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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/^^<? defoie gras, which the hero eats to the last crumb after 
 effecting several rapes, and this joined to his remorse gives him 
 an abominable attack of indigestion, of which he dies. A 
 moral termination, if ever there was one, proving that God is 
 just, and that vice is always punished and virtue rewarded. 
 
 As to the monstrous kind, you know how they have treated 
 it, how they have settled Hans of Iceland, the man-eater ; 
 Habibrah, the Obi ; Quasimodo, the bell-ringer ; and Triboulet, 
 who was only a hunchback ; — all that strangely swarming family 
 — all those gigantic creatures that my dear neighbor makes 
 crawl and skip through the virgin forests and cathedrals of his 
 romances. Neither grand features like Michael Angelo's, nor 
 curiosities worthy of Callot, nor effects of light and shade after 
 the manner of Goya — nothing could find favor in their eyes ; 
 they sent him back to his odes when he composed romances, 
 and to his romances when he composed dramas — tactics com- 
 mon with journalists, who always prefer what a man has done 
 to what he does. Happy the man, nevertheless, who is recog- 
 nized by the feuilleton writers as superior in all his works, ex- 
 cepting of course that one with which they are dealing, and who 
 would only have to write a theologf^ ! treatise or a cookery 
 book to have his stage deemed admirable ! 
 
PREFACE. 25 
 
 As for the romance of the heart, the ardent and impas- 
 sioned romance whose father is the German Werther, and 
 whose mother is the French Manon Lescaut, we have alluded, 
 at the beginning of this preface, to the moral scurf which is 
 desperately attached to it under pretence of religion and good 
 morals. Critical lice are like bodily lice, which desert corpses 
 to seek the living. From the corpse of the romance of the 
 middle ages the critics have passed to the body of this other, 
 whose skin is hard and healthy and might well injure their 
 teeth. 
 
 We think, in spite of all the respect that we have for the 
 modern apostles, that the authors of the so-called immoral 
 novels, without being married to the same extent as the vir- 
 tuous journalists, have commonly enough a mother, and that 
 many of them have sisters, and are abundantly provided with 
 female relations ; but their mothers and sisters do not read 
 novels, even immoral ones ; they sew, embroider, and busy them- 
 selves with household matters. Their stockings, as Monsieur 
 Planard would say, are perfectly white ; you may look at their 
 legs, they are not blue; and Chrysale, good man, who had 
 such a hatred for learned women, might hold them up as an 
 example to the learned Philaminte. 
 
 As to the spouses of these gentlemen, since they have so much 
 of them, I certainly think that, however virginal their husbands 
 may be, there are sundry things which they ought to know. 
 It may be indeed that they have been taught nothing. In that 
 case, I understand the anxiety to keep them in this precious 
 and blessed state of ignorance. God is great, and Mahomet is 
 His prophet ! Women are inquisitive ; Heaven and morality 
 grant that they may satisfy their curiosity in a more legitimate 
 fashion than did their grandmother Eve, and ask no questions 
 of the serpent ! 
 
 As for their daughters, if they have been to a boarding-school, 
 I do not see what these books could teach them. 
 
 It is as absurd to say that a man is a drunkard because he 
 describes an orgie, or a debauchee because he recounts a 
 debauch, as to pretend that a man is virtuous because he has 
 
25 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 written a moral book ; every day we see the contrary. It.is 
 the character who speaks and not the author ; the fact that his 
 hero is an atheist does not make him an atheist ; his brigands act 
 and speak like brigands, but he is not therefore a brigand him- 
 self. At that rate it would be necessary to guillotine Shake- 
 speare, Corneille, and all the tragic writers ; they have com- 
 mitted more murders than Mandrin and Cartouche. This has, 
 nevertheless, not been done, and I think that it will be long 
 before it is done, however virtuous and moral criticism may 
 come to be. It is one of the manias of these narrow-brained 
 scribblers to substitute always the author for the work and 
 have recourse to personalities, in order to give some poor scan- 
 dalous interest to their wretched rhapsodies, which they are 
 quite aware nobody would read if they contained only their 
 own individual opinions. 
 
 We find it hard to understand the purport of all this bawling, 
 the good of all this temper and despair, and who it is that im- 
 pels the miniature Geoffreys to constitute themselves the Don 
 Quixotes of morality, and like true literary policemen, to seize 
 and cudgel, in the name of virtue, every idea which makes its 
 appearance in a book Math its mob-cap awry or its skirt tucked 
 up a little too high. It is very singular. 
 
 Say what they will, the age is an immoral one (if this word 
 signifies anything, of which we have strong doubts), and we 
 wish for no other proof than the quantity of immoral books 
 it produces and the success that attends them. Books fol- 
 low morals, and not moral books. The Regency made 
 Cr^billon, and not Cr^billon the Regency. Boucher's little 
 shepherdesses had their faces painted and their bosoms bare, 
 because the little marchionesses had the same. Pictures are 
 made according to models, and not models according to 
 pictures. Some one has said somewhere that literature and the 
 arts influence morals. Whoever he was, he was undoubtedly 
 a great fool. It was like saying green peas make the spring 
 grow, whereas green peas grow because it is spring, and 
 cherries because it is summer. Trees bear fruits ; it is certainly 
 not the fruits that bear the trees, and this law is eternal and 
 
PREFACE. 27 
 
 invariable in its variety ; the centuries follow one another, and 
 each bears its own fruit, which is not that of the preceding 
 century ; books are the fruits of morals. 
 
 By the side of the moral journalists, under this rain of homi- 
 lies as under summer rain in some park, there has sprung up 
 between the planks of the Saint-Simonian stage a theory of little 
 mushrooms, of a novel and somewhat curious species, whose 
 natural history we are about to give. 
 
 These are the utilitarian critics. Poor fellows ! Their noses 
 are too short to admit of their wearing spectacles, and yet they 
 cannot see the length of their noses. 
 
 If an author threw a volume of romance or poetry on their 
 desk, these gentlemen would turn round carelessly in their easy 
 chair, poise it on its hinder legs, and balancing themselves with 
 a capable air, say loftily : — 
 
 " What purpose does this book serve ? How can it be 
 applied for the moralization and well-being of the poorest and 
 most numerous class ? What ! not a word of the needs of 
 society, nothing about civilization and progress ? How can a 
 man, instead of making the great synthesis of humanity, and 
 pursuing the regenerating and providential idea through the 
 events of history, how can he write novels and poems which 
 lead to nothing, and do not advance our generation on the path 
 of the future ? How can he busy himself with form, and style, 
 and rhyme in the presence of such grave interests ? What are 
 style, and rhyme, and form to us ? They are of no conse- 
 quence (poor foxes ! they are too sour). Society is suffering, it 
 is a prey to great internal anguish (translate — no one will sub- 
 scribe to utilitarian journals). It is for the poet to seek the 
 cause of this uneasiness and to cure it. He will find the means 
 of doing so by sympathizing from his heart and soul with 
 humanity — (philanthropic poets ! they would be something 
 uncommon and charming). This poet we await, and on him 
 we call with all our vows. When he appears, his will be the 
 acclamations of the crowd, his the palm, his the crown, his the 
 Prytaneum." 
 
 Well and good ! But as we wish our reader to remain 
 
28 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 awake until the end of this blissful preface, we shall not con^ 
 tinue this very faithful imitation of the utilitarian style, which is, 
 in its nature, tolerably soporific, and might, with advantage, 
 take the place of laudanum and Academic discourses. 
 
 No, fools, no, goitrous cretins that you are, a book does not 
 make gelatine soup ; a novel is not a pair of seamless boots ; a 
 sonnet, a syringe with a continuous jet ; or a drama, a railway 
 — all things which are essentially civilizing and adapted to 
 advance humanity on its path of progress. 
 
 By the guts of all the popes past, present, and future, no, and 
 two hundred thousand times no ! 
 
 We cannot make a cotton cap out of a metonymy, or put on 
 a comparison like a slipper ; we cannot use an antithesis as an 
 umbrella, and we cannot, unfortunately, lay a medley of rhymes 
 on our body after the fashion of a waistcoat. I have an inti- 
 mate conviction that an ode is too light a garment for winter, 
 and that we should not be better clad in strophe, antistrophe, 
 and epode than was the cynic's wife who contented herself 
 with merely her virtue as chemise, and went about as naked as 
 one's hand, so history relates. 
 
 However, the celebrated Monsieur de La Calpren6de had 
 once a coat, and when asked of what material it was made, he 
 replied, " Of Silvandre." Silvandre was the name of a piece 
 which he had just brought out with success. 
 
 Such arguments make one elevate one's shoulders above the 
 head, and higher than the Duke of Gloucester's. 
 
 People who pretend to be economists, and who wish to 
 reconstruct society from top to bottom, seriously advance simi- 
 lar nonsense. 
 
 A novel has two uses — one material and the other spiritual 
 — if we may employ such an expression in reference to a 
 novel. Its material use means first of all some thousands ot 
 francs which find their way into the author's pocket, and 
 ballast him in such a fashion that neither devil nor wind can 
 carry him off; to the bookseller, it means a fine thoroughbred 
 horse, pawing and prancing with its cabriolet of ebony and 
 steel, as Figaro says ; to the papermaker, another mill beside 
 
PREFACE. 29 
 
 some stream or other, and often the means of spoiling a fine 
 site ; to the printers, some tons of logwood for the weekly stain- 
 ing of their throats ; to the circulating library, some piles of 
 pence covered with very proletarian verdigris, and a quantity 
 of fat which, if it were properly collected and utilized, would 
 render whale-fishing superfluous. Its spiritual use is that when 
 reading novels we sleep, and do not read useful, virtuous, and 
 progressive journals, or other similarly indigestible and stupe- 
 fying drugs. 
 
 Let any one say after this that novels do not contribute to 
 civilization. I say nothing of tobacco-sellers, grocers, and 
 dealers in fried potatoes, who have a very great interest in this 
 branch of literature, the paper employed in it being commonly 
 of a superior quality to that of newspapers. 
 
 In truth, it is enough to make one burst with laughing to 
 hear the dissertations of these Republican or Saint-Simonian 
 utilitarian gentlemen. I should, first of all, very much like to 
 know the precise meaning of this great lanky substantive with 
 which the void in their columns is daily truffled, and which 
 serves them as a shibboleth and sacramental term — utility. 
 What is this word, and to what is it applicable ? 
 
 There are two sorts of utility, and the meaning of the vocable 
 is always a relative one. What is useful for one is not useful 
 for another. You are a cobbler ; I am a poet. It is useful to 
 me to have my first verse rhyme with my second. A rhyming 
 dictionary is of great utility to me ; you do not want it to cobble 
 an old pair of boots, and it is only right to say that a shoe- 
 knife would not be of great service to me in making an ode. 
 To this you will object that a cobbler is far above a poet, and 
 that people can do without the one better than without the 
 other. Without affecting to disparage the illustrious profes- 
 sion of cobbler, which I honor equally with that of constitu- 
 tional monarch, I humbly confess that I would rather have my 
 shoe unstitched than my verse badly rhymed, and that I 
 should be more willing to go without boots than without 
 poems. Scarcely ever going out, and walking more skilfully 
 with my head than with my feet, I wear out fewer shoes than 
 
^O MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 a virtuous Republican, who is always hastening from one 
 minister to another in the hope of having some place flung to 
 him. 
 
 I know that there are some who prefer mills to churches, and 
 bread for the body to that for the soul. To such I have 
 nothing to say. They deserve to be economists in this world 
 and also in the next. 
 
 Is there anything absolutely useful on this earth and in this 
 life of ours ? To begin with, it is not very useful that we are 
 on the earth and alive. I defy the most learned of the band to 
 tell us of what use we are, unless it be to not subscribe to the 
 "Constitutionnel," nor any other species of journal whatso- 
 ever. 
 
 Next, the utility of our existence being admitted a priori, 
 what are the things really useful for supporting it ? Some soup 
 and a piece of meat twice a day is all that is necessary to fill 
 the stomach in the strict acceptation of the word. Man who 
 finds a coffin six feet long by two wide more than sufficient 
 after his death does not need much more room during his life. 
 A hollow cube measuring seven or eight feet every way, with a 
 hole to breathe through, a single cell in the hive, nothing more 
 is wanted to lodge him and keep the rain off his back. A 
 blanket properly rolled around his body will protect him as 
 well and better against the cold than the most elegant and best 
 cut dress-coat by Staub. 
 
 With this he will be able, literally, to subsist. It is truly 
 said that it is possible to live on a shilling a day. But to pre- 
 vent one's-self from dying is not living ; and I do not see in 
 what respect a town organized after the utilitarian fashion 
 would be more agreeable to dwell in than the cemetery of 
 P6re-la-Chaise. 
 
 Nothing that is beautiful is indispensable to life. You might 
 suppress flowers, and the world would not suffer materially ; 
 yet who would wish that there were no more flowers ? I would 
 rather give up potatoes than roses, and I think that there is 
 none but an utilitarian in the world capable of pulling up a 
 bed of tulips in order to plant cabbages therein. 
 
PREFACE. ^I 
 
 What is the use of women's beauty ? Provided that a woman 
 be medically well formed, and in condition to bear children, she 
 will always be good enough for economists. 
 
 What is the good of music ? of painting ? Who would 
 be foolish enough to prefer Mozart to Monsieur Carrel, and 
 Michael Angelo to the inventor ot white mustard ? 
 
 There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be 
 of any use whatsoever ; everything useful is ugly, for it is the 
 expression of some need, and man's needs are ignoble and dis- 
 gusting like his own poor and infirm nature. The most useful 
 place in a house is the water-closet. 
 
 For my own part, may it please these gentlemen, I am one of 
 those to whom superfluity is a necessity — and I like things and 
 persons in an inverse ratio to the services that they render me. 
 I prefer a Chinese vase, strewn with dragons and mandarins, 
 and of no use to me whatever, to a certain utensil which is of 
 service to me, and of my talents the one I esteem the most is 
 my incapacity for guessing logogriphs and charades. I would 
 most joyfully renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen 
 to see an authentic picture by Raphael, or a beautiful woman 
 naked — Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for 
 Canova, or Julia Grisi entering her bath. I would willingly 
 consent, so far as I am concerned, to the return of the anthro- 
 pophagous Charles X, if he brought me back a hamper of Tokay 
 or Johannisberger from his Bohemian castle ; and I would deem 
 the electoral laws sufficiently wide, if some streets were more 
 so and some other things less. Although I am no dilletante, I 
 would rather have the noise of fiddles and tambourines than 
 that of the bell of the President of the Chamber. I would sell 
 my breeches for a ring, and my bread for preserves. It appears 
 to me that the most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to 
 do nothing, or to smoke analytically his pipe or cigar. I also 
 highly esteem those who play skittles and those who make 
 good verses. You see that the utilitarian principles are far 
 from being mine, and that I shall never be a contributor to a 
 virtuous journal, unless, of course, I become converted, which 
 would be rather comical. 
 
32 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 Instead of offering a Monthyon prize as the reward of virtue, 
 I would rather, like that great but misunderstood philosopher 
 Sardanapalus, give a large premium to any one inventing a new 
 pleasure ; for enjoyment appears to me to be the end of life and the 
 only useful thing in the world. God has willed it so. He who 
 has made women, perfumes, light, beautiful flowers, good 
 wines, frisky horses, greyhounds, and Angora cats ; He who 
 did not say to His angels, " Have virtue," but " Have love," 
 and who has given us a mouth more sensitive than the rest of 
 our skin to kiss women, eyes raised on high to see the light, a 
 subtle power of smell to breathe the soul of flowers, sinewy 
 thighs to press the sides of stallions, and to fly as quick as 
 thought without railway or steam-boiler, delicate hands to 
 stroke the long head of a greyhound, the velvety back of a cat, 
 and the smooth shoulders of a creature of easy virtue, and 
 who finally has granted to us alone the triple and glorious priv- 
 ilege of drinking when without thirst, of striking a light, and 
 of making love at all seasons, a privilege which distinguishes 
 us from brutes far more than the custom of reading papers and 
 fabricating charters. 
 
 Good heavens ! what a foolish thing is this pretended perfec- 
 tibility of the human race which is continually being dinned into 
 our ears ! One would think, in truth, that man is a machine 
 susceptible of improvements, and that some wheel-work in 
 better gear or a counterpoise more suitably placed would make 
 him work in a more convenient and easy fashion. When they 
 succeed in giving man a double stomach so that he may 
 ruminate like an ox, or eyes at the other side of his head that, 
 like Janus, he may see those who put out their tongues at him 
 behind, and contemplate his indignity in a less inconvenient 
 position than that of the Athenian Venus Callipyge, when they 
 plant wings upon his shoulder-blades that he may not be obliged 
 to pay threepence for an omnibus, and create a new organ tor 
 him, well and good : the word perfectibility will then begin to 
 have some meaning. 
 
 After all these fine improvements, what has been done that 
 was not done as well and better before the flood ? 
 
PREFACE. 2^ 
 
 Have people succeeded in drinking more than they drank in 
 the times of ignorance and barbarity (old style) ? Alexander, 
 the doubtful friend of the handsome Hephaestion, did not drink 
 so badly, although in his time there was no " Journal of Useful 
 Knowledge," and I do not know of any utilitarian who would 
 be capable of draining the great drinking vessel that he called 
 the cup of Hercules, without becoming oinopic and more 
 swelled out than the younger Lepeintre or a hippopotamus. 
 
 Marshal de Bassompierre, who emptied his great funnel- 
 shaped boot to the health of the thirteen cantons, appears 
 to me singularly worthy in his way and difficult to improve 
 upon. 
 
 What economist will enlarge our stomachs so as to contain 
 as many beef-steaks as did the late Milo of Crotona who ate 
 an ox ? The bill of fare of the Caf6 Anglais, of V^four's, or of 
 any other culinary celebrity that you will, appears to me very 
 meagre and oecumenical, compared with the bill of fare of 
 Trimalcio's dinner. At what table do they now serve up a sow 
 and her twelve young ones in a single dish ? Who has eaten 
 sea-eels and lampreys fattened on man ? Do you really believe 
 that Brillat-Savarin has improved on Apicius ? 
 
 Could that great tripe-man of a Vitellius fill his famous Min- 
 erva's shield at Chevet's, with brains of pheasants and peacocks, 
 tongues of flamingoes, and livers of scarus ? Your oysters 
 from the Rocher de Cancale are truly rarities beside the Lu- 
 crine oysters, which had a sea made expressly for them. The 
 little suburban villas of the Marquises of the Regency are 
 wretched country-boxes in comparison with the villas of the 
 Roman patricians at Baiae, Capreae, and Tibur. Should not 
 the Cyclopean magnificence of those great voluptuaries who 
 built eternal monuments for the pleasures of a day make us fall 
 flat on the ground before the genius of the ancients, and strike 
 out forever from our dictionaries the word perfectibility f 
 
 Have they invented a single capital sin the more ? Unfortu- 
 nately, there are but seven as before, a very moderate number 
 of falls for the upright man per day. I do not even think that 
 
 3 
 
24 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 after a century of progress, at the rate we are going, any lover 
 will be able to repeat the thirteenth labor of Hercules, Can a 
 man be agreeable to his divinity even once oftener than in the 
 time of Solomon ? Many very illustrious, learned men, and 
 very respectable ladies, hold quite the contrary opinion, and 
 maintain that amiability is decreasing. Well, then, what is 
 the use of speaking of progress ? I am quite aware that you 
 will tell me that we have an Upper and a Lower Chamber, that 
 we hope that everybody will soon be an elector, and the num- 
 ber of representatives doubled or tripled. Do you think that 
 there are not enough mistakes in French made as it is on the 
 national tribune, and that there are too few for the evil work 
 they have to plot ? I can scarcely understand the utility which 
 consists in penning two or three hundred provincials in a 
 wooden hut, with a ceiling painted by Monsieur Fragonard, to 
 have them jumble and blunder any number of petty laws 
 which are either atrocious or absurd. What matters it whether 
 it be a sabre, an aspergill, or an umbrella that governs you ? 
 It is always a stick, and I am astonished that men of progress 
 should dispute about the choice of a cudgel to tickle their 
 shoulders, when it would be much more progressive and less 
 expensive to break it and throw the pieces to all the devils. 
 
 The only one among you who has common-sense is a mad- 
 man, a great genius, an idiot, a divine poet far above Lamar- 
 tine, Hugo, and Byron ; he is Charles Fourrier, the phalan- 
 sterian, who is all this in himself alone : he alone has dis- 
 played logic with boldness enough to follow out its conse- 
 quences to the end. He affirms without hesitation that men will 
 soon have a tail fifteen feet long, with an eye at the extremity. 
 This would certainly be progress, and would admit of our 
 doing a thousand fine things previously impossible, such as 
 killing elephants without striking a blow, swinging on trees 
 without swings as conveniently as the best conditioned ape, 
 doing without umbrella or parasol by spreading the tail over 
 our heads like the squirrels, who get on very agreeably without 
 such devices, together with other prerogatives which it would 
 
PREFACE. ^5 
 
 take too long to enumerate. Many phalansterians even pre- 
 tend that they already have a small one, which is ready to become 
 larger, if God but grant them life. 
 
 Charles Fourrier has invented as many species of animals as 
 Georges Cuvier the great naturalist. He has invented horses 
 three times as big as elephants, dogs as large as tigers, fishes 
 capable of satisfying more people than Jesus Christ's three 
 fishes, which the incredulous Voltairians think were April ones, 
 and I a magnificent parable. He has built towns, beside which 
 Rome, Babylon, and Tyre were but mole-hills ; he has piled 
 Babels one upon the other, and raised spires to the clouds more 
 infinite than any of these in John Martin's engravings ; he has 
 conceived I know not how many orders of architecture and new 
 condiments ; he has designed a theatre which would appear 
 grand even to the Romans of the Empire, and drawn up a bill 
 of fare which Lucius or Nomentanus might perhaps have found 
 sufficient for a dinner of friends ; he promises to create new 
 pleasures and to develope our organs and senses ; he is to render 
 women more beautiful and voluptuous, and men more robust 
 and vigorous ; he guarantees you against children, and proposes 
 to reduce the number of the world's inhabitants, so that every- 
 body may be at his ease, which is more reasonable than to urge 
 the proletarians to produce others only to cannonade them after- 
 wards in the streets when they multiply overmuch, and to send 
 them bullets instead of bread. 
 
 Progress is possible only in this way. All the rest is bitter 
 'Snockery, witless buffoonery that is not even good enough to 
 dupe gaping idiots. 
 
 The phalanstery is truly an improvenient on the Abbey of 
 Th^l^me, and it definitely relegates the terrestrial paradise to 
 the number of completely superannuated and old-fashioned 
 things. The "Thousand and One Nights," and the "Tales 
 of Madame d'Aulnoy," can alone wrestle successfully with 
 the phalanstery. What fertility ! What invention ! There is 
 sufficient in it to supply with the marvellous three thousand 
 cart-loads of romantic or classic poems ; and our versifiers, 
 Academicians or not, are very sorry trouveres if we compare 
 
36 
 
 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 them with Monsieur Charles Fourrier, the inventor of impas- 
 sioned attractions. The idea of making use of impulses, which 
 up to the present people have sought to repress, is most as- 
 suredly a lofty and powerful one. 
 
 You say that we are progressing ! If a volcano were to open 
 its jaws to-morrow at Montmartre, and make a winding-sheet of 
 ashes and a tomb of lava for Paris, as Vesuvius did formerly 
 for Stabia, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and if after some thou- 
 sands of years the antiquaries of the time were to dig and 
 exhume the corpse of the dead town, what monument pray 
 would still be standing to witness to the splendor of the great 
 buried building, the Gothic Notre-Dame. They would obtain 
 a fine idea of our arts by clearing out the Tuileries as touched 
 up by Monsieur Fontaine ! The statues of the Pont Louis 
 XV would have a fine effect when transferred to the museums 
 of the day ! And if there were not the pictures of the ancient 
 schools, and the statues of antiquity, or of the Renaissance 
 heaped up in that long, shapeless interior, the Gallery of the 
 Louvre ; if there were not the ceiling by Ingres to prevent a 
 belief that Paris had been but an encampment of barbarians, 
 a village of Welches or Topinamboux, the things obtained 
 from the excavations would be of a very curious nature. Sabres 
 belonging to the National Guard, firemen's helmets, and coins 
 struck with a shapeless die, that is what they would find 
 instead of the beautiful, curiously-chased armor which the 
 middle ages have left beneath their towers and ruined tombs, 
 and the medals which fill the Etruscan vases and pave the 
 foundations of all the Roman structures. As to our wretched 
 furniture of veneered wood, all those miserable boxes, so bare, 
 so ugly, so insignificant, which are called chests of drawers and 
 writing-tables, and all our formless and fragile utensils, I hope 
 that time would have sufficient pity for them to destroy them 
 without leaving a trace behind. 
 
 Once upon a time we took a fancy to build a grand and 
 magnificent monument. We were first of all obliged to 
 borrow the plan from the ancient Romans ; and even before it 
 was finished our Pantheon gave way on its legs, like a rickety 
 
PREFACE. 37 
 
 child, and stumbled, like a pensioner dead drunk, so that it was 
 necessary to furnish it with crutches of stone, without which it 
 would have fallen pitifully at full length before the whole 
 world, and provided the nations with food for laughter for more 
 than a hundred years. We wished to set up an obelisk in one 
 of our squares ; we had to go and filch it from Luxor, and we 
 were two years bringing it home. Old Egypt bordered her 
 highways with obelisks, as we do ours with poplar trees ; she 
 carried bunches of them under her arms as a kitchen gardener 
 carries his bundles of asparagus, and cut out a monolith in the 
 sides of her mountains of granite more easily than we shape a 
 tooth-pick or an ear-pick. Some centuries ago they had 
 Raphael, they had Michael Angelo ; now we have Monsieur 
 Paul Delaroche, and all because we are making progress. 
 
 You boast of your opera ; ten operas such as yours would 
 dance the saraband in a Roman circus. Monsieur Martin 
 himself, with his tame tiger and his poor lion, gouty and asleep, 
 like a subscriber to the "Gazette," is something very wretched 
 beside an ancient gladiator. What are your benefit perform- 
 ances which last until two o'clock in the morning, when we 
 think of these plays which lasted a hundred days, of those 
 representations in which veritable vessels veritably fought in a 
 veritable sea ; in which thousands of men conscientiously cut 
 themselves to pieces ; — turn pale, O heroic Franconi ! — in 
 which, when the sea had retired, there came the desert, with its 
 tigers and roaring lions, terrible supers who served only for 
 once, in which the leading part was filled by some robust 
 Dacian or Pannonian athlete whom it would often have been 
 very difficult to recall at the conclusion of the piece, and, whose 
 sweetheart was some beautiful and dainty Numidian lioness 
 that had been fasting for three days ? Does not the elephant 
 funambulist appear to you superior to Mademoiselle Georges ? 
 Do you think that Mademoiselle Taglioni dances better than 
 Arbuscula, and Perrot better than Bathyllus ? I am persuaded 
 that Roscius might have given points to Bocage, excellent 
 as the latter is. Galeria Coppiola played a young girl's part at 
 more than a hundred years of age. It is right to say that the 
 
38 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 oldest of our young ladies is scarcely more than sixty, and that- 
 Mademoiselle Mars is not even progressing in that direction. 
 They had two or three thousand gods in whom they believed, 
 and we have only one in whom we scarcely believe at all. 
 It is progression of a strange sort. Is not Jupiter something 
 more than Don Juan, and a very different kind of seducer ? 
 In truth, I know not what we have invented or even improved 
 upon. 
 
 Next to the progressive journalists, and as if to serve as an 
 antithesis to them, there come the blase journalists, who are 
 usually twenty or two-and-twenty years of age, who have never 
 left their own neighborhood, and have as yet slept only with 
 their charwoman. Everything tires them, everything is too 
 much for them, everything wearies them ; they are surfeited, 
 blase,yNom out, inaccessible. They know beforehand what 
 you are going to tell them ; they have seen, felt, experienced, 
 heard all that it is possible to see, feel, experience, and hear ; 
 the human heart has no recess so secret that they have not 
 turned their lantern upon it. They tell you with marvellous 
 self-assurance : " The human heart is not like that ; women 
 are not made so ; this character is untrue ; " or, perhaps, 
 " What ! always love and hate ! always men and women ! Can- 
 not people speak of something else ? But man is worn thread- 
 bare, and women still more so, since Monsieur de Balzac has 
 concerned himself with them. 
 
 " ' Who will deliver us from men and women ? ' 
 
 " You think, sir, that your fable is new ? It is so in the same 
 way that the Pont-Neuf is ; nothing in the world is more 
 common ; I read it somewhere or other when I was at nurse 
 or elsewhere ; it has been dinned into my ears for ten years 
 past. Moreover, learn, sir, that there is nothing that I do not 
 know,^that everything is used up, so far as I am concerned, and 
 that were your idea as virginal as the Virgin Mary, I should 
 none the less affirm that I had seen her prostitute herself on 
 the roadsides with the pettiest of scribblers and poorest of 
 pedants." 
 
PREFACE. 39 
 
 These journalists have been the cause of Jocko, of the 
 Monstre Vert, the Lyons of Mysore, and a thousand other fine 
 inventions. 
 
 They are continually complaining of being obliged to read 
 books, and see pieces at the theatre. Apropos of a paltry 
 vaudeville, they will talk to you of almond-trees in flower, balmy 
 limes, the breeze of spring, and the fragrance of the young 
 foliage ; they set up for lovers of nature after the fashion of 
 young Werther, and yet have never set foot out of Paris, and 
 could not tell a cabbage from a beet. If it is winter, they speak 
 of the charms of the domestic hearth, the crackling fire, and 
 irons, slippers, dreaming, and dozing ; they will not fail to quote 
 the famous line from TibuUus, 
 
 •' Quam juvat immites ventos audire cubantem : " 
 
 whereby they will give themselves the most charming little 
 appearance in the world, at once disillusioned and ingenuous. 
 They pose as men who have ceased to be influenced by the 
 work of man, whom dramatic emotion leaves as cold and hard 
 as the knife with which they mend their pen, and who never- 
 theless cry, like J. J. Rousseau, " Voilk la pervenche ! " * 
 They profess a fierce antipathy to Gymnase colonels, American 
 uncles, cousins male and female, sensitive old growlers, and 
 romantic widows, and try to cure us of the vaudeville by 
 proving to us every day in their feuilletons that all Frenchmen 
 are not born clever. We do not, indeed, consider this a 
 great evil, but the contrary, and we are delighted to acknowl- 
 edge that the extinction of vaudeville or comic opera in France 
 (national species) would be one of the greatest blessings from 
 heaven. But I should like to know what kind of literature 
 these gentlemen would allow to take its place. It is true that 
 it could not be worse. 
 
 Others preach against bad taste, and translate the tragic 
 Seneca. Lastly, to bring up the rear, a new battalion of critics 
 has been formed of a kind not seen before. 
 
 * "Look at the periwinkle " (the flower), i. e, "the summer is coming." 
 — Translator'' s Note. 
 
40 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 Their critical formula is the most convenient, extensible, 
 malleable, peremptory, superlative, and triumphant that a critic 
 has ever conceived. Zoilus would certainly have profited by it. 
 
 Hitherto, when it was wished to depreciate a work, or dis- 
 credit it in the eyes of the patriarchal and ingenuous subscriber, 
 false or perfidiously isolated quotations were made ; phrases 
 were maimed and verses mutilated in such a fashion that the 
 author even would have thought himself the most ridiculous 
 person in the world ; he was charged with imaginary plagiarisms; 
 passages in his book were compared with passages in ancient 
 and modern authors with which they had not the least con- 
 nection ; he was accused in kitchen style, and with many 
 solecisms, of not knowing his own language, and of perverting 
 the French of Racine and Voltaire ; it was seriously affirmed 
 that his work had a tendency towards anthropophagy, and that 
 its readers would infallibly become cannibals or hydrophobes 
 in the course of the week ; but all this was poor and behind th6 
 time, as brazen-faced and fossilized as possible. The accusa- 
 tipn of immorality, dragged as it had been through feuilletons 
 and " variety " columns, was becoming insufficient, and so un- 
 serviceable, that scarcely any paper but the " Constitutionnel," 
 a pure and progressive one, as is known, had the desperate 
 courage still to employ it. 
 
 Then was invented criticism of the future, prospective criticism. 
 Can you not see at once how charming it is, and how it is the 
 product of a fine imagination ? The recipe is simple, and 
 may be imparted to you. The book to be considered fine and 
 worthy of praise is one that has not yet appeared. The book 
 that appears is bound to be detestable. To-morrow's will be 
 superb— but it is always to-day. Such criticism is like the 
 barber who had the following words for a sign written in large 
 characters : — 
 
 Shaving Gratis Here TO-MORROW. 
 
 All the poor devils who read the placard promised themselves 
 for the morrow the unspeakable and sovereign delight of having 
 a shave for once in their lives without loosening their purse- 
 
PREFACE. 4, 
 
 strings, and for joy of it their beards grew half-a-foot on their 
 chins in the course of the night preceding the lucky day ; but 
 when they had the napkin round their necks, the barber asked 
 them whether they had any money, and requested them to shell 
 out, or he would treat them after the fashion of nutters and apple 
 gatherers in Le Perche ; and he swore his most sacred oath that 
 he would cut their throats with his razor if they did not pay. 
 And when the poor beggars, in miserable and pitiful plight, 
 quoted the placard and the sacrosanct inscription, the bar- 
 ber said : " Ho, ho ! my fine fellows, you are no great schol- 
 ars, and would do well to go back to school ! The placard 
 says : ' To-morrow. ' I am not so simple and whimsical as to 
 shave gratis to-day ; my fellow-barbers would say that I was 
 ruining the trade. Come again next time, or the week when 
 two Sundays come together, and you will find yourselves well 
 off. May I become a green leper if I don't shave you gratis, on 
 the word of an honest barber. " 
 
 Authors who read a prospective article jeering at an actual 
 work, always flatter themselves that the book that they are writ- 
 ing will be the book of the future. They try to comply, as far 
 as is possible, with the critic's ideas, and become social, progres- 
 sive, moralizing, palingenesical, mythical, pantheistical, buchez- 
 istical, believing that they will thereby escape the tremendous 
 anathema ; but they fare as did the barber's customers — to-day 
 is not the eve of to-morrow. The often promised to-morrow 
 will never shine upon the world ; for this formula is too con- 
 venient to be abandoned so soon. While decrying the book 
 of which they are jealous, and which they would fain an- 
 nihilate, they put on the gloves of the most generous im- 
 partiality. It looks as though they asked nothing better than 
 to approve and to praise, and yet they never do so. This 
 recipe is far superior to that which might be called the 
 retrospective, and which consists in extolling only ancient works, 
 which are no longer read and which trouble nobody, at the ex- 
 pense of modern books which occupy attention and wound self- 
 love more directly. 
 
 We said, before beginning this review of the critics, that the 
 materials might furnish fifteen or sixteen folio volumes, but 
 
42 
 
 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 that we should content ourselves with a few lines. I am begin- 
 ning to fear that these few lines must be each two or three thou- 
 sand fathoms long, and resemble those great pamphlets which 
 are so thick that a gunshot could not pierce them, and which 
 bear the treacherous title — A word about the Revolution, a 
 word about this or that. The history of the deeds and jests, 
 and multiple loves of the divine Madeleine de Maupin would 
 run a serious risk of being put off, and it will be understood 
 that an entire volume is not too much to worthily sing the 
 adventures of this fair Bradamant. Hence, wishful though we 
 be to continue the blazonry of the illustrious Aristarchuses of 
 the age, we shall content ourselves with the unfinished sketch we 
 have just obtained, adding a few reflections on the good-nature 
 of our gentle brethren in Apollo, who, stupid as the Cassander 
 of pantomime, stand still to receive blows from harlequin's 
 wand and kicks in the rump from the clown, without stirring 
 any more than if they were images. 
 
 It is as though a fencing master should cross his arms behind 
 his back during a bout, and receive all his adversary's thrusts 
 in his unguarded breast, without essaying a single parry. 
 
 It is like a pleading in which the king's attorney had the 
 sole right of speech, or a debate in which reply was not al- 
 lowed. 
 
 The critic advances this or that. He lords it, and makes 
 a great display. Absurd, detestable, monstrous ; it is like 
 nothing ; it is like everything. A drama is produced, and the 
 critic goes to see it ; he finds that it corresponds in no respect 
 to the drama which he had fabricated in his head on the sug- 
 gestion of the title ; and so, in his feuilleton, he substitutes 
 his own drama for the author's. He gives large doses of 
 erudition ; he disburdens himself of all the knowledge he has 
 obtained the day before in some library, and treats like negroes 
 people to whom he should go to school, and the least of whom 
 might teach men more able than he. 
 
 Authors endure this with a magnanimity and forbearance 
 that seems really inconceivable to me. What, after all, are 
 these critics whose tones are so peremptory and words so 
 
PREFACE. 43 
 
 short, that one might take them for true sons of the gods ? 
 They are simply men who have been at college with us, and 
 who have evidently profited less by their studies than we, since 
 they have never produced a work, and can do nothing but 
 bespatter and spoil the works of others like veritable stympha- 
 lian vampires. 
 
 Would it not be something to criticise the critics ? for these 
 fastidious grandees, who make such an affectation of being 
 haughty and hard to please, are far from possessing the infal- 
 libility of our Holy Father. There would be enough to fill a 
 daily paper of the largest size. Their blunders, historical or 
 otherwise, their forged quotations, their mistakes in French, 
 their plagiarisms, their dotage, their trite and ill-mannered 
 pleasantries, their poverty of ideas, their want of intelligence 
 and tact, their ignorance of the simplest things which makes 
 them ready to take the Piraeus for a man and Monsieur De- 
 laroche for a painter, would provide authors with ample 
 materials for taking their revenge, without involving any work 
 but that of underlining the passages with pencil and reproduc- 
 ing them word for word ; for the critic's patent is not accom- 
 panied by that of a great writer, and mistakes in language or 
 taste are not to be avoided merely by reproving such in others. 
 The critics prove this every day. 
 
 If Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and others of the same kind 
 were to criticise, I could understand people kneeling and ador- 
 ing ; but that Messrs. Z. K. Y. V. Q. X., or some similar letter 
 between A and O, should play the part of pretty Quintilians and 
 scold you in the name of morality and polite literature, is some- 
 thing which always revolts me, and makes me indulge in un- 
 paralleled rage. I would fain have a police regulation for- 
 bidding certain names from jostling certain others. It is true 
 that a cat may look at a king, and that Saint Peter of Rome, 
 giant as he is, cannot prevent these Transteverinia from 
 polluting him in strange sort below ; but I none the less believe 
 that it would be insane to write along monnmental reputation : 
 
 Commit no nuisance here. 
 
44 
 
 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 Charles X alone really understood this question. By ordering 
 the suppression of the newspapers, he did a great service to the 
 arts and to civilization. New^spapers are a species of courtiers 
 or jobbers who interpose between artists and public, between 
 king and people. We know what fine results have followed. 
 These perpetual barkings deaden inspiration and fill heart and 
 intellect with such distrust that we dare not have faith either in 
 a poet or government ; and thus royalty and poetry, the two 
 greatest things in the world, become impossible, to the great 
 misfortune of the people, who sacrifice their welfare to the poor 
 pleasure of reading every morning a few broadsheets of bad 
 paper, soiled with bad ink and bad style. 
 
 There was no art criticism under Julius II, and I am not 
 acquainted with any feuilleton on Daniel de Volterre, Se- 
 bastien del Piombo, Michael Angelo, or Raphael, nor on 
 Ghiberti delle Porte or Benvenuto Cellini ; and yet I think 
 that for people who had no newspapers, and who knew neither 
 the word art nor the word artistic, they had for all that a fair 
 amount of talent, and did not acquit themselves badly in their 
 calling. 
 
 The reading of newspapers prevents the existence of true 
 scholars and true artists. It is like a daily debauch which 
 makes you come enervated and strengthless to the couch of 
 the Muses, those hard and difficult maidens who require their 
 lovers to be vigorous and quite fresh. The newspaper kills the 
 book, as the book has killed architecture, and as artillery has 
 killed courage and muscular strength. We are not aware of 
 what pleasures newspapers deprive us. They rob everything 
 of its virginity ; owing to them we can have nothing of our 
 own and cannot possess a book all to ourselves ; they rob you 
 of surprise at the theatre, and tell you all the catastrophes 
 beforehand ; they take away from you the pleasure of tattling, 
 chattering, gossiping and slandering, of composing a piece of 
 news or hawking a true one for a week through aTl the drawing- 
 rooms of society. They intone their ready-made judgments 
 to us, whether we want them or not, and prepossess us against 
 things that we should like ; it is owing to them that the 
 
PREFACE. 45- 
 
 dealers in phosphorous boxes, if only they have a little memory, 
 chatter about literature as nonsensically as country Academi- 
 cians ; it is also owing to them that all day long, instead of 
 artless ideas or individual stupidity, we hear half-digested 
 scraps of newspaper which resemble omelets raw on one 
 side and burnt on the other, and that we are pitilessly surfeited 
 with news, two or three hours old and already known to infants 
 at the breast ; they blunt our taste, and make us like 
 those peppered-brandy drinkers and file and rasp swallowers, 
 who have ceased to find any flavor in the most generous 
 wines, and cannot apprehend their flowery and fragrant 
 bouquet. 
 
 If Louis-Philippe were to suppress the literary and political 
 journals for good and all, I should be infinitely grateful to him, 
 and would rhyme him on the spot a fine disordered dithyramb 
 with bold verses and cross rhymes, signed : " Your very 
 humble and very faithful subject, etc." Let it not be imagined 
 that literature would no longer engage attention ; at a time 
 when there were no newspapers, a quatrain used to occupy all 
 Paris for a week and a first performance for six months. 
 
 It is true that we should lose the advertisements and the 
 eulogies at fifteen-pence a line, and notoriety would be less 
 prompt and less startling. But I have devised a very ingenious 
 method for replacing the advertisements. If my gracious 
 monarch suppresses the journals between the present time and 
 the publication of this glorious romance, I shall certainly make 
 use of it, and I promise myself wonders from it. The great 
 day being come, twenty-four criers on horseback, and in the 
 publisher's livery, with his address on their backs and breasts, 
 carrying in their hands banners embroidered on both sides 
 with the title of the romance, and each preceded by a drummer 
 and a kettle-drunlmer, will traverse the town, and, stopping 
 in the squares and at the cross-ways, cry in a loud and 
 intelligible voice : " To-day, and not yesterday, nor to-morrow, 
 is published the admirable, inimitable, divine, and more than 
 divine romance, ' Mademoiselle de Maupin,' by the very 
 celebrated Th^ophile Gautier, which Europe, and even the 
 
46 
 
 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 other parts of the world and Polynesia, have been expecting 
 so impatiently for a year and more. It is being sold at the 
 rate of five hundred copies a minute, and the editions are 
 following one another every half hour ; the nineteenth has been 
 reached already. A picket of municipal guards is before the 
 door of the shop, restraining the crowd and preventing all 
 disorder." 
 
 Surely this would be quite equal to a three-lined advertise- 
 ment in the " D^bats " or the " Courrier Fran^ais," among 
 elastic belts, crinolined collars, feeding-bottles with indestruct- 
 ible teats, Regnault's jujubes, and cures for toothache. 
 
 May, 1834. 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN, 
 
 I. 
 
 OU complain, my dear friend, of the infrequency 
 of my letters. What would you have me write 
 you except that I am well, and that I have ever 
 the same affection for you ? These are things 
 which you know perfectly, and which are so 
 natural, considering my age, and the excellent qualities to be 
 discerned in you that it is almost ridiculous to send a wretched 
 sheet of paper on a journey of a hundred miles with no more 
 information than that. All my seeking is in vain, I have 
 no news worth relating ; my life is the most uniform in the 
 world, and nothing comes to disturb its monotony. To-day 
 is followed by to-morrow, just as yesterday was followed by 
 to-day ; and, without being so conceited as to play the prophet, 
 I can in the morning boldly predict what will befall me in the 
 evening, 
 
 " Here is the plan of my day : I get up — that is of course, 
 and is the beginning of every day ; I breakfast, fence, go out, 
 come in again, dine, pay visits or read something, and then 
 I go to bed, just as I did the day before ; I fall asleep, and 
 my imagination, not having been excited by new objects, 
 affords me but trite and hackneyed dreams as monotonous 
 as my real life. This is not very diverting, as you see. Never- 
 
48 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 theless, I am better pleased with such an existence than I . 
 should have been six months ago. I am dull, it is true, but it 
 is in a peaceful and resigned fashion, not devoid of a certain 
 sweetness, which I should be ready enough to compare to those 
 wan and tepid autumn days in which we find a secret charm 
 after the excessive heat of summer. 
 
 " Although I have apparently accepted this kind of exist- 
 ence, it is nevertheless scarcely suitable for me, or at least it 
 has very little resemblance to that of which I dream, and to 
 which I consider myself adapted. It may be that I am mis- 
 taken, and that I really am suited only to this mode of life ; but 
 I can scarcely believe it, for if this were my true destiny, I 
 should have fitted myself into it with greater ease, and should 
 not have been bruised by the sharp corners of it at so many 
 places and so painfully. 
 
 " You know what an overpowering attraction strange adven- 
 tures have for me, how I worship everything that is singular, 
 extravagant, and perilous, and how greedily I devour novels 
 and books of travels. There is not, perhaps, on earth a fancy 
 more foolish or more vagrant than mine. Well, through some 
 fatality or other, it so happens that I have never had an 
 adventure and have never made a journey. So far as I am 
 concerned, the circuit of the world is the circuit of the town in 
 which I live ; I touch my horizon on all sides ; I rub shoulders 
 with the real ; my life is that of the shell on the sand-bank, of 
 the ivy round the tree, of the cricket on the hearth ; in truth, I 
 am surprised that my feet have not yet taken root. 
 
 " Love is painted with bandaged eyes ; but it is destiny that 
 he should be depicted thus, 
 
 " I have as valet a species of clown, heavy and stupid enough, 
 who has roved as much as the north wind, who has been to the 
 devil, and I know not where besides, who has seen with his 
 own eyes all those things about which I have formed such 
 fine ideas, and who cares as much for them as he does for a 
 glass of water ; he has been placed in the strangest situations, 
 and he has had the most astonishing adventures that one could 
 have. I make him talk sometimes, and am maddened to think 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ^g 
 
 that all these glorious things have befallen a booby, who is 
 capable of neither feeling nor reflection, and who is good for 
 nothing but his usual work, — brushing clothes and cleaning 
 boots. 
 
 " It is clear that this rascal's life ought to have been mine. 
 As for him, he thinks me very fortunate, and is lost in wonder 
 to see me melancholy, as I am. 
 
 " All this is not very interesting, my poor friend, and is 
 scarcely worth the trouble of writing, is it ? But since you 
 insist on my writing to you, I must relate my thoughts and 
 feelings, and give you the history of my ideas, in default of 
 events and actions. There will, perhaps, be little order and 
 little novelty in what I shall have to tell you, but you must lay 
 the blame on yourself alone. I shall be obeying your own wish. 
 
 " You have been my friend from childhood, and I was 
 brought up with you ; our lives were passed together for a 
 long time, and we are wont to tell each other our most secret 
 thoughts. I can therefore, without blushing, give you an 
 account of all the nonsense that passes through my idle 
 brain. I shall neither add nor deduct a single word, for I 
 have no false pride with you. And so I shall be scrupulously 
 exact, even in trifling and shameful matters ; I shall certainly 
 not veil myself before j^«. 
 
 " Beneath this winding sheet of indifferent and depressing 
 languor of which I have just told you, there sometimes stirs a 
 thought, torpid rather than dead, and I do not always possess 
 the sweet, sad calm that melancholy gives. I have relapses, 
 and I fall again into my old perturbations. Nothing in the 
 world is so fatiguing as these purposeless whirlwinds and these 
 aimless flights. On such days, although I have nothing to do 
 any more than on others, I rise very early, before the sun, so 
 persuaded am I that I am in a hurry, and that I shall not have 
 the necessary time. I dress myself with all speed, as if the 
 house were on fire, putting on my garments at random, and 
 bewailing the loss of a minute. Any one seeing me would 
 suppose that I was going to keep a love appointment or look 
 for money. Not at all. I even do not know whither I am go- 
 
 4 
 
JO MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 ing ; but go I must, and I should believe my safety compromised 
 if I remained. It seems to me that I am called from without, 
 that my destiny is at that moment passing in the street, and 
 that the question of my life is about to be decided. 
 
 " I go down with an air of wild surprise, my dress in dis- 
 order, and my hair uncombed. People turn and laugh when 
 they meet me, and think that I am a young debauchee, who 
 has spent the night at the tavern or elsewhere. Indeed I am 
 intoxicated, though I have drunk nothing, and I have the 
 manner of a drunkard, even to his uncertain gait, now fast 
 and now slow. I go from street to street, like a dog that has 
 lost his master, seeking quite at a venture, very troubled, very 
 much on the alert, turning at the least noise, gliding into every 
 group, heedless of the rebukes of the people I run up against, 
 and looking about me everywhere, with a clearness of vision 
 which at other times I do not possess. Then it suddenly be- 
 comes evident to me that I am mistaken, that it is assuredly 
 not there, that I must go further, to the other end of the town, 
 I know not where, and I set off as if the devil were carrying 
 me away. My toes only touch the ground, and I do not weigh 
 an ounce. Truly I must present a singular appearance with my 
 preoccupied and frenzied countenance, the gesticulations of my 
 arms and the inarticulate cries I utter. When I think of it in 
 cold blood, I laugh heartily in my own face ; but this, I would 
 have you know, does not prevent me from doing just the same 
 on the next occasion. 
 
 " If I were asked why I rush along in this way, I certainly 
 should be greatly at a loss for an answer. I am in no haste 
 to arrive, since I am going nowhere. I am not afraid of 
 being late, since I have no engagement. There is no one 
 waiting for me, and I have no reason for being in a hurry 
 here. 
 
 " Is it an opportunity for loving, an adventure, a woman, 
 an idea or a fortune, something which is wanting to my life, 
 and which I seek without accounting to myself for it, but 
 impelled by a vague instinct ? Is it my existence which desires 
 to complete itself ? Is it the wish to emerge from my home 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ^j 
 
 and from myself, the weariness of my present life and the 
 longing for another ? It is something of this, and perhaps all of 
 this put together. It is always a very unpleasant condition, a 
 feverish irritation, which is usually succeeded by the dullest 
 atony. 
 
 " I often have an idea, that if I had set out an hour earlier, or 
 had increased my pace, I should have arrived in time ; that, 
 while I was passing down one street, the object of my search 
 was passing down the other, and that a block of vehicles was 
 sufficient to make me miss what I have been pursuing quite at 
 random for so long. You cannot imagine the sadness and the 
 deep despair into which I fall when I see that all this ends in 
 nothing, and that my youth is passing away with no prospect 
 opening up before me ; then all my idle passions growl dully 
 in my heart, and prey upon themselves for lack of other food, 
 like beasts in a menagerie that the keeper has forgotten to feed. 
 
 "In spite of the stifled and secret disappointments of every 
 day, there is something within me which resists and will not 
 die. I have no hope, for hope implies desire, a certain dis- 
 position for wishing that things should turn out in one way 
 rather than in another. I desire nothing, for I desire every- 
 thing. I do not hope, or rather I hope no longer ; — that is too 
 silly, — and it is quite the same to me whether a thing happens 
 or not. I am waiting, and for what ? I do not know, but I 
 am waiting. 
 
 "It is a tremulous waiting, full of impatience, broken by 
 starts and nervous movements, as must be that of a lover who 
 awaits his mistress. Nothing comes ; I ^row furious, or begin 
 to weep. I wait for the heavens to open and an angel to 
 descend with a revelation to me, for a revolution to break 
 out and a throne to be given me, for one of Raphael's virgins 
 to leave the canvas and come to embrace me, for relations, 
 whom I do not possess, to die and leave me what will enable 
 me to sail my fancy on a river of gold, for a hippogriff to take 
 me and carry me into regions unknown. But, whatever I am 
 waiting for, it is assuredly nothing usual and commonplace. 
 
C2 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 " This has reached such a pitch, that, when I come in, I 
 never fail to say : ' No one has come ? There is no letter for 
 me ? No news ? ' I know perfectly well that there is nothing, 
 and that there can be nothing. It is all the same ; I am always 
 greatly surprised and disappointed on receiving the customary 
 reply : ' No, sir, nothing at all.' 
 
 " Sometimes — but this is seldom — the idea takes a more 
 definite form. It will be some beautiful woman whom I do 
 not know, and who does not know me, whom I have met 
 at the theatre or at church, and who has not heeded me 
 in the least. I go over the whole house, and until I have 
 opened the door of the last room — I scarcely dare tell you, it 
 is so foolish— I hope that she has come, and that she is there. 
 This is not conceit on my part. I have so little of the coxcomb 
 about me, that several women, whom I believed very indifferent 
 to me, and without any opinion in particular respecting me, 
 have, so others tell me, been greatly prepossessed in my favor. 
 It has a different origin. 
 
 " When I am not dulled by weariness and discouragement, 
 my soul awakes and recovers all its former vigor. I hope, 
 I love, I desire, and so violent are my desires, that I imagine' 
 that they will draw everything to them, as a powerful magnet 
 attracts particles of iron, even when they are at a great distance 
 from it. This is why I wait for the things I wish for, instead 
 of going to them, and frequently neglect the most favorable 
 opportunities that are opened up to my hopes. Another would 
 write the most amorous note in the world to the divinity of 
 his heart, or would seek for an opportunity to approach her. 
 As for me, I ask the messenger for the reply to a letter which 
 I have not written, and spend my time constructing the most 
 wonderful situations in my head for bringing me in the most 
 favorable and most unexpected light under the notice of 
 her whom I love. A book might be made larger and more 
 ingenious than the ' Stratagems of Polybius' of all the stratagems 
 which I imagine for introducing myself to her and revealing 
 my passion. Generally, it would only be necessary to say to 
 one of my friends : ' Introduce me to Madame So-and-so,' 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 53 
 
 and to pay a compliment drawn from mythology and suitably 
 punctuated with sighs. 
 
 " To listen to all this, one would think me fit for a mad- 
 house ; nevertheless, I am a rational fellow enough, and I 
 have not put many of my follies into practice. All this passes 
 in the recesses of my soul, and all these absurd ideas are 
 buried very carefully deep within me ; on the outside nothing 
 is to be seen, and I have the reputation of being a placid and 
 cold young man, indifferent to women, and without interest in 
 things belonging to his years ; which is as remote from the 
 truth as the judgments of the world usually are. 
 
 " Nevertheless, in spite of all my discouragements, some of 
 my desires have been realized, and, so little joy has been given 
 me by their fulfilment, that I dread the fulfilment of the rest. 
 You remember the childish eagerness with which I longed to 
 have a horse.of my own ; my mother gave me one quite recently ; 
 he is as black as ebony, with a little white star on his forehead, 
 with flowing mane, glossy coat, and slender legs, just as I 
 wished him to be. When they brought him to me, it gave me 
 such a shock, that I remained quite a quarter of an hour very 
 pale and unable to compose myself. Then I mounted, and, 
 without speaking a single word, set off at full gallop, and for 
 more than an hour went straight across country in an ecstasy 
 difficult to conceive. I did the same every day for a week, 
 and I really do not know how it was that I did not kill him or 
 at least break his wind. By degrees all this great eagerness 
 died away, I brought my horse to a trot, then to a walk, and 
 now I have come to ride him with such indifference that he 
 often stops and I do not notice it. Pleasure has become habit 
 more quickly than I could have thought possible. 
 
 " As to Ferragus — that is the name I have given him — he is 
 really the most charming animal that one could see. He has 
 tufts on his feet like eagle's down ; he is as lively as a goat 
 and as quiet as a lamb. You will have the greatest pleasure 
 in galloping him when you come here ; and, although my 
 mania for riding has passed away, I am still very fond of him, 
 for he is a horse of an excellent disposition, and I sincerely prefer 
 
54 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 him to many human beings. If you only heard how joyfully 
 he neighs when I go to see him in the stable, and with what 
 intelligent eyes he looks at me ! I confess that I am touched 
 by these tokens of affection, and that I take him by the neck 
 and embrace him with as much tenderness, on my word, as if 
 he were a beautiful girl. 
 
 " I had also another desire, more keen, more eager, more 
 continually awake, more dearly cherished, and for which I 
 had built in my soul an enchanting castle of cards, a palace 
 of chimeras, that was often destroyed but raised again with 
 desperate constancy: it was to have a mistress — a mistress 
 quite my own— like the horse. I do not know whether the 
 fulfilment of this dream would have found me so soon cold 
 as the fulfilment of the other ; I doubt it. But perhaps I am 
 wrong, and shall be tired of it as soon. Owing to my peculiar 
 disposition, I desire a thing so frantically, without, however, 
 making any effort to procure it, that if by chance, or otherwise, 
 I attain the object of my wish, I have such a moral lumbago, 
 and am so worn out, that I am seized with swoonings, and 
 have not energy enough left to enjoy it ; hence things which 
 come to me without my wishing for them generally give 
 me more pleasure than those which I have coveted most 
 strongly. 
 
 " I am twenty-two years old, and I am not virgin. Alas ! no 
 one is so now at that age, either in body, or, what is much 
 worse, in heart. Besides those females who afford us pleasure 
 for payment, and are not to be counted any more than a lasciv- 
 ious dream, I have had here and there, in some dark corner, 
 several virtuous or nearly virtuous women, neither beautiful nor 
 ugly, neither young nor old, such as are to be met with by 
 young fellows who have nothing regular on hand and whose 
 hearts are unoccupied. With a little good-will, and a pretty 
 strong dose of romantic illusions, you can call this having a 
 mistress, if you like. For myself, I find it impossible ; I might 
 have a thousand of the kind, and I should still believe my desire 
 as unfulfilled as ever. 
 
 '♦ I have not, therefore, as yet had a mistress, and my whole 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 55. 
 
 desire is to have one. It is an idea that torments me strangely ; 
 it is not an effervescence of temperament, a boiling of the blood, 
 the first burst of puberty. It is not woman that I want, but a 
 woman, a mistress ; I want her, I shall have her, and shortly ; 
 if I did not succeed, I confess toyou that I should never get over 
 it, and that I should have an inward timidity, a dull discourage- 
 ment, which would exercise a serious influence upon the rest of 
 my life. I should consider myself defective in certain respects, 
 inharmonious or incomplete, deformed in mind or body ; for 
 after all my requirement is a just one, and nature owes it to 
 every man. So long as I have not attained my end, Ishall look 
 upon myself merely as a child, and I shall not have the confi- 
 dence in myself which I ought to have. A mistress is to me 
 what the toga virilis was to the young Roman. 
 
 " I see so many beautiful women in the possession of men 
 who are ignoble in every respect, and scarcely fit to be their 
 lackeys, that I blush for them, and for myself. It gives me a 
 pitiful opinion of women to see them wasting their affection on 
 blackguards who despise and deceive them, instead of giving 
 themselves to some loyal and sincere young fellow who would 
 esteem himself very fortunate, and would worship them on his 
 knees ; to myself, for instance. It is true that men of the 
 former species obstruct the drawing-rooms, show themselves 
 off before every one, and are always lounging on the back 
 of some easy-chair, while I remain at home, my forehead 
 pressed against the window pane, watching the river steam 
 and the mist rise, while silently erecting in my heart the 
 perfumed sanctuary, the marvellous temple in which I am to 
 lodge the future idol of my soul. A chaste and poetical occu- 
 pation, and one for which women are as little grateful to you 
 as may be. 
 
 " Women have little liking for dreamers, and peculiarly 
 esteem those who put their ideas into practice. After all, they 
 are right. Obliged by their education and their social position 
 to keep silence and to wait, they naturally prefer those who come 
 to them and speak, and thus relieve them from a false and 
 tiresome position. I am quite sensible of this ; yet never in 
 
56 
 
 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 my life shall I be able to take it upon me, as I see many 
 others do, to rise from my seat, cross a drawing-room, and 
 say unexpectedly to a woman : • Your dress becomes you 
 like an angel,' or : ' Your eyes are particularly bright this 
 evening.' 
 
 "All this does not prevent me from positively wanting a 
 mistress. I do not know who it will be, but I see none' 
 among the women of my acquaintance who could suitably fill 
 this dignified position. I find that they possess very few of the 
 qualities I require. Those who would be young enough are 
 wanting in beauty or intellectual charm ; those who are beauti- 
 ful and young are basely and forbiddingly virtuous, or lack the 
 necessary freedom ; and then there is always some husband, 
 some brother, a mother or an aunt, somebody or other, with 
 big eyes and large ears, who must be wheedled or thrown out 
 of the window. Every rose has its worm, and every woman has 
 a swarm of relations who must be carefully cleared away, if we 
 wish to pluck some day the fruit of her beauty. There is not 
 one of them, even to country cousins of the third degree whom 
 we have never seen, that does not wish to preserve the spotless 
 purity of their dear cousin in all its whiteness. This is 
 nauseous, and I shall never have the patience to pull up all 
 the weeds, and lop away all the briars which fatally obstruct 
 the approaches to a pretty woman. 
 
 *' I am not fond of mammas, and I like young girls still less. 
 Further, I must confess that married women have but a very 
 slight attraction for me. They involve a confusion and a 
 mingling which are revolting to me ; I cannot tolerate the idea 
 of division. The woman who has a husband and a lover is a 
 prostitute for one of them, and often for both ; and, besides, I 
 could never consent to yield the first place to another. My 
 natural pride cannot stoop to such a degradation. I shall 
 never go because another man is coming. Though the woman 
 were to be compromised and lost, and we had to fight with 
 knives each with a foot upon her body, I should remain. 
 Private staircases, cupboards, closets, and all the machinery for 
 adultery would be of little service with me. 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 57 
 
 " I am not much smitten with what is called maidenly in- 
 genuousness, youthful innocence, purity of heart, and other 
 charming things which in verse are most effective ; that I call 
 simply nonsense, ignorance, imbecility, or hypocrisy. The 
 maidenly ingenuousness which consists in sitting on the very 
 edge of an easy chair, with arms pressed close to the body, and 
 eyes fixed on the point of the corset, and in not speaking with- 
 out permission from its grand-parents, the innocence which 
 has a monopoly of uncurled hair and white frocks, the purity of 
 heart which wears its dress high up at the neck because it has 
 as yet neither shoulders nor breast to show, do not, in truth, 
 appear wonderfully agreeable to me. 
 
 " I do not care much for teaching little simpletons to spell 
 out the alphabet of love. I am neither old enough nor de- 
 praved enough for that ; besides, I should succeed badly at 
 it, for I never could show anybody anything, even when I knew 
 best myself. I prefer women who read fluently, we arrive 
 sooner at the end of the chapter ; and in everything, but 
 especially in love, the end is what we have to consider. In 
 this respect, I am rather like those people who begin a novel 
 at the wrong end, read the catastrophe first of all, and then 
 go backwards to the first page. This mode of reading and 
 loving has its charm. Details are relished more when we are 
 at peace concerning the end, and the inversion introduces the 
 unforeseen. 
 
 " Young girls then, and married women are excluded from 
 the category. It must, therefore, be among the widows that 
 we are to choose our divinity. Alas ! though nothing else is 
 left to us, I greatly fear that neither will they afford us what 
 we wish. 
 
 " If I happened to love such a pale narcissus bathed in a 
 tepid dew of tears, and bending with melancholy grace over 
 the new marble tomb of some happily and recently departed 
 husband, I should certainly, and in a very short while, be as 
 miserable as was the defunct during his lifetime. Widows, 
 however young and charming they may be, have a terrible 
 drawback which other women are without ; if you are not on 
 
58 
 
 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 the very best terms with them, and a cloud passes across the 
 heaven of your love, they tell you at once v^ith a little superla- 
 tive and contemptuous air — 
 
 '♦ * Ah ! how strange you are to-day ! It is just like what he 
 was. When we quarrelled he used to speak to me in the very 
 same way ; it is curious, but you have the same tone of voice 
 and the same look ; when you are out of temper, you cannot 
 imagine how like my husband you are ; it is frightful.' 
 
 •' It is pleasant to have things of this sort said to your very 
 face ! There are some even who are impudent enough to 
 praise the departed one like an epitaph, and to extol his heart 
 and his leg at the expense of your leg and your heart. With 
 women who have only one or more lovers, you have at least 
 the unspeakable advantage of never hearing about your prede- 
 cessor, and this is a consideration of no ordinary interest. 
 Women have too great a regard for what is appropriate and 
 legitimate not to observe a diligent silence in such an event, 
 and all matters of the kind are consigned to oblivion as soon 
 as possible. It is an understood thing that a man is always a 
 woman's first lover. 
 
 " I do not think that an aversion so well founded admits of 
 any serious reply. It is not that I consider widows altogether 
 devoid of charm, when they are young and pretty and have 
 not yet laid aside their mourning. They have little languishing 
 airs, little ways of letting the arms droop, of arching the neck 
 and of bridling up like unmated turtle-doves ; a heap of charm- 
 ing affections sweetly veiled beneath the transparency of 
 crape, a well-ordered affectation of despair, skilfully managed 
 sighs, and tears which fall so opportunely and lend such lustre 
 to the eyes ! 
 
 " Truly, next to wine — perhaps even before it — the liquid I 
 love best to drink is a beautiful tear, clear and limpid, trembling 
 at the tip of a dark or a blonde eye-lash. What means are 
 there of resisting that ? We do not resist it ; and then black 
 is so becoming to women ! A white skin, poetry apart, turns to 
 ivory, snow, milk, alabaster, to everything spotless that there is 
 in the world for the use of composers of madrigals ; while a dark 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ca 
 
 skin has but a dash of brown that is full of vivacity and 
 fire. 
 
 " Mourning is a happy opportunity for a woman, and the 
 reason I shall never marry, is the fear lest my wife should get 
 rid of me in order to go into mourning for me. There are, 
 however, some women who cannot turn their sorrow to account, 
 and who weep in such a way that they make their noses red, 
 and distort their features like the faces that we see on fountains ; 
 this is a serious danger. There is need of many charms and 
 much art to weep agreeably ; otherwise, there is a risk of not 
 being comforted for a long time. Yet notwithstanding the 
 pleasure of making some Artemisia faithless to the shade of 
 her Mausolus, I cannot really choose from among this swarm 
 of lamenting ones her whose heart I shall ask in exchange for 
 my own. 
 
 " And now I hear you say : Whom will you take then ? 
 You will not have young girls, nor married women, nor widows. 
 You do not like mammas, and I do not suppose that you are 
 any fonder of grandmothers. Whom the deuce do you like ? 
 It is the answer to the charade, and if I knew it, I should not 
 torment myself so much. Up to the present, I have never loved 
 any woman, but I have loved and do love — love. Although I 
 have had no mistresses, and the women that I have had have 
 merely kindled desire, I have felt, and I am acquainted with 
 love itself. I have not loved this woman or that, one more 
 than another, but some one whom I have never seen, who must 
 live somewhere, and whom I shall find, if it please God. I 
 know well what she is like, and, when I meet her, I shall recog- 
 nize her. 
 
 " I have often pictured to myself the place where she dwells, 
 the dress that she wears, the eyes and hair that she has. I hear 
 her voice ; I should recognize her step among a thousand, and 
 if, by chance, some one uttered her name, I should turn round ; 
 it is impossible that she should not have one of the five or six 
 names that I have given her in my head. 
 
 " She is twenty-six years old, neither more nor less. She is 
 not without experience, and she is not yet satiated. It is a 
 
6o MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 charming age for making love as it ought to be, without 
 childishness and without libertinism. She is of medium 
 height. I like neither a giantess nor a dwarf. I wish to be able 
 to carry my goddess by myself from the sofa to the bed ; 
 but it would be disagreeable to have to look for her in the 
 latter. When raising herself slightly on tiptoe, her mouth 
 should reach my kiss. That is the proper height. As to her 
 figure, she is rather plump than thin. I am som.ething of the 
 Turk in this matter, and I should scarcely like to meet with a 
 corner when I expected a circumference ; a woman's skin 
 should be well filled, her flesh compact and firm, like the 
 pulp of a peach that is nearly ripe : and the mistress I shall 
 have is made just so. She is a blonde with dark eyes, white 
 like a blonde, with the color of a brunette, and a red and 
 sparkling smile. The lower lip rather large, the eyeball 
 swimming in a flood of natural moisture, her breast round, 
 small, and firm, her hands long and plump, her walk undula- 
 ting like a snake standing on its tail, her hips full and yield- 
 ing, her shoulders broad, the nape of her neck covered with 
 down : a style of beauty at once delicate and compact, grace- 
 ful and healthy, poetic and real ; a subject of Giorgione, 
 wrought by Rubens. 
 
 " Here is her costume : she wears a robe of scarlet or black 
 velvet, with slashings of white satin or silver cloth, an open 
 bodice, a large ruff ^ /^ Medici, a felt hat capriciously drawn 
 up like Helena Systerman's, and with long feathers curled and 
 crisp, a golden chain or a stream of diamonds about her neck, 
 and a quantity of large, variously enamelled rings on all her 
 fingers. 
 
 " I will not excuse her a ring or a bracelet. Her robe must 
 be literally of velvet or brocade ; at the very most, I might 
 permit her to stoop to satin. I would rather rumple a silk 
 skirt than a linen one, and let pearls and feathers fall from the 
 hair than natural flowers or a simple bow ; I know that the 
 lining of a linen skirt is often at least as tempting as that of a 
 silk one, but I prefer the silk one. 
 
 " Thus, in my dreams, I have given myself as mistresses 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. gl 
 
 many queens, many empresses, many princesses, many sultanas, 
 many celebrated courtesans, but never a commoner or a 
 shepherdess ; and amid my most vagrant desires, I have never 
 taken advantage of any one on a carpet of grass or in a bed of 
 serge d'Aumale. I consider beauty a diamond which should 
 be mounted and set in gold. I cannot imagine a beautiful 
 woman without a carriage, horses, serving-men, and all that 
 belongs to an income of twenty thousand a year ; there is a 
 harmony between beauty and wealth. One requires the other ; 
 a pretty foot calls for a pretty shoe, a pretty shoe calls for a 
 carpet, and a carriage, and all the rest of it. A beautiful 
 woman poorly dressed and in a mean house, is, to my mind, 
 the most painful sight that one could see, and I could not feel 
 love towards such a one. It is only the handsome and the 
 rich who can make love without being ridiculous or pitiable. 
 At this rate few people would be entitled to make love ; I 
 myself should be the first to be excluded ; but such is never- 
 theless my opinion. 
 
 " It will be in the evening, during a beautiful sunset, that 
 we shall meet for the first time ; the sky will have those clear 
 yellow and pale-green orange-colored tints that we see in the 
 pictures of the old masters ; there will be a great avenue ot 
 flowering chestnut trees and venerable elms filled with wood- 
 pigeons — fine trees of fresh dark green, giving a shade full of 
 mystery and dampness ; a few statues here and there, some 
 marble vases with their snowy whiteness standing out in relief 
 on the ground of green, a sheet of water with the familiar 
 swan, and, quite in the background, a mansion of brick and 
 stone, as in the time of Henri IV, with a peaked slate roof, 
 lofty chimneys, weathercocks on all the gables, and long narrow 
 windows. 
 
 " At one of these windows, the queen of my soul, in the dress 
 I have just described, leaning with an air of melancholy on the 
 balcony, and behind her a little negro holding her fan and 
 her parrot. You see that nothing is wanting, and that the 
 whole thing is perfectly absurd. The fair one drops her 
 glove ; I pick it up, kiss it, and bring it to her. We enter into 
 
62 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 conversation ; I display all the wit that I do not possess ; I say 
 charming things ; I am answered in the same way, I rejoin, 
 it is a display of fireworks, a luminous rain of dazzling words. 
 In short, I am adorable — and adored. Supper-time arrives ; I 
 am invited, and accept the invitation. What a supper, my dear 
 friend, and what a cook is my imagination ! The wine laughs 
 in the crystal, the brown and white pheasant smokes in the 
 blazoned dish ; the banquet is prolonged far into the night, and 
 you may be quite sure that I do not end the latter at my own 
 home. Is not this well conceived ? Nothing in the world can 
 be more simple, and it is truly very astonishing that it has not 
 come to pass ten times rather than once. 
 
 " Sometimes it is in a large forest. The hunt sweeps by ; 
 the horn sounds, and the pack giving tongue crosses the 
 path with the swiftness of lightning ; the fair one, in a riding 
 habit, is mounted on a Turkish steed as white as milk, and as 
 frisky and mettlesome as possible. Although she is an excellent 
 horsewoman, he paws the ground, caracoles, rears, and she has 
 all the trouble in the world to hold him in ; he gets the bit 
 between his teeth and takes her straight towards a precipice. 
 I fall there from the sky for the purpose, check the horse, take 
 the fainting princess in my arms, restore her, and bring her 
 back to the mansion. What well-born woman would refuse 
 her heart to a man who has risked his life for her ? Not 
 one ; and gratitude is a cross-road which very quickly leads 
 to love. 
 
 " You will, at all events, admit that when I go in for romance, 
 it is not by halves that I do so, and that I am as foolish as it 
 is possible to be. It is always so, for there is nothing in the 
 world more disagreeable than folly with reason in it. You will 
 almost admit that when I write letters they are volumes rather 
 than simple notes. In everything, I like what goes beyond 
 ordinary limits. That is the reason why I am fond of you. Do 
 not laugh too much at all the nonsense I have scribbled to you : 
 I am laying my pen aside in order to put it into practice ; for 
 I ever come back to the same refrain : I want to have a 
 mistress. I do not know whether it will be the lady of the park 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 5j 
 
 or the beauty of the balcony, but I bid you good-bye that I may 
 commence my quest. My resolution is taken. Should she, 
 whom I seek, be concealed in the remotest part of the kingdom 
 of Cathay or Samarcand, I shall manage to find her out. I 
 will let you know of the success or failure — I hope it will be 
 the success — of my enterprise. Pray for me, my dear friend. 
 For my own part, I am putting on my finest coat, and am 
 leaving the house determined not to return without a mistress 
 in accordance with my ideas. I have been dreaming long 
 enough ; to action now. 
 
 " P. S. — Send me some news of little D ; what has be- 
 come of him ? No one here knows anything about him ; and 
 give my compliments to your worthy brother and to the whole 
 family." 
 
II. 
 
 ELL ! my friend, I have come in again without 
 having been to Cathay, Cashmere, or Samarcand ; 
 but it is right to say that I have not a mistress 
 any more than before. Yet I had taken myself 
 by the hand and sworn my greatest oath that I would go 
 to the end of the world — and I have not even been to the 
 end of the town. I do not know how it is, but I have 
 never been able to keep my word to any one, even to myself: 
 the devil must have a hand in it. If I say, ' I shall go there 
 to-morrow,' I am sure to remain where I am ; if I purpose 
 going to the wine shop, I go to church ; If I wish to go to 
 church, the roads become as confused beneath my feet as 
 skeins of thread, and I find myself in quite a different place ; 
 I fast when I have determined on an orgie, and so on. Thus 
 I believe that my resolve to have a mistress is what prevents 
 me from having one. 
 
 " I must give you a detailed account of my expedition ; it is 
 quite worthy of the honors of narration. That day I had 
 spent two full hours at least at my toilet. I had my hair 
 combed and curled, the small amount of moustache that I 
 possess turned up and waxed, and with my usually pale face 
 animated somewhat by the emotion of desire, I was really not 
 so bad. At last, after looking at myself carefully in the glass 
 in different lights to see whether I had a sufficient handsome 
 and gallant appearance, I went resolutely out of the house, 
 with lofty countenance, chin in air, and one hand on my hip, 
 looking straight before me, making the heels of my boots rattle 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 5e 
 
 like an anspessade, elbowing the townsfolk, and with quite a 
 victorious and triumphal mien. 
 
 " I was like another Jason going to the conquest of the 
 Golden Fleece. But, alas ! Jason was more fortunate than I : 
 besides the conquest of the fleece he at the same time effected 
 the conquest of a beautiful princess, while, as for me, I have 
 neither princess nor fleece. 
 
 " I went away, then, through the streets, noticing all the 
 women, and hastening up to them and looking at them as 
 closely as possible when they seemed worth the trouble of an 
 examination. Some would assume their most virtuous air, and 
 pass without raising their eyes. Others would at first be sur- 
 prised, and then, if they had good teeth, would smile. Others 
 again would turn after a little to see me when they thought I 
 was no longer looking at them, and blush like cherries when 
 they found themselves face to face with me. 
 
 " The weather was fine, and there was a crowd of people out 
 walking. And yet I must confess, in spite of all the respect I 
 entertain towards that interesting half of the human race, that 
 which it is agreed to call the fair sex is devilishly ugly : in a 
 hundred women there was scarcely one that was passable. 
 This one had a moustache ; that one had a blue nose ; others 
 had red spots instead of eyebrows. One was not badly made, 
 but her face was covered with pimples. A second had a 
 charming head, but she might have scratched her ear with 
 her shoulder. A third would have shamed Praxiteles with the 
 roundess and softness of certain curves, but she skated on feet 
 that were like Turkish stirrups. Yet another displayed the most 
 magnificent shoulders that one could see : but as a set off, 
 her hands resembled for shape and size those enormous scarlet 
 gloves which haberdashers use as signs. And generally, what 
 fatigue was there on these faces ! how blighted, etiolated, and 
 basely worn by petty passions and petty vices ! What expres- 
 sions of envy, evil curiosity, greediness, and shameless coquetr}' ! 
 And how much more ugly is a woman who is not handsome 
 than a man who is not so ! 
 
 " I saw nothing good — except some grisettes. But there 
 
 5 
 
66 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 is more linen than silk to rumple in that quarter, and they 
 are no affair of mine. In truth, I believe that man, and 
 by man I also understand woman, is the ugliest animal on 
 earth. This quadruped who walks on his hind legs seems to 
 me singularly presumptuous in assigning quite as a matter of 
 right the first rank in creation to himself. A lion, or a tiger, is 
 handsomer than man, and many individuals in their species 
 attain to all the beauty that belongs to th^ir nature. This is 
 extremely rare among men. What abortions for an Antinoiis ! 
 what Gothones for a Phyllis ! 
 
 '' I am greatly afraid, my dear friend, that I shall never 
 embrace my ideal, and yet there is nothing extravagant or un- 
 natural in it. It is not the ideal of a third-form schoolboy. I 
 do not require globes of ivory, nor columns of alabaster, nor 
 traceries of azure ; and in its composition I have employed 
 neither lilies, nor snow, nor roses, nor jet,, nor ebony, nor coral 
 nor ambrosta, nor pearls, nor diamonds ; I have left the stars 
 of heaven in peace, and I have not unhooked the sun out of 
 season. It is almost a vulgar ideal, so simple is it ; and it 
 seems to me that with a bag or two of piastres I might find it 
 ready made and completely realized in no matter which bazaar 
 of Constantinople or Smyrna ; it would probably cost me less 
 than a horse or a thorough-bred dog. And to think that I shall 
 never attain to this — for I feel that I shall never do so ! It is 
 enough to madden one, and I fall into the finest passions in the 
 world against my fate. 
 
 "As for you — you are not so foolish as I am, and you are 
 fortunate ; you have simply given yourself up to your life with- 
 out tormenting yourself to shape it, and you have taken things 
 as they came. You have not sought happiness, and it has 
 sought you ; you are loved, and you love. I do not envy you — 
 you must not think that, at least — but when I reflect on 
 your bliss, I feel less joyous than I ought to be, and I say 
 to myself with a sigh that I would gladly enjoy similar 
 felicity. 
 
 " Perhaps my happiness has passed close to me, and in my 
 blindness I have not seen it. Perhaps the voice has spoken, 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 57 
 
 and the noise of the storms within me has prevented me from 
 hearing. 
 
 " Perhaps I have been loved in obscurity by some humble 
 heart that I have disregarded and broken. Perhaps I have 
 myself been the ideal of another, the lode-star of some soul in 
 suspense, the dream of a night and the thought of a day. Had 
 I looked to my feet, I might perhaps have seen some fair 
 Magdalene, v^ith her box of odors and her sweeping hair. I 
 passed along with my arms raised towards the heavens, desiring 
 to pluck the stars which fled from me, and disdaining to pick up 
 the little Easter daisy that was opening her golden heart to me 
 in the dewy grass. I have made a great mistake ; I have asked 
 from love something more than love, and that it could not give. 
 I forgot that love was naked ; I did not understand the mean- 
 ing of this grand symbol. I have asked from it robes of 
 brocade, feathers, diamonds, sublimity of soul, knowledge, 
 poetry, beauty, youth, supreme power — everything that is not 
 itself. Love can offer itself alone, and he who would obtain 
 from it aught else is not worthy to be loved. 
 
 " I have without doubt hastened too much : my hour has 
 not come ; God, who has lent me life, will not take it back 
 from me before I have lived. To what end give a lyre without 
 strings to a poet, or a life without love to a man ? God could 
 not do such an inconsistent thing ; and no doubt He will, at 
 His chosen time, place in my path her whom I am to love, and 
 by whom I am to be loved. But why has love come to me 
 before the mistress ? Why am I thirsty, yet without the spring 
 at which to quench my thirst ? or why can I not fly like the 
 birds of the desert to the spot where there is water? The 
 world is to me a Sahara without wells or date-trees. I have 
 not a single shady nook in my life where I can screen myself 
 from the sun : I endure all the fervor of passion without its 
 raptures and unspeakable delights ; I know its torments, and 
 am without its pleasures. I am jealous of what does not exist ; 
 I am disquieted by the shadow of a shadow ; I heave sighs 
 which have no motive ; I suffer sleeplessness which no wor- 
 shipped phantom comes to adorn ; I shed tears which flow to 
 
6S MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 the ground without being dried ; I give to the winds kisses 
 which are not returned ; I wear out my eyes trying to grasp 
 in the distance an uncertain and deceitful form ; I wait for 
 what is not to come, and I count the hours anxiously, as 
 though I had an appointment to keep. 
 
 "Whoever thou art, angel or demon, maid or courtesan, 
 shepherdess or princess, whether thou comest from the north 
 or from the south, thou whom I know not, and whom I love ! 
 oh ! force me not to wait longer for thee, or the flame will 
 consume the altar, and thou wilt find in the place of my heart 
 but a heap of cold ashes. Descend from the sphere where 
 thou art ; leave the crystal skies, consoling spirit, and come 
 thou to cast the shadow of thy mighty wings upon my soul. 
 Come thou, woman whom I will love, that I may close about 
 thee the arms that have been open for so long. Let the golden 
 doors of the palace wherein she dwells turn on their hinges ; 
 let the humble latch of her cottage rise ; let the branches in 
 the woods and the briars of the wayside untwine themselves ; 
 let the enchantments of the turret and the spells of the 
 magicians be broken ; let the ranks of the crowd be opened 
 up to suffer her to pass through. 
 
 " If thou comest too late, O my ideal ! I shall not have the 
 power left to love thee. My soul is like a dovecote full of 
 doves. At every hour of the day there flies forth some desire. 
 The doves return to the cote, but desires return not to the 
 heart. The azure of the sky becomes white with their count- 
 less swarms ; they pass away, through space, from world to 
 world, from clime to clime, in quest of some love where they 
 may perch and pass the night : hasten thy step, O my dream ! 
 or thou wilt find in the empty nest but the shells of the birds 
 that have flown away. 
 
 " My friend, companion of my childhood, to you alone 
 could I relate such things as these. Write to me that you 
 pity me, and that you do not reckon me a hypochondriac ; 
 afford me comfort, for never did I need it more : how enviable 
 are those who have a passion which they can satisfy ! The 
 drunkard never encounters cruelty in his bottle. He falls 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 69 
 
 from the tavern into the kennel, and is more happy on his 
 heap of filth than a king upon his throne. The sensualist goes 
 to courtesans for facile amours or shameless refinements. A 
 painted cheek, a short petticoat, a naked breast, a licentious 
 speech, and he is happy ; his eye grows white, his lip is wet ; 
 he attains the last degree of his happiness, he feels the rapture 
 of his coarse voluptuousness. The gamester has need but of 
 a green cloth and a pack of greasy and worn-out cards to 
 obtain the keen pangs, nervous spasms, and diabolical enjoy- 
 ments of his horrible passion. Such people as these may be 
 sated or amused ; but that is impossible for me. 
 
 " This idea has so taken possession of me that I no longer 
 love the arts, and poetry has no longer any charm for me. 
 What formerly transported me, makes not the least impression 
 on me. 
 
 " I begin to believe that I am in the wrong, and that I am ask- 
 ing more from nature and society than they can give. What 
 I seek has no existence, and I ought not to complain for 
 having failed to find it. Yet if the woman of our dreams is 
 impossible to the conditions of human nature, what is it that 
 causes us to love her only and none other, since we are men, 
 and our instinct should be an infallible guide ? Who has 
 given us the idea of this imaginary woman ? From what clay 
 have we formed this invisible statue ? Whence took we the 
 feathers that we have placed on the back of this chimera I 
 What mystic bird placed unnoted in some dark corner of our 
 soul the egg from which there has came forth our dream ? 
 What is this abstract beauty which we feel but cannot define ? 
 Why, in the presence of some woman who is often charming, do 
 we sometimes say that she is beautiful, while we think her very 
 ugly? 
 
 " Where is the model, the type, the inward pattern which 
 affords us the standard of comparison ? — for beauty is not an 
 absolute idea, and it can be estimated only by contrast. Have 
 we seen it in the skies, — in a star, — at a ball, under a mother's 
 shadow, the fresh bud of a leafless rose ? Was it in Italy or in 
 Spain ? Was it here or was it there, yesterday or a long time 
 
70 
 
 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 ago ? Was it the worshipped courtesan, the fashionable singer, 
 the prince's daughter ? A proud and noble head bending 
 beneath a weighty diadem of pearls and rubies ? A young and 
 childish face stooping among the nasturtiums and bindweeds at 
 the window ? To what school belonged that picture in which 
 this beauty stood out white and radiant amid the dark shadows ? 
 Was it Raphael who caressed the outline that pleases you ? 
 Was it Cleomenes who polished the marble that you adore ? 
 Are you in love with a Madonna or a Diana ? Is your ideal 
 an angel, a sylphid, or a woman ? 
 
 " Alas ! it is something of all this, and yet it is not this. 
 
 " Such transparency of tone, such freshness so charming and 
 full of splendor, such flesh wherein runs so much blood and 
 life, such beautiful flaxen hair spreading itself like a mantle of 
 gold, such sparkling smiles and such amorous dimples, such 
 shapes undulating like flames, such force and such suppleness, 
 such satin gloss and such rich lines, such plump arms and such 
 fleshy and polished backs — all this exquisite health belongs to 
 Rubens. Raphael alone could fill lineaments so chaste with 
 that pale amber color. What other, save he, curved those 
 long eye brows so delicate, and so black, and spread the fringes 
 of those eyelashes so modestly cast down ? Do you think that 
 Allegri goes for nothing in your ideal ? It is from him that the 
 lady of your thoughts has stolen the dull, warm whiteness that 
 enraptures you. She has stood for long before his canvases 
 to surprise the secret of that angelic and ever full-blown smile ; 
 she has modelled the oval of her face on the oval of a nymph 
 or a saint. That line of the hip which winds so voluptuously 
 belongs to the sleeping Antiope. Those fat, delicate hands 
 might be claimed by Danae or Magdalene. 
 
 " Dusty antiquity itself has provided many of the materials 
 for the composition of your young chimera. Those strong and 
 supple loins around which you twine your arms with so much 
 possion were sculptured by Praxiteles. That divinity has pur- 
 posely suffered the tip of her charming little foot to pass 
 through the ashes of Herculaneum that your idol may not be 
 lame. Nature has also contributed her share. Here and there 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 71 . 
 
 in the prism of desire you have seen a beautiful eye beneath a 
 window-blind, an ivory brow pressed against a pane, a smiling 
 mouth behind a fan. From a hand you have divined the arm, 
 and from an ankle, the knee. What you saw was perfect ; you 
 supposed the rest to be like what you saw, and you completed 
 it with portions of other beauties obtained elsewhere. 
 
 "Even the ideal beauty realized by the painters did not 
 satisfy you, and you have sought from the poets more rounded 
 curves, more ethereal forms, more divine charms, and more 
 exquisite refinements. You have besought them to give 
 breath and speech to your phantom, all their love, all their 
 musing, all their joy and sadness, their melancholy and their 
 morbidness, all their memories and all their hopes, their 
 knowledge and their passions, their spirit and their heart. 
 All this you have taken from them, and to crown the im- 
 possible you have added your own passion, your own spirit, 
 your own dream, and your own thought. The star has lent its 
 ray, the flower its fragrance, the palette its color, the poet his 
 harmony, the marble its form, and you your desire. 
 
 " How could a real woman, eating and drinking, getting up 
 in the morning and going to bed at night, however adorable 
 and full of charm she might otherwise be, compare with a 
 creature such as this ? It could not reasonably be expected, 
 and yet it is expected and sought. What strange blindness ? 
 It is sublime or absurd. How I pity and how I admire those 
 who pursue their dream in the teeth of all reality, and die 
 content if they have but once kissed the lips of their chimera ! 
 But what a fearful fate is that of a Columbus who has failed to 
 discover his world, and of a lover who has not found his 
 mistress ! 
 
 •' Ah ! if I were a poet my songs should be consecrated to 
 those whose lives have been failures ; whose arrows have missed 
 the mark, who have died without speaking the word they had 
 to utter and without pressing the hand that was destined for 
 them ; to all that has proved abortive and to all that has passed 
 unnoticed, to the stifled fire, to the barren genius, to the 
 unknown pearl in the depths of the sea, to all that has loved 
 
72 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 without return, and to all that has suffered with pity from none. 
 It would be a noble task. 
 
 *' Plato was right in wishing to banish you from his republic, 
 O ye poets ! for what evil have you wrought upon us ! How 
 yet more bitter has our wormwood been rendered by your 
 ambrosia ! and how yet more arid and desolate seems our life 
 to us after feasting our eyes on the vistas which you open up to 
 us of the infinite ! How terrible a conflict have your dreams 
 waged against our realities, and how have our hearts been 
 trodden and trampled on by these rude athletes during the 
 contest ! 
 
 " We have sat down like Adam at the foot of the walls of the 
 terrestrial paradise, on the steps of the staircase leading to the 
 world which you have created, seeing a light brighter than the 
 sun's flashing through the chinks of the door, and hearing 
 indistinctly some scattered notes of a seraphic harmony. 
 Whenever one of the elect enters or comes forth amid a flood 
 of splendor, we stretch our necks trying to see something 
 through the half-opened portal. The fairy architecture has 
 not its equal save in Arab tales. Piles of columns with arches 
 superposed, pillars twisted in spirals, foliage marvellously 
 carved, hollowed trefoils, porphyry, jaspar, lapis-lazuli — but 
 what know I of the transparencies and dazzling reflections, of 
 the profusion of strange gems, sardonyx, chrysoberyl, aqua 
 marina, rainbow-tinted opals, and azerodrach, with jets of 
 crystals, torches that would make the stars grow pale, a lus- 
 trous vapor, giddy and filled with sound — a luxury perfectly 
 Assyrian ! 
 
 " The door swings to again, and you see no more. Your 
 eyes, filled with corrosive tears, are cast down on this poor 
 earth so impoverished and wan, on these ruined hovels and on 
 this tattered race, on your soul, an arid rock where nothing 
 living springs, on all the wretchedness and misfortune of 
 reality. Ah ! if only we could fly so far, if the steps of that 
 fiery staircase did not burn our feet ; but, alas ! Jacob's ladder 
 can be ascended only by angels ! 
 
 " What a fate is that of the poor man at the gate of the rich ! 
 What keen irony is that of a palace facing a cottage— the ideal 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 73 
 
 facing the real, poetry facing prose ! What rooted hate must 
 wring the heart-strings of the wretched beings ! What gnash- 
 ings of teeth must sound through the night from their pallet, as 
 the wind brings to their ears the sighs of theorbos and viols of 
 love ! Poets, painters, sculptors, musicians, why have you lied 
 to us ? Poets, why have you told us your dreams ? Painters, 
 why have you fixed upon the canvas that impalpable phantom 
 which ascended and descended with your fits of passion 
 between your heart and your head, saying to us : ' This is a 
 woman ' ? Sculptors, why have you taken marble from the 
 depths of Carrara to make it express forever, and to the eyes 
 of all, your most secret and fleeting desire ? Musicians, why 
 have you listened during the night to the song of the stars and 
 the flowers, and noted it down ? Why have you made songs 
 so beautiful that the sweetest voice saying to us, ' I love you,' 
 seems hoarse as the grinding of a saw or the croaking of a 
 crow ? Curse you for impostors ! — and may fire from heaven 
 burn up and destroy all pictures, poems, statues, and musical 
 
 scores But this is a tirade of interminable length, and one 
 
 which deviates somewhat from the epistolary style. What a 
 dose ! 
 
 " I have given myself up nicely to lyrics, my dear friend, and 
 I have now been writing bombast for some time absurdly 
 enough. All this is very remote from our subject, which is, if 
 I remember rightly, the glorious and triumphant history of the 
 Chevalier d'Albert in his pursuit of the most beautiful princess 
 in the world, as the old romances say. But in truth the history 
 is so meagre that I am obliged to have recourse to digressions 
 and reflections. I hope that it will not be always so, and that 
 the romance of my life will before long be more tangled and 
 complicated than a Spanish imbroglio. 
 
 "After wandering from street to street, I determined to go 
 to one of my friends who was to introduce me to a house 
 where, I was told, a world of pretty women were to be seen — a 
 collection of real ideals, enough to satisfy a score of poets. 
 There were some to suit every taste — aristocratic beauties with 
 eagle looks, sea-green eyes, straight noses, proudly elevated 
 
74 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 chins, royal hands, and the walk of a goddess ; silver lilies 
 mounted on stalks of gold ; simple violets of pale color and 
 sweet perfume, with moist and downcast eye, frail neck, and 
 diaphanous flesh ; lively and piquant beauties, afifected beauties, 
 and beauties of all sorts ; for the house is a very seraglio, minus 
 the eunuchs and the kislar aga. 
 
 '•My friend tells me that he has already had five or six 
 flames there — quite as many. This seems to me prodigious in 
 the extreme, and I greatly fear that I shall not be equally 
 
 successful ; De C pretends that I shall, and that I shall 
 
 succeed beyond my wishes. According to him, I have only 
 one fault, which will be cured by time and by mixing in 
 society : it is that I esteem woman too much and women not 
 enough. It is quite possible that there may be some truth in 
 this. He says that I shall be quite lovable when I have got rid 
 of this little oddity. God grant it ! Women must feel that 
 I despise them, for a compliment which they would think 
 adorable and charming to the last degree in the mouth of 
 another, angers and displeases them as much as the most cut- 
 ting epigram when it proceeds from mine. This has probably 
 some connection with what De C objects to in me. 
 
 " My heart beat a little as I asceaded the staircase, and I 
 
 had scarcely recovered from my emotion when De C , 
 
 nudging me with his elbow, brought me face to face with a 
 woman of about thirty years of age, rather handsome, attired 
 with heavy luxury and an extreme affectation of childish 
 simplicity, which, however, did not prevent her from being 
 plastered with red paint like a coach wheel. It was the lady of 
 the house. 
 
 «• De C , assuming that shrill mocking voice so different 
 
 from his customary tones, and which he makes use of in society 
 when he wishes to play the charmer, said to her, with many 
 tokens of ironic respect, through which was visible the most 
 profound contempt : 
 
 " • This is the young fellow I spoke to you about the other 
 day — a man of the most distinguished merit. He belongs to 
 one of the best families, and I think that it cannot but be 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 75 
 
 agreeable to you to receive him. I have therefore taken the 
 liberty to introduce him to you.* 
 
 " 'You have certainly done quite right, sir,' replied the lady, 
 mincing in the most exaggerated fashion. Then she turned 
 to me, and, after looking me over with the corner of her eye 
 after the manner of a skilled connoisseur, and in a way that 
 made me blush to the tips of my ears, said, * You may consider 
 yourself as invited once for all, and come as often as you have 
 an evening to throw away.' 
 
 " I bowed awkwardly enough, and stammered out some 
 unconnected words, which could not have given her a lofty 
 opinion of my talents. The entrance of some other people re- 
 leased me from the irksomeness inseparable from an introduc- 
 tion, and De C , drawing me into a corner of the window, 
 
 began to lecture me soundly. 
 
 " ' The deuce ! You are going to compromise me. I 
 announced you as a phoenix of wit, a man of unbridled imagi- 
 nation, a lyric poet, everything that is most transcendent and 
 impassioned, and there you stand like a blockhead without 
 uttering a word ! What a miserable imagination ! I thought 
 your humor more fertile than that. But come, give your 
 tongue the rein, and chatter right and left. You need not say 
 sensible and judicious things ; on the contrary, that might do 
 you harm. Speak — that is the essential thing — speak much 
 and long. Draw attention to yourself; cast aside all fear and 
 modesty. Get it well into your head that all here are fools or 
 nearly so, and do not forget that an orator who would succeed 
 cannot despise his hearers enough. What do you think of the 
 mistress of the house ? ' 
 
 " • She displeases me considerably already ; and, though I 
 spoke to her for scarcely three minutes, I felt as bored as if I 
 had been her husband.' 
 
 " • Ah ! is that what you think of her ? * 
 
 " ' Why, yes.' 
 
 " ' Your dislike to her is then quite insurmountable ? Well, 
 so much the worse. It would have been only decent to have 
 had her if but for a month. It is the proper thing to do, and 
 
^(y MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 a respectable young fellow cannot be introduced into society 
 except through her.' 
 
 " ' Well ! I will have her,' I replied with a rather piteous air, 
 • since it is necessary. But is it so essential as you seem to 
 think .? ' 
 
 " ' Alas ! yes, it is most indispensable, and I am going to 
 explain the reasons to you. Madame de Themines is at pres- 
 ent in vogue ; she has all the absurdities of the day after a 
 superior fashion, sometimes those of to-morrow, but never those 
 of yesterday. She is quite in the swim. People wear what she 
 wears, and she never wears what has been worn already. 
 Furthermore she is rich, and her equipages are in the best 
 taste. She has no wit, but much jargon ; she has keen likings 
 and little passion. People please her, but do not move her. 
 She has a cold heart and a licentious head. As to her soul — 
 if she has one, which is doubtful — it is of the blackest, and 
 there is no wickedness or baseness of which it is incapable ; 
 but she is very dexterous, and she keeps up appearances just so 
 far as is necessary to prevent anything being proved against 
 her. Thus she will go to bed with a man without ado, and will 
 not write him the simplest note. Accordingly her most inti- 
 mate enemies can find nothing to say about her except that she 
 rouges too highly, and that certain portions of her person have 
 not in truth all the roundness that they seem to possess — which 
 is false.* 
 
 " ' How do you know ? ' 
 
 '"What a question ! In the only way one knows things of 
 the kind, by finding out for myself.' 
 
 " ' Then you have also had Madame de Thymines ? ' 
 
 "'Certainly? Why not? It would have been most unbe- 
 coming if I had not had her. She has been of great service to 
 me, and I am very grateful for it.* 
 
 '"I do not understand the nature of the services she can 
 have rendered you.* 
 
 " ' Are you really a fool then ? ' said De C , looking at 
 
 me with the most comical air in the world. ' Upon my word, 
 I am afraid so ? Must I tell you the whole story ? Madame 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 77 
 
 de Thymines is reputed, and deservedly so, to have special 
 knowledge on certain subjects, and a young man that she has 
 taken up and kept for a while may present himself boldly every- 
 where, and be sure that he will not remain for long without 
 having an affair on hand, and two rather than one. Besides 
 this unspeakable advantage, there is another no less important, 
 which is, that as soon as the women of the world here see that 
 you are the recognized lover of Madame de Thymines, they will 
 make it a pleasure and a duty, even if they have not the least 
 liking for you, to carry you off from a woman who is the fashion 
 as she is. Instead of the advances and proceedings that would 
 have been necessary, you will not know where to choose, and 
 you will of necessity become the object of all the allurements 
 and affectations imaginable. 
 
 " ' Nevertheless, if she inspires you with too great a repug- 
 nance, do not take her. You are not exactly obliged to do so, 
 though it would have been polite and proper. But make a 
 choice quickly, and attack her who pleases you most, or who 
 seems to afford you most facilities, for delay would lose you 
 the benefit of novelty, and the advantage it gives you for a few 
 days over all the cavaliers here. All these ladies have no con- 
 ception of those passions which have their birth in intimacy, 
 and develop slowly with respect and silence. They are for 
 thunderbolts and occult sympathies — something marvellously 
 well imagined to save the tedium of resistance, and all the pro- 
 lixity and reputation which sentiment mingles with the romance 
 of love, and which only serves to delay the conclusion uselessly. 
 These ladies are very economical of their time, and it ap- 
 pears so precious to them that they would be grieved to leave 
 a single minute unemployed. They have a desire to oblige 
 mankind, which cannot be too highly praised, and they love 
 their neighbor as themselves, which is quite according to the 
 Gospel, and very meritorious. They are very charitable creat- 
 ures, who would not for anything in the world cause a man to 
 die of despair. 
 
 " ' There must be three or four already smitten in your 
 favor, and I would advise you in a friendly way to pursue 
 
78 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 your point with spirit over these instead of amusing yourself 
 gossiping with me in the embrasure of a window, which will 
 not advance you to any great extent.' 
 
 " ' But, my dear De C , I am quite new to this kind of 
 
 thing. I am utterly without the power to distinguish at first 
 sight a woman who is smitten from one who is not ; and I might 
 make strange blunders if you did not assist me with your ex- 
 perience.* 
 
 " ♦ You are really as primitive as you can be. I did not think 
 that it was possible to be as pastoral and bucolic as that in the 
 present blessed century ! What the devil do you do, then, with 
 the large pair of black eyes that you have there, and that would 
 have the most crushing effect if you knew how to make use of 
 them ? 
 
 "'Just look yonder a moment at that little woman in rose, 
 playing with her fan in the corner near the fireplace. She has 
 been eyeing you for a quarter of an hour with the most signifi- 
 cant fixity and assiduity. There is not another in the world 
 who can be indecent after such a superior fashion, and display 
 such noble shamelessness. She is greatly disliked by the women 
 who despair of ever attaining to such a height of impudence, 
 but, to compensate for this, she is greatly liked by the men, 
 who find in her all the piquancy of a courtesan. She is in truth 
 charmingly depraved, and full of wit, spirit, and caprice. She 
 is an excellent mistress for a young man with prejudices. In a 
 week she will rid your conscience of all scruples, and corrupt 
 your heart in such a way that you will never be a subject for 
 ridicule or elegy. She has inexpressibly practical ideas about 
 everything ; she goes to the bottom of things with a swiftness 
 and certainly that are astonishing. She is algebra incarnate, is 
 that little woman. She is precisely what is needed by a dreamer 
 and an enthusiast. She will soon cure you of your vaporish 
 idealism, and she will do you a great service. She will more- 
 over do it with the greatest pleasure, for it is an instinct with 
 her to disenchant poets.* 
 
 " My curiosity being aroused by De C 's description, I 
 
 left my retreat, and gliding through the various groups, ap- 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 7g 
 
 preached the lady, and looked at her with much attention. 
 She was perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six years of age. Her 
 figure was small, but well made, though somewhat inclined to 
 embonpoint. Her arm was white and plump, her hand noble, her 
 foot pretty and even too delicate, her shoulders full and glossy, 
 and her breast small, but what there was of it very satisfactory, 
 and giving a favorable idea of the remainder. As to her hair, it 
 was splendid in the extreme, of a blue black, like that of a 
 jackdaw's wing. The corner of her eye was turned up rather 
 high towards the temple, her nose slender with very open 
 nostrils, her mouth humid and sensual, a little furrow in the 
 lower lip, and an almost imperceptible down where the upper 
 was united to it. And with all this there was such life, anima- 
 tion, health, force, and such an indefinable expression of lust 
 skilfully tempered with coquetry and intrigue, that she was in 
 short a very desirable creature, and more than justified the 
 eager likings which she had inspired and still inspired every 
 day. 
 
 "I wished for her ; but I nevertheless understood that, agree- 
 able as she was, she was not the woman who would realize my 
 desire, and make me say, ' At last I have a mistress ! * 
 
 " I returned to De C and said to him : ' I like the lady 
 
 well enough, and I shall perhaps make arrangements with her. 
 But before saying anything definite and binding, I should be 
 very glad if you would be kind enough to point me out these in- 
 dulgent beauties who had the goodness to be smitten with me, 
 so that I may make a choice. It would please me too, seeing 
 that you are acting as demonstrator to me here, if you would add 
 a little account of them with the nomenclature of their qualities 
 and their defects, the manner in which they should be attacked, 
 and the tone to adopt with them in order that I may not look 
 too much like a provincial or an author.' 
 
 " ' Willingly,' said De C . ' Do you see that beautiful, 
 
 melancholy swan, displaying her neck so harmoniously, and 
 moving her sleeves as though they were wings ? She is modesty 
 itself— everything that is chastest and most maidenly in the 
 v/orld. She has a brow of snow, a heart of ice, the looks of a 
 
8o MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 Madonna, the smile of a simpleton, her dress is white, and her 
 soul is the same. She puts nothing but orange-blossoms or 
 leaves of the water-lily in her hair, and she is connected with 
 the earth only by a thread. She has never had an evil thought, 
 and she is profoundly ignorant of how a man differs from a 
 woman. The Holy Virgin is a Bacchante beside her, which, 
 however, does not prevent her from having had more lovers 
 than any other woman of my acquaintance, and that is saying 
 a good deal. Just examine this discreet person's breast for a 
 moment ; it is a little masterpiece, and it is really difficult to 
 show so much while hiding more. Say, is she not, with all her 
 restrictions and all her prudery, ten times more indecent than 
 that good lady on her left, who is making a grand show of two 
 hemispheres, which if they were joined together, would make a 
 map of the world of natural size, or than the other on her right, 
 whose dress is open almost to her stomach, and who is parad- 
 ing her nothingness with charming intrepidity ? 
 
 " ' This maidenly creature, if I am not greatly mistaken, has 
 already computed in her head the amount of love and passion 
 promised by your paleness and black eyes, and what makes me 
 say so is the fact that she has not once, apparently, at least, 
 looked towards you ; for she can move her eyes with so much 
 art, and look out of the corner of them so skilfully, that nothing 
 escapes her ; one would think that she could see out of the back 
 of her head, for she knows perfectly well what is going on be- 
 hind her. She is a female Janus. If you would succeed with 
 her you must lay swaggering and victorious manners aside. You 
 must speak to her without looking at her, without making any 
 movement, in an attitude of contrition, and in suppressed and 
 respectful tones. In this way you may say to her what you 
 will, provided it be suitably veiled, and she will allow you the 
 greatest freedom at first of speech, and afterwards of action. 
 Only be careful to look at her with tenderness when her own 
 eyes are cast down, and speak to her of the sweets of platonic 
 love and of the intercourse of the soul, while employing the 
 least platonic and ideal pantomime in the world ! She is very 
 sensual and very susceptible ; embrace her as much as you 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. gi 
 
 like ; but, when most freely intimate with her, do not forget to 
 call her madame two or three times in every sentence. She 
 quarrelled with me because when I was in her own bed with 
 her I addressed her familiarly when saying something or other. 
 The devil ! a woman is not virtuous for nothing.* 
 
 " ' I have no great desire to hazard the adventure, after 
 what you have told me. A prudish Messalina ! the union is 
 monstrous and strange.* 
 
 " ' It is as old as the world, my dear fellow ! It is to be 
 seen every day, and nothing is more common. You are wrong 
 not to have fixed upon her. She has one great charm, which 
 is, that with her a man always seems to be committing mortal 
 sin, and the least kiss appears perfectly damnable, while in the 
 case of others he scarcely thinks the sin a venial one and often 
 even thinks nothing of it at all. That is why I kept her longer 
 than any other mistress. I should have had her still if she 
 had not left me herself. She is the only woman who has 
 anticipated me, and I have a certain respect for her on that 
 account. She has little voluptuous refinements of the most 
 exquisite delicacy, and she possesses the great art of making it 
 appear that she has wrested from her what she grants very 
 willingly — a circumstance which gives each of her favors 
 the charm of a rape. You will find in the world ten of her 
 lovers who will swear to you on their honor that she is the 
 most virtuous creature in existence. She is just the contrary. 
 It is a curious study to anatomize virtue of that kind on a 
 pillow. Being forewarned you will not run any risk, and you 
 will not have the awkwardness to fall really in love with her.* 
 
 " ' And how old is this adorable person ? ' I asked, for, 
 examining her with the most scrupulous attention, I found it 
 impossible to determine her age. 
 
 '• ' Ah ! how old is she ? That is just the mystery, and God 
 alone knows. I who pique myself on telling a woman's age to 
 within a minute have never been able to find out. I merely 
 estimate approximately that she is perhaps from eighteen to 
 thirty-six years of age. I have seen her in full dress, in dis- 
 habille, and between the sheets, and I can tell you nothing 
 
 6 
 
32 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 with respect to this. My knowledge is at fault ; the age 
 which she seems particularly to be is eighteen, yet that cannot 
 be the case. She has the body of a maiden and the soul of 
 a gay woman, and to become so deeply and so speciously 
 depraved, much time or genius is necessary ; it is needful to 
 have a heart of bronze in a breast of steel : she has neither 
 one nor the other, and I therefore think that she is thirty-six ; 
 but practically I do not know.' 
 
 " • Has she no intimate friend who could give you informa- 
 tion on this point ? ' 
 
 " ' No. She arrived in this town two years ago. She came 
 from the country, or from abroad, I forget which — an admirable 
 situation for a woman who Jcnows how to turn it to account. 
 With such a face as hers she might give herself any age she 
 liked, and date only from the day that she arrived here.' 
 
 " ' Nothing could be more pleasant, especially when some 
 impertinent wrinkle does not come to give you the lie, and 
 time, the Great Destroyer, has the goodness to lend himself to 
 this falsification of the certificate of baptism/ 
 
 " He showed me some others who, according to him, would 
 favorably receive all the petitions that it might please me to 
 address to them, and would treat me with most particular 
 philanthropy. But the woman in rose at the corner of the 
 fire-place, and the modest dove who served as her antithesis, 
 were incomparably better than all the rest : and if they had 
 not all the qualities which I require, they had, in appearance 
 at least, some of them. 
 
 " I conversed the whole evening with them, especially with 
 the latter, and was careful to cast my ideas in the most re- 
 spectful mould. Although she scarcely looked at me, I 
 thought that I saw her eyes gleam sometimes beneath their 
 curtain of eyelashes, and, when I ventured some rather lively 
 gallantries, clothed, however, in most modest guise, a little 
 blush, checked and suppressed, pass two or three lines below 
 her skin, similar to that produced by a rose-colored liquid 
 when poured into a semi-opaque cup. Her replies were, in 
 general, sober and circumspect, yet acute and full of point 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 83 
 
 and they suggested more than they expressed. All this was 
 intermingled with omissions, hints, indirect allusions, each 
 syllable having its purpose, and each silence its import. 
 Nothing in the world could have been more diplomatic and 
 more charming. And yet, whatever pleasure I may have 
 taken in it for the moment, I could not keep up a conversa- 
 tion of the kind for long. One must be perpetually on the 
 alert and on one's guard, and what I like best of all in a chat 
 is freedom and familiarity. 
 
 We spoke at first of music, which led us quite naturally to 
 speak of the Opera, next of women, and then of love, a sub- 
 ject in which it is easier than in any other to find means of 
 passing from the general to the particular. We vied with 
 each other in making love ; you would have laughed to listen 
 to me. In truth, Amadis on the poor Roche was but a 
 pedant without fire beside me. There was generosity, and ab- 
 negation, and devotion enough to cause the deceased Roman, 
 Curtius, to blush for shame. I really did not think myself 
 capable of such transcendent balderdash and bombast. 
 
 " I playing at the most quintessential Platonism — does it 
 not strike you as a most facetious thing, as the best comedy 
 scene that could be presented ? And then, good heavens ! 
 the perfectly devout air, the little, demure, and hypocritical 
 ways that I displayed ! I looked most innocent, and any 
 mother who had heard me reasoning would not have hesi- 
 tated about letting me go to bed with her daughter, and any 
 husband would have entrusted his wife to me. On that 
 evening I appeared more virtuous, and was less so than ever 
 in my life before. I thought that it was more difficult than 
 that to play the hypocrite, and to say things without in the 
 least believing them. It must be easy enough, or I must be 
 very apt to have succeeded so agreeably the first time. In 
 truth I have some fine moments. 
 
 •' As to the lady, she said many things that were most in- 
 geniously detailed, and which in spite of the appearance of 
 frankness which she threw into them, denoted the most con- 
 summate experience. You can form no idea of the subtlety 
 
84 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 of her distinctions. That woman would saw a hair into three 
 parts lengthways, and would disconcert all the angelic and 
 seraphic doctors. For the rest she speaks in such a manner 
 that it is impossible to believe that she has even the shadow 
 of a body. She is immaterial, vaporous, and ideal enough to 
 
 make you break your arms, and if De C had not warned 
 
 me about the ways of the animal, I should assuredly have 
 despaired of success, and have stood piteously aside. And 
 when a woman tells you for two hours, with the most dis- 
 engaging air in the world, that love lives only by privations 
 and sacrifices, and other fine things of the sort, how the devil 
 can you decently hope to persuade her some day to place her- 
 self between a pair of sheets with you to foment your com- 
 plexion, and to see whether you are both made alike ? 
 
 " In short, we separated on very friendly terms, with re- 
 ciprocal congratulations on the loftiness and purity of our 
 sentiments. 
 
 " The conversation with the other one was, as you may 
 imagine, of quite an opposite description. We laughed as 
 much as we spoke. We made fun very wittily of all the 
 women who were there ; but I am mistaken when I say ; 
 
 • We made fun of them very wittily.' I should have said that 
 
 * she * did so, for a man can never laugh effectively at a 
 woman. For my part, I listened and approved, for it would 
 have been impossible to draw a more lively sketch, or to color 
 it more highly. It was the most curious gallery of caricatures 
 that I have ever seen. In spite of the exaggerations, one could 
 
 see the truth underlying it. De C was quite right ; the 
 
 mission of this woman is to disenchant poets. She has about 
 her an atmosphere of prose in which a poetical thought can- 
 not live. 
 
 " She is charming and sparkling with wit, yet beside her 
 one thinks only of base and vulgar things. While speaking to 
 her I felt a crowd of desires incongruous and impracticable in 
 the place where I was, such as to call for wine and gee drunk, 
 to place her on one of my knees and kiss her breast, to raise 
 the hem of her skirt and see whether her garter was above 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 85 
 
 or below the knee, to sing a ribald refrain with all my might, 
 to smoke a pipe, or to break the windows — in short, to do any- 
 thing. All the animal part, all the brute, rose within me ; I 
 would willingly have spit on the Iliad of Homer ; and I would 
 have gone on my knees to a ham. I can now quite understand 
 the allegory of the companions of Ulysses being changed into 
 swine by Circe. Circe was probably some lively creature like 
 my little woman in rose. 
 
 "Shameful to relate, I experienced great delight in feeling 
 myself overtaken by brutishness ; I made, no resistance, but 
 assisted it as much as I could — so natural is depravity to man, 
 and so much mire is there in the clay of which he is formed. 
 
 " Yet for one moment I feared the canker that was seizing 
 upon me, and wished to leave my corrupter ; but the floor 
 seemed to have risen to my knees, and it was as though I were 
 set fast in my place. 
 
 " At last I took it on me to leave her, and, the evening being 
 far advanced, I returned home much perplexed and troubled, 
 and without very well knowing what to do. I hesitated 
 between the prude and her opposite. I found voluptuousness 
 in one and piquancy in the other, and after a most minute and 
 searching self-examination, I found, not that I loved them both, 
 but that I wished sufficiently for them both, for one as much as 
 for the other, to dream about them and be preoccupied with 
 the thought of them. 
 
 ** To all appearance, my friend, 1 shall have one of these two 
 women, and perhaps both ; and yet I confess to you that the 
 possession of them will only half satisfy me. It is not that they 
 are not very pretty, but at sight of them nothing cried out 
 within me, nothing panted, nothing said : ' It is they.' I did 
 not recognize them. Nevertheless, I do not think that I shall 
 meet with anything much better so far as birth and beauty are 
 
 concerned, and De C advises me to go no further. I shall 
 
 certainly take his advice, and one or other of them will be my 
 mistress, or the devil will take me before very long ; but at the 
 bottom of my heart a secret voice reproaches me for being false 
 to my love, and for stopping thus at the first smile of a woman 
 
86 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 for whom I care nothing, instead of seeking untiringly through 
 the world, in cloisters and in evil places, in palaces and in 
 taverns, for her who, whether she be princess or serving-maid, 
 nun or courtesan, has been made for me and destined to me 
 by God. 
 
 " Then I say to myself that I am fancying chimeras, and that 
 it is after all just the same whether I sleep with this woman or 
 with another ; that it will not cause the earth to deviate by a 
 hair's breadth from its path, or the four seasons to reverse their 
 order ; that nothing in the world can be of smaller moment ; 
 and that I am very simple to torment myself with such crotch- 
 ets. This is what I say to myself ; but it is all in vain ! I am 
 not more tranquil nor resolved than before. 
 
 " This, perhaps, results from the fact that I live a great deal 
 with myself, and that the most petty details in a life so monot- 
 onous as mine assume too great an importance. I pay too 
 much attention to my living and thinking. I hearken to the 
 throbbing of my arteries, and the beatings of my heart ; by dint 
 of close attention I detach my most fleeting ideas from the 
 cloudy vapor in which they float, and give them a body. If I 
 acted more I should not perceive all these petty things, and 
 I should not have time to be looking at my soul through a 
 microscope, as I do the whole day long. The noise of action 
 would put to flight this swarm of idle thoughts which flutter 
 through my heart, and stun me with the buzzing of their wings. 
 Instead of pursuing phantoms I should grapple with realities ; 
 I should ask from women only what they can give — pleasure ; 
 and I should not seek to embrace some fantastic ideal attired 
 in cloudy perfections. 
 
 " This intense straining of the eye of my soul after an 
 invisible object has distorted my vision. I cannot see what is 
 for my gazing at what is not ; and my eye, so keen for the 
 ideal, is perfectly near-sighted in matters of reality. Thus I 
 have known women who are declared charming by everybody, 
 and who appear to me to be anything but that. I have greatly 
 admired pictures generally considered bad, and odd or unintel- 
 ligible verses have given me more pleasure than the most 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 87 
 
 worthy productions. I should not be astonished if, after offer- 
 ing up so many sighs to the moon, staring so often at the stars, 
 and composing so many elegies and sentimental apostrophes, 
 I were to fall in love with some vulgar prostitute or some ugly 
 old woman. That would be a fine downfall ! Reality will 
 perhaps revenge herself in this way for the carelessness with 
 which I have courted her. Would it not be a nice thing if I 
 were to be smitten with a fine romantic passion for some awk- 
 ward cross-patch or some abominable trollop ? Can you see 
 me playing the guitar beneath a kitchen window, and ousted 
 by a scullion carrying the pug of an old dowager who is getting 
 rid of her last tooth ? 
 
 " Perhaps, too, finding nothing in the world worthy- of my 
 love, I shall end by adoring myself, like the late Narcissus of 
 egotistical memory. To secure myself against so great a mis- 
 fortune, I look into all the mirrors and all the brooks that I 
 come across. In truth, with my reveries and aberrations, I am 
 tremendously afraid of falling into the monstrous or unnatural. 
 It is a serious matter, and I must take care. 
 
 "Good-bye, my friend ; I am going directly to see the lady 
 in rose, lest I should give myself up to my customary medita- 
 tions. I do not ihink that we pay much attention toentelechia, 
 and I imagine that anything we may do will have no connection 
 with spiritualism, although she is a very spiritual creature : I 
 carefully roll up the pattern of my ideal mistress, and put it 
 away in a drawer, that I may not use it as a test with her. I 
 wish to enjoy peacefully the beauties and the merits that she 
 possesses. I wish to leave her attired in a robe that suits her, 
 without trying to adapt for her the vesture that I have cut out 
 beforehand, and at all hazards for the lady of my thoughts, 
 These are very wise resolutions ; I do not know whether I shall 
 keep them. Once more, good-bye." 
 
III. 
 
 AM the established lover of the lady in rose ; it 
 is almost a calling or a charge, and gives one 
 stability in society. I am no longer like a 
 schoolboy seeking good luck among the grand- 
 mothers, and not venturing to utter a madrigal to a woman 
 unless she is a centenarian. I perceive that since my installa- 
 tion people think more of me, that all the women speak to me 
 with jealous coquetry, and put themselves very much about on 
 my account. The men, on the contrary, are colder, and there 
 is something ot hostility and constraint in the few words that 
 we exchange. They feel that they have in me a rival who is 
 already formidable, and who may become more so. 
 
 " I have been told that many of them had criticised my 
 manner of dress with bitterness, and said that it was too 
 effeminate ; that my hair was curled and glossed over with 
 much care ; that this, joined to my beardless face, gave me the 
 most ridiculously foppish appearance ; that for my garments I 
 affected rich and splendid materials which had the odor of 
 the theatre about them, and that I was more like an actor 
 than a man — all the commonplaces in fact that people utter 
 in order to give themselves the right of being dirty and of 
 wearing sorry and badly-cut coats. But all this only 
 serves to whitewash me, and all the ladies think that my 
 hair is the handsomest in the world, and that my refinements 
 in dress are in the best taste, and they seem very much in- 
 clined to indemniiy me for the expense I have gone to on 
 their account — for they are not so foolish as to believe that 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. gg 
 
 all this elegance is merely intended for my own personal 
 adornment. 
 
 '• The lady of the house seemed at first somewhat piqued by 
 my choice, which she had thought must of necessity have fallen 
 upon herself, and for a few days she harbored some bitterness 
 on account of it (towards her rival only ; for she has always spoken 
 in the same way to me), which manifested itself in sundry little 
 ' My dears,' uttered in that sharp, jerky manner which is the ex- 
 clusive property of women, and in sundry unkind opinions re- 
 specting her toilet given in as loud a tone as possible, such as : 
 ' Your hair is dressed a great deal too high, and does not suit 
 your face in the least ; ' or, ' Your bodice is creased under the 
 arms ; whoever made that dress for you ? ' or, ' You look very 
 we'aried ; you seem quite changed ; ' and a thousand other small 
 observations, to which the other failed not to reply when an 
 opportunity presented itself with all the malice that could be 
 desired ; and if the opportunity did not come soon enough, 
 she herself provided one for her own use, and gave back more 
 than she had received. But another object diverting the 
 attention of the slighted Infanta, this little wordy war soon 
 came to an end, and things returned to their usual order. 
 
 " I have told you summarily that I am the established lover 
 of the lady in rose, but that is not enough for so exact a man as 
 you. You will no doubt ask me what she is called. As to 
 her name, I will not tell it to you ; but if you like, to facilitate 
 the narrative, and in memory of the color of the dress in 
 which I saw her for the first time, we will call her Rosette ; it 
 is a pretty name, and it was thus that my little puss was called. 
 
 " You will wish to know in detail — for you. love precision in 
 matters of this kind — the history of our loves with this fair 
 Bradamant, and by what successive gradations I passed from 
 the general to the particular, and from the condition of simple 
 spectator to that of actor ; how from being an indifferent 
 onlooker I have become a lover. I will gratify your wish 
 with the greatest pleasure. There is nothing sinister in our 
 romance. It is rose-colored, and no tears are shed in it save 
 those of pleasure ; no delays or repetitions are to be met 
 
gQ MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 with in it ; and everything advances tow^ards the end with the 
 haste and swiftness so strongly recommended by Horace ; it 
 is a truly French romance. 
 
 " Nevertheless, do not imagine that I carried the fortress at 
 the first assault. The Princess, though very humane towards 
 her subjects, is not so lavish of her favors as one might 
 think at first. She knows the value of them too well not to 
 make you buy them ; and she further knows too well the 
 eagerness given to desire by apt delay, and the flavor given 
 to pleasure by a show of resistance, to surrender herself to you 
 all at once, however strong the liking may be with which you 
 have inspired her. 
 
 •' To tell you the story in full I must go a little further back. 
 I gave you a sufficiently circumstantial narrative of our first 
 interview. I had one or two more in the same house, or per- 
 haps three, and then she invited me to go and see her ! I did 
 not wait lo be pressed, as you may well believe ; I went at 
 first with discretion, then somewhat oftener, then oftener still, 
 and at last whenever I felt so inclined, and I must confess that 
 that happened at least three or four times a day. The lady, 
 after a few hours' absence, always received me as if I had just 
 returned from the East Indies ; I was very sensible of this, and 
 it obliged me to show my gratitude in a manner marked with 
 the greatest gallantry and tenderness in the world, to which 
 she responded to the best of her ability. 
 
 " Rosette, since we have agreed to call her so, is a woman 
 of great sense, and one who understands men admirably ; and 
 although she delayed the conclusion of the chapter for some 
 time, I was never once out of temper with her. This is truly 
 wonderful, for you know the fine passions I fall into when I 
 have not at once what I desire, and when a woman exceeds the 
 time that I have assigned her, in my head, for her surrender. 
 
 " I do not know how she managed it, but from the first in- 
 terview she gave me to understand that I should have her, and 
 I was more sure of it than if I had had the promise written 
 and signed with her own hand. It will be said, perhaps, that 
 the boldness and ease of her manners left the ground clear 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ^I 
 
 for the rashness of hopes. I do not think that this can be the 
 true reason : I have seen some women whose extraordinary 
 freedom excluded in a measure the very shadow of a doubt, 
 who have yet not produced this effect upon me, and with whom 
 I have experienced timidity and disquietude when they were at 
 the least out of place. 
 
 *' What makes me in general much less amiable with the 
 women I wish to have than with those about whom I am un- 
 concerned, is the passionate waiting for the opportunity, and 
 the uncertainty in which I am respecting the success of my 
 undertaking ; this makes me gloomy, and throws me into a 
 delirium, which robs me of many of my talents and much of 
 my presence of mind. When I see the hours which I had des- 
 tined for a different employment escaping one by one, anger 
 seizes me in spite of myself, and I cannot prevent myself from 
 saying very sharp and bitter things, which are sometimes even 
 brutal, and which throw things back a hundred leagues. 
 With Rosette I felt nothing of all this ; never, even when 
 she was resisting me the most, had I the idea that she wished 
 to escape my love. I allowed her quietly to display all her 
 little coquetries, and I endured with patience the somewhat 
 long delays which it pleased her to inflict on my ardor. Her 
 severity had something smiling in it which consoles you as 
 much as possible, and in her most Hyrcanian cruelties you had 
 a glimpse of a background of humanity which hardly allowed 
 you to have any serious fear. 
 
 " Virtuous women, even when they are least so, have a cross 
 and disdainful appearance which to me is intolerable. They 
 always look as if they were ready to ring the bell and have you 
 kicked out of the house by their lackeys; and I really think 
 that a man who takes the trouble to pay his addresses to a 
 woman (which as it is, is not so agreeable as one would fain 
 believe) does not deserve to be looked at in that way. 
 
 " Our dear Rosette has no such looks— and, I assure you, 
 that is to her advantage. She is the only woman with whom 
 I have been myself, and I have the conceit to say that I have 
 never been so good. My wit is freely displayed, and by the 
 
92 
 
 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 dexterity and the fire of her replies she has made me discover 
 more than I credited myself with, and more, perhaps, than I 
 really have. It is true that I have not been very logical ; that 
 is scarcely possible with her. It is not, however, that she has 
 
 not her poetical side, in spite of what De C said about it ; 
 
 but she is so full of life, and force, and movement, she seems 
 so well off in the atmosphere in which she is, that one has no 
 wish to leave it in order to ascend into the clouds. She fills 
 real life so agreeably, and makes such an amusing thing of it 
 for herself and others, that dreamland has nothing better to 
 offer you. 
 
 " What a wonderful thing ! I have known her now for nearly 
 two months, and during that time I have felt weary only when 
 I was not with her. You will acknowledge that it is no ordi- 
 nary woman that can produce such an effect, for usually women 
 produce just the reverse effect upon me, and please me much 
 more at a distance than when close at hand. 
 
 " Rosette has the best disposition in the world, with men, 
 be it understood, for with women she is as wicked as a devil. 
 She is gay, lively, alert, ready for everything, very original in 
 her way of speaking, and always with some charming and un- 
 expected drolleries to say to you. She is a delicious compan- 
 ion, a pretty comrade with whom one sleeps, rather than a mis- 
 tress, and if I had a tew years more and a few romantic ideas 
 less, it would be all one to me, and I should even esteem my- 
 self the most fortunate mortal in existence. But — but — a par- 
 ticle which announces nothing good, and this little limiting 
 devil of a word is unfortunately more used than any other in all 
 human languages ; — but I am a fool, an idiot, a veritable ninny 
 who can be satisfied with nothing, and who is always conjuring 
 up difficulties where none exist, and I am only half happy in- 
 stead of being wholly so. Half is a good deal for this world 
 of ours, and yet I do not find it enough. 
 
 " In the eyes of all the world I have a mistress whom many 
 wish for and envy me, and whom no one would disdain. My 
 desire is therefore apparently fulfilled, and I have no longer 
 any right to pick quarrels with fate. Yet I do not seem to 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. g^ 
 
 have a mistress ; I understand by reasoning that such is the 
 case, but I do not feel it to be so, and if some one were to ask 
 me unexpectedly whether I had one, I believe I should answer 
 ' No.' Nevertheless, the possession of a woman who has beauty 
 and wit constitutes what at all times and in all lands has been and 
 is called having a mistress, and I do not think that any other 
 mode exists. This does not prevent* me from having the 
 strangest doubts on the subject, and it has gone so far that if 
 several persons were to conspire to affirm to me that I am not 
 Rosette's favored lover, I should, in spite of the palpable evi- 
 dence to the contrary, end by believing them. 
 
 " Do not imagine from what I have told you that I do not 
 love her, or that she displeases me in any way. On the con- 
 trary, I love her very much, and I find her, as all the rest of 
 the world will find her, a pretty, piquant creature. I simply do 
 not feel that I have her, and that is all. And yet no woman 
 has ever given me so much pleasure, and if ever I have under- 
 stood what voluptuousness is, it was in her arms. A single 
 kiss from her, the chastest of her endearments, makes me quiver 
 to the soles of my feet, and sends all my blood flowing back to 
 my heart. Account for all this if you can. It is just as I tell 
 you. But the heart of man is full of such absurdities, and if it 
 were necessary to reconcile all its contradictions, we should 
 have enough to do. 
 
 " What can be the origin of this ? In truth I do not know. 
 
 " I see her the whole day, and even the whole night if I 
 wish. I give her all the caresses that I please ; I have her 
 naked or dressed in town or in country. Her complaisance is 
 inexhaustible, and she enters thoroughly into all my caprices, 
 however whimsical they may be. One evening I took a fancy 
 to possess her in the midst of the drawing-room, with the lustre 
 and candles lighted, a fire on the hearth, the easy-chairs 
 arranged as if for a great evening reception, she dressed for a 
 ball with her bouquet and fan, all her diamonds on her fingers 
 and neck, plumes on her head, and in the most splendid cos- 
 tume possible, while I myself was dressed like a bear. She 
 gave her consent to it. When all was ready the servants were 
 
p4 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 greatly surprised to receive an order not to allow anybody to 
 come up ; they did not seem to understand it in the least, and 
 they went off with a dazed look which made us laugh greatly. 
 Without doubt they thought that their mistress was distinctly 
 mad, but what they did or did not think was of little moment 
 to us. 
 
 " It was the drollest evening of my life. Imagine to yourself 
 the appearance I must have presented with my plumed hat 
 under my paw, rings on all my claws, a little sword with a silver 
 guard, and a sky-blue ribbon at the hilt. 1 approached the 
 fair one, and after making her a most graceful bow, seated 
 myself by her side, and laid siege to her in all due form. The 
 affected madrigals, the exaggerated gallantries which I ad- 
 dressed to her, all the jargon of the occasion was singularly 
 set off by passing through my bear's muzzle, for I had a superb 
 head of painted cardboard, which, however, I was soon obliged 
 to throw under the table, so adorable was my deity that even- 
 ing, and so greatly did I long to kiss her hand, and something 
 better than her hand. The skin followed close on the head, 
 for, not being accustomed to play the bear, I was greatly stifled 
 in it and more so than was necessary. 
 
 " The ball costume had then a fine time of it, as you may 
 believe ; the plumes fell like snow around my beauty, her 
 shoulders soon emerged from the sleeves, her bosom from the 
 corset, her feet from the shoes, and her legs from the stock- 
 ings. The necklaces became unstrung, and rolled on the floor, 
 and I think that never was more fresh a dress more piteously 
 crushed and rumpled ; the dress was of silver gauze, with a 
 lining of white satin. Rosette displayed on this occasion a 
 heroism which was quite beyond that of her sex, and which 
 gave me the highest opinion of her. She looked on at the 
 pillage of her toilet as though she were a disinterested specta- 
 tor, and not for a single instant did she show the least regret 
 for her dress and her laces ; on the contrary, she was madly 
 gay, and herself assisted in tearing and breaking what could 
 not be untied or unhooked quickly enough for my pleasure 
 and hers. 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. pj 
 
 " Do you not think this fine enough to be recorded in history 
 beside the most splendid deeds of the heroes of antiquity ? 
 The greatest proof of love that a woman can give her lover is 
 not to say to him : ' Take care not to rumple me or stain me/ 
 especially if her dress is nevv^. A new dress is a stronger 
 motive for a husband's security than is commonly believed. 
 Rosette must worship me, or she possesses a philosophy 
 superior to that of Epictetus. 
 
 " However, I think that I paid Rosette the worth of her dress 
 and more in a coin which is not the less esteemed and prized, 
 that it does not pass current with the shopkeepers. So much 
 heroism well deserved a like reward. Besides, like a generous 
 woman, she well repaid what I gave her. I had a mad, almost 
 convulsive pleasure, such as I did not believe myself capable 
 of feeling. Those sounding kisses mingled with piercing 
 laughs, those quivering and most impatient caresses, all that 
 acrid and irritating voluptuousness, that pleasure tasted incom- 
 pletely by reason of dress and situation, but keener a hundred 
 times than if it had been without impediment, had such an 
 effect upon my nerves that I was seized with spasms, from 
 which I recovered with difficulty. 
 
 " You cannot imagine the tender and proud air with which 
 Rosette looked at me, and the manner, full of joy and dis- 
 quietude, in which she busied herself about me. Her face 
 still radiated the pleasure which she felt at producing such an 
 effect upon me, while at the same time her eyes, bathed in 
 gentle tears, bore witness to the fear that she experienced at 
 seeing me ill, and the interest that she took in my health. 
 Never has she appeared to me so beautiful as she did at that 
 moment. There was something so maternal and so chaste in 
 her look, that I totally forgot the more than Anacreonic scene 
 which had just taken place, and, kneeling before her, asked 
 permission to kiss her hand. This she granted me with singu* 
 lar gravity and dignity. 
 
 •' Assuredly such a woman is not so depraved as De C 
 
 pretends, and as she has often seemed to myself. Her corrup- 
 tion is of the mind, and not of the heart. 
 
96 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 "I have quoted this scene to you from among twenty others, 
 and it seems to me that after this a man might, without extreme 
 conceit, believe himself to be a woman's lover. Well, it is 
 what I do not do. I had scarcely returned home when the 
 same thought again took possession of me, and began to 
 torment me as usual. I remembered perfectly all that I had 
 done and seen done. The most trivial gestures and attitudes, 
 all the most petty details, were very clearly delineated in my 
 memory ; 1 recalled everything, to the lightest inflections of 
 voice and the most fleeting shades of voluptuousness ; only it 
 did not seem to me that all these things had happened to 
 myself rather than to another. I was not sure that it was not 
 an illusion, a phantasmagoria, a dream, or that I had not read 
 it somewhere, or even that it was not a tale composed by 
 myself, just as similar ones had often been made by me. I 
 was afraid of being the dupe of my own credulity and the butt 
 of some hoax ; and in spite of the witness borne by my lassi- 
 tude, and the material proofs that I had slept elsewhere, I would 
 have been ready to believe that I had put myself under my 
 bedclothes at my usual time, and had slept till morning. 
 
 " I am very unfortunate in not having the capacity to acquire 
 the moral certainty of a thing, the physical certainty of which I 
 possess. Generally the reverse happens, and it is the fact that 
 proves the idea. I would fain prove the fact to myself by the 
 idea ; I cannot do so ; though this is singular enough, it is the 
 case. The possession of a mistress depends upon myself up to 
 a certain point, but I cannot bring myself to believe that I have 
 one while having her all the time. If I have not the necessary 
 faith within me, even for something so evident as this, it is as 
 impossible for me to believe in so simple a fact as it is for 
 another to believe in the Trinity. Faith is not acquired ; it is 
 purely a gift, a special grace from Heaven. 
 
 " Never has any one desired so strongly as myself to live the 
 life of others, and to assimilate another nature ; never has any 
 one succeeded less in doing so. Whatever I may do, other 
 men are to me scarcely anything but phantoms, and I have no 
 sense of thier existence ; yet it is not the desire to recognize 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. p7 
 
 their life and to participate in it that is wanting in me. It is 
 the power, or the lack of real sympathy for anything. The 
 existence or non-existence of a thing or person does not 
 interest me sufficiently to affect me in a sensible and convinc- 
 ing manner. 
 
 " The sight of a woman or a man who appears to me in real 
 life leaves no stronger traces upon my soul than the fantastic 
 vision of a dream. About me there moves, with dull humming 
 sound, a pale world of shadows and semblances false or true, 
 in the midst of which I am as isolated as possible, for none of 
 them acts on me for good or evil, and they seem to me to be 
 of quite a different nature. If I speak to them, and they reply 
 to me with something like common-sense, I am as much sur- 
 prised as if my dog or my cat were suddenly to begin to speak 
 and mingle in the conversation. The sound of their voice 
 always astonishes me, and I would be very ready to believe 
 that they are merely fleeting appearances whose objective 
 mirror I am. Inferior or superior, I am certainly not of their 
 kind. 
 
 '* There are moments when I recognize none save God 
 above me, and others, when I judge myself scarcely the equal 
 of the wood-louse beneath its stone, or the mollusc on its sand- 
 bank ; but in whatever state of mind I may be, whether lofty 
 or depressed, I have never been able to persuade myself that 
 men were really my fellows. When people call me ' Sir,* or in 
 speaking about me, say, * this man,' it appears very singular to 
 me. Even my name seems to me but an empty one, and not 
 in reality mine, yet no matter in how low a tone it be pro- 
 nounced amidst the loudest noise, I turn suddenly with a con- 
 vulsive and feverish eagerness for which I have never been 
 able to account to myself. Can it be the dread of finding in 
 this man who knows my name, and to whom I am no longer 
 one of the crowd, an antagonist or an enemy ? 
 
 "It is especially when I have been living with a woman 
 that I have most felt the invincible repugnance of my nature 
 to any alliance or mixture. I am like a drop of oil in a glass 
 of water. It is in vain that you turn and move the latter ; the 
 
 7 
 
gS MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 oil can never unite with it. It will divide itself into a hundred 
 thousand little globules which will reunite and mount again to 
 the surface as soon as there is a moment's calm. The drop of 
 oil and the glass of water — such is my history. Even volupt- 
 uousness, that diamond chain which binds all creatures to- 
 gether, that devouring fire which melts the rocks and metals 
 of the soul, and makes them fall in tears, as material fire causes 
 iron and granite to melt, has never, all powerful as it is, suc- 
 ceeded in taming and affecting me. Yet my senses are very 
 keen, but my soul is to my body a hostile sister, and the hap- 
 less couple, like every possible couple, lawful or unlawful, live 
 in a state of perpetual war. A woman's arms, the closest bonds 
 on earth, so people say, are very feeble ties, so far as I am 
 concerned, and I have never been further removed from my 
 mistress than when she was pressing me to her heart. I was 
 stifled, that was all. 
 
 " How many times have I been angered with myself ! How 
 many efforts have I made not to be as I am ! How have I 
 exhorted myself to be tender, amorous, impassionate ! How 
 often have I taken my soul by the hair and dragged her to my 
 lips in the midst of a beautiful kiss ! Whatever I did she 
 always retreated as soon as I released her. "What torture for 
 this poor soul to be present at the debauches of my body, and 
 to sit everlasting at banquets where she has nothing to eat ! 
 
 "It was with Rosette that I resolved, once for all, to try 
 whether I was not decidedly unsociable, and whether I could 
 take sufficient interest in the existence of another to believe 
 in it. I pushed my experiments to the point of exhaustion, 
 and I did not become much clearer amid my doubts. With 
 her, pleasure is so keen that often enough the soul is, if not 
 moved, at least diverted, and this somewhat prejudices the 
 exactness of my observations. But after all I came to see 
 that it did not pass beyond the skin, and that I had only an 
 epidermic enjoyment in which the soul took no part save from 
 curiosity. I have pleasure, because I am young and ardent ; 
 but this pleasure comes to me from myself and not from 
 another. The cause of it is in myself rather than in Rosette. 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. gg 
 
 " My efforts are in vain, I cannot come out of myself. I am 
 still what I was, something, that is to say, very wearied and 
 very wearisome, and this displeases me greatly. I have not 
 succeeded in getting into my brain the idea of another, into my 
 soul the feeling of another, into my body the pain or joy of 
 another. I am a prisoner within myself, and all invasion is 
 impossible. The prisoner wishes to escape, the walls would 
 most gladly fall in, and the gates open up to let him through, 
 but some fatality or other invincibly keeps each stone in its 
 place, and each bolt in its socket. It is as impossible for 
 me to admit any one to see me as it is for me to go to see 
 others. I can neither pay visits nor receive them, and I 
 live in the most mournful isolation in the midst of the 
 crowd. My bed perhaps is not widowed, but my heart is so 
 always. 
 
 '• Ah ! to be unable to increase one's self by a single particle, 
 a single atom ; to be unable to make the blood of others flow 
 in one's veins ; to see ever with one's own eyes, and not more 
 clearly, nor further, nor differently ; to hear sounds with the 
 same ears and the same emotion ; to touch with the same 
 fingers ; to perceive things that are varied with an organ 
 that is invariable ; to be condemned to the same quality of 
 voice, to the return of the same tones, the same phrases, and 
 the same words, and to be unable to go away, to avoid one's 
 self, to take refuge in some corner where there is no self-pursuit ; 
 to be obliged to keep one's self always, to dine with it, and go 
 to bed with it ; to be the same man for twenty new women ; 
 to drag into the midst of the strangest situations in the drama 
 of our life a reluctant character whose rdle you know by heart ; 
 to think the same things, and to have the same dreams : what 
 torment, what weariness ! 
 
 " I have longed for the horn of the brothers Tangut, the hat 
 of Fortunatus, the staff of Abaris, the ring of Gyges ; I would 
 have sold my soul to snatch the magic wand from the hand of 
 a fairy ; but I have never wished so much for anything as, like 
 Tiresias the soothsayer, to meet on the mountain the serpents 
 which cause a change of sex : and what I envy most in the 
 
lOo MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 monstrous and whimsical gods of India are their perpetual 
 avatars and their countless transformations. 
 
 " I began by desiring to be another man ; then, on reflect- 
 ing that I might by analogy nearly foresee what I should feel, 
 and thus not experience the surprise and the change that I had 
 looked for, I would have preferred to be a woman. This idea 
 has always come to me when I had a mistress who was not 
 ugly — for to me an ugly woman is a man — and at the mo- 
 ments of pleasure I would willingly have changed my part, 
 for it is very provoking to be unaware of the effect that one 
 produces, and to judge of the enjoyment of others only by one's 
 own. These thoughts, and many others, have often given me, 
 at times when it was most out of place, a meditative and dreamy 
 air, which has led to my being accused, really most undeserv- 
 edly, of coldness and infidelity. 
 
 ♦' Rosette, who very happily does not know all this, believes 
 me the most amorous man on earth ; she takes this impotent 
 transport for a transport of passion ; and to the best of her 
 ability she lends herself to all the experimental caprices that 
 enter my head. 
 
 " I have done all that I could to convince myself that I 
 possess her. I have tried to descend into her heart, but I 
 have always stopped at the first step of the staircase, at her 
 skin or on her mouth. In spite of the intimacy of our cor- 
 poreal relations, I am very sensible that there is nothing in 
 common between us. Never has an idea similar to mine 
 spread its wings in that young and smiling head ; never has 
 that heart, full of life and fire, that heaves with its throbbing 
 so firm and pure a breast, beaten in unison with my heart. My 
 soul has never united with that soul. Cupid, the god with 
 hawk's wings, has not kissed Psyche on her beautiful ivory 
 brow. No ! this woman is not my mistress. 
 
 " If you knew all that I had done to compel my soul to 
 share in the love of my body, the frenzy with which I have 
 plunged my mouth into hers, and steeped my arms in her hair, 
 and how closely I have strained her round and supple form ! 
 Like the ancient Salmacis enamored of the young Her- 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. lOi 
 
 maphrodite, I strove to blend her body with mine ; I drank her 
 breath and the tepid tears caused by voluptuousness to over- 
 flow from the brimming chalice of her eyes. The more our 
 bodies were entwined, and the closer our embraces, the less 
 I loved her. My soul, seated mournfully, gazed with an air 
 of pity on this lamentable marriage to which she was not 
 invited, or veiling her face in disgust, wept silently beneath 
 the skirt of her cloak. All this comes perhaps from the fact 
 that in reality I do not love Rosette, worthy as she is of being 
 loved, and wishful as I am to love her. 
 
 " To get rid of the idea that I was myself, I devised very 
 strange surroundings, in which it was altogether improbable 
 that I would encounter myself, and not being able to cast my 
 individuality to the dogs, I endeavored to place it in such a 
 different element that it would recognize itself no longer. I 
 had but indifferent success, and this devil of a self pursues me 
 obstinately ; there are no means of getting rid of it. I cannot 
 resort to telling it like other intruders that I am out, or that I 
 have gone to the country. 
 
 " I have had my mistress in the bath, and I did my best to 
 play the Triton. The sea was a very large tub of marble. As 
 to the Nereid, what was seen of her accused the water, all 
 transparent as it was, of yet not being sufficiently so for the 
 exquisite beauty of what it concealed. I have had her at night 
 by the light of the moon in a gondola with music. 
 
 " This would be common enough at Venice, but it is not at 
 all so here. In her carriage, flying along at full galop, amid 
 the noise of wheels, with leaps and joltings,, now lit up by 
 the lamps, and now plunged into the most profound darkness. 
 This is a mode not devoid of a certain piquancy, and I ad- 
 vise you to try it. But I was forgetting that you are a vener- 
 able patriarch, and that you do not go in for such refinements. 
 I have come into her house through the window with the key 
 of the door in my pocket. I have made her come to me at 
 noon-day ; and, in short, I have compromised her in such a 
 fashion that nobody now (myself, of course, excepted) has any 
 doubt that she is my mistress. 
 
102 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 " By reason of all these devices, which, if I were not so 
 young, would look like the expedients of a worn-out libertine. 
 Rosette worships me chiefly and above all others. She sees 
 in them the eagerness of a petulant love which nothing can 
 restrain, and which is the same notwithstanding the diversity 
 of times and places. She sees in them the constantly reviving 
 effect of her charms, and the triumph of her beauty ; truly, I 
 wish that she were right, and to be just, it is neither my fault 
 nor hers that she is not. 
 
 " The only respect in which I wrong her is that I am my- 
 self. If I were to tell her this, the child would very quickly 
 reply that it is just my greatest merit in her eyes ; which would 
 be more kind than sensible. 
 
 " Once — it was at the beginning of our union — I believed 
 that I had attained my end, for one minute I believed that I 
 had loved — I did love. Oh ! my friend, I have never lived 
 save during that minute, and had that minute been an hour 
 I should have become a god. We had both gone out on 
 horseback, I on my dear Ferragus, she on a mare as white as 
 snow, and with the look of a unicorn, so slim were its legs and 
 so slender its neck. We were following a large avenue of elms 
 of prodigious height ; the sun was descending upon us luke- 
 warm and golden, sifted through the slashings in the foliage ; 
 lozenges of ultramarine sparkled here and there through the 
 dappled clouds, great lines of pale blue strewed the edge of 
 the horizon, changing into an apple-green of exquisite tender- 
 ness when they met with the orange-colored tints of the west. 
 The aspect of the heavens was charming and strange ; the 
 breeze brought to us an odor of wild flowers that was ravish- 
 ing in the extreme. From time to time a bird rose before us, 
 and crossed the avenue singing. 
 
 " The bell of a village that was not visible was gently ringing 
 the Angelus, and the silver sounds, which reached us, weakened 
 by the distance, were infinitely sweet. Our animals were at a 
 walk, and were going so equally side by side, that one was not 
 in advance of the other. My heart expanded, and my soul 
 overflowed my body. I had never been so happy. I said 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 103 
 
 nothing, nor did Rosette, and yet we had never understood 
 each other so well. We were so close together that my leg 
 was touching the body of Rosette's horse. I leaned over to her, 
 and passed my arm about her waist ; she made the same move- 
 ment on her side, and laid back her head upon my shoulder. 
 Our lips clung together ; oh ! what a chaste and delicious 
 kiss ! Our horses were still walking with their bridles floating 
 on their necks. I felt Rosette's arm relax, and her loins yield 
 more and more. For myself I was growing weak, and was 
 ready to swoon. Ah ! I can assure you that at that moment 
 I thought little of whether I was myself or another. We 
 went thus as far as the end of the avenue, when the noise of 
 feet made us abruptly resume our positions ; it was some people 
 of our acquaintance, also on horseback, who came up and spoke 
 to us. If I had had pistols, I believe that I should have fired 
 upon them. 
 
 " I looked at them with a gloomy and furious air, which 
 must have appeared very singular to them. After all, I was 
 wrong to become so angry with them, for they had, without 
 intending it, done me the service of interrupting my pleasure 
 at the very moment when, by reason of its own intensity, it 
 was on the point of becoming a pain, or of sinking beneath 
 its own violence. The science of stopping in time is not 
 regarded with all the respect which is its due. Sometimes 
 when lying with a woman you pass your arm beneath her 
 waist ; it is at first most voluptuous to feel the gentle warmth 
 of her body, the soft and velvety flesh of her loins, the 
 polished ivory of her side, and to close your hand upon her 
 swelling and quivering breast. The fair one falls asleep in 
 this amorous and charming position ; the curve of her loins 
 becomes less pronounced, her breast becomes calm : her 
 sides heave with the larger and more regular respiration of 
 sleep ; her muscles relax, her head rolls over in her hair. 
 
 " Your arm, however, is pressed more than before, and you 
 begin to preceive that it is a woman and not a sylphid ; yet 
 you would not take away your arm for anything in the world, 
 and for this there are many reasons. First, it is rather 
 
I04 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 dangerous to awake a woman with whom you are sleeping ; 
 you must be prepared to substitute for the delicious dream 
 that she has no doubt been having a reality more delicious 
 still. Secondly, by asking her to raise herself that you may 
 withdraw your arm, you tell her indirectly that she is heavy 
 and in your way, which is not polite, or perhaps you gave her 
 to understand that you are weak or fatigued — a most humiliat- 
 ing thing for you, and one which will prejudice you infinitely 
 in her mind. Thirdly, you believe that as you have experienced 
 pleasure in this position, you may do so again by maintaining 
 it, and in this you are mistaken. The poor arm finds itself 
 caught beneath the mass that oppresses it, the blood stops, the 
 nerves twitch, and the numbness pricks you with its millions 
 of needles. You are a sort of a little Milo of Crotona, and the 
 mattress of your bed and the back of your divinity represent 
 with sufficient exactness the two parts of the tree which are 
 joined together again. Day comes at last to release you from 
 this martyrdom, and you leap down from this rack with more 
 eagerness than any husband displays in descending from the 
 nuptial stage. 
 
 " Such is the history of many passions. 
 
 " It is that of all pleasures. 
 
 " Be that as it may, in spite of the interruption, or by reason 
 of it, never did such voluptuousness pass over my head ; I 
 really felt myself to be another. The soul of Rosette had 
 entered in its integrity into my body. My soul had left me, 
 and filled her heart as her own soul filled mine. No doubt 
 they had met on the way in that long equestrian kiss, as Rosette 
 afterwards called it (which by the way annoyed me), and had 
 crossed each other, and mingled together as intimately as is 
 possible for the souls of two mortal creatures on a grain of 
 perishable mud. 
 
 " The angels must surely embrace one another thus, and the 
 true paradise is not in the sky, but on the lips of one we love. 
 
 " I have waited in vain for a similar moment, and I have tried, 
 but without success, to provoke its return. We have very often 
 gone to ride in the avenue of the wood during beautiful sun- 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. I05 
 
 sets ; the trees had the same verdure, the birds were singing 
 the same song, but the sun looked dull to us, and the foliage 
 yellowed; the singing of the birds seemed harsh and discord- 
 ant, for there was no longer harmony within ourselves. We 
 have brought our horses to a walk, and we have tried the same 
 kiss. Alas ! our lips only were united, and it was but the 
 spectre of the old kiss. The beautiful, the sublime, the divine, 
 the only true kiss that I have ever given and received in my 
 life had disappeared forever. Since that day I have always 
 returned from the wood with a depth of inexpressible sadness. 
 Rosette, gay and playful as she usually is, cannot escape 
 from the impression of this, and her reverie is betrayed by a 
 little, delicately wrinkled pout, which at the least is worth her 
 smile. 
 
 "There is scarcely anything but the fumes of wine, and the 
 brilliancy of wax-candles that can recall me from these 
 melancholy thoughts. We both drink like persons condemned 
 to death, silently and continually, until we have reached the 
 necessary dose ; then, we begin to laugh and to make fun most 
 heartily of what we call our sentimentality. 
 
 "We laugh — because we cannot weep. Ah ! who will cause 
 a tear to spring in the depths of my exhausted eye ? 
 
 " Why had I so much plasure that evening ? It would be 
 very difficult to say. Nevertheless I was the same man and 
 Rosette the same woman. It was not the first time that either 
 of us was out riding. We had seen the sun set before, and 
 the spectacle had only affected us like the sight of a picture 
 which is admired according as its colors are more or less 
 brilliant. There are more avenues of elms and chestnut trees 
 then one in the world, and it was not the first that we were 
 passing through. Who, then, caused us to find in it so 
 sovereign a charm, who metamorphosed the dead leaves into 
 topazes, and the green leaves into emeralds, who had gilded 
 all those fluttering atoms, and changed into pearls all those 
 drops of water scattered on the sward, who gave so sweet a 
 harmony to the sounds of a usually discordant bell, and to 
 the carolling of sundry little birds ? There must have been 
 
I06 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 some very searching poetry in the air, since even our horses 
 appeared to be sensible of it. 
 
 " Yet nothing in the world could have been more pastoral 
 and more simple. Some trees, some clouds, five or six blades 
 of wild thyme, a woman, and a ray of the sun falling across it 
 all like a golden chevron on a coat of arms. I had, further, 
 no sensation of surprise or astonishment ! I knew where I was 
 very well. I had never come to the place before, but I recol- 
 lected perfectly both the shape of the leaves and the position 
 of the clouds ; the white dove which was crossing the sky was 
 flying away in the same direction — the little silvery bell which 
 I heard for the first time had very often tinkled in my ear, and 
 its voice seemed to me like the voice of a friend ; without 
 having ever been there I had many times passed through the 
 avenue with princesses mounted on unicorns ; my most vo- 
 luptuous dreams used to resort thither every evening, and my 
 desires had given kisses there precisely similar to that exchanged 
 by Rosette and myself. 
 
 " The kiss had no novelty to me, but it was such a one as I 
 had thought that it would be. It was perhaps the only time in 
 my life that I was not disappointed, and that the reality 
 appeared to me as beautiful as the ideal. If I could find a 
 woman, a landscape, a piece of architecture, anything answering 
 to my intimate desire as perfectly as that minute answered to 
 the minute of my dreams, I should have no reason to envy the 
 gods, and I would very willingly resign my stall in paradise. 
 But in truth, I do not believe that a man of flesh could with- 
 stand such penetrating voluptuousness for an hour — two kisses 
 such as that one would pump out an entire existence, and 
 would make a complete void in soul and body. This is not a 
 consideration that would stop me, for, not being able to prolong 
 my life indefinitely, I am indifferent to death, and I would 
 rather die of pleasure than of old age or weariness. 
 
 ** But this woman does not exist. Yes, she does exist. It 
 may be that I am separated from her merely by a partition. 
 It may be that I have jostled her yesterday or to-day. 
 
 •' What is lacking in Rosette that she is not that woman ? 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 107 
 
 She lacks my belief in her. What fatality is it that causes me 
 ever to have for my mistress women whom I do not love. Her 
 neck is smooth enough to hang on it necklaces of the finest 
 workmanship ; her fingers are tapering enough to do honor to 
 the finest and richest rings ; rubies would blush with pleasure 
 to sparkle at the rosy extremity of her delicate ear ; her waist 
 might gird on the cestus of Venus ; but it is love alone who can 
 knot his mother's scarf. 
 
 •' All the merit that Rosette possesses is in herself, I have lent 
 her nothing. I have not cast over her beauty that veil of per- 
 fection with which love envelops the loved one ; the veil of Isis 
 is transparent beside such a one as that. Nothing but satiety 
 can raise a corner of it. 
 
 *' I do not love Rosette ; at least the love, if any, which I 
 have for her has no resemblance to the idea that I have formed 
 of love. Still my idea is perhaps not correct. I do not venture 
 to give any decision. However, she renders me quite insensi- 
 ble to the merit of other women, and I have never wished for 
 anybody with any consistency since possessing her. If she has 
 cause to be jealous of any, it is only of phantoms, and they do 
 not disquiet her much. Yet my imagination is her most for- 
 midable rival ; it is a thing which, with all her acuteness, she 
 will probably never find out. 
 
 " If women knew this ! Of what infidelities is not the least 
 volatile lover guilty towards his most worshipped mistress ! 
 It is to be presumed that the women pay us back with interest ; 
 but they do as we do, and say nothing about it. A mistress 
 is an obligato, which usually disappears beneath its graces 
 and flourishes. Very often the kisses she receives are not 
 for her ; it is the idea of another woman that is embraced 
 in her person, and she often profits (if such can be called a 
 profit) by the desires which are inspired by another. Ah ! 
 how many times, poor Rosette, have you served to embody my 
 dreams, and given a reality to your rivals ! How many the infi- 
 delities in which you have been the involuntary accomplice ! 
 
 If you could have thought at those moments when my arms 
 clasped you with so much intensity, when my lips were united 
 
lo8 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 most closely to yours, that your beauty and your love counted 
 for nothing, and that the thought of you was a thousand leagues 
 away from me ! If you had been told that those eyes, veiled 
 with amorous languor, were cast down only that they might 
 not see you and so dissipate the illusion that you merely served 
 to complete, and that instead of being a mistress you were but 
 an instrument of voluptuousness, a means of deceiving, a desire 
 impossible of realization ! 
 
 " O celestial creatures, beautiful virgins, frail and diapha- 
 nous, who bend your pervinca eyes and clasp your lily hands 
 on the golden background of the pictures of the old German 
 masters, window saints, missal-martyrs who smile so sweetly 
 amid the scrolls of arabesques, and emerge so fair and fresh 
 from the bells of flowers ! O beautiful courtesans lying naked 
 in your hair on beds strewn with roses, beneath broad purple 
 curtains with your bracelets and necklaces of huge pearls, 
 your fan and your mirrors where the west hangs in the 
 shadow a flaming spangle ! brown daughters of Titian, who 
 display so voluptuously to us your undulating hips, your firm 
 and compact thighs, your smooth bodies, and your supple 
 and muscular loins ! ancient goddesses, who rear your 
 white phantom in the shadows of the garden ! — you form a 
 part of my seraglio ; I have possessed you all in turn. Saint 
 Ursula, on Rosette's beautiful hands I have kissed thine ; I 
 have played with the black hair of the Muranese, and never 
 had Rosette more trouble in dressing her hair again ; maidenly 
 Diana, I have been with thee more than Actaeon, and I have 
 not been changed into a stag : I have replaced thy beautiful 
 Endymion ! How many rivals who are unsuspected, and on 
 whom no vengeance can be taken ! Yet they are not always 
 painted or sculptured ! 
 
 ** Women, when you see your lover become more tender 
 than is his wont, and strain you in his arms with extraordi- 
 nary emotion ; when he sinks his head into your lap, and 
 raises it again with humid and wandering eyes ; when enjoy- 
 ment only augments his desire, and he stifles your voice with 
 kisses, as though he feared to hear it, be certain that he does 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 109 
 
 not know even whether you are there ; that he is keeping 
 tryst at this moment with a chimera which you render palp- 
 able, and whose part you play. Many chamber-maids have 
 profited by the love inspired by queens. Many women have 
 profited by the love inspired by goddesses, and a vulgar 
 enough reality has often served as a socle for an ideal idol. 
 That is the reason why poets usually take trollops for their 
 mistresses. A man might lie ten years with a woman with- 
 out having ever seen her ; such is the history of many great 
 geniuses whose ignoble or obscene connections have astonished 
 the world. 
 
 " I have been guilty only of infidelities of this description 
 towards Rosette. I have betrayed her only for pictures and 
 statues, and she has shared equally in the betrayal. I have 
 not the smallest material trespass on my conscience to re- 
 proach myself with. I am in this respect as white as the snow 
 on the Jungfrau, and yet, without being in love with any one, 
 I would wish to be so with some one. I do not seek an 
 opportunity, and I should not be sorry were it to come ; if it 
 came I should perhaps not avail myself of it, for I have an 
 intimate conviction that it would be the same with another, 
 and I had rather it were thus with Rosette than with any 
 other ; for, putting the woman on one side, there remains to 
 me at least a pretty companion, full of wit, and very agreeably 
 demoralized ; and this consideration is not one of the least that 
 restrain me, for, in losing the mistress, I should be grieved to 
 lose the friend." 
 
IV. 
 
 O you know that for nearly five months — yes, for 
 quite five months — for five eternities, I have 
 been Madame Rosette's established Celadon ? 
 It is perfectly splendid. I should never have 
 believed that I was so constant, nor, I will wager, would she 
 have believed it either. We are, in truth, a couple of plucked 
 pigeons, for only turtle doves could display such tenderness. 
 What billing ! What cooing ! What ivy-like entwinings. 
 What a twofold existence ! Nothing in the world could have 
 been more touching, and our two poor little hearts might have 
 been put on one cartel, pierced by the same spit, with a gusty 
 flame. 
 
 " Five month's tite-d-tete, so to speak, for we have been seeing 
 each other every day and nearly every night — the door always 
 closed to everybody ; is it not enough to make one shudder to 
 think of it ! Well, to the glory of the peerless Rosette, it must 
 be said that I have not been overmuch wearied, and that this 
 period will no doubt prove to have been the most agreeable in 
 my life. I do not believe that it would be possible to occupy 
 a man devoid of passion in a more sustained and amusing 
 manner, and God knows what a terrible idleness is that which 
 proceeds from an empty heart ! It would be impossible to 
 form any idea of this woman's resources. She commenced by 
 drawing them from her intellect, and then from her heart, for 
 she loves me to adoration. With what art does she profit by 
 the smallest spark, and how well she knows how to convert 
 it into a conflagration ! how skilfully she directs the faintest 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. m 
 
 movements of the soul ! how well can she turn languor into 
 tender dreaming ! and by how many indirect paths can she 
 guide the mind that is wandering from her back to herself 
 again ! It is wonderful ! And I admire her as one of the 
 loftiest geniuses that can exist. 
 
 " I came to see her very cross, in a very bad temper, and 
 seeking a quarrel. I know not how the sorceress managed it, 
 but at the end of a few minutes she had obliged me to pay 
 her compliments, although I had not the least wish to do so, 
 and to kiss her hands and laugh with all my heart, although 
 I was terribly angry. Is such tyranny conceivable ? Never- 
 theless, skilful as she is, the tete-$-tdte cannot last much longer ; 
 and, during the past fortnight, I pretty often chanced to do 
 what I had never done before, to open the books that are on 
 the table, and read a few lines in the intervals of conversa- 
 tion. Rosette noticed it, and was struck with dismay, which 
 she was scarcely able to conceal, and she sent away all the 
 books out of the room. I confess that I regret them, although 
 I cannot ask for them again. 
 
 " The other day — frightful symptom ! — some one called 
 while we were together, and instead of being furious, as I used 
 to be at the beginning, I experienced a kind of joy. I was 
 almost amiable ; I kept up the conversation which Rosette 
 was trying to let drop so that the gentleman might take his 
 leave, and, when he was gone, I volunteered the remark that 
 he was not without wit, and that his society was agreeable. 
 Rosette reminded me that two months before I had thought 
 him stupid, and the silliest nuisance on earth, to which I had 
 nothing to reply, for I had indeed said so. I was neverthe- 
 less right, in spite of my recent contradiction ; for the first 
 time he disturbed a charming Ute-d-tite, and the second time 
 he came to the assistance of a conversation that was exhausted 
 and languishing (on one side at least), and for that day spared 
 me a scene of tenderness somewhat fatiguing to go through. 
 
 " Such is our position. It is a grave one — especially when 
 one of the two is still enamored, and clings desperately to 
 what remains of the other's love. I am in great perplexity. 
 
1 1 2 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 Although I am not in love with Rosette, I have a very great 
 affection for her and I should not like to do anything that 
 w^ould cause her pain. I wish to believe, as long as possible, 
 that I love her. 
 
 " In gratitude for all those hours to which she has given 
 wings, in gratitude for the love which, for my pleasure, she 
 has bestowed on me, I wish it. I shall deceive her, but is not 
 an agreeable deception better than a distressing truth ? for I 
 shall never have the heart to tell her that I do not love her. 
 The vain shadow of love on which she feasts appears so 
 adorable to her, she embraces the pale spectre with such in- 
 toxication and effusion that I dare not cause it to vanish; 
 yet I am afraid that in the end she will perceive that, after all, 
 it is but a phantom. This morning we had a conversation, 
 which I am going to relate in dramatic form for the sake of 
 greater fidelity, and which makes me fear that we cannot pro- 
 long our union very long. 
 
 "The scene represents Rosette's bed. A ray of sun is 
 shining through the curtains ; it is ten o'clock. Rosette has 
 one arm beneath my neck, and does not move for fear of 
 waking me. From time to time she raises herself a little on 
 her elbow, and, holding her breath, bends her face over mine. 
 I see all this through the grating of my eyelashes, for I have 
 been awake for an hour past. Rosette's chemise has a neck- 
 trimming of Mechlin lace which is all torn : the night has 
 been a stormy one ; her hair is escaping in confusion from her 
 little cap. She is as pretty as a woman can be when you do 
 not love her, and are in bed with her. 
 
 ** Rosette (seeing that I am no longer asleep) — * O the 
 nasty sleeper ! ' 
 
 " Myself (yawning) — ' A— a — ah ! ' 
 
 "Rosette — ' Do not yawn like that, or I will not kiss you 
 for a week." 
 
 " Myself—' Oh ! ' 
 
 " Rosette — ' It seems sir, that you do not think it very im- 
 portant that I should kiss you ? ' 
 
 *' Myself — • Yes, I do.' 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. H^ 
 
 " Rosette — ' How carelessly you say that ! Very well ; you 
 may expect that for the next week I shall not touch you with 
 the tip of my lips. To-day is Tuesday — so till next Tuesday.' 
 
 " Myself—' Pshaw ! ' 
 
 ♦* Rosette—' How, pshaw ! ' 
 
 " Myself — ' Yes pshaw ! You will kiss me before this 
 evening, or I die.' 
 
 •' Rosette—' You will die ! What a coxcomb ! I have 
 spoiled you, sir,' 
 
 " Myself — ' I will live. I am not a coxcomb, and you 
 have not spoiled me — quite the contrary. First of all, I re- 
 quest the suppression of the Sir j you are well enough 
 acquainted with me to call me by my name, and to say thou 
 to me.' 
 
 " Rosette — ' I have spoiled thee, D' Albert.* 
 
 " Myself — ' Good. Now bring your lips near/ 
 
 " Rosette—' No, next Tuesday.' 
 
 " Myself — ' Nonsense. Are we not to pet each other for 
 the future except with a calendar in our hands ? We are both 
 a little too young for that. Now, your lips, my infanta, or I 
 shall get a crick in my neck.' 
 
 " Rosette—' No.' 
 
 " Myself — ' Ah ! you wish to be ravished, my pet ; by 
 heavens ! you shall be. The thing is feasible, though per- 
 haps it has not been done yet.' 
 
 Rosette — ' Impertinent man ! ' 
 
 Myself — ' Observe, most fair one, that I have paid you 
 the compliments of a perhaps ; it is very polite on my part. 
 But we are wandering from the subject. Bend your head. 
 Come : what is this, my favorite sultana ? and what a cross 
 face. We wish to kiss a smile and not a pout.' 
 
 " Rosette (stooping down to kiss me) — ' How would you 
 have me laugh ? You say such harsh things to me ! ' 
 
 " Myself — ' My intention is to say very tender ones. — 
 Why do you think that I say harsh things to you ? ' 
 " Rosette — ' I don't know— but you do.' 
 " Myself — 'You take jokes of no consequence for harshness.' 
 8 
 
114 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 " Rosette — ' Of no consequence ! You call that of no 
 consequence ? Everything is of consequence in love. Listen, 
 I would rather have you beat me than laugh as you are doing.' 
 
 " Myself — ' You would like to see me weep, then ? ' 
 
 " Rosette — ' You always go from one extreme to the other. 
 You are not asked to weep, but to speak reasonably, and to 
 give up this quizzing manner, which suits you very badly.' 
 
 " Myself — ' It is impossible for me to speak reasonably and 
 not to quiz ; so I am going to beat you, since it is your liking.' 
 
 " Rosette—' Do.' 
 
 " Myself (giving her a few little slaps on her shoulders)—' I 
 would rather cut off my own head than spoil your adorable 
 little body, and marble the whiteness of this charming back 
 with blue. My goddess, whatever pleasure a woman may have 
 in being beaten, you shall certainly not have it.' 
 
 " Rosette — ' You love me no longer.' 
 
 " Myself — * That does not follow very directly from what 
 precedes ; it is about as logical as to say : It is raining, so do 
 not give me my umbrella ; or : It is cold, open the window.' 
 
 " Rosette — ' You do not love me, you have never loved me.' 
 
 " Myself — ' Ah ! the matter is becoming complicated ; you 
 love me no longer, and you have never loved me. This is 
 tolerably contradictory ; how can I leave off doing a thing 
 which I have never begun ? You see, little queen, that you do 
 not know what you are saying, and that you are perfectly absurd.' 
 
 " Rosette — ' I wished so much to be loved by you that I 
 assisted in deluding myself. People easily believe what they 
 desire ; but now I can quite see that I am deceived. You were 
 deceived yourself ; you took a liking for love, and desire for 
 passion. The thing happens every day. I bear you no ill-will 
 for it ; it did not depend upon yourself to be in love ; I must 
 lay the blame on my own lack of charms. I should have been 
 more beautiful, more playful, more coquettish ; I should have 
 tried to mount up to you ; O my poet ! instead of wishing you 
 to come down to me ; I was afraid of losing you in the 
 clouds, and I dreaded lest your head should steal away your 
 heart from me. I imprisoned you in my love, and I believed 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. j j 5 
 
 when giving up myself wholly to you that you would keep 
 something ' 
 
 " Myself — ' Rosette, move back a little ; your thigh burns 
 me, you are like a hot coal.' 
 
 " Rosette — ' If I am in your way, I will get up. Ah ! heart 
 of rock, drops of water pierce the stone, and my tears cannot 
 penetrate you.' (She weeps.) 
 
 "Myself — 'If you weep like that, you will certainly turn 
 our bed into a bath. A bath ? I should say into an ocean. 
 Can you swim. Rosette ? * 
 
 " Rosette — ' Villain ! ' 
 
 "Myself — ' Well ! all at once I am a villain ! You flatter 
 me. Rosette, I have not the honor : 1 am a gentle citizen, 
 alas ! and have never committed the smallest crime ; I have 
 done a foolish thing, perhaps, which was to love you to dis- 
 traction : that is all. Would you absolutely make me repent 
 of it ? I have loved you, and I love you as much as I can. 
 Since I have been your lover, I have always walked in your 
 shadow : I have given up all my time to you, my days and my 
 nights. I have not used lofty phrases with you, because I do 
 not like them except in writing ; but I have given you a 
 thousand proofs of my fondness. I will say nothing to you 
 of the most scrupulous fidelity, for that is of course ; I have 
 become seven quarters of a pound thinner since you have been 
 my mistress. What more would you have ? Here I am in 
 your bed ; I was here yesterday, and I shall be here to-morrow. 
 Do people behave in this way with those whom they do not 
 love? I do everything that you wish. You say "Go,"' and I 
 go ; " Stay," and I stay. I am the most admirable lover in the 
 world, it seems to me.' 
 
 " Rosette — ♦ That is just what I complain about — the most 
 perfect lover in the world, in fact.' 
 
 " Myself — ' What have you to reproach me with ? ' 
 
 " Rosette — ' Nothing, and I would rather have some cause 
 of complaint against you.' 
 
 " Myself — ' This is a strange quarrel.' 
 
 " Rosette—' It is much worse. You do not love me. I 
 
Il6 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 cannot help it nor can you. What would you have done in 
 such a case ? Unquestionably I should prefer to have some 
 fault to pardon in you. I would scold you ; you would excuse 
 yourself well or ill, and we should make it up.' 
 
 "Myself — *It would be all to your advantage. The 
 greater the crime the more splendid would the reparation 
 be.' 
 
 " Rosette — ' You are quite aware, sir, that I am not yet 
 reduced to employ that expedient, and that if I pleased pres- 
 ently, although you do not love me, and we are quarrelling ' 
 
 " Myself — * Yes, I acknowledge it as purely an effect of 
 your clemency. Do please a little ; it would be better than 
 syllogizing at random as we are doing.' 
 
 " Rosette — ' You wish to cut short a conversation which is 
 inconvenient to you ; but, if you please, my fine friend, we shall 
 content ourselves with speaking ! ' 
 
 " Myself — ' It is an entertainment that does not cost much. 
 I assure you that you are wrong ; for you are wonderfully 
 pretty, and I feel towards you ' 
 
 •' Rosette — ' What you will express to me another time.' 
 
 " Myself — 'Oh come, adorable one, are you a little Hyrcan- 
 ian tigress ? You are incomparably cruel to-day ! Are you 
 itching to become a vestal ? It would be an original caprice.' 
 
 " Rosette — • Why not ? there have been stranger ones than 
 that ; but I shall certainly be a vestal for you. Learn, sir, that 
 I give myself only to people who love me, or by whom I believe 
 myself loved. You do not come under either of these two 
 denominations. Allow me to rise ! * 
 
 " Myself — * If you get up, I shall get up as well. You will 
 have the trouble of getting into bed again : that is all.* 
 
 " Rosette — ' Let me alone ! ' 
 
 " Myself — ' By heavens, no ! * 
 
 " Rosette (struggling) — * Oh ! you will let me go ! 
 
 "Myself — *I venture, madame, to assure you of the con- 
 trary.' 
 
 •• Rosette (seeing that she is not the stronger) — • Well ! I 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ny 
 
 will stay ; you are squeezing my arm with such force ! — What 
 do you want with me ? ' 
 
 " Myself — ' I think you know. I should not allow myself 
 to say what I allow myself to do ; I have too much respect for 
 decency.* 
 
 " Rosette (already finding it impossible to defend herselt) — 
 ' On condition that you will love me a great deal — I surrender.' 
 
 " Myself — • It is rather late to capitulate when the enemy is 
 already in the fortress.' 
 
 " Rosette (throwing her arms round my neck, and half- 
 fainting) — Unconditionally — I trust to your generosity.' 
 
 " Myself — * You do well.' 
 
 " Here, my dear friend, I think it would not be amiss to put 
 a line of asterisks, for the rest of the dialogue could scarcely be 
 translated except by onomatopoeia. 
 
 « -x- « « 
 
 " The ray of sunshine has had time to make the circuit of 
 the room since the beginning of this scene. An odor of lime- 
 trees comes in from the garden, sweet and penetrating. The 
 weather is the finest that could be seen ; the sky is as blue as 
 an Englishwoman's eye. We get up, and after breakfasting 
 with great appetite, go for a long rural walk. The transpar- 
 ency of the air, the splendor of the country, and the joyous 
 aspect of nature inspired my soul with enough sentimentality 
 and tenderness to make Rosette acknowledge that after all I 
 had a sort of heart like other people. 
 
 " Have you never remarked how the shade of woods, the 
 murmuring of fountains, the singing of birds, smiling prospects, 
 fragrance of foliage and flowers, all the baggage of eclogue 
 and description which we have agreed to laugh at, none the 
 less preserves over us, however depraved we may be, an occult 
 power which it is impossible to resist ? I will confide to you, 
 under the seal of the greatest secret, that quite recently I sur- 
 prised myself in a state of most countrified emotion towards a 
 nightingale that was singing. 
 
 " It was in 's garden : although it was night, the sky had 
 
 a clearness nearly equal to that of the finest day ; it was so 
 
Ii8 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 deep and so transparent that the gaze easily penetrated to God. 
 It seemed to me that I could see the last folds of angels* robes 
 floating over the pale windings of the Milky Way. The moon 
 had risen, but a large tree hid her completely ; she riddled 
 its dark foliage with a million little luminous holes, and hung 
 more spangles upon it than had ever the fan of a marchioness. 
 Silence, filled with sounds and stifled sighs, was heard through- 
 out the garden (this perhaps resembles pathos, but it is not my 
 fault) ; although I saw nothing but the blue glimmering of the 
 moon I seemed to be surrounded by a population of unknown 
 and worshipped phantoms, and I did not feel alone, although 
 there was only myself on the terrace. 
 
 " I was not thinking, I was not dreaming, I was blended 
 with the nature that surrounded me ; I felt myself quiver 
 with the foliage, glisten with the water, shine with the ray, ex- 
 pand v/ith the flower ; I was not myself more than the trees, 
 the water, and the great night-shade. I was all of these, and 
 I do not believe that it would be possible to be more absent 
 from one's self than I was at that moment. All at once, as 
 though something extraordinary were going to happen, the 
 leaf was stilled at the end of the branch, the water-drop in the 
 fountain remained suspended in air, and did not complete its 
 fall ; the silver thread which had set out from the edge of 
 the moon stopped on its way — only my heart beat so 
 sonorously that it seemed to fill all that great space with 
 sound. It ceased to beat, and there fell such a silence that 
 you might have heard the grass grow, and a word whispered 
 at a distance of two hundred leagues. Then from the little 
 throat of the nightingale, which probably was only waiting for 
 this moment to begin its song, there burst a note so shrill and 
 piercing that I heard it with my heart as much as with my 
 ears. The sound spread suddenly through the crystalline sky, 
 which was void of noise, and formed a harmonious atmosphere, 
 wherein, beating their wings, hovered the other notes which 
 followed. 
 
 " I understood perfectly what it said, as though I had had 
 the secret of the language of the birds. It was the history of 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ,,g 
 
 the loves which had not been mine that this nightingale sang. 
 Never was a history more accurate and true. It did not omit 
 the smallest detail or the most imperceptible tint. It told me 
 what I had been unable to tell myself, and explained to me 
 what I had been unable to understand ; it gave a voice to my 
 dreaming, and caused the phantom, mute until then, to reply. 
 I knew that I was loved, and the most languishing trilling 
 taught me that I should be happy soon. I thought that 
 through the quivering song, and beneath the rain of notes, I 
 could see the white arms of my beloved stretched out towards 
 me in a ray from the moon. She came up slowly with the per- 
 fume from the heart of a large hundred -leaved rose. 
 
 " I shall not try to describe her beauty. It was one of 
 those things to which words are denied. How speak the un- 
 speakable ? how paint that which has neither form nor color ? 
 how mark a voice which is without tone and speech ? Never 
 had I had so much love in my heart ; I would have pressed 
 nature to my bosom. I clasped the void in my arms as 
 though I had closed them on a maiden's form : I gave kisses 
 to the air that passed across my lips : I swam in effluence 
 from my own radiant body. Ah ! if Rosette had been there ! 
 What adorable nonsense would I have uttered to her ! But 
 women never know when to arrive opportunely. The nightin- 
 gale ceased to sing ; the moon, worn out with sleep, drew her 
 cloud-cap over her eyes ; and I— I left the garden, for the cold- 
 ness of the night began to overtake me. 
 
 "As I was cold, I very naturally thought I should be 
 warmer in Rosette's bed than in my own, and I went to share 
 her couch. I entered with my pass-key, for every one in the 
 house was slumbering. Rosette herself had fallen asleep, and 
 I had the satisfaction of seeing that it was over an uncut 
 volume of my latest poems. She had both her arms above her 
 head, her mouth smiling and partly open, one leg stretched 
 out and the other slightly bent in a posture of grace and ease ; 
 she looked so well that I felt mortal regret at not being more 
 in love with her. 
 
 "While gazing upon her, I bethought me that I was as 
 
I20 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 stupid as an ostrich. I had what I had desired so long, a 
 mistress of my own like my horse and my sword, young, 
 pretty, amorous, and intellectual — with no high-principled 
 mother, decorous father, intractable aunt, or fighting brother ; 
 with the unspeakable charm of a husband duly sealed and 
 nailed in a fine oak coffin lined with lead, and the whole 
 covered over with a big block of freestone — a circumstance 
 not to be despised, for it is, after all, but slight entertainment 
 to be caught in the midst of a voluptuous spasm, and to go and 
 complete the sensation on the pavement, after describing 
 an arc of from 40 to 50 degrees, according to the story on 
 which you happen to be — a mistress as free as mountain air, 
 rich enough to indulge in the most exquisite refinements 
 and elegancies, and devoid, moreover, of all moral ideas, never 
 speaking to you of her virtue while trying a new position, nor 
 of her reputation any more than if she had never had one; 
 never intimate with women, and scorning them all nearly as 
 much as if she were a man, making very light of Platonism 
 without any concealment, and yet always bringing the heart 
 into play : — a woman who, had she been placed in a different- 
 sphere, would undoubtedly have become the most admirable 
 courtesan in the world, and made the glory of the Aspasias 
 and Imperias grow pale ! 
 
 " Then this woman so constituted was mine. I did what 
 I would with her ; I had the key of her room and her drawer ; 
 I opened her letters ; I had taken her own name from her 
 and given her another. She was my thing, my property. Her 
 youth, beauty, love all belonged to me, and I used and abused 
 them. I made her go to bed during the day and get up at 
 night, if I took a fancy to do so, and she obeyed me simply, 
 without appearing to make a sacrifice, and without assuming 
 the little airs of a resigned victim. She was attentive, caress- 
 ing, and, monstrous circumstance, scrupulously faithful ; that 
 is to say, that if six months ago, when I was complaining of 
 being without a mistress, I had been given even a distant 
 glimpse of such happiness, I should have gone mad with joy, 
 and sent my hat knocking against the sky in token of my 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ,21 
 
 rejoicing. Well, now that I have her, this happiness seems 
 cold to me ; I scarcely feel, I do not feel it, and the situation in 
 which I am affects me so little, that I am often doubtful 
 whether I have made a change. Were I to leave Rosette, I 
 have an intimate conviction, that at the end of a month, 
 perhaps before, I should have so completely and carefully for- 
 gotten her, that I should no longer be able to tell whether I 
 had known her or not ! Would she do as much on her part ? 
 I think not. 
 
 " I was reflecting, then, upon all these things, and, feeling a 
 sort of repentance, I laid on the fair sleeper's forehead the 
 chastest and most melancholy kiss that ever a young man gave 
 a young woman on the stroke of midnight. She moved a little, 
 and the smile on her lips became somewhat more decided, 
 but she did not awake. I undressed myself slowly, and slip- 
 ping under the bedclothes, stretched myself along her like a 
 snake. The freshness of my body surprised her ; she opened 
 her eyes, and, without speaking to me, she fastened her mouth 
 to mine, and wound herself about me so well, that I was warmed 
 in less than no time. All the lyrism of the evening was turned 
 into prose ; but it was at least poetical prose. That night was 
 one of the fairest sleepless nights that I have ever spent : I can 
 hope for such no longer. 
 
 " We still have agreeable moments, but it is necessary that 
 they should have been led up to, and prepared for, by some 
 external circumstances such as I have related, and at the be- 
 ginning I had no need to excite my imagination by looking at 
 the moon and listening to the nightingale's song, in order to 
 have all the pleasure that is possible to a man who is not really 
 in love. There are no broken threads as yet in our weft, but 
 there are knots here and there, and the warp is not nearly so 
 smooth. 
 
 " Rosette, who is still in love, does what she can to obviate 
 these inconveniences. Unfortunately, there are two things in 
 the world which cannot be commanded — love and weariness. 
 On my part, I make superhuman efforts to overcome the som- 
 nolence which overtakes me in spite of myself, and, like country 
 
122 MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. 
 
 people who fall asleep at ten o'clock in town drawing-rooms, 
 I keep my eyes as wide open as possible, and lift up my eyelids 
 with my fingers ! It is of no use, and I assume a conjugal free- 
 dom from restraint which is most unpleasing. 
 
 "The dear child, who the other day found herself the better 
 for the rural system, brought me yesterday into the country. 
 
 " It might be to the purpose, perhaps, to give you a little 
 description of the said country, which is rather pretty ; it 
 might enliven our metaphysics somewhat, and, besides, the 
 characters must have a background ; the figures cannot stand 
 out against a blank, or against that vague brown tint with 
 which painters fill the field of their canvas. 
 
 " The approaches to it are very picturesque. You arrive, by 
 a highway bordered with old trees, at a star, the middle of 
 which is marked by a stone obelisk surmounted by a ball of 
 gilt copper. Five roads form the rays ; then the ground 
 becomes suddenly hollow. The road dips into a rather narrow 
 valley, crosses the little stream, that occupies the bottom, by a 
 one-arched bridge, and then with great strides reascends the 
 opposite side, where stands the little village, the slated steeple 
 of which can be seen peeping from among the thatched roofs 
 and round-headed apple-trees. The horizon is not very vast, 
 for it is bounded on both sides by the crest of the hill, but it is 
 cheerful and rests the eye. Beside the bridge there is a mill, 
 and a structure of red stones in the shape of a tower ; the nearly 
 perpetual barking, and the sight of some brachs and young 
 bandy-legged turnspits warming themselves in the sun before 
 the door, would tell you that it is there that the gamekeeper 
 dwells, if the buzzards and martins nailed to the shutters could 
 leave you in doubt about it for a moment. 
 
 " At this spot there begins an avenue of sorbs, the scarlet 
 fruit of which attracts clouds of birds. As people do not pass 
 there very often, there is only a white band along the middle ; 
 all the rest is covered over with a short fine moss, and in the 
 double rut traced by the wheels of vehicles, little frogs, green 
 as chrysoprase, croak and hop. After proceeding for some 
 time you find yourself before a gilded and painted iron grating 
 
MADEMOISELLE DE MAUPIN. ,23 
 
 its sides adorned with spiked fences and chevaux-de-frise. 
 Then the road turns towards the mansion — which, being buried 
 in the verdure like a bird's nest, cannot as yet be seen — without 
 hastening too much, however, and not infrequently turning 
 aside to visit an elegant kiosk or a fine prospect, crossing and 
 recrossing the stream by Chinese or rustic bridges. 
 
 " Owing to the unevenness of the ground, and the dams 
 erected for the service of the mill, the stream has, in several 
 places, a fall of from four to five feet, and nothing can be more 
 pleasant than to hear all these cascades prattling close at hand, 
 most frequently without seeing them, for the osiers and elders 
 which line the bank form an almost impenetrable curtain. But 
 all this portion of the park is in a measure only the ante-cham- 
 ber of the other park. A high road passing across this property 
 unfortunately cuts it in two, an inconvenience which has been 
 remedied in a very ingenious manner. Two great embattled 
 walls full of barbicans and loopholes, in imitation of a ruined 
 fortress, stand on either side of the road ; a tower on which 
 hangs gigantic ivy, and which flanks the mansion, lets fall on 
 the opposite bastion a veritable drawbridge with iron chains, 
 which are lowered every morning. 
 
 " You pass through a pointed archway into the interior of the 
 donjon, and thence into the second enclosure, where the trees, 
 which have not been cut for more than a century, are of ex- 
 traordinary height, with knotted trunks swaddled in parasitical 
 plants and are the finest and most singular that I have ever 
 seen. Some have no leaves except at the top, where they termi- 
 nate in broad parasols ; others taper into plumes. Others, on 
 the contrar>', 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. 
 
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