V

"She rose, and walked twice round the boudoir in real or affected

agitation; then she no doubt found an attitude and a look beseeming

the new state of affairs, for she stopped in front of me, held out her

hand, and said in a voice broken by emotion, 'Well, Henri, you are

loyal, noble, and a charming man; I shall never forget you.'

"These were admirable tactics. She was bewitching in this transition

of feeling, indispensable to the situation in which she wished to

place herself in regard to me. I fell into the attitude, the manners,

and the look of a man so deeply distressed, that I saw her too newly

assumed dignity giving way; she looked at me, took my hand, drew me

along almost, threw me on the sofa, but quite gently, and said after a

moment's silence, 'I am dreadfully unhappy, my dear fellow. Do you

love me?'--'Oh! yes.'--'Well, then, what will become of you?' "

At this point the women all looked at each other.

"Though I can still suffer when I recall her perfidy, I still laugh at

her expression of entire conviction and sweet satisfaction that I must

die, or at any rate sink into perpetual melancholy," de Marsay went

on. "Oh! do not laugh yet!" he said to his listeners; "there is better

to come. I looked at her very tenderly after a pause, and said to her,

'Yes, that is what I have been wondering.'--'Well, what will you do?'

--'I asked myself that the day after my cold.'--'And----?' she asked

with eager anxiety.--'And I have made advances to the little lady to

whom I was supposed to be attached.'

"Charlotte started up from the sofa like a frightened doe, trembling

like a leaf, gave me one of those looks in which women forgo all their

dignity, all their modesty, their refinement, and even their grace,

the sparkling glitter of a hunted viper's eye when driven into a

corner, and said, 'And I have loved this man! I have struggled! I

have----' On this last thought, which I leave you to guess, she made

the most impressive pause I ever heard.--'Good God!' she cried, 'how

unhappy are we women! we never can be loved. To you there is nothing

serious in the purest feelings. But never mind; when you cheat us you

still are our dupes!'--'I see that plainly,' said I, with a stricken

air; 'you have far too much wit in your anger for your heart to suffer

from it.'--This modest epigram increased her rage; she found some

tears of vexation. 'You disgust me with the world and with life.' she

said; 'you snatch away all my illusions; you deprave my heart.'

"She said to me all that I had a right to say to her, and with a

simple effrontery, an artless audacity, which would certainly have

nailed any man but me on the spot.--'What is to become of us poor

women in a state of society such as Louis XVIII.'s charter made it?'--

(Imagine how her words had run away with her.)--'Yes, indeed, we are

born to suffer. In matters of passion we are always superior to you,

and you are beneath all loyalty. There is no honesty in your hearts.

To you love is a game in which you always cheat.'--'My dear,' said I,

'to take anything serious in society nowadays would be like making

romantic love to an actress.'--'What a shameless betrayal! It was

deliberately planned!'--'No, only a rational issue.'--'Good-bye,

Monsieur de Marsay,' said she; 'you have deceived me horribly.'--

'Surely,' I replied, taking up a submissive attitude, 'Madame la

Duchesse will not remember Charlotte's grievances?'--'Certainly,' she

answered bitterly.--'Then, in fact, you hate me?'--She bowed, and I

said to myself, 'There is something still left!'

"The feeling she had when I parted from her allowed her to believe

that she still had something to avenge. Well, my friends, I have

carefully studied the lives of men who have had great success with

women, but I do not believe that the Marechal de Richelieu, or Lauzun,

or Louis de Valois ever effected a more judicious retreat at the first

attempt. As to my mind and heart, they were cast in a mould then and

there, once for all, and the power of control I thus acquired over the

thoughtless impulses which make us commit so many follies gained me

the admirable presence of mind you all know."

"How deeply I pity the second!" exclaimed the Baronne de Nucingen.

A scarcely perceptible smile on de Marsay's pale lips made Delphine de

Nucingen color.

"How we do forget!" said the Baron de Nucingen.

The great banker's simplicity was so extremely droll, that his wife,

who was de Marsay's "second," could not help laughing like every one

else.

"You are all ready to condemn the woman," said Lady Dudley. "Well, I

quite understand that she did not regard her marriage as an act of

inconstancy. Men will never distinguish between constancy and

fidelity.--I know the woman whose story Monsieur de Marsay has told

us, and she is one of the last of your truly great ladies."

"Alas! my lady, you are right," replied de Marsay. "For very nearly

fifty years we have been looking on at the progressive ruin of all

social distinctions. We ought to have saved our women from this great

wreck, but the Civil Code has swept its leveling influence over their

heads. However terrible the words, they must be spoken: Duchesses are

vanishing, and marquises too! As to the baronesses--I must apologize

to Madame de Nucingen, who will become a countess when her husband is

made a peer of France--baronesses have never succeeded in getting

people to take them seriously."

"Aristocracy begins with the viscountess," said Blondet with a smile.

"Countesses will survive," said de Marsay. "An elegant woman will be

more or less of a countess--a countess of the Empire or of yesterday,

a countess of the old block, or, as they say in Italy, a countess by

courtesy. But as to the great lady, she died out with the dignified

splendor of the last century, with powder, patches, high-heeled

slippers, and stiff bodices with a delta stomacher of bows. Duchesses

in these days can pass through a door without any need to widen it for

their hoops. The Empire saw the last of gowns with trains! I am still

puzzled to understand how a sovereign who wished to see his drawing-

room swept by ducal satin and velvet did not make indestructible laws.

Napoleon never guessed the results of the Code he was so proud of.

That man, by creating duchesses, founded the race of our 'ladies' of

to-day--the indirect offspring of his legislation."

"It was logic, handled as a hammer by boys just out of school and by

obscure journalists, which demolished the splendors of the social

state," said the Comte de Vandenesse. "In these days every rogue who

can hold his head straight in his collar, cover his manly bosom with

half an ell of satin by way of a cuirass, display a brow where

apocryphal genius gleams under curling locks, and strut in a pair of

patent-leather pumps graced by silk socks which cost six francs,

screws his eye-glass into one of his eye-sockets by puckering up his

cheek, and whether he be an attorney's clerk, a contractor's son, or a

banker's bastard, he stares impertinently at the prettiest duchess,

appraises her as she walks downstairs, and says to his friend--dressed

by Buisson, as we all are, and mounted in patent-leather like any duke

himself--'There, my boy, that is a perfect lady.' "

"You have not known how to form a party," said Lord Dudley; "it will

be a long time yet before you have a policy. You talk a great deal in

France about organizing labor, and you have not yet organized

property. So this is what happens: Any duke--and even in the time of

Louis XVIII. and Charles X. there were some left who had two hundred

thousand francs a year, a magnificent residence, and a sumptuous train

of servants--well, such a duke could live like a great lord. The last

of these great gentlemen in France was the Prince de Talleyrand.--This

duke leaves four children, two of them girls. Granting that he has

great luck in marrying them all well, each of these descendants will

have but sixty or eighty thousand francs a year now; each is the

father or mother of children, and consequently obliged to live with

the strictest economy in a flat on the ground floor or first floor of

a large house. Who knows if they may not even be hunting a fortune?

Henceforth the eldest son's wife, a duchess in name only, has no

carriage, no people, no opera-box, no time to herself. She has not her

own rooms in the family mansion, nor her fortune, nor her pretty toys;

she is buried in trade; she buys socks for her dear little children,

nurses them herself, and keeps an eye on her girls, whom she no longer

sends to school at a convent. Thus your noblest dames have been turned

into worthy brood-hens."