hunter, and whether he was perfectly sure that it was not his twin sister. " But you would think that he had never worn any other costume in his life ! His movements are not in the least em- barrassed, he walks very well, and does not get entangled in his train ; he ogles and flirts with his fan in a ravishing manner ! and his waist is so slender ! you might enclose it with your fingers ! It is extraordinary, inconceivable ! The illusion is as complete as it can be : you would almost think that he had a bosom, his breast is so devoloped and well filled, and then not a hair on his face, not a single one ; and his voice so sweet ! Oh ! the beautiful Rosalind ! and who would not wish to be her Orlando ? " Yes, who would not wish to be the Orlando of such a Rosalind, even at the cost of the torments I have suffered ? To love as I did with a monstrous love which could not be confessed and yet which could not be uprooted from your heart ; to be condemned to keep the profoundest silence and to shrink MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 255 from indulging in what the most discreet and respectful lover might fearlessly say to the most prudish and severe of women ; to feel yourself devoured by insane longings without excuse even in the eyes of the most abandoned libertines, what are ordinary passions to such a one as that, a passion ashamed of itself and hopeless, whose improbable success would be a crime and would cause you to die of shame ? To be reduced to wish for failure, to dread favorable chances and opportunities, and to avoid them as another would seek them — such was my fate. " The deepest discouragement had taken possession of me ; I looked upon myself with horror, mingled with surprise and curiosity. What was most revolting to me was the thought that I had never loved before, and that this was my first effervescence of youth, the first Easter-daisy in the spring-tide of my love. '*This monstrosity took the place with me of the fresh and chaste illusions of early years ; my fondly cherished dreams of tenderness at evening on the skirts of the woods, down the little reddening paths, or along the white marble terraces, near the sheet of water in the park, were then to be metamorphosed into this perfidious sphinx with doubtful smile and ambiguous voice, and before which I stood without venturing to undertake the solution of the enigma ! To interpret it wrongly would have caused my death ; for, alas ! it is the only tie which unites me to the world ; when it is broken, all will be over. Take from me this spark and I shall be more gloomy and inanimate than the band-swathed mummy of the most ancient Pharaoh. " On the occasions when I felt myself most forcibly drawn towards Theodore, I would throw myself back with dismay into the arms of Rosette, although she was infinitely displeasing to me ; I tried to interpose her like a barrier and shield between myself and him, and I felt a secret satisfaction when lying beside her in thinking that she had been proved to be a woman, and that although I had ceased to love, I was still loved by her sufficiently well to prevent our union from degenerating into intrigue and debauch. " Nevertheless, at the bottom of my heart, I felt through all this a kind of regret at being thus faithless to the idea of my 256 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. impossible passion ; I felt resentful against myself for, as itM^ere, an act of treason, and, though I well knew that I should never possess the object of my love, I was discontented with myself, and resumed my coldness towards Rosette. " The rehearsal was much better than I had hoped for ; Theodore especially proved admirable ; it was also considered that I acted uncommonly well. This, hov^'ever, was not because I possess the qualities necessary to make a good actor, and it would be a great mistake to suppose me capable of taking other parts in the same fashion ; but, through rather a singular chance, the Avords which I had to utter agreed with my situation so well, that they seemed to me to have been invented by myself rather than learnt by heart from a book. Had my memory failed me at certain passages, I should certainly not have hesitated for a minute before supplying the void with an improvised phrase. Orlando was I, at least, as much as I was Orlando : it would be impossible to meet with a more wonderful coincidence. " In the wrestling scene, when Theodore unfastened the chain from his neck and presented it to me, in accordance with his part, he cast upon me so sweetly languorous and promising a look, and uttered the sentence : ' Gentleman, Wear this for me, one out of suits with fortune That could give more but that her hand lacks means,' with such grace and nobility, that I was really troubled by it and could scarcely go on : * What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue ? I cannot speak to her, yet she urged conference. O poor Orlando ! ' " In the third act Rosalind, dressed like a man and underthe name of Ganymede reappears with her cousin, Celia, who has changed her name to Aliena. "This made a disagreeable impression upon me. I had already become so well accustomed to the feminine costume which indulged my desires with some hopes, and kept me in a perfidious but seducing error ! We very soon come to look upon our wishes as realities on the testimony of the most fleet- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 257 ing appearances, and I became quite gloomy when Theodore reappeared in his man's dress, more gloomy than I had been before ; for joy only serves to make us feel grief more keenly, the sun strives only to give us a better understanding of the horror of darkness, and the gayety of white is only intended to give relief to all the sadness of black. " His coat was the most gallant and coquettish in the world, of an elegant and capricious cut, all adorned with trimmings and ribbons, nearly in the style of the wits of the court of Louis XIII ; a pointed felt hat with a long curled feather shaded the ringlets of his beautiful hair, and the lower part of his travelling cloak was raised by a long damaskeened sword. " Yet he was dressed in such a way as to give one a presentiment that these manly clothes had a feminine lining ; a breadth of hip, a fullness of bosom, and a sort of undulation never seen in cloth on the body of a man, left but slight doubts respecting the person's sex. "He had a half deliberate, half timid manner which was most diverting, and, with infinite art, he assumed as em- barrassed an appearance in a costume which was his usual one, as he had seemed to be at his ease in garments which were not his own. " My serenity returned to some extent, and I persuaded myself afresh that it was really a woman. I recovered sufficient composure to play my part in a fitting manner. " Do you know this piece ? Perhaps not. For the last fortnight I have done nothing but read it and declaim it, I know it entirely by heart, and I cannot imagine that everybody is not as conversant with its knot and plot as I am myself. I fall commonly enough into the error of believing that when I am drunk all creation is fuddled and incapable, and if I knew Hebrew I would to a certainty ask my servant in Hebrew for my dressing-gown and slippers, and be very much astonished that he did not understand me. You will read it if you wish ; I shall assume that you have read it and only touch upon such passages as have some bearing upon my situation. " Rosalind, when walking in the forest with her cousin, is 17 258 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. greatly astonished to find that instead of blackberries and sloes the bushes bear madrigals in her praise ; strange fruits which fortunately do not grow on brambles as a rule ; for when you are thirsty it is better to find good blackberries on the branches than bad sonnets. She is very anxious to know who has spoiled the bark of the young trees in this way by cutting the letters of her name upon it. Celia, who has already en- countered Orlando, tells her, after many entreaties, that the rhymer is none other than the young man who vanquished the Duke's athlete Charles, in the wrestling match. " Soon Orlando himself appears, and Rosalind enters into conversation with him by asking him what o'clock it is. Certes, this opening is simple in the extreme ; nothing in the world could be more homely. But be not afraid : from this commonplace and vulgar phrase you will see gathered in a harvest of unexpected conceits, full of flowers and whimsical comparisons as from the most vigorous and best manured soil. " After some lines of sparkling dialogue, whose every word, falling on the phrase, causes millions of sportive spangles to fly right and left like a hammer on a red-hot iron bar, Rosalind asks Orlando whether peradventure he may know the man who hangs odes on hawthorns and elegies on brambles, and who seems to have the quotidian of love upon him, an ill which she is quite able to cure. Orlando confesses that it is he that is so tormented by love, and asks her to do him the favor of show- ing him a remedy for this sickness, seeing that she has boasted of having several infallible ones for its cure. ' You in love ? ' replies Rosalind ; ' you have none of the marks whereby a lover may be known ; you have neither a lean cheek nor a blue and sunken eye ; your hose is not ungartered, nor your sleeve unbuttoned, and your shoe is most gracefully tied ; if you are in love with anyone it is assuredly with yourself, and you need not my remedies.' " It was not without genuine emotion that I replied textually as follows : "'Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.' MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 259 *♦ This answer so unexpected and strange, which is led up to by nothing, and had seemingly been written expressly for me as though by a species of provision on the part of the poet, greatly affected me as I uttered it standing before Theodore, whose divine lips were still slightly swelled with the ironic expression of the phrase that he had just spoken, while his eyes smiled with inexpressible sweetness, and a bright ray of kindness gilded all the loftiness of his young and beautiful countenance. " ' Me believe it ! You may as soon make her that you love believe it ; which I warrant she is apter to do, than to confess she does ; that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences. But, in good sooth, are you he that hangs these fair praises of Rosalind on the trees, and have you truly need of a remedy for your madness ? ' " When she is quite satisfied that it is he, Orlando, and none other, who has rhymed these admirable verses going on so many feet, beautiful Rosalind consents to tell him her recipe. Its composition was as follows : — She pretended to be the beloved of the love-sick suitor, who was obliged to woo her as though she had been his very mistress, and to cure him of his passion she indulged in the most extravagant caprices ; would now weep and then smile ; one day entertain him, another forswear him ; would scratch him and spit in his face, and not for a single moment be like herself: fantastical, inconstant, prudish, and languishing, she was all these in turns and the poor wretch had to endure or execute all the unruly fancies engendered by weariness, vapors, and the blues in the hollow head of a frivolous woman. A goblin, an ape, and an attorney all in one had not devised more maliciousness. This miraculous treatment had not failed to produce its effect ; the sick one was driven from his mad humor of love into a living humor of madness — which was to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook truly monastic ; a most satis- factory result, and one, too, which might easily be expected. " Orlando, as may well be believed, is not very anxious to recover his health by such means ; but Rosalind insists and is desirous of undertaking the cure. She uttered the sentence : 26o MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ' I would cure you if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote and woo nle,'with so marked and visible an intention, and casting on me so strange a look, that I found it impossible not to give it a wider meaning than belongs to the words, nor see in it an indirect admonition to declare my true feelings. And when Orlando replies : ' With all my heart, good youth, 'it was in a still more significant manner, and with a sort of spite at failing to make herself understood, that she uttered the reply : * Nay, you must call me Rosalind.' " Perhaps I was mistaken and thought I saw what had really no existence, but it seemed to me that Theodore, had perceived my love, though I had most certainly never spoken a word of it to him, and that he was alluding, through the veil of these borrowed expressions, beneath this theatrical mask and in these hermaphrodite words to his real sex and to our mutual situation. It is quite impossible that so spiritual and refined a woman as she is should not have distinguished, from the very beginning, what was passing in my soul. In the absence of my words, my eyes and troubled air spoke plainly enough, and the veil of ardent friendship which I had cast over, my love, was not so impene- trable that it could not be easily pierced by an attentive and interested observer. The most innocent and inexperienced girl would not have been checked by it for a moment. " Some important reason, and one that I cannot discover, doubt- less compels the fair one to this cursed disguise, which has been the cause of all my torments and was nearly making a strange lover of me : but for this, everything would have gone evenly and easily like a carriage with well greased wheels on a level and finely sanded road ; I might have abandoned myself with sweet security to the most amorously vagrant dreamings, and taken in my hands the little white silky hand of my divinity without shuddering with horror, or shrinking twenty paces back as though I had touched a red-hot iron, or felt the claws of Beelzebub in person. " Instead of being in despair and as agitated as a real maniac, of doing my utmost to feel remorse and of grieving because I failed, I should have said to myself every morning, MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 261 stretching my arms with a sense of duty done and conscience at rest : ' I am in love,' a sentence as agreeable to say to your- self in the morning with your head on a soft pillow, and warm bed-clothes covering you, as any other imaginable sentence of four words, — always excepting this one : ' I have money.' " After rising I should have placed myself before my glass, and there, looking at myself with a sort of respect, have waxed tender, as I combed my hair, over my poetic paleness, resolving at the same time to turn it to good account and duly make the most of it, for nothing can be viler than to make love with a scarlet phiz ; and when you are so unfortunate as to be ruddy and in love, circumstances which may come together, I am of opinion that you should flour your physiognomy daily or re- nounce refinement and stick to the Margots and Toinons. "I should then have breakfasted with compunction and gravity in order to nourish this dear body, this precious box of passion, to compose sound, amorous chyle and quick, hot blood for it from the juice of meat and game, and keep it in a condition to afford pleasure to charitable souls. " Breakfast finished, and while picking my teeth, I should have woven a few heteroclite rhymes after the manner of a sonnet, and all in honor of my mistress ; I should have found out a thousand little comparisons, each more unusual than another, and infinitely gallant. In the first quatrain there would have been a dance of suns, and in the second a minuet of theological virtues ; the two tercets would not have been of an inferior style ; Helen would have been treated like an inn- servant, and Paris like an idiot ; the East would have had nothing to be envied for in the magnificence of metaphor ; the last line, especially, would have been particularly admirable and would have contained at least two conceits in a syllable ; for a scorpion's venom is in its tail, and the merit of a sonnet is in the last line. "The sonnet completed and well and duly transcribed on glazed and perfumed paper, I should have left the house a hundred cubits tall, bending my head lest I should knock against the sky and be caught in the clouds (a wise precaution), 262 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. and should have gone and recited my new production to all my friends and enemies, then to infants at the breast of their nurses, then to the horses and donkeys, then to the walls and trees, just to know the opinion of creation respecting the last product of my vein. " In social circles I should have spoken with \yomen in a doctoral manner, and maintained sentimental theses in a grave and measured tone of voice, like a man who knows much more than he cares to say concerning the subject in hand, and has not acquired his knowledge from books ; — a style which never fails to produce a prodigious effect, and causes all the women in the company who have ceased to mention their age, and the few little girls not invited to dance to turn up the whites of their eyes. " I might have led the happiest life in the world, treading on the pug-dog's tail without its mistress making too great an outcry, upsetting tables laden with china, and eating the choicest morsel at table without leaving any for the rest of the party. All this would have been excused out of consideration for the well-known absent-mindedness of lovers ; and as they saw me swallowing up everything with a wild look, everyone would have clasped his hands and said, ' Poor fellow ! ' " And then the dreamy, doleful air, the dishevelled hair, the untidy stockings, the slack cravat, the great hanging arms that I should have had ! how I should have hastened through the avenues in the park, now swiftly, now slowly, after the fashion of a man whose reason is completely gone ! How I should have stared at the moon and made rings in the water with pro- found tranquillity ! " But the gods have ordained it otherwise. " I am smitten with a beauty in doublet and boots, with a proud Bradamant who scorns the garments of her sex, and leaves you at times wavering amid the most disquieting per- plexities ; her features and body are indeed the features and body of a woman, but her mind is unquestionably that of a man. *' My mistress is most proficient with the sword, and might teach the most experienced fencing master's assistant ; she has MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 2^3 had I do not know how many duels, and has killed or wounded three or four persons ; she clears ditches ten feet wide on horse- back, and hunts like an old country squire — singular qualities for a mistress ! such things never happen except with me. •* I laugh, but I have certainly no cause for doing so, for I never sufTered so much, and the last two months seemed to me like two years or rather two centuries. There was an ebb and flow of uncertainties in my head sufficient to stupefy the strongest brain ; I was so violently agitated and pulled in all directions, I had such furious transports, such dull atonies, such extrava- gant hopes and such deep despairs, that I really do not know how it was that I did not die from the pain of it. This idea so occupied and possessed me that I was astonished that it was not seen clearly through my body like a candle in a lantern, and I was in mortal terror lest someone should chance to discover the object of my insane love. " However, Rosette, being the person most interested in watching the movements of my heart, appeared to perceive nothing ; I believe that she was too much engaged in loving Theodore to pay attention to my cooling towards her ; otherwise I must be a master of the art of dissimulation, and I am not so conceited as to have this belief. Thdodore himself up to that day never showed that he had the faintest suspicion of the con- dition of my soul, and always spoke to me in a familiar and friendly fashion, as a well-bred young fellow speaks to another of his own age — nothing more. His conversation with me used to turn on all sorts of subjects, arts, poetry, and other similar matters, but never on anything of an intimate and exact nature having reference to himself or to me. " It may be that the motives compelling him to this disguise have ceased to exist, and that he will soon resume the dress that is suitable for him. This I do not know ; the fact remains that Rosalind uttered certain words with peculiar inflexions, and in a very marked manner emphasized all the passages in her part which had an ambiguous meaning and might point in a particular direction. •* In the trysting scene, from the moment when she reproaches 264 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. Orlando for not coming two hours too soon as would befit a genuine lover instead of two hours too late, until the sorrowful sigh which, fearful at the extent of her passion, she heaves as she throws herself into Aliena's arms : ' O coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathoms deep I am in love ! ' she displayed miraculous talent. It was an irresistible blending of tenderness, melancholy, and love ; there was a trembling and agitation in her voice, and behind the laugh might be felt the most violent love ready to burst forth ; add to this all the piquancy and singularity of the transposition and the novelty of seeing a young man woo a mistress whom he takes for a man, and who has all the appearance of one. " Expressions which in other situations would have appeared ordinary and commonplace, were in ours thrown into peculiar relief, and all the small change of amorous comparisons and protestations in vogue on the stage seemed struck with quite a new stamp ; besides, had the thoughts, instead of being rare and charming as they are, been more worn than a judge's robe or the crupper of a hired donkey, the style in which they were delivered would have caused them to be apparently character- ized by the most marvellous refinement and best taste in the world. " I forgot to tell you that Rosette, after declining the part of Rosalind, compliantly undertook the secondary part of Phoebe. Phoebe is a shepherdess in the forest of Arden, loved to distrac- tion by the shepherd Silvius, whom she cannot endure, and whom she overwhelms with consistent harshness. Phoebe is as cold as the moon whose name she bears ; she has a heart of snow which is not to be melted by the fire of the most burning sighs, but whose icy crust constantly thickens and hardens like diamond ; but scarcely has she seen Rosalind in the dress of the handsome page Ganymede, than all this ice dissolves to tears, and the diamond becomes softer than wax. " The haughty Phoebe who laughed at love, is herself in love, and now suffers the torments which she formerly made others endure. Her pride is humble so far as to make every advance ; she sends poor Silvius to Rosalind with an ardent MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 265 letter containing the avowal of her passion in most humble and supplicating terms. Rosalind, touched with pity for Silvius, and having, moreover, most excellent reasons for not respond- ing to Phoebe's love, subjects her to the harshest treatment, and mocks her with unparalleled cruelty and animosity. Never- theless, Phoebe prefers these outrages to the most delicate and impassioned madrigals from her helpless shepherd ; she follows the handsome stranger everywhere, and, by dint of her impor- tunities, extracts the promise, — the most favorable she can ob- tain, — that if ever he marries a woman, he will most certainly marry her ; meanwhile he binds her to treat Silvius well, and not to nurse too flattering a hope. " Rosette acquitted herself of her part with a sad, fond grace and a tone of mournful resignation which went to the heart ; and when Rosalind said to her, ' I would love you if I could,' the tears were on the point of overflowing her eyes, and she found it difficult to restrain them, for Phoebe's history is hers, just as Orlando's is mine, with the difference that everything turns out happily for Orlando, while Phoebe, deceived in her love, is reduced to marrying Silvius, instead of the charming ideal she would fain embrace. Life is ordered thus : that which makes the happiness of one, makes of necessity the mis- fortune of another. It is very fortunate for me that Theodore is a woman : it is very unfortunate for Rosette that he is not a man ; and she now finds herself amid the amorous impossi- bilities in which I was lately lost. " At the end of the piece Rosalind lays aside the doublet of the page Ganymede for the garments of her sex, and makes herself known to the duke as his daughter, and to Orlando as his mistress. The god Hymen then arrives with his saff"ron livery and lawful torches. Three marriages take place — Orlando weds Rosalind, Phoebe Silvius, and the facetious Touchstone the artless Audrey. Then comes the salutation of the epilogue, and the curtain falls. " We have been very greatly interested and occupied with all this. It was in some measure a play within a play, an invisible drama unknown to the audience, which we acted for ourselves 266 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. alone, and which, in symbolical words, summed up our entire life, and expressed our most hidden desires. Without Rosa- lind's singular recipe, I should have become more sick than ever, without even the hope of a distant cure, and should have continued to wander sadly through the crooked paths of the dark forest. " Nevertheless, I have only a moral certainty : I am without proofs, and I cannot remain any longer in this state of un- certainty ; I really must speak to Theodore in a more definite manner. I have gone up to him twenty times with a sentence prepared, rnd could not manage to utter it. I dare not ; I have many opportunities of speaking to him alone, either in the park or in my room, or in his own, for he visits me, and I him, but I let them slip without availing myself of them, although the next moment I feel mortal regret, and fall into horrible passions with myself. I open my mouth, and, in spite of my- self, other words take the place of those that I would utter ; in- stead of declaring my love, I enlarge upon the rain or the fine weather, or some other similar stupidity. Yet the season is drawing to a close, and we shall soon return to town ; the facilities which here are opened up favorably to my desires will never be met with again. We shall perhaps lose sight of each other, and opposite currents will no doubt carry us away. "Country freedom is so charming and convenient a thing ! the trees, even when they have lost some of their leaves in autumn, afford such delicious shades to the dreamings of in- cipient love ! it is difficult to resist amid the surroundings of beautiful nature! the birds have such languorous songs, the flowers such intoxicating scents, the backs of the hills such golden and silky turf! Solitude inspires you with a thousand voluptuous thoughts, which the whirlwind of the world would have scattered or have caused to fly hither and thither, and the instinctive movement of two beings listening to the beating of their hearts in the silence of the deserted country is to entwine the arms more closely and enfold each other, as though they were indeed the only living creatures in the world. "I was out walking this morning; the weather was mild MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 267 and damp, and though the sky gave no glimpse of the smallest lozenge of azure, it was neither dark nor lowering. Two or three tones of pearl-gray, harmoniously blended, bathed it from end to end, and across this vaporous background cottony clouds, like large pieces of wool, passed slowly along ; they were being driven by the dying breath of a little breeze, scarcely strong enough to shake the summitsof the most restless aspens ; flakes of mist were rising among the tall chestnut-trees and marking the course of the river in the distance. When the breeze took breath again, parched and reddened leaves would scatter in agitation and hasten along the path before me like swarms of timid sparrows ; then the breath ceasing, they would sink down a few paces further on — a true image of those natures which seem to be birds flying freely with their wings, but which after all are only leaves withered by the morning frost, the toy and sport of the slightest passing breeze. " The distance was stumped with vapor and the fringes of the horizon ravelled on the border in such a manner that it was scarcely possible to determine the exact point at which the earth ended and the sky began : a gray which was somewhat more opaque, and a mist which was somewhat more dense, vaguely indicating the separation and the difference of the planes. Through this curtain the willows, with their ashen tops, looked like spectral rather than real trees, and the curves of the hills had a greater resemblance to the undulations of an accumulation of clouds than to the bearings of solid ground. The outlines of objects wavered to the eye, and a species of gray weft of unspeakable fineness, like a spider's ,web, stretched between the foreground of the landscape and the retreating depths behind ; in shaded places the hatchings were much more clearly drawn, displaying the meshes of the network ; in the brighter parts this misty thread was imperceptible, and became lost in a diffused light. In the air there was some- thing drowsy, damply warm, and sweetly dull, which strangely predisposed to melancholy. " As I went along I thought that with me too autumn was come and the radiant summer vanished never to return ; the 268 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. tree of my soul was perhaps stripped even barer than the trees of the forests ; only, on the loftiest bough a single green little leaf remained, swaying, and quivering, and full of sadness to see its sisters leave it one by one. " Remain on the tree, O little leaf the color of hope, cling to the bough with all the strength of thy ribs and fibres ; let not thyself be dismayed by the whistlings of the wind, O good little leaf ! for, when thou art gone, who will mark whether I be a dead or a living tree, and who will restrain the woodman that he cut not my foot with blows of his axe nor make faggots of my boughs ? It is not yet the time when trees are bare of leaves, and the sun may yet rid himself of the misty swaddling- clothes which are about him. " This sight of the dying season impressed me greatly. I thought that time was flying fast, and that I might die without clasping my ideal to my heart. " As I returned home I formed a resolution. Since I could not make up my mind to speak, I wrote all my destiny on a sheet of paper. Perhaps it is ridiculous to write to some one living in the same house with you, and whom you may see any day at any hour ; But I am no longer one to consider what is ridiculous or not. " I sealed my letter not without trembling and changing color ; then, choosing a time when Theodore was out, I placed it on the middle of his table, and fled with as much agitation as though I had performed the most abominable action in the worjd." XII. PROMISED you the continuation of my adven- tures ; but I am so lazy about writing, that I really must love you as the apple of my eye, and know that you are more inquisitive than Eve or Psyche, to be able to sit down before a table with a large sheet of white paper which is to be turned quite black, and an ink-bottle deeper than the sea, whose every drop must turn into thoughts, or something like them, without coming to the sudden resolu- tion of mounting on horseback and going at full speed over the eighty enormous leagues which separate us, to tell you viva-voce what I am going to scrawl to you in imperceptible lines, so that I may not be frightened myself at the prodigious volume of my Picaresque odyssey. •' Eighty leagues ! to think that there is all this space between me and the person whom I love best in the world ! I have a great mind to tear up my letter and have my horse saddled. But I forgot ; in the dress that I am wearing I could not approach you and resume the familiar life which w^e used to lead together when we were very ingenuous and innocent little girls. If I ever go back to petticoats, it will certainly be from this motive. " I left you, I think, at the departure from the inn where I had passed such a comical night, and where my virtue was nearly making shipwreck as it was leaving the harbor. We all set out together, going in the same direction. My compan- ions were in the greatest raptures over the beauty of my horse, which is, in fact, a thoroughbred, and one of the best coursers Z'JO MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. in existence ; this raised me at least half a cubit in their estimation, and they added all my mount's deserts to my own. Nevertheless, they seemed to fear that it was too frisky and spirited for me. I bade them calm their fears, and to show them that there was no danger, made it curvet several times ; then I cleared rather a high fence and set off at a gallop. " The band tried in vain to follow me ; I turned bridle when I was far enough away, and returned at full speed to meet them ; when I was close to them I checked my horse as he was launched out on his four feet and stopped him short, which, as you know, or, as you do not know, is a genuine feat of strength. " From esteem they passed at a bound to the profoundest respect. They had not suspected that a young scholar, who had only just left the university, was so good a horseman as all that. This discovery that they made was of greater ser- vice to me than if they had recognized in me every theological and cardinal virtue ; — instead of treating me as a youngster they spoke to me with a tone of obsequious familiarity which was very gratifying to me. " I had not laid aside my pride with my clothes : being no longer a woman, I wished to be in every respect a man, and not to be satisfied with having merely the external appearance of one. I had made up my mind to have as a gentleman the success to which, in the character of a woman, I could no longer pretend. What I was most anxious about was to know how I should proceed in order to possess courage ; for courage and skill in bodily exercise are the means by which men find it easiest to establish their reputation. It is not that I am timid for a woman, and I am devoid of the idiotic pusillanimity to be seen in many ; but from this to the fierce and heedless brutality which is the glory of men there still remains a wide interval, and my intention was to become a little fire-eater, a hector like men of fashion, so that I might be on a good footing in society and enjoy all the advantages of my metamorphosis. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 271 ** But the course of events showed me that nothing was easier, and that the recipe for it was very simple. "I will not relate to you, after the custom of travellers, that I did so many leagues on such a day, and went from such a place to such another, that the roast at the White Horse or the Iron Cross was raw or burnt, the wine sour, and the bed in which I slept hung with figured or flowered curtains : such details are very important and fitting to be preserved for posterity ; but posterity must do without them for once, and you must submit to be ignorant of the number of dishes com- posing my dinner, and whether I slept well or ill during the course of my travels. "Nor shall I give you an exact description of the different landscapes, the corn-fields and forests, the various modes of cultivation and the hamlet-laden hills which passed in succession before my eyes ; it is easy to imagine them ; take a little earth, plant a few trees and some blades of grass in it, daub on a bit of grayish or pale blue sky behind, and you will have a very sufficient idea of the moving background against which our little caravan was to be seen. If, in my first letter, I entered into some details of the kind, pray excuse me, I will not relapse into the same fault again : as I had never gone out before, the least thing seemed to me of enormous importance. "One of the gentlemen, the sharer of my bed, he whom I had nearly pulled by the sleeve in that memorable night the agonies of which I have described to you at length, con- ceived a great passion for me, and kept his horse by the side of mine the whole time. " Except that I would not have accepted Him for a lover though he brought me the fairest crown in the world, he was not at all displeasing ; he was well-informed, and was not without wit and good-humor ; only, when he spoke of women, he did so with an air of contempt and irony, for which I would most willingly have torn both his eyes out of his head, and this the more because, for all its exaggeration, there was a great deal in what he said that was cruelly true, and the justice of which my man's attire compelled me to admit. Z'JZ MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. " He invited me so pressingly and so often to go with him on a visit to one of his sisters, whose widowhood was nearly- over, and who was then living at an old mansion Mnth one of his aunts, that I could not refuse him. I made a few objections for form's sake, for in reality I was as ready to go there as any- where else, and I could attain my end as well in this fashion as in another ; and, as he assured me that he would feel quite offended if I did not give him at least a fortnight, I replied that I was willing, and that the matter was settled. " At a branching of the road, my companion, pointing to the right stroke of this natural Y, said to me : ' It is down there ! ' The rest gave us a grasp of the hand and departed in the other direction. " After a few hours travelling we reached our destination. " A moat, which was rather broad, but which was filled with abundant and bushy vegetation instead of with water, separated the park from the high-road ; it was lined with freestone, and the angles bristled with gigantic iron spikes, which looked as if they had grown like natural plants between the disjointed blocks of the wall. A little one-arched bridge crossed this dry channel and gave access to the gateway. " An avenue of lofty elms, arched like an arbor and cut in the old style, appeared before you first of all ; and, after follow- ing it for some time, you arrived at a kind of cross-roads. "The trees looked superannuated rather than old; they appeared to be wearing wigs and white powder ; only a little tuft of foliage had been spared to them quite at the top ; all the remainder was carefully pruned, so that they might have been taken for huge plumes planted at intervals in the ground. " After leaving the cross-way, which was covered with fine, carefully-rolled grass, you had then to pass beneath a curious piece of foliage architecture ornamented with fire-pots, pyramids and rustic columns, all wrought with the assistance of shears and hedgebills in an enormous clump of box. In different perspectives to right and left might be seen now a half-ruined rock-work castle, now the moss-eaten staircase of a dried-up waterfall, or perhaps a vase, or a statue of a nymph and shepherd MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 273 with nose and fingers broken and some pigeons perched on their shoulders and head. " A large flower-garden, laid out in the French style, stretched before the mansion ; all the divisions were traced with box and holly in the most rigorously symmetrical manner ; it had quite as much the appearance of a carpet as of a garden ; large flowers in ball-dress, with majestic bearing and serene air, like duchesses preparing to dance a minuet, bent their heads slightly to you as you passed ; others, apparently less polished, remained stiff" and motionless, like dowagers working tapestry. Shrubs of every possible shape, always excepting the natural one, round, square, pointed and triangular, in green and gray boxes, seemed to walk in procession along the great avenue, and lead you by the hand to the foot of the steps. " A few turrets, half entangled in more recent constructions, rose above the line of the building by the whole height of their slate extinguishers, and their dove-tailed vanes of iron-place bore witness to a sufficiently honorable antiquity. The win- dows of the pavilion in the centre all opened upon a common balcony ornamented with a very rich and highly-wrought iron balustrade, and the rest were surrounded with stone facings sculptured in figures and knots. " Four or five large dogs ran up with open-mouthed barkings and prodigious gambols. They frisked about the horses, jump- ing up to their noses, and gave a special welcome to my comrade's horse, which probably they often visited in the stable or followed out-of-doors. " A kind of servant, looking half laborer and half groom, at last appeared at all this noise, and taking our beasts by the bridle led them away. I had not as yet seen a living soul, with the exception of a little peasant-girl, as timid and wild as a deer, who had fled at the sight of us and crouched down in a furrow behind some hemp, although we had called to her over and over again, and done all we could to reassure her. " No one was to be seen at the windows ; you would have thought that the mansion was not inhabited at all, or only by spirits, for not the slightest sound could be heard from without. iS 274 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. " We were beginning to ascend the steps, jingling our spurs, for our legs were rather numb, when we heard a noise inside like the opening and shutting of doors, as if some one were hastening to meet us. " In fact, a young woman appeared at the top of the steps, cleared the space separating her from my companion at a single bound, and threw herself on his neck. He embraced her most affectionately, and putting his arm round her waist, and almost lifting her up, carried her in this way to the top. " ' Do you know that you are very amiable and polite for a brother, my dear Alcibiades ? It is not at all unnecessary, sir, is it, to apprise you that he is my brother, for he certainly has scarcely the ways of one ? ' said the young and fair one turning towards me. " To which I replied that a mistake might possibly be made about it, and that it was in some measure a misfortune to be her brother and be thus excluded from the list of her adorers ; and that were this my case, I should become at once the happiest and most miserable cavalier on the earth. This made her smile gently. " Talking thus we entered a parlor, the walls of which were decorated with high-warped Flanders tapestry. There were large trees, with sharp-pointed leaves, supporting swarms of fan- tastic birds ; the colors, altered by time, showed strange trans- positions of tints ; the sky was green, the trees royal blue with yellow lights, and in the drapery of the figures the shadow was often of an opposite color to the ground formed by the material ; the flesh resembled wood, and the nymphs walking beneath the faded shades of the forest looked like unswathed mummies ; their mouths alone, the purple of which had preserved its primitive tint, smiled with an appearance of life. In the foreground bristled tall plants of singular green, with broad striped flowers, the pistils of which resembled peacocks' crests. Herons with serious and thoughtful air, their heads sunk be- tween their shoulders, and their long beaks resting on their plump crops, stood philosophically on one of their thin legs in black and stagnant water streaked with tarnished silver threads. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 275 through the foliage there were distant glimpses of little mansions with turrets like pepper-boxes and balconies filled with beautiful ladies in grand attire watching processions or hunts pass by. " Capriciously indented rockeries, with torrents of white wool falling from them, mingled and dappled clouds on the edge of the horizon. " One of the things that struck me most was a huntress shooting a bird. Her open fingers had just released the string and the arrow was gone ; but, as this part of the tapestry hap- pened to be at a corner, the arrow was on the other side of the wall and had described a sharp curve, while the bird was flying away on motionless wings, and apparently desirous of gaining a neighboring branch. " This arrow, feathered and gold-tipped, always in the air and never reaching the mark, had a most singular effect ; it was like a sad and mournful symbol of human destiny, and the more I looked at it, the more I discovered in it mysterious and sinister meanings. There stood the huntress with her foot advanced, her knee bent, and her eye, with its silken lashes, wide open, and no longer able to see the arrow which had deviated from its path. She seemed to be looking anxiously for the mottled-plumed phenicopter which she was desirous of bringing down and expecting to see fall before her pierced through and through. I do not know whether it was a mistake of my imagination, but I thought that the face had as dull and despairing an expression as that of a poet dying without having written the work which he expected to establish his reputation, and seized by the pitiless death-rattle while endeavoring to dictate it. " I am talking to you at length about this tapestry, certainly at a greater length than the importance of the subject demands ; but that fantastic world created by the workers in high warp is a thing which has always strangely preoccupied me. "I am passionately fond of its imaginary vegetation, the flowers and plants which have no existence in reality, the forests of unknown trees wherein wander unicorns and snowy capri mules and stags with golden crucifixes between their 376 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. antlers and commonly pursued by red-bearded hunters in Sar- acen costume. " When I was a child, 1 scarcely ever entered a tapestried chamber without experiencing a kind of shiver, and when there I hardly dared to stir. " All the figures standing upright against the wall, and deriv- ing a sort of fantastic life from the undulation of the material and the play of light, seemed to me so many spies engaged in watching my actions in order to give an account of them at a proper time and place, and I would not have eaten a stolen apple or cake in their presence. " How many things would these grave personages have to tell could they open their lips of red thread, and could sounds pene- trate into the concha of their embroidered ears ! Of how many murders, treasons, infamous adulteries and monstrosities of all kinds are they not silent and impassable witnesses ! " But let us leave the tapestry and return to our story. " * Alcibiades, I will have my aunt informed of your arrival.' " ' Oh ! there is no great hurry about that, my dear sister ; let us sit down first of all and talk a little. I have to introduce to you a gentleman, Theodore de S^rannes, who will spend some time here. I have no need to recommend you to give him a hearty welcome ; he is himself a sufficient recommendation.' (I am telling you what he said ; do not accuse me unreasonably of conceit.) " The fair one slightly bent her head as though to give assent, and we spoke of something else. " While conversing, I looked at her minutely, and exam- ined her with * more attention than I had found possible until then. " She was perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, and her mourning was most becoming to her ; truth to tell, she had not a very lugubrious or disconsolate appearance, and I suspect that she would have eaten the ashes of her Mausolus in her soup like rhubarb. I do not know whether she had wept plenteously for her deceased spouse ; if so, there was, at all events, little appearance of it, and the pretty cambric hand- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 277 kerchief which she held in her hand was as perfectly dry as it was possible to be. " Her eyes were not red, but, on the contrary, were the brightest and most brilliant in the world, and you would have sought in vain on her cheeks for the furrow where her tears had flowed ; there were in fact only two little dimples hollowed by an habitual smile, and it is right to say that, for a widow, her teeth were very frequently to be seen — certainly not a dis- agreeable sight, for they were small and very regular. I esteemed her at the very first for not having believed that, because a husband had died, she was obliged to discolor her eyes and give herself a violet nose. I was also grateful to her for not assuming a doleful little air, and for speaking naturally, with her sonorous and silvery voice, without drawling her words and breaking her phrases with virtuous sighs. " This appeared to me in very good taste ; I judged her from the first to be a woman of sense, as indeed she is. " She was well made, with a very becoming hand and foot ; her black costume was arranged with all possible coquettish- ness, and so gayly that the lugubriousness of the color com- pletely disappeared, and she might have gone to a ball dressed as she was without any one considering it strange. If ever I marry and become a widow, I shall ask for a pattern of her dress, for it becomes her angelically. " After some conversation we went up to see the old aunt. " We found her seated in a large, easy-backed arm-chair, with a little stool under her foot, and beside her an old dog, bleared and sullen, which raised its black muzzle at our arrival, and greeted us with a very unfriendly growl. " I have never looked at an old woman without horror. My mother died when quite young ; no doubt, if I had seen her slowly growing old, and seen her features becoming distorted in an imperceptible progression, I should have quietly come to be used to it. In my childhood I was surrounded only by young and smiling faces, so that I have preserved an insurmountable antipathy towards old people. Hence I shuddered when the beautiful widow touched the dowager's yellow forehead with her 278 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. pure, vermilion lips. It is what I could not undertake to do. I know that I shall be like her when I am sixty years old ; but it is all the same, I cannot help it, and I pray God that He may make me die young like my mother. " Nevertheless, this old woman had retained some simple and majestic traces of her former beauty which prevented her from falling into that roast-apple ugliness which is the portion of women who have been only pretty or simply fresh ; her eyes, though terminating at their corners in claws of wrinkles, and covered with large, soft eyelids, still possessed a few sparks of their early fire, and you could see that in the last reign they must have darted dazzling lightnings of passion. Her thin and delicate nose, somewhat curved like the beak of a bird of prey, gave to her profile a sort of serious grandeur, which was tempered by the indulgent smile of her Austrian lip, painted with carmine, after the fashion of the last century. " Her costume was old-fashioned without being ridiculous, and was in perfect harmony with her face ; for head-dress she had a simple mop-cap, white with small lace ; her long, thin hands, which you could see had been very beautiful, trembled in mittens without either fingers or thumb ; a dress of dead-leaf color, figured with flowerings of deeper hue, a black mantle and an apron of pigeon's neck paduasoy, completed her attire. " Old women should always dress in this way, and have sufficient respect for their approaching death not to harness themselves with feathers, garlands of flowers, bright-colored ribbons, and a thousand baubles which are becoming only to extreme youth. It is vain for them to make advances to life, life will have no more of them ; with the expenses to which they put themselves, they are like superannuated courtesans who plaster themselves with red and white, and are spurned on the pavement by drunken muleteers with kicks and insults. " The old lady received us with that exquisite ease and politeness which is the gift of those who belonged to the old court, and the secret of which seemingly is being lost from day to day, like so many other excellent secrets, and with a MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 279 voice which, broken and tremulous as it was, still possessed great sweetness. " I appeared to please her greatly, and she looked at me for a very long time with much attention and with apparently deep emotion. A tear formed in the corner of her eye and crept slowly down one of her great wrinkles, wherein it was lost and dried. She begged me to excuse her and told me that I was very like a son of hers who had been killed in the army. " Owing to this real or imaginary likeness, the whole time that I stayed at the mansion, I was treated by the worthy dame with extraordinary and quite maternal kindness. I discovered more charms in her than I should have at first believed possible, for the greatest pleasure that elderly people can give me is never to speak to me, and to go away when I arrive. *' I shall not give you a detailed account of my daily doings at R . If I have been somewhat diffuse through all this commencement, and have sketched you these two or three physiognomies of persons or places with some care, it is because some very singular though very natural things befell me there, things which I ought to have foreseen when assuming the dress of a man. " My natural levity caused me to be guilty of an indiscretion of which I cruelly repent, for it has filled a good and beautiful soul with a perturbation which I cannot allay without discovering what I am and compromising myself seriously. " In order to appear perfectly like a man, and to divert my- self a little, I thought that I could not do better than woo my friend's sister. It appeared very funny to me to throw myself on all fours when she dropped her glove and restore it to her with profound obeisances, to bend over the back of her easy- chair with an adorably languorous little air, and to drop a thousand and one of the most charming madrigals into the hollow of her ear. As soon as she wished to pass from one room to another I would gracefully offer her my hand ; if she mounted on horseback I held the stirrup, and when walking I was always by her side ; in the evening I read to her and sang 28o MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. with her ; in brief, I performed all the duties of a 'cavaliere servente' with scrupulous exactness. " I pretended everything that I had seen lovers do, which amused me and made me laugh like the true madcap that I am, when I was alone in my room, and reflected on all the imper- tinent things I had just uttered in the most serious tone in the world. " Alcibiades and the old marchioness appeared to view this intimacy with pleasure and very often left us together. I sometimes regretted that I was not really a man, that I might have profited better by it ; had I been one, the matter would have been in my own hands, for our charming widow seemed to have totally forgotten the deceased, or, if she did remember him, she would willingly have been faithless to his memory. " After beginning in this fashion I could not honorably, draw back again, and it was very difficult to effect a retreat with arms and baggage ; yet I could not go beyond a certain limit, nor had I much knowledge of how to be amiable except in words : I hoped to be able to reach in this way the end of the month which I was to spend at R and then to retire, promising to return, but without the intention of doing so. I thought that at my departure the fair one would console herself, and seeing me no more would soon forget me. " But in my sport I had aroused a serious passion, and things turned out differently — an illustration of a long well-known truth, namely, that you should never play either with fire or with love. " Before seeing me. Rosette knew nothing of love. Married very young to a man much older than herself, she had been unable to feel for him anything more than a sort of filial friendship ; no doubt she had been courted, but, extraordinary as it may appear, she had not had a lover ; either the gallants who had paid her attention were sorry seducers, or, what is more likely, her hour had not yet struck. Country squires and lordlings, always talking of fumets and leashes, hog-steers and antlers, morts and stags of ten, and mingling the whole with almanac charades and madrigals mouldy with age, were cer- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 28 1 tainly little adapted to suit her, and her virtue had not to strug- gle much to resist them. " Besides, the natural gayety and liveliness of her dispo- sition were a sufficient defence to her against love, that soft pas- sion which has such a hold upon the pensive and melancholy ; the idea which her old Tithonus had been able to give her of voluptuousness must have been a very indifferent one not to cause her to be greatly tempted to make still further trials, and she was placidly enjoying the pleasure of being a widow so soon and having still so many years in which to be beautiful. " But on my arrival everything was quite changed. I at first believed that if I had kept within the narrow limits of cold and scrupulous politeness towards her, she would not have taken much notice of me ; but, in truth, the sequel obliged me to admit that it would have have been just the same, neither more nor less, and that though my supposition was a very modest, it was a purely gratuitous one. Alas ! nothing can turn aside the fatal ascendant, and no one can escape the good or evil in- fluence of his star. " Rosette's destiny was to love only once in her lifetime, and with an impossible love ; she must fulfil it, and she will fulfil it. " I have been loved, O Graciosa ! and it is a sweet thing, though it was only by a woman, and though there was an element of pain in such an irregular love which cannot belong to the other ; — oh ! a very sweet thing ! When you awake in the night and rise upon your elbow and say to yourself : ' Some pne is thinking or dreaming of me ; some one is occupied with my life ; a movement of my eyes or lips makes the joy or the sadness of another creature ; a word that I have chanced to let fall is carefully gathered up and commented on and turned over for whole hours ; I am the pole to which a restless magnet points ; my eye is a heaven, my mouth a paradise more desired than the true one ; were I to die, a warm rain cf tears would revive my ashes, and my tomb would be more flowery than a marriage gift ; were I in danger some one would rush between the sword's point and my breast ; everything would be sacrificed 282 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. for me ! ' — it is glorious ; I do not know what more one can wish for in the world. " This thought gave me pleasure for which I reproached my- self, since I had nothing to give in return for it all, but was in the position of a poor person accepting presents from a rich and generous friend without the hope of ever being able to do the like for him in turn. It charmed me to be adored in this way, and at times I abandoned myself to it with singular compla- cency. From hearing every one call me ' Sir,' and seeing my- self treated as though I were a man, I was insensibly forgetting that I was a woman ; my disguise seemed to me my natural dress, and I was forgetting that I had ever worn another ; I had ceased to remember that I was after all only a giddy girl who had made a sword of her needle, and cut one of her skirts into a pair of breeches. " Many men are more womanish than I. I have little of the woman, except her breast, a few rounder lines, and more deli- cate hands ; the skirt is on my hips, and not in my disposition. It often happens that the sex of the soul does not at all cor- respond with that of the body, and this is a contradiction which I cannot fail to produce great disorder. For my own part, for instance, if I had not taken this resolution — mad in appear- ance, but in reality very wise — and renounced the garments of a sex which is mine only materially and accidentally, I should have been very unhappy : I like horses, fencing, and all violent exercises ; I take pleasure in climbing and running about like a youth ; it wearies me to remain sitting with my feet close together and my elbows glued to my sides, to cast my eyes modestly down, to speak in a little, soft, honeyed voice, and to pass a bit of wood ten million times through the holes in a canvas ; I have not the least liking for obedience, and the expression that I most frequently employ is : ' I will.' Beneath my smooth forehead and silken hair move strong and manly thoughts ; all the affected nonsense which chiefly beguiles women has never stirred me to any great degree, and, like Achilles disguised as a young girl, I should be ready to relin- guish the mirror for a sword. The only thing that pleases MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 283 me in women is their beauty ; in spite of the inconveniences resulting from it, I would not willingly renounce my form, however ill-assorted it may be with the mind which it contains. " There was an element of novelty and piquancy in such an intrigue, and I should have been greatly amused by it had it not been taken seriously by poor Rosette. She began to love me most ingenuously and conscientiously, with all the power of her good and beautiful soul — with the love that men do not understand and of which they could not form even a remote conception, tenderly and ardently, as I would wish to be loved, and as I should love, could I meet with the reality of my dream. What a splendid treasure lost, what white transparent pearls, such as divers will never find in the casket of the sea ! what sweet breaths, what soft sighs dispersed in air, which might have been gathered by pure and amorous lips ! " Such a passion might have rendered a young man so happy ! so many luckless ones, handsome, charming, gifted, full of intellect and heart, have vainly supplicated on their knees insensible and gloomy idols ! so many good and tender souls have in despair flung themselves into the arms of cour- tesans, or have silently died away like lamps in tombs, who might have been rescued from debauchery and death by a sin- cere love ! " What whimsicality is there in human destiny ! and what a jester is chance ! " What so many others had eagerly longed for came to me, to me who did not and could not desire it. A capricious young girl takes a fancy to ramble about the country in man's dress in order to obtain some knowledge as to what she may depend upon in the matter of her future lovers ; she goes to bed at an inn with a worthy brother who conducts her with the tip of his finger to his sister, who finds nothing better to do than fall in love with her like a puss, like a dove, like all that is most amorous and languorous in the world. It is very evident that, if I had been a young man and this state of things might have been of some service to me, it would have been quite different, and the lady would have abhorred me. 284 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. Fortune loves thus to give slippers to those who have wooden legs, and gloves to those who have no hands ; the inheritance which might have enabled you to live at your ease usually comes to you on the day of your death. " Sometimes, though not so often as she would have wished, I visited Rosette at her bedside ; usually she received only when she was up, but this rule was overlooked, in my favor. Many other things might have been overlooked had I wished ; but, as they say, the most beautiful girl can only give what she has, and what I had would not have been of much use toRosette. "She would stretch out her little hand for me to kiss — and I confess that I did not kiss it without pleasure, for it is very smooth, very white, exquisitely scented, and softly tender with incipient moisture ; I could feel it quiver and contract beneath my lips, the pressure of which I would maliciously prolong. Then Rosette, quite moved and with a look of entreaty, would turn towards me her long eyes laden with voluptuousness and bathed in humid and transparent light, and let her pretty head, raised a little for my better reception, fall back again upon her pillow. Beneath the clothes I could see the undulations of her restless bosom and the sudden movements of her whole frame. Certainly any one in a condition to venture might have ven- tured much ; he would surely have met with gratitude for his temerity, and thankfulness for having skipped some chapters of the romance. " I used to remain an hour or two with her, without relin- quishing the hand I had replaced on the coverlet ; we had charming and interminable talks, for although Rosette was very much preoccupied with her love, she believed herself too sure of success to lose much of her freedom and playfulness of dis- position. Only now and then would her passion cast a trans- parent veil of sweet melancholy upon her gayety, and this ren- dered her still more pleasing. " In fact, it would have been an unheard-of thing that a young beginner, such as I was to all appearance, should not have deemed himself very well off with such good fortune and have profited by it to the best of his ability. Rosette, indeed, was by no means one likely to encounter great cruelties, and not MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 285 knowing more about me, she counted on her charms and on my youth in default of my love. " Nevertheless, as the situation was beginning to be pro- longed beyond its natural limits, she became uneasy about it, and scarcely could a redoubling of flattering phrases and fine protestations restore her to her former state of unconcern. Two things astonished her in me, and she noticed contradictions in my conduct which she was unable to reconcile : they were my warmth of speech and my coldness of action. " You know better than any one, my dear Graciosa, that my friendship has all the characteristics of a passion ; it is sudden, eager, keen, exclusive, with love even to jealousy, and my friendship for Rosette was almost exactly similar to the friend- ship I have for you. A mistake might have been caused by less. Rosette was the more completely mistaken about it, because the dress I wore scarcely allowed of her having a different idea. " As I have never yet loved a man, the excess of my tender- ness has, in a measure, found a vent in my friendships with young girls and young women ; I have displayed the same transport and exultation in them as I do in everything else, for I find it impossible to be moderate in anything, and especially in what concerns the heart. In my eyes there are only two classes of people — those whom I worship, and those whom I execrate ; the others are to me as though they did not exist, and I would urge my horse over them as I would over the highway : they are identical in my mind with pavements and milestones. " I am naturally expansive, and have very caressing manners. When walking with Rosette, I would sometimes, forgetful of the import of such demonstrations, pass my arm about her person as I used to do when we walked together in the lonely alley at the end of my uncle's garden ; or, perhaps, leaning on the back of her easy-chair while she was working embroidery, I would roll the soft down on the plump round nape of her neck between my fingers, or with the back of my hand smooth her beautiful hair stretched by the comb and give it additional 286 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. lustre, — or, perhaps, it would be some other of those endear- ments which, as you know, I habitually employ with my dear friends. " She took very good care not to attribute these caresses to mere friendship. Friendship, as it is usually understood, does not go to such heights ; but seeing that I went no further, she was inwardly astonished and scarcely knew what to think ; she decided thus : that it was excessive timidity on my part, caused by my extreme youth and a lack of experience in love affairs, and that I must be encouraged by all kinds of advances and kindnesses. " In consequence, she took pains to contrive for me a multi- tude of opportunities for private conversations in places calcu- lated to embolden me by their solitude and remoteness from all noise and intrusion ; she took me for several walks in the great woods;, to try whether the voluptuous dreaming and amorous desires with which tender souls are inspired by the thick and kindly shade of the forests might not be turned to her advantage. " One day, after having made me wander for a long time through a very picturesque park which extended for a great distance behind the mansion, and which was unknown to me with the exception of those parts which were in the neighbor- hood of the buildings, she led me, by a little capriciously wind- ing path bordered with elders and hazel trees, to a rustic cot, a kind of charcoal-burner's hut built of billets placed transversely, with a roof of reeds, and a door coarsely made of five or six pieces of roughly-planed wood, the interstices of which were stopped up with mosses and wild plants ; quite close, among the green roots of tall ashes with silvery bark, dotted here and there with dark patches, gushed a vigorous spring, which, a few feet further on, fell over two marble steps into a basin filled with cress of more than emerald green. " At places where there was no cress might be seen fine sand as white as snow ; the water had the transparency of crystal and the coldness of ice ; issuing suddenly from the ground, and never touched by the faintest sun-ray, beneath those im- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 287 penetrable shades, it had no time to become warm or troubled. In spite of its crudity I love such spring water, and, seeing it there so limpid, I could not resist a desire to drink of it ; I stooped down and took some several times in the hollow of my hand, having no other vessel at my disposal. " Rosette intimated a wish to drink also of this water to quench her thirst, and requested me to bring her a few drops, for she dared not, she said, stoop down far enough to reach it herself. I plunged both my hands, which I had joined to- gether as accurately as possible, into the clear fountain, then raised them like a cup to Rosette's lips, and kept them thus until she had drained the water contained in them — not a long time, for there was very little, and that little trickled through my fingers, however tightly I closed them ; it made a very pretty group, and it is almost a pity that there was no sculptor present to take a sketch of it. " When she had almost finished, and my hand was close to her lips, she could not refrain from kissing it, in such a way, however, as to make it look like an act of suction for the pur- pose of draining the last pearl of water gathered in my palm ; but I was not deceived by it, and the charming blush which sud- denly overspread her countenance betrayed her plainly enough. " She took my arm again, and we proceeded towards the cot. The fair one walked as close to me as possible, and when speaking to me leaned over in such a way that her bosom rested entirely on my sleeve — a very cunning position, and one capable of disturbing any one else but me ; I could feel its pure firm outline and soft warmth perfectly well — nay, I could even remark a hurried undulating motion which, whether affected or real, was none the less flattering and engaging. " In this way we reached the door of the cot, which I opened with a kick, and I was certainly not prepared for the sight that met my eyes. I had thought that the hut was carpeted with rushes with a mat on the floor and a few stools to rest on : not at all. '• It was a boudoir furnished with all imaginable elegance. The frieze panels represented the gallantest scenes in Ovid's Metamorphoses : Salmacis and Hermaphrodite, Venus and 288 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. Adonis, Apollo and Daphne, and other mythological loves in bright lilac camaieu ; the piers were formed of pompon roses very delicately sculptured, and little daisies, which, with a refinement of luxury, had only their hearts gilded, their leaves being silvered. All the furniture was edged with silver cord which revealed a tapestry of the softest blue that could possibly be found, and one marvellously adapted to setoff the whiteness and lustre of the skin; mantelpiece, consoles, and what-nots were laden with a thousand charming curiosities, and there was such a luxurious number of settees, couches and sofas, as pretty clearly showed that this nook was not designed for very austere occupations, and that certainly no maceration went on in it. " A handsome rock-work clock, standing on a richly-inlaid pedestal, faced a large Venetian mirror, and was repeated in it with singular gleamings and reflections. It had stopped, more- over, as though it would have been something superfluous to mark the hours in a place intended to forget them. "I told Rosette that this refinement of luxury pleased me, that I thought it in very good taste to conceal the greatest choiceness beneath an appearance of simplicity, and that I greatly approved of a woman having embroidered petticoats and lace-trimmed chemises with an outer covering of simple material ; that to the lover whom she has or might have it was a delicate attention for which he could not be sufficiently grate- ful, and that it was unquestionably better to put a diamond into a nut, than a nut into a golden box. " To prove to me that she was of my opinion, Rosette raised her dress a little and showed me the edge of a petticoat very richly embroidered with large flowers and leaves ; it only rested with myself to be let into the secret of greater internal magni- ficence ; but I did not ask to see whether the splendor of the chemise corresponded with that of the petticoat ; it is probable that it was equally luxurious. Rosette let the fold of her dress fall again, vexed at not having shown more. " Nevertheless, the exhibition had been sufficient to display the beginning of a perfectly turned calf, suggesting the most excellent ascensional ideas. The leg which she held out in MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 280 order to show off her petticoat to better advantage was indeed miraculously delicate and graceful in its neat well-drawn stock- ing of pearl-gray silk, and the little heeled shoe, adorned with a tuft of ribbons in which it terminated, was like the glass slipper worn by Cinderella. I paid her very sincere compli- ments about it, and told her that I had never known a prettier leg or a smaller foot, and that I did not think that they could possibly be of a better shape. To which she replied with charming and lively frankness and ingenuousness : '" Tis true.' "Then she went to a panel contrived in the wall, took out one or two flagons of liqueurs and some plates of sweetmeats and cakes, placed the whole on a little round table, and came and sat down beside me in a somewhat narrow easy-chair, so that, in order not to be very uncomfortable, I was obliged to pass my arm behind her waist. As she had both hands free, and I had just my left to make use of, she filled my glass herself, and put fruits and sweets upon my plate ; and soon even, seeing that I was rather awkward, she said to me : ' Come, leave it alone ; I am going to feed you, child, since you are not able to eat all by yourself.' Then she herself conveyed the morsels to my mouth, and forced me to swallow them more quickly than I wished, pushing them in with her pretty fingers, just as people do with birds that are being crammed, and laughing very much over it. " I could scarcely dispense with paying her fingers back the kiss which she had lately given to the palms of my hands, and as though to prevent me from doing so, but really to enable me to impart a greater pressure to my kiss, she struck my mouth two or three times with the back of her hand. " She had drunk a few drops of Cr^me des Barbades, with a glass of Canary, and I about as much. It was certainly not a great deal ; but it was sufficient to enliven a couple of women accustomed to drink scarcely anything stronger than water. Rosette leaned backwards, throwing herself across my arm in very amorous fashion. She had cast aside her mantle, and the upper part of her bosom, strained and stretched by this arched 19 2^0 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. position, could be seen ; it was enchantingly delicate and trans- parent in tone, while its shape was one of marvellous daintiness and solidity combined. I contemplated her for some time with indefinable emotion and pleasure, and the reflection occurred to me that men were more favored in their loves than we, seeing that we give them possession of the most charming treasures while they had nothing similar to offer us. " What a pleasure it must be to let their lips wander over this smooth fine skin, and these rounded curves which seem to go out to meet the kiss and challenge it ! this satin flesh, these undulating and mutually involving lines, this silky hair so soft to the touch ; what exhaustless sources of delicate volup- tuousness which we do not possess in common with men ! Our caresses can scarcely be other than passive, and yet it is a greater pleasure to give than to receive. " These are remarks which undoubtedly I should not have made last year, and I might have seen all the bosoms and shoulders in the world without caring whether their shape was good or bad ; but, since I have laid aside the dress belonging to my sex and have lived with young men, a feeling which was unknown to me has developed within me: the feeling of beauty. Women are usually denied it, I know not why, for at first sight they would seem better able to judge of it than men ; but as they are the possessors of beauty, and self-knowledge is more difficult than that of any other description, it is not surprising that they know nothing at all about it. " Commonly, if one woman thinks another woman pretty, you may be sure that the latter is very ugly, and that no man will take any notice of her. On the other hand, all women whose beauty and grace are extolled by men are unanimously considered abominable and affected by the whole petticoated tribe ; there are cries and clamors Vv^ithout end. If I were what I appear to be, I should be guided in my choice by nothing else, and the disapprobation of women would be a sufficient certificate of beauty for me. '* At present I love and know beauty ; the dress I wear sepa- rates me from my sex, and takes away from me all species of MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 29 1 rivalry ; I am able to judge it better than another. I am no longer a woman, but I am not yet a man, and desire will not blind me so far as to make me take puppets for idols ; I can see coldly without any prejudice for or against, and my position is as perfectly disinterested as it could possibly be. •' The length and delicacy of the eyelashes, the transparency of the temples, the limpidity of the crystalline, the curvings of the ear, the tone and quality of the hair, the aristocracy of foot and hand, the more or less slender joints of leg and wrist, a thousand things of which I used to take no heed, but which constitute real beauty and prove purity of race, guide me in my estimates, and scarcely admit of a mistake. I believe that if I had said of a woman : ' Indeed she is not bad,* you might accept her with your eyes shut. " By a very natural consequence I understand pictures better than I did before, and though I have but a very superficial tincture of the masters, it would be difficult to make me pass a bad work as a good one ; 1 find a deep and singular charm in this study ; for, like everything else in the world, beauty, moral or physical, requires to be studied, and cannot be penetrated all at once. " But let us return to Rosette ; the transition from this sub- ject to her is not a difficult one, for they are two ideas which are bound up in each other. " As I have said, the fair one had thrown herself back across my arm and her head was resting against my shoulder ; emotion shaded her beautiful cheeks with a tender rose-color which was admirably set off by the deep black of a very coquettishly placed little patch ; her teeth gleamed through her smile like raindrops in the depths of a poppy, and the humid splendor of her large eyes was still further heightened by her half-drooping lashes ; a ray of light caused a thousand metallic lustres to play on her silky clouded hair, some locks of which had escaped and were rolling in ringlets along her plump round neck, and re- lieving its warm whiteness ; a few little downy hairs, more mutinous than the rest, had got loose from the mass, and were twisting themselves in capricious spirals, gilded with singular 292 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. reflections, and, traversed by the light, assuming all the shades of the prism : you would have thought that they were such golden threads as surround the heads of the virgins in the old pictures. We both kept silence, and I amused myself with tracing her little azure-blue veins through the nacreous trans- parency of her temples, and the soft insensible depression of the down at the extremities of her eyebrows. " The fair one seemed to be inwardly meditating and to be lulling herself in dreams of infinite voluptuousness ; her arms hung down along her body as undulating and as soft as loosened scarfs ; her head bent back more and more as though the muscles supporting it had been cut or were too feeble for their task. She had gathered up her two little feet beneath her petticoat, and had succeeded in crouching down altogether in the corner of the lounge that I was occupying, in such a way that, although it was a very narrow piece of furniture, there was a large empty space on the other side. " Her easy, supple body modelled itself on mine like wax, fol- lowing its external outline with the greatest possible accuracy : water would not have crept into all the sinuosity of line with more exactness. Clinging thus to my side, she suggested the double stroke which painters give their drawings on the side of the shadow, in order to render them more free and full. Only with a woman in love can there be such undulations and entwin- ings. Ivy and willow are a long way behind. " The soft warmth of her body penetrated through her garments and mine ; a thousand magnetic currents streamed around her ; her whole life seemed to have left her altogether and to have entered into me. Every minute she was more languishing, expiring, yielding ; a light sweat stood in beads upon her lustrous brow ; her eyes grew moist, and two or three times she made as though she would raise her hands to hide them ; but half-way her wearied arms fell back upon her knees, and she could not succeed in doing so ; — a big tear overflowed from her eyelid and rolled along her burning cheek where it was soon dried. " My situation was becoming very embarrassing and tolerably MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 293 ridiculous ; I felt that I must look enormously stupid, and this provoked me extremely, although no alternative was in my power. Enterprising conduct was forbidden me, and such was the only kind that would have been suitable. I was too sure of meeting with no resistance to risk it, and I was, in fact, at my wit's end. To pay compliments and repeat madrigals would have been excellent at the beginning, but nothing would have appeared more insipid at the stage that we had reached ; to get up and go out would have been unmannerly in the extreme ; and besides I am not sure that Rosette would not have played the part of Potiphar's wife, and held me by the corner of my cloak. " I could not have assigned any virtuous motive for my resistance ; and then, I confess it to my shame, the scene, equivocal as its nature was for me, was not without a charm which detained me more than it should have done ; this ardent desire kindled me with its flame, and I was really sorry to be unable to satisfy it ; I even wished to be, as I actually appeared to be, a man, that I might crown this love, and I greatly regretted that Rosette was deceived. My breathing became hurried, I felt blushes rising to my face, and I was little less troubled than my poor lover. The idea of our similitude in sex gradually faded away, leaving behind only a vague idea of pleasure ; my gaze grew dim, my lips trembled, and, had Rosette been a man instead of what she was, she would assuredly have made a very easy conquest of me. " At last, unable to bear it any longer, she got up abruptly with a sort of spasmodic movement, and began to walk about the room with great activity ; then she stopped before the mirror and adjusted some locks of her hair which had lost their folds. During this promenade I cut a poor figure, and scarcely knew how to look. " She stopped before me and appeared to reflect. " She thought that it was only a desperate timidity that restrained me, and that I was more of a schoolboy than she had thought at first. Beside herself and excited to the last degree of amorous exasperation, she would try one supreme effort and stake all on the result at the risk of losing the game. 294 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. " She came up to me, sat down on my knees more quickly than lightning, passed her arms round my neck, crossed her hands behind my head, and clung with her lips to mine in a furious embrace ; I felt her half-naked and rebellious bosom bounding against my breast, and her twined fingers twithcing in my hair. A shiver ran through my whole body, and my nipples became erect. " Rosette did not release my mouth ; her lips enveloped mine, her teeth struck against my teeth, our breaths were mingled. I drew back for an instant, and turned my head aside two or three times to avoid this kiss ; but a resistless attrac- tion made me again advance, and I returned it with nearly as much ardor as she had given it. I scarcely know how it would all have ended had not a loud barking been heard outside the door, together with the sound of scratching feet. The door yielded, and a handsome white greyhound came yelping and gambolling into the cot. " Rosette rose up suddenly, and with a bound sprang to the end of the room. The handsome white greyhound leaped glee- fully and joyously about her, and tried to reach her hands in order to lick them ; she was so much agitated that she found great difficulty in arranging her mantle upon her shoulders. " This greyhound was her brother Alcibiades's favorite dog ; it never left him, and whenever it appeared, its master to a cer- tainty was not far off ; this is what had so greatly frightened poor Rosette. " In fact Alcibiades himself entered a minute later, booted and spurred and whip in hand. * Ah ! there you are,' said he ; ' I have been looking for you for an hour past, and I should cer- tainly not have found you had not my good greyhound Snug unearthed you in your hiding-place.' And he ca?t a half-serious, half-playful look upon his sister which made her blush up to the eyes. ' Apparently you must have had very knotty subjects to treat of, to retire into such profound solitude ? You were no doubt talking about theology and the twofold nature of the soul ? ' " ' Oh ! dear no ; our occupation was not nearly so sublime ; MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 295 we were eating cakes and talking about the fashions — that is all.' " ' I don't believe a word of it ; you appeared to me to be deep in some sentimental dissertation ; but to divert you from your vaporish conversation, I think that it would be a good thing if you came and took a ride with me. I have a new mare that I want to try. You shall ride her as well, Theodore, and we will see what can be made of her.* " We went out all three together, he giving me his arm, and I giving mine to Rosette. The expressions on our faces were singularly different. Alcibiades looked thoughtful, I quite at ease, and Rosette excessively annoyed. " Alcibiades had arrived very opportunely for me, but very in- opportunely for Rosette, who thus lost, or thought she lost, all the fruits of her skilful attacks and ingenious tactics. No pro- gress had been made ; a quarter of an hour later and the devil take me if I know what issues the adventure could have had — I cannot see one that would not have been impossible. Perhaps it might have been better if Alcibiades had not come in at the ticklish moment like a god in his machine : the thing must have ended in one way or another. During the scene I was two or three times on the point of acknowledging who I was to Rosette ; but the dread of being thought an adventuress and of seeing my secret revealed kept back the words that were ready to escape from my lips. " Such a state of things could not last. My departure was the only means of cutting short this bootless intrigue, and ac- cordingly I announced officially at dinner that I,should leave the very next day. Rosette, who was sitting beside me, nearly fainted on hearing this piece of news, and let her glass fall. A sudden paleness overspread her beautiful face : she cast on me a mournful and reproachful look which made me nearly as much affected and troubled as she was herself. " The aunt raised her old wrinkled hands with a movement of painful surprise, and said in her shrill, trembling voice, which was even more tremulous than usual : ' My dear Monsieur Theodore, are you going to leave us in that fashion ? That is 296 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. not right ; yesterday you did not seem in the least disposed to go. The post has not come, and so you have received no letters, and are without any motive. You had granted us a fortnight longer, and now you are taking it back ; you have really no right to do so : what has been given cannot be taken away again. See how Rosette is looking at you, and how angry she is with you ; I warn you that I shall be at least as angry as she is, and look quite as sternly at you, and a stern face at sixty- eight is a little more terrible than one at twenty-three. See to what you are voluntarily exposing yourself : the wrath both of aunt and niece, and all on account of some caprice which has suddenly entered your head at dessert.' " Alcibiades, giving the table a great blow with his fist, swore that he would barricade the doors of the mansion and hamstring my horse sooner than let me go. " Rosette cast another look upon me, and one so sad and sup- plicating that nothing short of the ferocity of a tiger that had been fasting for a week could have failed to be moved by it. I did not withstand it, and though it gave me singular annoyance, I made a solemn promise to stay. Dear Rosette would willingly have fallen on my neck and kissed me on the mouth for this kindness ; Alcibiades enclosed my hand in his huge one and shook my arm so violently that he nearly dislocated my shoulder, made my rings oval instead of round, and cut three of my fingers somewhat deeply. " The old lady, rejoicing, took an immense pinch of snuff. " Rosette, however, did not completely recover her gayety ; the idea that I might go away and that I wished to do so, an idea which had never yet come clearly before her mind, plunged her deep in thought. The color which had been chased from her cheeks by the announcement of my departure did not return to them with the same brilliance as before ; there still was paleness on her cheek and disquiet in the depth of her soul. My conduct towards her surprised her more and more. After the marked advances which she had made, she could not under- stand the motives which induced me to put so much restraint into my relations with her ; her object was to lead me up to a MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 297 perfectly decisive engagement before my departure, not doubt- ing that afterwards she would find it extremely easy to keep me as long as she liked. " In this she was right, and, had I not been a woman, her calculation would have been correct ; for, whatever may have been said about satiety of pleasure and the distaste which commonly follows possession, every man whose heart is at all in the right place, and who is not miserably used up and with- out resource, feels his love increased by his good fortune, and frequently the best means of retaining a lover who is ready to leave you is to surrender yourself unreservedly to him. " Rosette intended to bring me to something decisive before my departure. Knowing how difficult it is to subsequently take up a liaison just where it had been dropped, and being besides not at all sure of finding me again under such favorable cir- cumstances, she neglected no opportunity that presented itself of placing me in a position to speak out clearly and abandon the evasive demeanor* behind which I had entrenched myself. As on my part, I had the most formal intention of avoiding every species of meeting similar to that in the rustic pavilion, and yet could not, without being ridiculous, affect much cool- ness towards Rosette and assume girlish prudery in my rela- tions with her, I scarcely knew how to behave, and tried always to have a third person with us. " Rosette, on the contrary, did everything in her power to secure being alone with me, and, as the mansion was at a dis- tance from the town and seldom visited by the neighboring nobility, she frequently succeeded in her design. My obtuse resistance saddened and surprised her ; there were moments when she had doubts and hesitations about the power of her charms, and, seeing herself so little loved, she was sometimes not far from believing herself ugly. Then she would redouble her attention and coquetry, and although her mourning did not permit her to make use of all the resources of the toilet, she nevertheless knew how to give it grace and variety in such a manner as to be twice or thrice as charming every day — which is saying a great deal, She tried everything : she was playful, 298 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. melancholy, tender, impassioned, kind, coquettish, and even affected ; she put on in succession all those adorable masks which become women so well that it is impossible to say whether they are veritable masks or real faces ; — she assumed eight or ten contrasted individualities one after another in order to see which pleased me, and to fix upon it. In herself alone she provided me with a complete seraglio wherein I had only to throw the handkerchief ; but she had, of course, no success. " The failure of all these stratagems threw her into a state of profound stupefaction. She would, indeed, have turned Nestor's brain, and melted the ice of the chaste Hippolytus himself,— and I appeared to be anything but Nestor or Hip- polytus. I am young, and I had a lofty and determined air, boldness of speech, and everywhere except in solitary inter- views, a resolute countenance. " She might have thought that all the witches of Thrace and Thessaly had cast their spells upon my person, or that I was at least unmanned, and have formed a most detestable opinion of my virility, which is in fact poor enough. Apparently, how- ever, the idea did not occur to her, and she attributed this sin- gular reserve only to my lack of love for her. " The days passed away without any advancement of her interests, and she was visibly affected by it : an expression of restless sadness had taken the place of the ever fresh-blooming smile on her lips ; the corners of her mouth, so joyously arched, had become sensibly lower, and formed a firm and serious line ; a few little veins appeared in a more marked fashion on her tender eyelids ; her cheeks, lately so like the peach, had now nothing of it left save its imperceptible velvet down. I often saw her, from my window, crossing the garden in a morning gown : scarcely raising her feet, she would walk as though she were gliding along, both arms loosely crossed upon her breast, her head bent more than a willow-branch dipping into the water, and with something undulating and sinking about her like a drapery which is too long and the edge of which touches the ground. At such moments she looked like one of the amorous women of antiquity, victims to the wrath of Venus, and furiously MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 299 assailed by the pitiless goddess ; it is thus, to my fancy, that Psyche must have been when she had lost Cupid. " On the days when she did not endeavor to vanquish my coldness and reluctance, her love had a simple and primitive manner which might have charmed me ; it was a silent and confiding surrender, a chaste facility of caress, an exhaustless abundance and plentitude of heart, all the treasures of a fine nature poured forth without reserve. She had none of that bitterness and meanness to be seen in nearly all women, even in those that are the best endowed ; she sought no disguise, and tranquilly suffered me to see the whole extent of her pas- sion. Her self-love did not revolt for an instant at my failure to respond to so many advances, for pride leaves the heart on the day that love enters it ; and if ever anyone was truly loved, I was loved by Rosette. " She suffered, but without complaint or bitterness, and she attributed the failure of her attempts only to herself. Never- theless her paleness increased every day ; a mighty combat had been waged on the battle-field of her cheeks between the lilies and the roses, and the latter had been decisively routed ; it distressed me, but in all truth I was less able than anyone to remedy it. The more gentle and affectionate my words and the more caressing my manner, the more deeply I plunged into her heart the barbed arrow of impossible love. To comfort her to-day I made ready a much greater despair for the future ; my remedies poisoned her wound while appearing to soothe it. I repented in a measure of all the agreeable things I had ever said to her, and, owing to my extreme friendship for her, I would fain have discovered the means to make her hate me. Disinterestedness could not be carried further, for such a result would unquestionably have greatly grieved me ; — but it would have been better. " I made two or three attempts to speak harshly to her, but I soon returned to madrigals, for I dread her tears even more than her smile. On such occasions, although the honesty of my intention fully acquitted me in my conscience, I was more touched than I should have been, and felt something not far 300 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. removed from remorse. A tear can scarcely be dried except by a kiss ; the ofifice cannot decently be left to a handkerchief, be it of the finest cambric in the world. I undid what I had done, the tear was quickly forgotten, more quickly than the kiss, and there always ensued an increase of embarrassment for me. " Rosette, seeing that I am going to escape her, again fastens obstinately and miserably upon the remnants of her hope, and my position is growing more and more complicated. The strange sensation which I experienced in the little hermitage, and the inconceivable confusion into which I was thrown by the ardent caresses of my fair mistress, have been several times renewed though with less violence ; and often when seated beside Rosette with her hand in mine, and listening to her speak to me in her soft cooing voice, I fancy that I am a man as she believes me to be, and that it is pure cruelty on my part not to respond to her love. " One evening, by some chance or other, I happened to be alone with the old lady in the green room ; — she had some tapestry work in her hand, for, in spite of her sixty-eight years, she never remained idle, wishing, as she said, to finish before she died a task which she had commenced and at which she had now wrought for a long time. Feeling somewhat fatigued, she laid her work aside and lay back in her large easy chair. She looked at me very attentively, and her gray eyes sparkled through her spectacles with strange vivacity ; she passed her hand two or three times across her wrinkled forehead, and appeared to be reflecting deeply. The recollection of times that were no more and that she regretted imparted an expression of emotion to her face. I did not speak lest I should disturb her in her thoughts, and the silence lasted for some minutes. At last she broke it, " ' They are Henri's — my dear Henri's very eyes ; the same humid and brilliant gaze, the same carriage of the head, the same sweet and proud physiognomy ; one would think it were he. You cannot imagine the extent of this likeness. Monsieur Theodore ; when I see you I cannot believe that Henri is MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 301 dead ; I think that he has only been on a long journey, and has now at last come back. You have given me much pleasure and much pain, Theodore : pleasure by reminding me of my poor Henri, and pain by showing me how great has been my loss ; sometimes I have taken you for his phantom. I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that you are going to leave us ; it seems to me like losing my Henri once more. " I told her that if it were really possible for me to remain longer I should do so with pleasure, but that my stay had already been prolonged far beyond the limits it should have had ; beside, I quite expected to return, and I should retain memories of the mansion far too agreeable to forget it so quickly. •' ' However sorry I may be at your departure. Monsieur Theodore,' she resumed, pursuing her own train of thought, ' there is some one here who will feel it more than L You understand whom I mean without my telling you. I do not know what we shall do with Rosette when you are gone ; but this old place is very dull. Alcibiades is always hunting, and for a young girl like her, the society of a poor infirm woman like me is not very diverting.' " * If anyone should have regrets, it is not you, madame, nor Rosette, but I ; you are losing little, I much ; you will easily discover society more charming than mine, but it is more than doubtful whether I shall ever be able to replace Rosette's and yours.' '<^ ' I do not wish to pick a quarrel with your modesty, my dear sir, but I know what I know, and what I say is fact. It will probably be a long time before we see Madame Rosette in a good humor again, for at present her smiles and tears depend only on you. Her mourning is about to end, and it would be a pity if she laid aside her gayety with her last black dress ; it would be a very bad example, and quite contrary to natural laws. This is a thing which you could prevent without much trouble, and which you will prevent, no doubt,' said the old lady, laying great emphasis on the last words. " ' Unquestionably I will do all in my power that your dear niece may not lose her charming gayety, since you suppose me to 302 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. have such influence over her. Nevertheless, I scarcely see what method I can adopt.' " * Oh ! really, you scarcely see ! What are your handsome eyes for ? I did not know that you were so short-sighted. Rosette is free ; she has an income of eighty thousand livres wholly under her own control, and women twice as ugly as she is, are often considered pretty. You are young, handsome, and, as I imagine, unmarried ; it appears to me to be the simplest thing in the world, unless you have an unsurmountable horror of Rosette, which it is difficult to believe * " ' Which is not and could not be the case, for her soul is as excellent as her person, and she is one of those who might be ugly without our noticing it or wishing them otherwise * •• ' She might be ugly with impunity and she is charming. That is to be doubly in the right ; I have no doubt of what you say, but she has taken the wisest course. So far as she is con- cerned I would willingly answer for it that there are a thousand whom she hates more than you, and that if she were asked several times she would perhaps end by confessing that you do not altogether displease her. You have a ring on your finger which would suit her perfectly, for your hand is nearly as small as hers, and I am almost sure that she would accept it with pleasure.' " The good lady stopped for a few moments to see what effect her words would produce on me, and I do not know whether she had reason to be satisfied with the expression of my face. I was cruelly embarrassed and did not know what to reply, from the beginning of the conversation I had perceived the ten- dency of all her insinuations ; and, although I almost expected what she had just said, I was quite surprised and confused by it ; I could not but refuse ; but what valid motives could I give for such a refusal ? I had none, except that I was a woman : an excellent motive it is true, but precisely the only one that I was unwilling to state. " I could hardly fall back upon stern and ridiculous parents ; all the parents in the world would have accepted such a union with enthusiasm. Had Rosette not been what she was, good. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 305 fair, and well-born, the eighty thousand livres a year would have removed all difficulty. To say that I did not love her would have been neither true nor honorable, for I did really love her very much and more than any woman loves a woman. I was too young to pretend that I was engaged in another quarter. What I thought it best to do was to let it be understood that being a younger son the interests of my house required me to enter the Maltese Order, and did not permit me to think of matrimony, a circumstance which had caused me all the sorrow m the world since I had seen Rosette. "This reply was not worth much, and I was perfectly sensible of the fact. The old lady was not deceived by it, and did not regard it as definite ; she thought that I had spoken in this way to gain time for reflection and for consulting my parents. Indeed, such a union was so advantageous for me, and one so little to be expected, that it would not have been possible for me to refuse it even though I had felt little or no love for Rosette ; it was a price of good fortune that was not to be slighted. *' I do not know whether the aunt made this overture at the instance of her niece, but I am inclined to believe that Rosette had nothing to do with it ; she loved me too simply and too eagerly to think of anything else but the immediate possession of me, and marriage would assuredly have been the last of the means that she would have employed. The dowager, who had not failed to remark our intimacy, and doubtless thought it much greater than it was, had contrived the whole of this plan in her head in order to keep me near her, and as far as possible replace her dear son Henri, who had been killed in the army, and to whom, as she considered, I bear so striking a likeness. She had been pleased by this idea and had taken advantage of the moment of solitude to come to an explanation with me. I saw by her mien that she did not look upon herself as beaten, and that she intended to return soon to the charge ; — at which 1 felt extremely annoyed. " That same night Rosette, on her part, made a last attempt which had such serious results that I must give you a separate account of it, and cannot relate it in this letter which is already 304 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. swelled to an extravagant size. You will see to what singular adventures I was predestined, and how heaven had cut me out beforehand to be a heroine of romance ; I am not quite sure, though, what moral could be drawn from it all, — but existences are not like fables, each chapter has not a rhymed sentence at the end. Very often the meaning of life is that it is not death. That is all. Good-bye, dear, I kiss you on your lovely eyes. You will shortly receive the continuation of my triumphant biography." XIII. hAoDORE,— Rosalind,— for I know not by what name to call you, — I have only just seen you and I am writing to you. — Would that I knew your woman's name ! it must be pleasant as honey, and hover sweeter and more harmonious than poetry on the lips ! Never could I have dared to tell you this, and yet I should have died for lack of saying it. What 1 have suffered no one knows nor can know, nor could I myself give any but a faint idea of it ; words will not express such anguish ; I should appear to have turned my phrases carefully, to have striven to say new and singular things, and to be indulging in the most extravagant exaggeration when merely depicting what I have experienced with the help of unsatisfying images. " O Rosalind ! I love you, I worship you ; why is there not a word more expressive than that ! I have never loved, I have never worshipped any one save you ; I prostrate myself, I hum- ble myself before you, and I would fain compel all creation to bend a knee before my idol ; you are more to me than the whole of nature, more than myself, more than God,— nay, it seems strange to me that God does not descend from heaven to become your slave. Where you are not all is desolate, all is dead, all is dark ; you alone people the world for me ; you are life, sunshine — you are everything. Your smile makes the day, and your sadness the night ; the spheres follow the movements of your body, and the celestial harmonies are guided by you, O my cherished queen ! O my glorious and real dream ! You are clothed with splendor, and swim ceaselessly in radiant effluence. " I have known you scarcely three months, but I have long 20 3o6 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ' loved you. Before seeing you, I languished for love of you ; I called you, sought for you, and despaired of ever meeting with you in my path, for I knew that I could never love any other woman. How many times have you appeared to me, — at the window of the mysterious mansion leaning in melancholy fashion on your elbow in the balcony and casting the petals of some flower to the wind, or else a petulant Amazon on your Turkish horse, whiter than snow, galloping through the dark avenues of the forest ! It was indeed your proud and gentle eyes, your diaphanous hands, your beautiful waving hair, and your faint, adorably disdainful smile. Only you were less beautiful, for the most ardent and unbridled imagination, the imagination of a painter and a poet, could not attain to the sublime poetry of this reality. "There is in you an exhaustless spring of graces, an ever- gushing fountain of irresistible seductions ; you are an ever open casket of most precious pearls, and, in your slightest movements, in your most forgetful gestures, in your most un- studied attitudes, you every moment throw away with royal profusion inestimable treasures of beauty. If the soft waving contour, if the fleeting lines of an attitude could be fixed and preserved in a mirror, the glasses before which you had passed would cause Raphael's divinest canvases to be despised and be looked upon as tavern sign-boards. " Every gesture, every pose of your head, every different aspect of your beauty, are graven with a diamond point upon the mirror of my soul, and nothing in the world could efface the deep impression ; I know in what place the shadow was, and in what the light, the flat part glistening beneath the ray, and the spot where the wandering reflection was blended with the more softened tints of the neck and cheek. I could draw you in your absence ; the idea of you is ever placed before me. " When quite a child I would remain whole hours standing before the old pictures of the masters, and eagerly explore their dark depths. I gazed upon those beautiful faces of saints and goddesses whose flesh, white as ivory or wax, stands out so mar- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 307 vellously against the obscure backgrounds that are carbonized by the decomposition of the colors ; I admired the simplicity and magnificence of their shape, the strange grace of their hands and feet, the pride and fine expression of their features which are at once so delicate and firm, the grandeur of the draperies which flutter around their divine forms, and the purplish folds of which seem to extend like lips to kiss those beauteous bodies. *' From obstinately burying my eyes beneath the veil of smoke thickened by ages, my sight grew dim, the outlines of objects lost their precision, and a species of motionless and dead life animated all those pale phantoms of vanished beauties ; I ended by finding that these faces had a vague resemblance to the fair unknown whom I worshipped at the bottom of my heart ; I sighed as I thought that she whom I was to love was perhaps one of them, and had been dead for three hundred years. This idea often affected me so far as to make me shed tears, and I would indulge in great anger against myself for not having been born in the sixteenth century, when all these fair ones had lived. I thought it unpardonable awkwardness and clumsiness on my part. *' When I grew older the sweet phantom beset me still more closely. I continually saw it between me and the women whom I had for mistresses, smiling with an ironic air and deriding their human beauty with all the perfection of its own which was divine. It caused me to find ugliness in women who really were charming and capable of giving happiness to any one who had not become enamored of this adorable shadow whose body I did not think existed and which was only the presenti- ment of your own beauty. O Rosalind ! how. unhappy have I been on your account, before I knew you ! O Theodore ! how unhappy I have been on your account, after I knew you ! If you will, you can open up to me the paradise of my dreams. You are standing on the threshold like a guardian angel wrapped in his wings, and you hold the golden key in your beautiful hands. Say, Rosalind, say, will you ? *' I wait for but a word from you to live or to die — will you pronounce it ? 3o8 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. " Are you Apollo driven from heaven, or the fair Aphrodite coming forth from the bosom of the sea ? where have you left your chariot of gems yoked with its four flaming steeds ? what have you done with your nacreous conch and your azure-tailed dolphins ? what amorous nymph has blended her body with yours in the midst of a kiss, O handsome youth, more charming than Cyparissus and Adonis, more adorable than all women ? " But you are a woman, and we are no longer in the days of metamorphoses ; Adonis and Hermaphrodite are dead, and such a degree of beauty can no longer be attained by man ; — for, since heroes and gods have ceased to be, you alone preserve in your marble bodies, as in a Grecian temple, the precious gift of form anathematized by Christ, and show that the earth has no cause to envy heaven ; you worthily represent the first divinity of the world, the purest symbolization of the eternal essence, — beauty. " As soon as I saw you something was rent within me, a veil fell, a door was opened, I felt myself inwardly flooded by waves of light ; I understood that my life was before me, and that I had at last arrived at the decisive crossway. The dark and hidden portions of the half radiant figure which I was seeking to separate from the shadow were suddenly illuminated ; the browner tints drowning the background of the picture were softly lighted ; a tender roseate gleam crept over the greenish ultramarine of the distance ; the trees which had formed only confused silhouettes began to be more clearly defined; the dew-laden flowers dotted with brilliant specks the dull verdure of the turf. I saw the bull-finch with his scarlet breast at the end of an elder bough, the little white pink-eyed straight-eared rabbit putting out his head between two sprays of wild thyme and passing his paw across his nose, and the fearful stag coming to drink at the spring and admire his antlers in the water. '* From the morning when the sun of love rose upon my life everything has been changed ; there, where in the shadow used to wander ill-defined forms rendered terrible or monstrous by their uncertainty, groups of flowering trees show themselves with ele- MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 309 gance, hills curve in graceful amphitheatres, and silver palaces, their terraces laden v^ith vases and statues, bathe their feet in azure lakes and seem to float between two skies ; what in the darkness I took for a gigantic dragon having wings armed with claws and crawling over the night with its scaly feet, is nothing but a felucca with silken sail, and painted and gilded oars, filled with women and musicians, and that frightful crab which methought was shaking its fangs and claws above my head, is nothing but a fan-palm whose long and narrow leaves were stirred by the nocturnal breeze. My chimeras and my errors have vanished : — I love. " Despairing of ever finding you I accused my dream of a lie and quarrelled furiously with fate : I told myself that I was alto- gether mad to seek for such a type, or that nature was very bar- ren and the Creator very unskilful to be unable to realize the simple idea of my heart. Prometheus had the noble pride to desire to make a man and rival God ; I had created a woman, and I believed that as a punishment for my audacity, a never satisfied desire would gnaw my liver like a second vulture ; I was expecting to be chained with diamond fetters on a hoary rock at the edge of the savage ocean, — but the fair marine nymphs with their long green hair, raising their white pointed breasts above the waves, and displaying to the sun their nacre- ous bodies all streaming with the tears of the sea, would not have come and leaned their elbows on the shore to converse with me and console me in my pain as in the play of old iEschylus. " There has been nothing of all this. " You came, and I had reason to reproach my imagination with its impotence. My torment was not what I dreaded, to be the perpetual prey of an idea on a sterile rock ; but I suffered none the less. I had seen that you did in fact exist, that my presentiments had not been false to me on this point ; but you manifested yourself to me with the ambiguous and ter- rible beauty of the sphinx. Like the mysterious goddess, Isis, you were wrapped in a veil which I dared not raise lest I should be stricken dead. 3IO MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. " If you knew with what panting and restless heed, beneath my apparent inattention, I watched you and followed you even in your slightest movements ! Nothing escaped me ; how eagerly I gazed upon the little flesh that appeared at your neck or wrist in my endeavor to determine your sex ! your hands have been the subject of profound studies by me, and I am able to say that I know their smallest curves, their most impercepti- ble veins, and their slightest dimple ; though you were to con- ceal yourself from head to foot in the most impenetrable domino, I should recognize you on seeing merely one of your fingers. I analyzed the undulations in your walk, the manner in which you placed your feet, and dressed your hair ; I sought to discover your secret in the habits of your body. I especially watched you in those hours of indolence when the bones seem to be withdrawn from the body and the limbs sink and bend as though they had lost their stiffness, to see whether the feminine line would be more boldly pronounced amid this forgetfulness and carelessness. Never was anyone eyed so eagerly as you. " For whole hours I would forget myself in this contempla- tion. Apart in some corner of the drawing-room, with a book in my hand which I was not reading, or crouched behind the curtain in my room, when you were in yours and your window- blinds were raised, then, penetrating v^rith the marvellous beauty which is diffused about you like a luminous atmosphere, I would say to myself, ' Surely it is a woman ; ' — then suddenly an abrupt bold movement, a manly accent or an off-hand manner would in a minute destroy my frail edifice of probabilities and throw me back again into my former irresolution. " I would be voyaging with flowing sails over the limitless ocean of amorous dreaming, and you would come and ask me to fence or play tennis with you ; the young girl, transformed into a young cavalier, would give me terrible blows and strike the foil from my hand as quickly and cleverly as the most ex- perienced swashbuckler ; at every moment of the day there was some such disappointment. " I would be about to approach you and say to you, ' My dear fair one, 'tis you that I adore,' and I would see you bending down tenderly to a lady's ear and breathing puffs of madrigals MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 311 and compliments through her hair. Judge of my situation. Or, perhaps, some woman whom, in my strange jealousy, I could have flayed alive with all the voluptuousness in the world, would hang on your arm, and draw you aside to confide some puerile secrets to you, and would keep you for hours together in an embrasure of the window. " I was maddened to see women talking to you, for it made me believe that you were a man, and, had you been so, it would have cost me extreme pain to endure it. When men came up in a free and familiar fashion, I was still more jealous, because then I thought that you were a woman and that they had a suspicion of it like myself ; I was a prey to the most contrary passions and did not know what conclusion to arrive at. " I was angry with myself, and addressed the harshest re- proaches to myself for being thus tormented by such a love and for not having the strength to uproot from my heart the veno- mous plant which had sprung up there in a night like a poisonous toad-stool ; I cursed you, I called you my evil genius ; I even believed for a moment that you were Beelzebub in person, for I could not explain the sensation which I experienced in your presence. " When I was quite persuaded that you were in fact nothing else but a woman in disguise, the improbability of the motives with which I sought to justify such a caprice plunged me again into my uncertainty, and I began again to lament that the form which I had dreamed of for the love of my soul belonged to one ot the same sex as myself ; — I accused chance which had clothed a man with such charming appearance, and, to my everlasting misfortune, had caused me to meet with him just when I had lost the hope of seeing realized the absolute idea of pure beauty which I had cherished in my heart for so long. " Now, Rosalind, I have the profound certainty that you are the most beautiful of women ; I have seen you in the costume of your sex, I have seen your pure and correctly rounded shoulders and arms. The beginning of your bosom, of which your gorget gave a glimpse, could belong only to a young girl : neither the beautiful hunter Meleager, nor the effeminate Bacchus, with their 312 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. dubious forms, ever had such sweetness of line or such delicacy of skin, even though they be both of Paros marble and polished by the kisses of twenty centuries. I am tormented no longer in this respect. But this is not all : you are a woman, and my love is no longer reprehensible, I may give myself up to it without remorse and abandon myself to the billow which is bearing me towards you ; great and unbridled as the passion that I feel may be, it is permitted and I may confess it ; but you, Rosalind, for whom I was consumed in silence and who knew not the immensity of my love, you whom this tardy revelation will only, it may be, surprise, do you not hate me, do you love me, can you ever love me ? I do not know, — and I tremble, and am yet more unhappy than before. •• There are moments when it seems to me that you do not hate me ; when we acted ' As you like it,' you gave a peculiar accent to certain passages in your part which strengthened their meaning, and, in a measure, invited me to declare myself. I believed that I could see in your eyes and smile gracious promises of indulgence, and could feel your hand respond to the pressure of mine. If I was deceived, O God ! it is a thing on which I dare not reflect. Encouraged by all this and impelled by my love, I have written to you, for the dress you wear is ill-suited to such avowals, and my words have a thousand times been stayed upon my lips ; even though I had the idea and firm conviction that I was speaking to a woman, that manly costume would startle all my tender loving thoughts and hinder them from taking their flight towards you. " I beseech you, Rosalind, if you do not yet love me, strive to love me who have loved you in spite of everything, and beneath the veil in which you wrap yourself, no doubt out of pity for us ; do not devote the remainder of my life to the most frightful despair and the most gloomy discouragement ; think that I have worshipped you ever since the first ray of thought shone into my head, that you were revealed to me beforehand, and that, when I was quite little, you appeared to me in my dreams with a crown of dew-drops, two prismatic wings, and the little blue flower in your hand ; that you are the end, the means, and MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 3^3 the meaning of my life ; that without you I am but an empty shadow, and that, if you blow upon the flame that you have kindled, nothing will remain within me but a pinch of dust finer and more impalpable than that which besprinkles the very wings of death. Rosalind, you who have so many recipes to cure the sickness of love, cure me, for I am very sick ; play your part to the end, cast aside the dress of the handsome page Ganymede, and stretch out your white hand to the younger son of the brave knight Rowland-des-Bois." XIV. WAS at my window engaged in looking at the stars which were blooming joyously in the gardens of the sky, and inhaling the perfume of the Marvel of Peru wafted to me by an expiring breeze. The wind from the open casement had extin- guished my lamp, the last remaining light in the mansion. My thoughts were degenerating into vague dreaming, and a sort of somnolence was beginning to overtake me ; nevertheless, whether owing to fascination by the charm of the night, or to carelessness and forgetfulness, I still remained leaning with my elbow on the stone balustrade. Rosette, no longer seeing the light of my lamp and being unable to distinguish me owing to a great corner c'' shadow which fell just across the window, had no doubt concluded that I was in bed, and it was for this that she was waiting in order to risk a last desperate attempt. She pushed open the door so softly that I did not hear her enter, and was within two steps of me before I had perceived her. She was very much astonished to see me still up ; but, soon recover- ing from her surprise, she came up to me and took hold of my arm calling me twice by my name :— ' Theodore, Theodore ! * " • What ! you, Rosette, here, at this hour, quite alone with- out a light and so completely undressed ! ' " I must tell you that the fair one had nothing on her but a night-mantle of excessively fine cambric, and the triumphant lace-trimmed chemise which I was not willing to see on the day of the famous scene in the little kiosk in the park. Her arms, smooth and cold as marble, were entirely bare, and the linen covering her body was so supple and diaphanous that it allowed MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 3,5 the nipples of her breasts to be seen, as in the statues of bathers covered with wet drapery. " Is that a reproach, Theodore, that you are making against me ? or is it only a simple, purely exclamatory phrase ? Yes, I, Rosette, the fine lady here, in your very room and not in my own where I ought to be, at eleven or perhaps twelve o'clock at night, with neither duenna, chaperon, nor maid, nearly naked, in a mere night-wrapper ; — that is very astonishing, is it not ? I am as surprised at it as you are, and scarcely know what explanation to give you. •' As she said this she passed one of her arms around my body, and let herself fall on the foot of my bed in such a way as to draw me along with her. " ' Rosette,' I said, endeavoring to disengage myself, ' I am going to try to light the lamp again ; there is nothing more melancholy than darkness in a room ; and then, when you are here, it is really a sin not to see clearly and so lose the sight of your charms. Allow me by a piece of tinder and a match, to make myself a little portable sun to throw into relief all that the jealous night is effacing beneath its shades.' " ' It's not worth while ; I would as soon you did not see my blushes ; I can feel my cheeks burning all over, for it is enough to make me die of shame.' She hid her face upon my breast, and for some minutes remained thus as if suffocated by her emotion. " As for myself, during this interval, I passed my fingers mechanically through the long ringlets of her disordered hair, and searched my brain for some honorable evasion to relieve me of my embarrassment. I could find none, however, for I had been driven into my last entrenchment, and Rosette appeared perfectly determined not to leave the room as she had entered it. Her attire was of a formidable easy nature, which did not promise well. I myself was wearing only an open dressing-gown which would have been a poor protection for my incognito, so that I was extremely anxious about the result of the battle. " ' Theodore, listen to me,' said Rosette, rising and throwing 3i6 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. back her hair from both sides of her face, as far as I could see by the feeble light which the stars and a very slender crescent of the rising moon shed into the room through the still open window ; ' the step which I am taking is a strange one ; — everyone would blame me for having taken it. But you are leaving soon, and I love you ! I cannot let you go in this way without coming to an explanation with you. Perhaps you will never return ; perhaps it is the first and the last time that I am to see you. Who knows where you will go ? But wherever you go you will carry away my soul and my life with you. If you had remained I should not have been reduced to this extremity. The happiness of looking at you, of listening to you, of living by your side would have been sufficient for me ; I would not have asked for anything more. I would have shut up my love within my heart ; you would have thought that you had in me only a good and sincere friend ; — but that cannot be. You say that it is absolutely necessary that you should leave. " ' It annoys you, Theodore, to see me clinging thus to your footsteps like a loving shadow which cannot but follow you and would fain blend itself with your body ; it must displease you always to find behind you beseeching eyes and hands stretched forth to seize the edge of your cloak. I know it, but I cannot prevent myself from acting thus. Besides, you cannot complain ; it is your own fault. I was calm, tranquil, almost happy before knowing you. You arrived handsome, young, smiling, like Phoebus the charming god. You paid me the most assiduous and delicate attentions ; never was cavalier more sprightly and gallant. Your lips every moment let fall roses and rubies ; — everything served you as an opportunity for a madrigal, and you know how to turn the most insignificant phrases so as to convert them into adorable compliments. *' ' A woman who had hated you mortally at first would have ended by loving you, I, I loved you from the very moment when first I saw you. Why do you appear so surprised, then after being so lovable and so well loved ? Is it not quite a nat- ural consequence ? I am neither mad, nor thoughtless, nor yet a romantic little girl who becomes enamored of the first sword MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 317 that she sees. I am well-bred, and I know what life is. What I am doing, every woman, even the most virtuous or most prudish, would equally have done. What was your idea and your inten- tion ? to please me, I imagine, for I can suppose no other. How is it, then, that you look sorry, in a measure, for having succeeded so well ? Have I, without knowing it, done anything to displease you ? I ask your pardon for it. Have you ceased to think me beautful, or have you discovered some defect in me which repels you ? " * You have the right of being hard to please in beauty, but either you have strangely lied to me, or else I too am beautiful ! I am as young as you, and I love you ; why do you now disdain me ? You used to be so eager about me, you supported my arm with such constant solicitude, you pressed the hand I sur- rendered to you so tenderly, you raised such languorous eyes towards me : if you did not love me, what was the use of all this intrigue ? Could you perchance have had the cruelty to kindle love in a heart in order to have afterwards a subject for mirth ? Ah ! that would be horrible mockery, impiety, sacrilege ! such could be the amusement only of a frightful soul, and I cannot believe it of you, quite inexplicable as is your behavior towards me. •' ' What, then, is the cause of this sudden change ? For my part, I can see none. What mystery is concealed behind such cold- ness ? I cannot believe that you have a repugnance to me ; your conduct proves the contrary, for no one woos a woman he dislikes with such eagerness were he the greatest impostor on earth. O Theodore, what have you against me ? who has changed you thus ? what have I done to you ? If the love which you appeared to have for me has taken its flight, mine, alas ! has remained, and I cannot uproot it from my heart. Have pity on me, Theodore, for I am very unhappy. At least pretend to love me a little, and say some gentle words to me ; it will not cost you much, unless you have an insurmountable horror of me.' '* At this pathetic portion of her discourse, her sobs com- pletely stifled her voice ; she crossed both her hands upon my 3i8 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. shoulder and laid her forehead upon them in quite a broken- hearted attitude. All that she said was perfectly correct, and I had no good reply to make. I could not assume a bantering tone. It would not have been suitable. Rosette was not one of those creatures who could be treated so lightly : — I was, moreover, too much affected to be able to do it. I felt myself guilty for having trifled in such a manner with the heart of a charming woman, and I experienced the keenest and sincerest remorse in the world. " Seeing that I made no reply, the dear child heaved a long sigh and made a movement as though to rise but she fell back again, weighed down by her emotion ; then she encircled me in her arms, the freshness of which penetrated my doublet, laid her face upon mine, and began to weep silently. " It had a singular effect upon me to feel this exhaustless flow of tears, which did not come from my own eyes, streaming in this way down my cheek. It was not long before they were mingled with mine, and there was a veritable bitter rain suffi- cient to cause a new deluge had it only lasted forty days. " At that moment the moon happened to shine straight upon the window ; a pale ray dipped into the room and illuminated our taciturn group with a bluish light. " With her white wrapper, her bare arms, her uncovered breast and throat, of nearly the same color as her linen, her dis- hevelled hair and her mournful look, Rosette had the appear- ance of an alabaster figure of Melancholy seated on a tomb. As to myself I scarcely know what appearance I had since I could not see myself, and there was no glass to reflect my image, but I think that I might very well have posed for a statue of Uncertainty personified. " I was moved, and bestowed a few more tender caresses than usual upon Rosette ; from her hair my hand had descended to her velvety neck, and thence to her smooth round shoulder, which I gently stroked, following its quivering line. The child vibrated beneath my touch like a keyboard beneath a musician's fingers ; her flesh started and leaped abruptly, and amorous thrillings ran through her body. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 319 ** I myself felt a vague and confused species of desire, whose aim I could not discern, and I felt great voluptuousness in going over these pure delicate contours. I left her shoulder, and, profiting by the hiatus of a fold suddenly closed my hand upon her little frightened breast, which palpitated distractedly like a turtle-dove surprised in its nest ; — from the extreme outline of her cheek which I touched with an almost insensible kiss, I reached her half-parted lips, and we remained like this for some time. I do not know, though, whether it was two minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or an hour ; for I had totally lost the notion of time, and I did not know whether I was in heaven or on earth, here or elsewhere, living or dead. The heady wine of voluptuousness had so intoxicated me at the first mouthful that I had drunk, that any reason I possessed had left me. " Rosette clasped me more and more tightly in her arms, and covered me with her body ; — she leaned convulsively upon me and pressed me to her naked panting breast ; at every kiss her life seemed to rush wholly to the spot that was touched, and desert the rest of her person. Strange ideas passed through my head ; had I not dreaded the betrayal of my incognito, I should have given play to Rosette's impassionate bursts, and should, perhaps, have made some vain and mad attempt to impart a semblance of reality to the shadow of pleasure so ardently embraced by my fair mistress ; I had not yet had a lover ; and these keen attacks, these reiterated caresses, the contact with this beautiful body, and these sweet names lost in kisses, agitated me to the highest degree, although they were those of a woman ; — and then the nocturnal visit, the romantic pas- sion, the moonlight, all had a freshness and novel charm for me which made me forget that after all I was not a man. " Nevertheless, making a great effort over myself, I told Rosette that she was compromising herself horribly by coming into my room at such an hour and remaining in it so long, and that her woman might notice her absence and see that she had not passed the night in her own apartment. " I said this so gently that Rosette only replied by dropping 320 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. her cambric mantle and her slippers, and by gliding into my bed like a snake into a bowl of milk ; for she imagined that my clothes alone prevented me from coming to more precise de- monstrations, and that this was the sole obstacle that restrained me. '• She believed, poor child, that the happy hour which had been so laboriously contrived, was at last about to strike for her ; but it only struck two in the morning. My situation was as critical as it could be, when the door turned on its hinges and gave passage to the very Chevalier Alcibiades in person ; he held a candlestick in one hand and his sword in the other. " He went straight to the bed, threw back the clothes, and, in holding the light to the face of the confused Rosette, said to her in a jeering tone — ' Good-morning, sister.' Little Rosette was unable to find a word in reply. " • So it appears, my dearest and most virtuous sister, that having in your wisdom judged that the Seigneur Theodore's bed was softer than your own, you have come to share it .'' or perhaps it is on account of the ghosts in your room, and you thought that you would be in greater safety in this one under the protection of the said seigneur ? 'Tis very well advised. Ah ! Chevalier de S^rannes, so you have cast your amorous glance upon my sister, and you think that it will end there. I fancy that it would not be unwholesome to have a little cutting of each other's throats, and if you will be so kind I shall be infinitely obliged to you. Theodore, you have abused the friendship that I had for you, and you make me repent of the good opinion which at the very first I had formed of the integrity of your character : it is bad, very bad.' *• I could not offer any valid defence : appearances were against me. Who would have believed me if I had said, as was indeed the case, that Rosette had come into my room in spite of me, and that, far from seeking to please her, I was doing everything in my power to estrange her from me ? I had only one thing to say, and I said it — ' Seigneur Alcibiades, there shall be as much throat-cutting as you like.' " During this colloquy, Rosette had not failed to faint MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. Sai according to the soundest rules of the pathetic ; — I went to a crystal cup full of water in which the stem of a large white, half leafless rose was immersed, and threw a few drops over her face, which promptly brought her round again. " Scarcely knowing what face to put on the matter, she crouched down at the bedside and buried her pretty head beneath the clothes, like a bird settling itself to sleep. She had so gathered the sheets and pillows about her that it would have been very difficult to make out what there was beneath the heap ; — only by a few soft sighs issuing from time to time could it have been guessed that it was a young repentent sinner, or at least one extremely sorry at being a sinner in intention only and not in deed, — which was the case with the unfortunate Rosette. " The brother, having no further anxiety about his sister, resumed the dialogue, and said in a somewhat gentler tone : ' It is not absolutely indispensable to cut each other's throats at once, that is an extreme measure which may be resorted to at any time. Listen : — we are not equally matched. You are in early youth and much less vigorous than I, if we were to fight I should certainly kill you or maim you — and I should not like either to kill or disfigure you — which would be a pity ; Rosette, who is over there under the bed-clothes and does not utter a word, would bear me ill-will for it all her life ; for she is as spiteful and wicked as a tigress when she sets about it, the dear little dove. You don't know this, you who are her Prince Galaor, and who receive only charming kindnesses from her ; but it is no slight matter. Rosette is free and so are you ; it appears that you are not irreconcilable enemies ; her widowhood is about to end, and things could not be better. Marry her ; she will have no need to return to her own couch, while I shall in this way be freed from the necessity of taking you as a sheath for my sword, which would not be agreeable either for you or for me ; — what do you think ? ' " I had every reason for making a horrible grimace, for his proposal was of all things in the world the most impracticable for me : I could sooner have walked on all fours on the ceiling, 21 32 2 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. like the flies, or taken down the sun without having a stool to stand on, than do what he asked of me, and yet the last prop- osition was unquestionably more agreeable than the first. " He appeared surprised that I did not accept with ecstasy, and he repeated what he had said as if to give me time to reply. " • An alliance with you would be a most honorable one for me, and I should never have dared to pretend to it : I know that it would be an unprecedented piece of good fortune for a youth, who, as yet, has neither rank nor standing in the world, and one that the most illustrious would esteem themselves fortunate to obtain ; — but yet I can only persist in my refusal, and, since I am free to choose between a duel and a marriage, I prefer the duel. 'Tis a singular taste — and few people would have it — but it is mine.' " Here Rosette gave the most mournful sob in the world, put forth her head from beneath the pillow, and seeing my impassi- ble and determined countenance put it in again like a snail whose horns have been struck. " ' It is not that I have no love for Madame Rosette, I love her infinitely ; but I have reasons for not marrying which you would yourself consider excellent if it were possible for me to tell them to you. Moreover things have not gone so far as appearances might lead one to believe ; except a few kisses which a lively friendship is sufficient to explain and to justify, nothing has passed between us that may not be acknowledged, and your sister's virtue is assuredly the most intact and blame- less in the world. I owed her this testimony. Now, Seigneur Alcibiades at what time do we fight, and where ? ' " ' Here, at once,' cried Alcibiades, intoxicated with rage. " * Can you think of it ? before Rosette ? ' "'Draw, villain, or I shall assassinate you,' he continued, brandishing his sword and whirling it round his head. " ' Let us at least leave the room.' '"If you do not put yourself on guard I will pin you to the wall like a bat, my fine Celadon, and though you may flap your wings to eternity, you will not get free, I give you warning.' And he rushed upon me with his weapon raised. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 3^3 " I drew my rapier, — for he would have done as he had said, — and at first contented myself with parrying his thrusts. " Rosette made a superhuman effort to come and throw herself between our swords for both combatants were equally dear to her ; but her strength deserted her, and she rolled senseless on to the foot of the bed. " Our blades gleamed and made a noise like that of an anvil, for want of space obliged us to engage our swords very closely. " Two or three times Alcibades nearly reached me, and had I not been an excellent master of fence my life would have been in the greatest danger ; for his skill was astonishing and his strength prodigious. He exhausted all the tricks and feints in fencing to touch me. Enraged at his want of success, he exposed himself twice or thrice ; I would not take advantage of it ; but he returned to the attact with such desperate and savage fury, that I was forced to seize upon the opening that he gave me ; moreover, the noise and whirling flashes of the steel intoxicated and dazzled me. I did not think of death and had not the least fear : the keen and mortal point which came before my eyes every second had no more effect upon me than if I were fighting with buttoned foils ; only I was indignant at Alcibiades's brutality, and my indignation was still further heightened by the consciousness of my perfect innocence. I wished merely to prick him in the arm or shoulder and so make him drop his sword, for I had vainly tried to disarm him. He had a wrist of iron, and the devil could not have made him. move it. " At last he made a thrust so quick and so long that I could only partially parry it ; my sleeve was pierced and I felt the chill of the iron on my arm ; but I was not wounded. At sight of this I became angry, and instead of defending myself attacked in turn ; — I forgot that he was Rosette's brother and I fell upon him as though he had been my mortal enemy. Taking advantage of a mistake in a position of his sword I made so close a flanconnade that I reached his side, and with an ' Oh ! ' he fell backwards. *♦ I thought that he was dead but he was really only wounded, 324 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. and his fall was occasioned by a false step that he had made while trying to defend himself. I cannot express, Graciosa, the sensation that I experienced ; certainly, it is not difficult to make the reflection that if you strike flesh with a fine, sharp point, a hole will be pierced and blood will gush out. Never- theless I was profoundly stupefied on perceiving red streams trickling over Alcibiades's doublet. I of course had not thought sawdust would come out as from a burst doll ; but I know that never in my life did I experience such great surprise, and it seemed to me that some unheard-of thing had just happened to me. " The unheard-of thing was not, as it appeared to me, that blood should flow from a wound, but that the wound should have been given by me, and that a young girl of my age (I was going to write ' a young man,' so well have I entered into the spirit of my part) should have laid low a vigorous captain so well trained in the art of fence as Alcibiades : — and all this, what is more, for the crime of seducing and refusing to marry a very rich and charming woman ! " I was truly in a cruel embarrassment, with the sister in a swoon, the brother, as I believed, dead, and myself nearly swooning or dead like one or other of them. I hung to the bell-rope, chimed loud enough to wake the dead, and, leaving the task of explaining matters to the servants and the old aunt to be performed by the fainting Rosette and the embowelled Alcibiades, went straight to the stable. The air restored me at once ; I took out my horse, and saddled and bridled him myself; I ascertained that the crupper was properly fastened and the curb in a right condition ; I made the stirrups of equal length, drew the girth a notch tighter : — in a word, I harnessed, him with an attention that was at least singular at such a moment, and with a calmness quite inconceivable after a combat terminated in such a way. *' I mounted my beast and crossed the park by a path that I knew. The branches of the trees all laden with dew, lashed my face and wetted it ; you would have thought that the old trees were stretching out their arms to stop me and keep me for the MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 3,5 love of their mistress. Had I been in a different mood, or at all superstitious, I might have believed that they were so many phantoms who wished to seize me and were showing me their fists. '• But in reality I had not a single idea either of that kind or of any other ; a leaden stupor, so great that I was scarcely con- scious of it, weighed upon my brain like too tight a helmet ; only it did seem to me that I had killed some one yonder and that it was for this that I was going away. I was, moreover, horribly inclined to sleep, whether owing to the lateness of the hour or to the fact that the emotions of the evening had had a physical reaction and had corporally fatigued me. " I reached a little postern which opened upon the fields in a secret way which Rosette had shown me in our walks. I dis- mounted, touched the knob and pushed open the door: I regained my saddle after leading my horse through, and put him to the gallop until I reached the highroad to C , at which place I arrived at early dawn. •• Such is the very faithful and circumstantial history of my first intrigue and my first duel." XV. T was five o'clock in the morning when I entered the town. The houses were beginning to look out of window; the worthy natives were showing their benign countenances surmounted by collos- sal night-caps behind the panes. At the sound of my horses' iron-shod hoofs ringing upon the uneven flinty pave- ment there would emerge from every dormer window the big curiously red countenances and the matutinally uncovered breasts of the local Venuses who lost themselves in conjectures about the unwonted appearances of a traveller at C , at such an hour and in such an equipment, for my attire was on a very small scale, and my appearance was, at the least, suspicious. " I got a little rascal, who had his hair over his eyes, and lifted up his spaniel's muzzle in the air that he might consider me more comfortably, to point me out an inn ; I gave him a few coppers for his trouble, and a conscientious cut with my riding-whip, which made him flee away screaming like a jay that had been plucked alive. I threw myself upon a bed and fell fast asleep. When I awoke it was three o'clock in the afternoon, — a length of time scarcely sufficient to rest me completely. In fact it was not too much for a sleepless night, an intrigue, a duel, and a very rapid though quite victorious flight. " I was very anxious about the wound that I had given Alci- biades ; but some days afterwards I was completely reassured, for I learnt that it had not been attended by dangerous conse- quences, and that he was quite convalescent. This relieved MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 327 me of a singular weight, for the idea of having killed a man tormented me strangely although it had been in lawful self- defence, and against my own wish. I had not yet arrived at that sublime indifference towards men's lives to which I after- wards attained. '' At C I again came across several of the young fellows with whom we had travelled. This pleased me ; I formed a closer connection with them, and they introduced me into several agreeable houses. I had become completely used to my dress, and the ruder and more active life that I had led, and the violent exercises to which I had devoted myself had made me twice as robust as I had been before. I followed these madcaps everywhere ; I rode, hunted, had orgies with them, for little by little I had come to drink ; without attaining to the perfectly German capacity of some among them, I could empty two or three bottles for my share without getting very tipsy, which was very satisfactory progress. I made verses like a god with extreme copiousness, and kissed inn-servants with sufficient boldness. " In short, I was an accomplished young cavalier in complete conformity with the last fashionable pattern. I got rid of cer- tain countrified notions that I had had about virtue and other similar tarradiddles ; on the other hand, I became so pro- digiously delicate in point of honor that I fought a duel nearly every day : it even became a necessity with me to do so, a sort of indispensable exercise without which I should have felt out of sorts the whole day. Accordingly, when no one had looked at me or trodden on my foot and I had no motive for fighting, rather than remain idle and not exercise myself in fencing, I would act as second to my comrades or even to men whom I knew only by name. " I had soon a colossal renown for bravery, and nothing short of it was necessary to check the pleasantries which would infallibly have been suggested by my beardless face and effem- inate appearance. But two or three superfluous button-holes that I had opened in some doublets, and a few slices that I very delicately cut from some recalcitrant skins, caused my appear- 328 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIK. ance to be generally considered more manly than that of Mars in person or of Priapus himself, and you might have met with people who would have sworn that they had held bastards of mine over the baptismal font. "Through all this apparent dissipation, amid this riotous, extravagant life, I ceased not to pursue my original idea, that is to say the conscientious study of man and the solution of the great problem of a perfect lover, a problem somewhat more difficult to solve than that of the philosopher's stone. " Certain ideas are like the horizon which most certainly exists since you see it in front of you in whatever direction you turn, but which flees obstinately before you, and, whether you go at a foot pace or at a gallop, keeps always at the same distance from you ; for it cannot manifest itself except with a determined condition of remoteness ; it is destroyed in pro- portion as you advance, to be formed further away with its fleeting imperceptible azure, and it is in vain that you try to detain it by the hem of its flowing mantle. " The further I progressed in my knowledge of the animal, the more I saw how utterly impossible was the realization of my desire, and how completely external to the conditions of its nature was that which I found indispensable to an auspicious love. I convinced myself that the man who would be the most sincerely in love with me would with the greatest readi- ness in the world find means to make me the most wretched of women, and yet I had already abandoned many of my girlish requirements. I had come down from the sublime clouds, not altogether into the street and the kennel, but upon a hill of medium height, accessible though somewhat steep. " The ascent, it is true, was rude enough ; but I was so proud as to believe that I was quite worth the trouble of the effort, and that I should be sufficient compensation for the pains that had been taken. I could never have prevailed upon myself to take a step forward ; I waited, perched patiently upon my summit. " My plan was as follows : — In my male attire I should have made the acquaintance of some young man whose exterior MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ^29 pleased me ; I should have lived on familiar terms with him ; by means of skilful questions and false confidences which would have challenged true ones, I should soon have acquired a com- plete knowledge of his feelings and thoughts ; and, if I found him such a one as I wished him to be, I should have alleged some journey, and kept away from him for three or four months to give him time to forget my features ; then I should have returned in my woman's costume, and arranged a voluptuous little house, buried amid trees and flowers, in a retired suburb ; then I should have so ordered matters that he would have met me and wooed me ; and, if he showed a true and faithful love, I should have given myself to him without restriction or pre- caution : — the title of his mistress would have appeared honor- able to me, and I should not have asked him for any other. " But assuredly this plan will never be put into execution, for it is characteristic of plans never to be executed, wherein prin- cipally appear the frailty of the will and the mere nothingness of man. The proverb ' God wills what woman wills * has no more truth in it than any other proverb, that is to say, it has hardly any at all. *' So long as I had seen men only at a distance and through the medium of my desire, they had appeared comely to me, and my sight had deceived me. Now I consider them frightful in the highest degree, and do not understand how a woman can admit such a creature into her bed ; for my part, it would turn my stomach, and I could never bring myself to it. "How coarse and ignoble are their lineaments, and how devoid of delicacy and elegance ! what unfinished and unpleas- ing lines ! what hard, dark, and furrowed skin ! Some are as swarthy as men that had been hanged for six months, emaciated, bony, hairy, with violin-strings on their hands, large drawbridge feet, dirty moustaches always full of food and twirled back to the ears, hair as rough as a broom's bristles, chins ending like boars' heads, lips cracked and dried by strong liquors, eyes sur- rounded by three or four dark orbs, necks full of twisted veins, big muscles and prominent cartilages. Others are stuffed with red meat, and push on before them a belly that their waist-belt ^^O MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. can scarcely span ; they blink as they open their little sea- green eyes inflamed with luxury, and resemble hippopotamuses in breeches rather than human creatures. They always smell either of wine, or brandy, or tobacco, or else of their own natural odor, which is the very worst of all. As to those whose forms are somewhat less disgusting, they are like misshapen women. And that is all. " I had not remarked all this. I had been in life as in a cloud, and my feet scarcely touched the earth. The odor of the roses and lilacs of spring went to my head like too strong a perfume. I dreamt only of accomplished heroes, faithful and respectful lovers, flames worthy of the altar, marvellous devo- tions and sacrifices, and I should have thought that I had found them all in the first blackguard that bade me good-day. Yet this first, coarse intoxication had no long duration ; strange suspicions seized me, and I could have no rest until I had cleared them up. " At first my horror of men was pushed to the last degree of exaggeration, and I looked upon them as dreadful monstrosi- ties. Their modes of thought, their manners and their care- lessly cynical language, their brutality and their scorn of women shocked and revolted me extremely, so little did the idea that I had formed of them correspond with the reality. They are not monsters, if you will, but something, on my word, that is much worse ! They ape capital fellows of very jovial disposition, who eat and drink well, will do you all kinds of services, are good painters and musicians, and are suitable for a thousand things, with, however, the single exception of that one for which they were created, namely, to be the male of the animal called woman, with which they have not the slightest affinity, physical or moral. "Originally, I could scarcely disguise the contempt with which they inspired me, but by degrees I became accustomed to their manner of life. I was as little annoyed by the jests that they launched against women as if I had myself belonged to their own sex. On the contrary, I made some very good ones, the success of which singularly flattered my pride ; certainly MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 331 none of my comrades went so far as I did in the matter of sar- casm and pleasantries on this subject. My perfect knowledge of the ground gave me a great advantage, and, besides any piquant turn that they might have, my epigrams shone in virtue of an accuracy that was often wanting in theirs. For although all the evil that is said of women has always some foundation, it is nevertheless difficult for men to preserve the composure requisite in order to jest about them well, and there is often a good deal of love in their invectives. " I remarked that it was those that were most tender and had most feeling about women who treated them worse than the rest, and who returned to the subject with quite a peculiar bitter- ness as though they owed them a mortal grudge for not being what they wished them to be, and for falsifying the good opinion they had first formed about them. *' What I desired above all things was not physical beauty, it was beauty of the soul, love ; but love, as I am sensible of it, is perhaps beyond human possibilities. And yet it seems to me that I should love in this way, and that I should give more than I require. " What magnificent madness ! what sublime extravagance ! " To surrender yourself entirely without any self-reservation, to renounce the possession of yourself and the freedom of your will, to place the latter in the hands of another, to see only with his eyes and hear only with his ears, to be but one in two bodies, to blend and mingle your souls so that you cannot tell whether you are yourself or the other, to absorb and radiate continually, to be now the moon and now the sun, to see the whole of the world and of creation in a single being, to displace the centre of life, to be ready, at any time, for the greatest sacrifices and the most absolute abnegation, to suffer in the bosom of the person loved as though it were your own ; O wonder ! to double yourself while giving yourself — such is love as I conceive it. '* Fidelity like that of the ivy, entwinings as of the young vine, and cooings as of the turtle-dove, these are matters of course, and are the first and simplest conditions. 332 MADEMOISELLE DE MAXJPIN. " Had I remained at home, in the costume of my sex, turning my wheel with melancholy or making tapestry behind a pane in the embrasure of a window, what I have sought for through the world would perhaps have come and found me of itself. Love is like fortune, and dislikes to be pursued. It visits by pref- erence those that are sleeping on the edge of wells, and the kisses of queens and gods often descend upon closed eyes. It is a lure and a deception to think that all adventures and all happiness exist only in those places where you are not, and it is a miscalculation to have your horse saddled and to post off in quest of your ideal. Many people make, and many others will again make this mistake. The horizon is always of the most charming azure, although when you reach it the hills com- posing it are usually but poor, cracked clay, or ochre washed by the rain. *• I had imagined that the world was full of adorable youths, and that populations of Esplandians, Amadises, and Lancelots of the Lake were to be met with on the roads in pursuit of their Dulcineas ; and I was greatly astonished that the world took very little heed of this sublime search and was content to share the couch of the first prostitute that came in the way. I am well punished for my curiosity and distrust. I am surfeited in the most horrible manner possible without having enjoyed. With me knowledge has gone before use ; nothing can be worse than such premature experiences which are not the fruit of ac- tion. " The completest ignorance would be a thousand times better ; it would at least make you do many foolish things which would serve to instruct you and to rectify your ideas ; for, beneath the disgust of which I have been speaking, there is always a lively and rebellious element which produces the strangest disorders : the mind is vanquished, but the body is not, and will not subscribe to this superb disdain. The young and robust body strives and kicks beneath the mind like a vigor- ous stallion ridden by a feeble old man, whom, however, he is unable to throw, for the cavesson holds his head and the bit tears his mouth. MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 333 Since I have lived with men, I have seen so many women basely betrayed, so many secret connections imprudently di- vulged, the purest loves dragged carelessly through the mire, young fellows hastening to frightful courtesans on leaving the arms of the most charming mistresses, the most firmly estab- lished amours suddenly broken off without any plausible motive, that I now find it impossible to decide on taking a lover. It would be to throw oneself in broad daylight and with open eyes into a bottomless abyss. Nevertheless, the secret desire of my heart is still to have one. The voice of nature stifles the voice of reason. I am quite sensible that I shall never be happy if I cannot love and be loved : — but the misfortune is that only a man can be had as a lover, and if men are not altogether devils they are very far from being angels. It would be vain for them to stick feathers on their shoulderblades and put a glory of gilt paper on' their heads; I know them too well to be de- ceived. All the fine things that they could whisper to me would be of no avail. I know beforehand what they are going to say, and could say it for them. " I have seen them studying their parts and rehearsing them before going on in front ; I know the chief of the tirades that they intend to be effective and the passages on which they rely. Neither paleness of face nor alteration of feature would convince me. I know that these prove nothing. A night of orgie, a few bottles of wine, and two or three girls, are sufficient to wrinkle your face most becomingly. I have seen this trick practised by a young marquis, by nature very rosy and fresh-colored, who found himself all the better for it, and owed the crowning of his passion only to this touching and well-gained paleness. I know also how the most languorous Celadons console themselves for the harshness of their Astraeas and find means for being patient while waiting for the happy hour. I have seen sluts serving as substitutes for chaste Ariadnes. " Truly, after this, man tempts me but little : for he does not possess beauty like woman, beauty, that splendid garment which so well disguises the imperfections of the soul, that divine drapery cast by God over the nakedness of the world, and which ^j4 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. makes it in some measure excusable to love the vilest courtesan of the kennel if she owns this magnificent and royal gift. " In default of the virtues of the soul, I should at least wish for exquisite perfection of form, satinity of flesh, roundness of contour, sweetness of line, deHcacy of skin, all that makes the charm of women. Since I cannot have love, I would have voluptuousness, and well or ill, replace the brother by the sister. But all the men that I have seen seem to me frightfully ugly. My horse is a hundred times more handsome, and I should have less repugnance to kissing him than to kissing sundry wonderful fellows who believe themselves very charm- ing. Certainly a fop like those of my acquaintance would not be a brilliant theme for me to embellish with variations of pleasure. " A soldier would suit me nearly as little ; military men have something mechanical in their walk and something bestial in their face which makes me look upon them as scarcely human creatures ; gentlemen of the long robe are not more delightful to me, they are dirty, oily, shaggy threadbare, with glaucous eyes and lipless mouths ; they smell immoderately rancid and mouldy, and I should feel no inclination to lay my face against their lynx or badger-like muzzles. As to poets, they think of nothing in the world but the endings of words and go no further back than to the penultimate, and, in truth, are diffi- cult to make use of suitably ; they are more wearisome than the others, but they are as ugly and have not the least distinction or elegance in their figure and dress, which is truly singluar ; — men who are occupied the whole day with form and beauty do not perceive that their boots are badly made and their hats ridiculous ! They look like country apothecaries or teachers of learned dogs out of work, and would give you a dis- taste for poetry and verse for several eternities. " As for painters, their stupidity also is enormous ; they see nothing except the seven colors. One with whom I had spent a few days at R , and who was asked what he thought of me, made this ingenious reply : ' He is rather warm in tone, and in the shadows pure Naples yellow should be employed instead MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN, ^^^ of white, with a little Cassel ochre and reddish brown.* Such was his opinion, and, moreover, his nose was crooked and his eyes like his nose ; which did not improve his chances. Whom shall I take ? — a soldier with bulging crop, a limb of the law with convex shoulders, a poet or painter with a wild look, a lean little coxcomb without consistence ? Which cage shall I choose in this menagerie ? I am quite unable to say ; I feel as little inclination in one direction as in another, for they are as perfectly equal in point of foolishness and ugliness as they can possibly be. •' Another alternative would still be open to me, which would be to take any one that I loved though he were a porter or a jockey ; but I do not love even a porter. O unhappy heroine that I am ! unmated turtle-dove condemned eternally to utter elegiac cooings i " Oh ! how many times have I wished to be really a man as I appear to be ! How many women are there with whom I should have had a fellow-feeling, and whose hearts would have understood mine ! how perfectly happy should I have been rendered by those delicacies of love, those noble flights of pure passion to which I could have replied ! What sweetness, what delight ! how would all the sensitive plants of my soul have bloomed freely without being obliged every minute to contract and close beneath some coarse touch ! What charming efflo- rescence of invisible flowers which will never open, and whose mysterious perfume would have tenderly embalmed the fraternal soul ! It seems to me that it would have been an enchanting life, an infinite ecstasy with ever outstretched wings ; walks, with hands entwined never releasing their hold, beneath avenues of golden sand, through groves of eternally-smiling roses, in parks full of fish-ponds with gliding swans, and alabaster vases standing out against the foliage. " Had I been a youth, how I should have loved Rosette ! what worship it would have been ! Our souls were truly made for each other, two pearls destined to blend together and make but one ! How perfectly should I have realized the ideas that she had formed of love ! Her character suits me completely, ^^^ MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. and her style of beauty pleases me. It is a pity that our love should be totally condemned to indispensable platonism ! " An adventure befell me lately. " I used to visit a house in which there was a charming little girl, fifteen years old at the very most : I have never seen a more adorable miniature. She was fair, but so delicately and transparently fair that ordinary blondes would have appeared excessively brown and as dark as moles beside her ; you would have thought that she had golden hair powdered with silver ; her eyebrows were of so mild and soft a tint that they were scarcely apparent to the sight ; her pale blue eyes had the most velvety look and the most silky lashes imaginable ; her mouth, too small to put the tip of your finger into it, added still further to the childish and exquisite character of her beauty, and the gentle curves and dimples of her cheeks had an ingenuousness that was unspeakably charming. The whole of her dear little person delighted me beyond all expression ; I loved her frail, white, little hands through which you could see the light, her bird-like foot which scarcely touched the ground, her figure which a breath would have broken, and her pearly shoulders, little de- veloped as yet, which her scarf, placed awry, happily disclosed. " Her prattle, in which artlessness imparted fresh piquancy to her natural wit, would engage me for whole hours, and I took singular pleasure in making her talk ; she would utter a thousand delicious comicalities, now witii extraordinary nicety of intention, and now without having apparently the slightest comprehension of their scope, — which made them a thousand times more attractive. I used to give her bon-bons and loz- enges, kept expressly for her in a light tortoise-shell box, which pleased her greatly, for she is dainty like the true little puss that she is. As soon as I arrived she would run up to me and try my pockets to see whether the blissful bon-bon box was there ; I would make her run from one hand to the other, and this would occasion a little battle in which she in the end infal- libly got the upper hand and completely plundered me. "One day, however, she contented herself with greeting me in a very grave manner, and did not come as usual to see MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 337 whether the sweetmeat fountain was still flowing in my pocket ; she remained haughtily on her chair, quite upright and with her elbows drawn back. " ' Well ! Ninon,' I said to her, ' have you become fond of salt now, or are you afraid that sweets will make your teeth drop out ? , And as I spoke I tapped the box, which gave forth the most honeyed and sugary sound in the world from beneath my jacket. "She put her little tongue half-way out on the edge of her lips as thought to taste the ideal sweetness of the absent bon-bon but she did not stir. " Then I drew the box from my pocket, opened it, and began religiously to swallow the burnt almonds of which she was especially fond : the greedy instinct was for a moment stronger than her resolution ; she put out her hand to take some and drew it back again immediately, saying ' I am too big to eat sweets ! ' And she heaved a sigh. •' ' It did not strike me that you had grown very much since last week ; you must be like the mushrooms which spring up in a night. Come and let me measure you. ' *' ' Laugh as much as you like,' she rejoined with a charming pout ; ' I am no longer a little girl, and I want to grow very big,' " ' Your resolutions are excellent, and should be adhered to ; but might it be known, my dear young lady, what has caused these lofty ideas to come into your head ? For, a week ago, you appeared quite content to be small, and craunched your burnt almonds without caring very much about compromising your dignity.* " The little creature looked at me in a singular manner, glanced around her, and, when she had quite satisfied herself that no one could hear us, leaned over towards me in a mysterious fashion and said : " ' I have a lover.* " ' The deuce ! I am no longer surprised that you have ceased to care for lozenges ; you were wrong, however, not to take some, for you might have had a doll's dinner-party with him, or exchanged them for a shuttlecock.' 22 J38 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. "The child made a scornful movement with her shoulders and appeared to look upon me with perfect contempt. As she continued to maintain her attitude of an offended queen, I continued : " ' What is the name of this glorious personage ? Arthur, I suppose, or else Henry.' These were two little boys with whom she used to play, and whom she called her husbands. " ' No, neither Arthur nor Henry,' she said, fixing her clear, transparent eye upon me, ' a gentleman.' She raised her hand above her head to give me an idea of height. " * As tall as that ? Why, this is getting serious. And who is this tall lover ? * " ' Monsieur Theodore, I will tell you, but you must not speak about it to any one, neither to mamma, or Polly (her gover- ness), or your friends who think me a child and would make fun of me.' " I promised the most inviolable secrecy, for I was very curious to know who the gallant personage was, and the child, seeing that I was making fun of the matter, hesitated to take me entirely into her confidence. " Reassured by the word of honor that I gave her to be carefully silent about it, she left her easy-chair, came and leaned over the back of mine, and whimpered the name of the beloved prince very softly in my ear. "I was confounded : it was the Chevalier de G , a dirty, intractable animal, with the morals of a schoolmaster and the physique of a drum-major, the most intemperate debauchee of a man that could possibly be seen, a genuine satyr, minus the goat's feet and the pointed ears. This inspired me with grave apprehensions for dear Ninon, and I made up my mind to put the matter to rights. "Some people came in, and the conversation dropped. " I withdrew into a corner and searched my brain for the means of preventing things from going further, for it would have been quite a sin for so delicious a creature to fall to such an arrant scoundrel. •• The little one's mother was a kind of courtesan who kept MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 339 gaming tables and had a literary salon. Bad verses were read at her house and good money lost, which was a compensation. She had not much love for her daughter, who was, to her, a sort of living baptismal certificate which prevented her falsifying her chronology. Besides, the child was growing up, and her budding charms gave rise to comparisons which were not to the advantage of the prototype, already somewhat worn by the action of years and men. The child was accordingly rather neglected, and was left defenceless to the enterprises of the blackguards who frequented the house. If her mother had taken any notice of her, it would probably have been only to profit by her youth and trade on her beauty and innocence. In one way or another the fate that awaited her was not in doubt. This pained me, for she was a charming little creature who was assuredly deserving of better things, a pearl of the finest water lost in that infectious slough ; the thought of it affected me so far that I resolved to get her at all costs out of that frightful house. " The first thing to be done was to prevent the chevalier from pursuing his design. I thought that the best and simplest way was to pick a quarrel with him and make him fight a duel, and I had all the trouble in the world to do so, for he is as cowardly as he can be and dreads blows more than any one. At last I said so many stinging things to him, that he was obliged to make up his mind to come on the ground, although it was greatly against the grain. I even threatened to have him cudgelled by my footman if he did not put a better face on it. Nevertheless he could handle his sword well enough, but he was so confused by fear that we had hardly crossed our weapons when I was able to administer a nice little thrust which sent him to bed for a fortnight. This satisfied me ; I had no wish to kill him, and would as soon have let him live to be hanged later on — a touching attention for which he ought to have been more grateful to me ! My rogue being stretched between a pair of sheets and duly trussed with bandelets, it only remained to induce the little one to leave the house, which was not extremely difficult. 240 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. "I told her a story about her lover's disappearance, which was giving her extraordinary anxiety. I informed her that he had gone off with an actress belonging to the company then at C , which, as you may believe, made her very indignant. But I consoled her by speaking ill in every way of the chevalier, who was ugly, drunken, and already old, and I ended by asking her whether she would not rather have me for a wooer. She replied that she would, because I was handsomer, and my clothes were new. This artlessness, spoken with enormous seriousness, made me laugh till I cried. I turned the little one's head and succeeded in inducing her to leave the house. A few bouquets, about as many kisses, and a pearl necklace that I gave her, charmed her to an extent difficult to describe, and she assumed an important air in the presence of her little friends which was extremely laughable. "I had a very rich and elegant page's costume of about her size made, for I could not take her away in her girl's dress, unless I myself resumed female attire, which I was unwilling to do. I bought a pony, which was gentle and easy to ride, and yet a sufficiently good courser to follow my barb when it was my pleasure to go quickly. Then I told the fair one to try to come down at dusk to the door, where I would call for her ; and this she very punctually did. I found her mounting guard behind the half-opened door. I passed very close to the house ; she came out, I stretched out my hand to her, she rested her foot on the tip of mine, and jumped very nimbly up behind me, for she possessed marvellous agility. I spurred my horse, and succeeded in returning home through seven or eight circuitous and deserted lanes without any one seeing us. " I made her exchange her clothes for her disguise, and my- self acted as her maid ; at first she made a little fuss, and wished to dress all alone ; but I made her understand that this would waste a great deal of time ; that, moreover, being my mistress, it was not in the least improper, and that such was the custom between lovers. This was quite enough to convince her, and she yielded to circumstances with the best grace in the world. " Her body was a little marvel of delicacy. Her arms, which MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 341 were somewhat thin like those of every young girl, had inex- pressible sweetness of line, and her budding breasts gave such charming promise, that none better devoloped could have sus- tained a comparison with them. She had still all the graces of the child, and already all the charm of the woman ; she was in that adorable transition period when the little girl is blended with the young girl ; a blending fugitive and impalpable, a delicious epoch when beauty is full of hope, and when every day instead of taking something from your love, adds new per- fections to it. " Her costume became her extremely well. It gave her a little unruly air, which was very curious and diverting, and made her burst out laughing when I offered her the glass to let her judge of the effect of her toilet. I afterwards made her eat some biscuits dipped in Spanish wine, in order to give her courage and enable her better to support the fatigue of the journey. " The horses were waiting ready saddled in the courtyard : she mounted hers with some deliberation, I bestrode the other, and we set out. Night had completely fallen, and occasional lights, which were being extinguished every moment, showed that the honest town of C was virtuously engaged as every country town ought to be on the stroke of nine. ♦' Wc could not go very quickly, for Ninon was no better horsewoman than she ought to have been, and when her beast began to trot she would cling with all her might to his mane. However, on the following morning we were too far away to be overtaken, at all events unless extraordinary diligence had been employed : but we were not pursued, or at least, if we were, it was in an opposite direction to that which we had taken. " I was singularly interested in the little fair one. I no longer had you with me, my dear Graciosa, and I was im- mensely sensible of the need of loving somebody or some- thing, of having a dog or a child with me to caress familiarly. Ninon was this to me ; she shared my bed and put her little arms around my body to go to sleep ; she most seriously thought herself my mistress, and had no doubt that I was a 342 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. man ; her great youth and extreme innocence preserved her in this error which I was careful not to dissipate. The kisses that I gave her quite completed her illusion, for her ideas went, as yet, no further, and her desires did not speak loudly enough to cause her to suspect anything else. After all, she was only partly mistaken. " And, really, there was the same difference between her and me, as there is between myself and men. She was so diaphanous, so slender, so light, of so delicate and choice a nature, that she was a woman even to me who am myself a woman, and who look like a Hercules beside her. I am tall and dark, she is small and blonde ; her features are so soft that they make mine appear almost hard and austere, and her voice is so melodious a warble that mine seems harsh in comparison. If a man had her he would break her in pieces, and I always feel afraid that the wind will carry her off some fine morning. I should like to enclose her in a box of cotton and wear her hanging about my neck. You can have no conception, my dear friend, of her grace and wit, her delicious coaxing, her childlike endearments, her little ways and pretty manners. She is the most adorable creature in existence, and it would have been truly a pity had she remained with her unworthy mother. " I took a malicious joy in thus depriving men's rapacity of such a treasure. I was the griffin preventing all approach, and if I did not enjoy her myself, at least no one else enjoyed her — an idea which is always consoling, let all the foolish detractors of egotism say what they will. " I intended to preserve her in her ignorance as long as possible, and to keep her with me until she was unwilling to stay any longer, or I had succeeded in securing a settlemenf for her. " In her boy's dress I took her on all my journeys, right and left ; this mode of life gave her singular pleasure, and the charm that she found in it assisted her to endure its fatigues. Everywhere I was complimented on the exquisite beauty of my page, and I have no doubt that it gave many people a precisely contrary idea of what was actually the case. Several even MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 343 tried to unravel the mystery ; but I did not allow the little one to speak to anybody, and the curious were completely disappointed. " Every day I discovered some new quality in this amiable child which made me cherish her more and congratulate my- self on the resolution I had taken. Assuredly men were not worthy to possess her, and it would have been a deplorable thing if so many bodily and spiritual charms had been sur- rendered to their brutal appetites and cynical depravity. " Only a woman could love her with sufficient delicacy and tenderness. One side of my character, which could not have been developed in a different connection and which was com- pletely brought out in the present one, is the need and desire of affording protection, a duty which usually belongs to men. If I had taken a lover it would have displeased me extremely to find him assuming to defend me, for the reason that this is an attention I love to show to those whom I like, and that my pride is much better suited with the first rdle than with the second, although the second may be more agreeable. Thus I felt pleased in paying my little darling all the attentions which I ought to have liked to receive, such as assisting her on difficult roads, holding her bridle or stirrup, serving her at table, un- dressing her and putting her to bed, defending her if any one insulted her ; in short, doing everything for her that the most impassioned and attentive lover does for a mistress he adores. " I was insensibly losing the idea of my sex, and it was with difficulty that I remembered, at considerable intervals, that I was a woman ; at first I often forgot myself, and unthinkingly said something that did not harmonize with the coat I wore. Now this never happens, and even when writing to you, to you who are in my secret, I sometimes preserve a useless virility in my adjectives. If ever I take a fancy to go and look for my skirts in the drawer where I left them — which I think very doubtful, unless I fall in love with some young spark — I shall find it difficult to lose these habits, and, instead of being a woman disguised as a man, I shall look like a man disguised as a woman. In truth, neither of the two sexes are mine : I have 344 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. not the imbecile submission, the timidity or the littleness of women ; I have not the vices, the disgusting intemperance, or the brutal propensities of men : I belong to a third, distinct sex, which as yet has no name : higher or lower, more defective or superior ; I have the body and soul of a woman, the mind and power of a man, and I have too much or too little of both to be able to pair with either. " O Graciosa ! I shall never be able to completely love any one, man or woman ; an unsated something ever chides within me, and the lover or friend answers only to a single aspect of my character. If I had a lover, the feminine element in me would doubtless for a time dominate over the manly, but this would not last for long, and I feel that I should be only half satisfied ; if I have a friend, the idea of corporeal voluptuous- ness prevents me from tasting entirely the pure voluptuousness of the soul ; so that I know not where to rest, and perpetually waver from one to the other. "My chimera would be to have both sexes in turn in order to satisfy this double nature : a man to-day, a woman to-morrow, for my loveps I should keep my languorous tenderness, my sub- missive and devoted ways, my softest caresses, my little sadly- drawn sighs, all the cat-like and woman-like elements in my char- acter ; then with my mistresses I should be enterprising, bold, impassioned, with triumphant manners, my hat on my ear, and the style of a boaster and adventurer. My nature would thus be entirely brought out, and I should be perfectly happy, for true happiness consists in the ability to develop freely in every direction and to be all that it is possible to be. "But these are impossibilities, and are not to be thought of. " I had carried off the child with the idea of deluding my propensities and turning upon some one all the vague ten- derness which floats in my soul and floods it ; I had taken her as a sort of escape for my loving faculties ; but I soon recog- nized, in spite of all the affection that I bore her, what an immense void, what a bottomless abyss she left in my heart, and how little her tenderest caresses contented me ! I resolved to try a lover, but a long time passed and I met no one who did MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 345 not displease me. I forgot to tell you that Rosette, having discovered whither I was gone, had written me the most be- seeching letter to go and see her ; I could not refuse her, and I met her again at a country house where she was. I returned there several times, and even quite lately. Rosette, in despair at not having had me for her lover, had thrown herself into the whirl of society and dissipation, like all tender souls that are not religious and that have been wounded in their first love ; she had had many adventures in a short time, and the list of her conquests was already very numerous, for every one had not the same reasons for resisting her that I had. " She had with her a young man named D'Albert, who was at the time her established lover. I appeared to make quite a peculiar impression upon him, and at the very first he took a strong liking to me. " Although he treated Rosette with great deference, and his manners towards her were in the main tender enough, he did not love her, — not owing to satiety or distaste, but rather because she did not correspond to certain ideas, true or false, which he had formed concerning love and beauty. An ideal cloud inter- posed between him and her, and prevented him from being as happy as otherwise he must have been. Evidently his dream was not fulfilled, and he sighed for something else. But he did not seek for it, and remained faithful to the bonds which weighed on him ; for he has more delicacy and honor in his soul than most men, and his heart is very far from being as corrupted as his mind. Not knowing that Rosette had never been in love except with me, and that she was so still, in spite of all her intrigues and follies, he had a dread of distressing her by letting her see that he did not love her. It was this consid- eration that restrained him, and he was sacrificing himself in the most generous way. " The character of my features gave him extraordinary pleasure, for he attaches extreme importance to external form ; so much so that he fell in love with me in spite of my male attire and the formidable rapier which I wear at my side. I confess that I was grateful to him for the acuteness of his 346 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. instinct, and that I held him in some esteem for having dis- tinguished me beneath these delusive appearances. At the beginning he believed himself endowed with a fancy far more depraved than it really was, and I laughed inwardly to see him torment himself in this way. Sometimes, when accosting me, he had a frightened look which amused me immensely, and the very natural inclination which drew him toward me ap- peared to him as a diabolical impulse which could not be too strongly resisted. On such occasions he would fall back fu- riously upon Rosette, and endeavor to recover more orthodox habits of love ; then he would come back to me, of course more inflamed than before. " Then the luminous idea that I might perhaps be a woman crept into his mind. To convince himself of this he set himself to observe and study me with the minutest attention : he must be acquainted with every particular hair, and know accurately how many eyelashes I have on my lids ; feet, hands, neck, cheeks, the slightest down at the corner of my lips, he examined, com- pared, and analyzed them all, and from this investigation, in which the artist aided the lover, it came out as clear as day (when it is clear), that I was well and duly a woman, and more- over, his ideal, the type of his beauty, the reality of his dream ; a wonderful discovery ! " It only remained to soften me, and obtain the gift of amor- ous mercy, to completely establish my sex. A comedy which we acted, and in which I appeared as a woman, quite decided him. I gave him some equivocal glances, and made use of some passages in my part, analogous to our own situation, to embolden him and impel him to declare himself. For, if I did not passionately love him, he pleased me well enough not to let him pine away with love ; and, as he was the first since my transformation to suspect that I was a woman, it was quite fair that I should enlighten him on this important point, and I was resolved not to leave him a shadow of doubt. " Several times he came into my room with his declaration on his lips, but he dared not utter it ; for, indeed, it is diffi- cult to speak of love to one who is dressed like yourself, and MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 347 is trying on riding boots. At last, unable to take it upon himself to do this, he wrote me a long, very Pindaric letter, in which he explained to me at great length what I knew better than he did. " I do not quite know what I ought to do. Admit his request or reject it, — the latter would be immoderately virtuous ; besides, his grief at finding himself refused would be too great : if we make people who love us unhappy, what are we to do those who hate us ? Perhaps it would be more strictly becoming to be cruel for a time, and wait at least a month before unhooking the tigress's skin to dress after the human fashion in a chemise. But, since I have resolved to yield to him, immediately is as good as later ; I do not well understand those fine, mathemati- cally graduated resistances which surrender one hand to-day, the other to-morrow, then the foot, and then the leg and knee as far as the garter exclusively, nor those intractable virtues which are always ready to hang themselves to the bell-rope if you pass by a hair's-breath beyond the territory which they have resolved to grant on that day. It makes me laugh to see those methodical Lucretias walking backwards with the tokens of the most maidenly terror, and from time to time casting a furtive glance over their shoulder to make sure that the sofa on which they are to fall is quite directly behind them. I could never be as careful as that. *' I do not love D'Albert, at least in the sense which I give to the word, but I have certainly a liking and an inclination for him ; his mind pleases me and his person does not repel me : there are not many people of whom I can say as much. He has not everything, but he has something ; what pleases me in him is that he does not seek to satiate himself brutally like other men ; he has a perpetual aspiration and an ever sustained breathing after beauty, — after material beauty alone, it is true, but still it is a noble inclination, and one which is sufficient to keep him in pure regions. His conduct towards Rosette proves honesty of heart, an honesty rarer than the other, if that be possible. ♦* And then, if I must tell you, I am possessed with the most 348 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. violent desires, — I am languishing and dying of voluptuousness ; for the dress I wear, while involving me in all sorts of adven- tures with women, protects me only too perfectly against the enterprises of men ; an idea of pleasure which is never realized floats vaguely through my head, and this dull, colorless dream wearies and annoys me. So many women placed amid the chastest surroundings lead the lives of prostitutes ! while I, by a somewhat facetious contrast, remain chaste and virgin like cold Diana herself, in the midst of the most disordered dissipa- tion and surrounded by the greatest debauchees of the century. " This bodily ignorance unaccompanied by ignorance of the mind is the most miserable thing in existence. That my flesh may have no cause to assume airs over my soul, I wish to soil it equally, provided the soiling be something worse than eating and drinking, — as to which I am doubtful. In a word, I want to know what a man is and what the pleasure is that he gives. Since D'Albert has recognized me beneath my disguise, it is quite fair that he should be rewarded for his penetration ; he was the first to divine that I was a woman, and I shall prove to him to the best of my ability that his suspicions were well founded. It would be scarcely charitable to let him believe that his fancy was solely a monstrous one. " D'Albert it is, then, who will solve my doubts and give me my first lesson in love : the only question now is to bring the matter about in quite a poetical fashion. I am inclined not to reply to his letter and to look coldly on him for a few days. When I see him very sad and despairing, inveighing against the gods, shaking his fist at creation, and looking down the wells to see whether they are not too deep to throw himself into them, —I shall retire like Peau d'Ane to the end of the corridor, and put on my light-blue dress, that is to say my costume as Rosa- lind ; for my feminine wardrobe is very limited. Then I shall go to him as radiant as a peacock displaying its feathers, osten- tatiously showing what I usually conceal with the greatest care, and with nothing but a very low and loose lace tucker, and shall say to him in the most pathetic tone that I can assume — " ' O most elegiac and perspicacious young man ! I am truly MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 349 a young and modest beauty, one who adores you into the bar- gain, and only asks to give pleasure to you and to herself as well. See whether this suits you, and, if you have still some scruple left feel this, go in peace, and sin as much as you can.' " This fine discourse ended, I shall let myself fall half-swoon- ing into his arms, and, heaving melancholy sighs, shall skil- fully cause the hook of my dress to come undone so that I shall be in the indispensable costume, that is to say half-naked. D'Albert will do the rest, and I hope that on the following morning I shall know what to think of all those fine things which have been troubling my brain for so long. While satis- fying my curiosity, I shall have the further pleasure of making some one happy. " I also propose to go and pay a visit to Rosette in the same costume, and to show her that, if I have not responded to her love, it was not from coldness or distaste. I do not wish her to preserve such a bad opinion of me, and she deserves, equally with D'Albert, that I should betray my incognito in her favor. How will she look at this revelation ? Her pride will be con- soled by it, but her love will lament it. " Good-bye, most fair and good one ; pray to heaven that I may not think as little of the pleasure as I do of those who afford it. I have jested throughout this letter, and yet what I am going to essay is a serious matter and something which may affect the rest of my life." XVI. T 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 extra- ordinary 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 Made- moiselle 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 chesnut-trees in the dark. The distance was bathed in a thick mist, a gray MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 351 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 some- what 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'Al- bert'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 you, 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 ! 352 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 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 to hide from view those two charming unfriendly brothers, who, alas ! have only too often a tendency to become reconciled. A bosom entirely bare, white, transparent, like an ancient marble, of the purest and most exquisite cut, projected boldly from a very low dress body, and seemed to bid defiance to 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 ex- tremity ; 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, Rosa- lind. 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 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 353 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 sen- sibility, 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 satify 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 non- sense were not sufficient to procure you 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. 23 354 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN " I do not ask of you an oath of eternal love nor any exag- gerated protestation. Love me as much as heaven ordains — I w^ill do as much on my side. I will not call you a traitor or a w^retch 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 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 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 35- 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 lain with Endymion, as Mary before she had made the acquaintance of the divine pigeon, 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 body 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 h^ir 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 trans- parent linen. The blissful lover knelt down, and had soon thrown the two pretty little red-heeled shoes into an opposite 356 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 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 per- ceived 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, I^ut, 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 splen- dor 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 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 357 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 body standing before him — delicacy and strength, form 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 otten 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 knees were admirably pure, the ankles, elegant and slender, the legs and thighs proudly and superbly turned, the skin as lustrous as an agate, the hips supple and powerful, the bosom enough to make the gods come down from heaven to kiss it, the arms and shoulders of the most magnificent character ; 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 bed ; in a twinkling he was himself beside her. Our fair reader would certainly pout at her lover if we re- vealed to her the formidable 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 when . . . the night which would be remembered a hundred thousand days, did not death come before ; let her lay 358 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. her book aside and compute on the iips 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 as- tonished 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 was obliged, after a superhuman eflfort, to take a 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 ascer- tain, 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 singu- lar 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 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 359 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 peri- phrastic 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, with- out 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 prowess 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. XVII. OU are no doubt greatly surprised, my dear D'Albert, at what I have just done after acting as I did. I will allow you to be so, for you have reason. The odds are that you have already bestowed upon me at least twenty of the epithets that we had agreed to erase from our vocabulary — perfidious, inconstant, wicked, — is it not so ? At least you will not call me cruel or virtuous, and that is still something gained, You curse me, and you are wrong. You desired me, you loved me, I was your ideal ; — very well. I at once granted you what you asked ; it was your own fault that you did not have it sooner. I served as a body for your dream as compliantly as possible. I gave you what assuredly I shall never again give to any one, a sur- prise on which you hardly counted and for which you ought to be more grateful to me. Now that I have satisfied you, it pleases me to go away. What is there so monstrous in this ? "You have had me entirely and unreservedly for a whole night ; what more would you have } Another night, and then another ; you would even make free with the days if need were. You would go on in this way until you were surfeited with me. I can hear you from this crying out most gallantly that I am not one of those with whom surfeit is possible. Good gracious ! I am like the rest. " It would last six months, two years, ten years even, if you will, but still everything must have an end. You would keep me from a kind of feeling of propriety, or because you would not have the courage to give me my dismissal. What would be the use of waiting until matters came to this ? MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 361 "And then, it might perhaps be myself who would cease to love you. I have found you charming ; perhaps, by dint of seeing you, I might have come to find you detestable. Forgive me this supposition. Living with you in close intimacy, I should no doubt have had occasion to see you in a cotton cap or in some ridiculous or facetious domestic situation. You would necessarily have lost the romantic and mysterious side which allures me more than anything else, and your character, when better understood, would no longer have appeared so strange to me. I should have been less taken up with you through having you beside me, in something like the fashion in which we treat those books that we never open because they are in our libraries. Your nose or your wit would no longer have seemed nearly so well turned ; I should have perceived that your coat did not fit you and that your stockings were un- tidy ; I should have had a thousand deceptions of this kind which would have given me singular pain, and at last I should have come to this conclusion : that you decidedly had neither heart nor soul, and that I was destined to be misunderstood in love. " You adore me and I you. You have not the slightest reproach to make againstone, and I have nothing in the world to complain of in you. I have been perfectly faithful to you throughout our amour, I have deceived you in nothing. I had neither false bosom nor false virtue ; you had the extreme kindness to tell me that I was yet more beautiful than you had imagined. For the beauty that I gave you, you repaid me with pleasure : we are quits : — I go my way and you yours, and per- haps we shall meet again at the Antipodes. Live in this hope. *' You believe, perhaps, that I do not love you because I am leaving you. Later, you will recognize the truth of the con- trary. Had I valued you less, I should have remained, and would have poured out to you the insipid beverage to the dregs. Your love would soon have died of weariness ; after a time you would have quite forgotten me, and, as you read over my name on the list of your conquests, would have asked yourself : ' Now, who the deuce was she ? ^ I have at least the satisfaction ot 362 MADEMOISELLE DE MA.UPIN. thinking that you will remember me sooner than another. Your unsated desire will again spread its wings to fly to me ; I shall ever be to you something desirable to which your fancy will love to return, and I hope that in the arms of the mistresses you may have, you will sometimes think of the unrivalled night you spent with me. " Never will you be more amiable than you were that bliss- ful evening, and, even were you equally so, it would still be something less ; for in love, as in poetry, to remain at the same point is to go back. Keep to that impression, and you will do well. ♦* You have rendered the task of the lovers I may have (if I have other lovers) a difficult one, and no one will be able to efface the memory of you ;— they will be the heirs of Alexander. " If you are too much grieved at losing me, burn this letter, which is the only proof that you have possessed me, and you will believe that you have had a beautiful dream. What is there to hinder you ? The vision has vanished before the light, at the hour when dreams return home through the horn or the ivory gate. How many have died who, less fortunate than you, have not even given a single kiss to their chimera ! •* I am neither capricious, nor mad, nor a conceited prude. What I am doing is the result of profound conviction. It is not in order to inflame you more, or from calculating coquetry that I have gone away from C ; do not try to follow me or to find me again ; you will not succeed. My precautions to conceal from you all traces of myself have been too well taken ; you will always be for me the man who opened up to me a world of new sensations. These are things that a woman does not easily forget. Though absent, I shall often think of you, oftener than if you were with me. "Comfort poor Rosette as well as you can, for she must be at least as sorry for my departure as you are. Love each other well in memory of me, whom both of you have loved, and breathe my name sometimes in a kiss." THE END. t I URN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 202 Main Library ^N PERIOD 1 OME USE 2 3 5 6 . BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS lewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. >ks may be Renewed by calling 642-3405. DUE AS STAMPED BELOW EiinRRARYLOA^ PD err 2 3 1907 OF CALIF., bi. 1 1 1 lyy/ 01/3, 3V 2 7 2004 ^A NO. 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