VII

"As to the /bourgeoise/, the citizen womankind, she cannot possibly be

mistaken for the spell cast over you by the Unknown. She is bustling,

and goes out in all weathers, trots about, comes, goes, gazes, does

not know whether she will or will not go into a shop. Where the lady

knows just what she wants and what she is doing, the townswoman is

undecided, tucks up her skirts to cross a gutter, dragging a child by

the hand, which compels her to look out for the vehicles; she is a

mother in public, and talks to her daughter; she carries money in her

bag, and has open-work stockings on her feet; in winter, she wears a

boa over her fur cloak; in summer, a shawl and a scarf; she is

accomplished in the redundancies of dress.

"You will meet the fair Unknown again at the Italiens, at the Opera,

at a ball. She will then appear under such a different aspect that you

would think them two beings devoid of any analogy. The woman has

emerged from those mysterious garments like a butterfly from its silky

cocoon. She serves up, like some rare dainty, to your lavished eyes,

the forms which her bodice scarcely revealed in the morning. At the

theatre she never mounts higher than the second tier, excepting at the

Italiens. You can there watch at your leisure the studied

deliberateness of her movements. The enchanting deceiver plays off all

the little political artifices of her sex so naturally as to exclude

all idea of art or premeditation. If she has a royally beautiful hand,

the most perspicacious beholder will believe that it is absolutely

necessary that she should twist, or refix, or push aside the ringlet

or curl she plays with. If she has some dignity of profile, you will

be persuaded that she is giving irony or grace to what she says to her

neighbor, sitting in such a position as to produce the magical effect

of the 'lost profile,' so dear to great painters, by which the cheek

catches the high light, the nose is shown in clear outline, the

nostrils are transparently rosy, the forehead squarely modeled, the

eye has its spangle of fire, but fixed on space, and the white

roundness of the chin is accentuated by a line of light. If she has a

pretty foot, she will throw herself on a sofa with the coquettish

grace of a cat in the sunshine, her feet outstretched without your

feeling that her attitude is anything but the most charming model ever

given to a sculptor by lassitude.

"Only the perfect lady is quite at her ease in full dress; nothing

inconveniences her. You will never see her, like the woman of the

citizen class, pulling up a refractory shoulder-strap, or pushing down

a rebellious whalebone, or looking whether her tucker is doing its

office of faithful guardian to two treasures of dazzling whiteness, or

glancing in the mirrors to see if her head-dress is keeping its place.

Her toilet is always in harmony with her character; she had had time

to study herself, to learn what becomes her, for she has long known

what does not suit her. You will not find her as you go out; she

vanishes before the end of the play. If by chance she is to be seen,

calm and stately, on the stairs, she is experiencing some violent

emotion; she has to bestow a glance, to receive a promise. Perhaps she

goes down so slowly on purpose to gratify the vanity of a slave whom

she sometimes obeys. If your meeting takes place at a ball or an

evening party, you will gather the honey, natural or affected of her

insinuating voice; her empty words will enchant you, and she will know

how to give them the value of thought by her inimitable bearing."

"To be such a woman, is it not necessary to be very clever?" asked the

Polish Count.

"It is necessary to have great taste," replied the Princesse de

Cadignan.

"And in France taste is more than cleverness," said the Russian.

"This woman's cleverness is the triumph of a purely plastic art,"

Blondet went on. "You will not know what she said, but you will be

fascinated. She will toss her head, or gently shrug her white

shoulders; she will gild an insignificant speech with a charming pout

and smile; or throw a Voltairean epigram into an 'Indeed!' an 'Ah!' a

'What then!' A jerk of her head will be her most pertinent form of

questioning; she will give meaning to the movement by which she twirls

a vinaigrette hanging to her finger by a ring. She gets an artificial

grandeur out of superlative trivialities; she simply drops her hand

impressively, letting it fall over the arm of her chair as dewdrops

hang on the cup of a flower, and all is said--she has pronounced

judgment beyond appeal, to the apprehension of the most obtuse. She

knows how to listen to you; she gives you the opportunity of shining,

and--I ask your modesty--those moments are rare?"

The candid simplicity of the young Pole, to whom Blondet spoke, made

all the party shout with laughter.

"Now, you will not talk for half-an-hour with a /bourgeoise/ without

her alluding to her husband in one way or another," Blondet went on

with unperturbed gravity; "whereas, even if you know that your lady is

married, she will have the delicacy to conceal her husband so

effectually that it will need the enterprise of Christopher Columbus

to discover him. Often you will fail in the attempt single-handed. If

you have had no opportunity of inquiring, towards the end of the

evening you detect her gazing fixedly at a middle-aged man wearing a

decoration, who bows and goes out. She has ordered her carriage, and

goes.

"You are not the rose, but you have been with the rose, and you go to

bed under the golden canopy of a delicious dream, which will last

perhaps after Sleep, with his heavy finger, has opened the ivory gates

of the temple of dreams.

"The lady, when she is at home, sees no one before four; she is shrewd

enough always to keep you waiting. In her house you will find

everything in good taste; her luxury is for hourly use, and duly

renewed; you will see nothing under glass shades, no rags of wrappings

hanging about, and looking like a pantry. You will find the staircase

warmed. Flowers on all sides will charm your sight--flowers, the only

gift she accepts, and those only from certain people, for nosegays

live but a day; they give pleasure, and must be replaced; to her they

are, as in the East, a symbol and a promise. The costly toys of

fashion lie about, but not so as to suggest a museum or a curiosity

shop. You will find her sitting by the fire in a low chair, from which

she will not rise to greet you. Her talk will not now be what it was

at the ball; there she was our creditor; in her own home she owes you

the pleasure of her wit. These are the shades of which the lady is a

marvelous mistress. What she likes in you is a man to swell her

circle, an object for the cares and attentions which such women are

now happy to bestow. Therefore, to attract you to her drawing-room,

she will be bewitchingly charming. This especially is where you feel

how isolated women are nowadays, and why they want a little world of

their own, to which they may seem a constellation. Conversation is

impossible without generalities."

"Yes," said de Marsay, "you have truly hit the fault of our age. The

epigram--a volume in a word--no longer strikes, as it did in the

eighteenth century, at persons or at things, but at squalid events,

and it dies in a day."

"Hence," said Blondet, "the intelligence of the lady, if she has any,

consists in casting doubts on everything. Here lies the great

difference between two women; the townswoman is certainly virtuous;

the lady does not know yet whether she is, or whether she always will

be; she hesitates and struggles where the other refuses point-blank

and falls full length. This hesitancy in everything is one of the last

graces left to her by our horrible times. She rarely goes to church,

but she will talk to you of religion; and if you have the good taste

to affect Free-thought, she will try to convert you, for you will have

opened the way for the stereotyped phrases, the head-shaking and

gestures understood by all these women: 'For shame! I thought you had

too much sense to attack religion. Society is tottering, and you

deprive it of its support. Why, religion at this moment means you and

me; it is property, and the future of our children! Ah! let us not be

selfish! Individualism is the disease of the age, and religion is the

only remedy; it unites families which your laws put asunder,' and so

forth. Then she plunges into some neo-Christian speech sprinkled with

political notions which is neither Catholic nor Protestant--but moral?

Oh! deuced moral!--in which you may recognize a fag end of every

material woven by modern doctrines, at loggerheads together."

The women could not help laughing at the airs by which Blondet

illustrated his satire.

"This explanation, dear Count Adam," said Blondet, turning to the

Pole, "will have proved to you that the 'perfect lady' represents the

intellectual no less than the political muddle, just as she is

surrounded by the showy and not very lasting products of an industry

which is always aiming at destroying its work in order to replace it

by something else. When you leave her you say to yourself: She

certainly has superior ideas! And you believe it all the more because

she will have sounded your heart with a delicate touch, and have asked

you your secrets; she affects ignorance, to learn everything; there

are some things she never knows, not even when she knows them. You

alone will be uneasy, you will know nothing of the state of her heart.

The great ladies of old flaunted their love-affairs, with newspapers

and advertisements; in these days the lady has her little passion

neatly ruled like a sheet of music with its crotchets and quavers and

minims, its rests, its pauses, its sharps to sign the key. A mere weak

women, she is anxious not to compromise her love, or her husband, or

the future of her children. Name, position, and fortune are no longer

flags so respected as to protect all kinds of merchandise on board.

The whole aristocracy no longer advances in a body to screen the lady.

She has not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of lofty

antagonism; she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be

crushed. Thus she is apt at Jesuitical /mezzo termine/, she is a

creature of equivocal compromises, of guarded proprieties, of

anonymous passions steered between two reef-bound shores. She is as

much afraid of her servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a

trial in the divorce-court. This woman--so free at a ball, so

attractive out walking--is a slave at home; she is never independent

but in perfect privacy, or theoretically. She must preserve herself in

her position as a lady. This is her task.

"For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a meagre

allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the

divine accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a

townswoman; she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will

not receive a married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover still

have anything to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect

lady may perhaps give occasion to calumny, never to slander."

"It is all so horribly true," said the Princesse de Cadignan.