VI BIOGRAPHY OF CAMILLE MAUPIN

The town of Guerande, which for two months past had seen Calyste, its

flower and pride, going, morning or evening, often morning and

evening, to Les Touches, concluded that Mademoiselle Felicite des

Touches was passionately in love with the beautiful youth, and that

she practised upon him all kinds of sorceries. More than one young

girl and wife asked herself by what right an old woman exercised so

absolute an empire over that angel. When Calyste passed along the

Grand' Rue to the Croisic gate many a regretful eye was fastened on

him.

It now became necessary to explain the rumors which hovered about the

person whom Calyste was on his way to see. These rumors, swelled by

Breton gossip, envenomed by public ignorance, had reached the rector.

The receiver of taxes, the /juge de paix/, the head of the Saint-

Nazaire custom-house and other lettered persons had not reassured the

abbe by relating to him the strange and fantastic life of the female

writer who concealed herself under the masculine name of Camille

Maupin. She did not as yet eat little children, nor kill her slaves

like Cleopatra, nor throw men into the river as the heroine of the

Tour de Nesle was falsely accused of doing; but to the Abbe Grimont

this monstrous creature, a cross between a siren and an atheist, was

an immoral combination of woman and philosopher who violated every

social law invented to restrain or utilize the infirmities of

womankind.

Just as Clara Gazul is the female pseudonym of a distinguished male

writer, George Sand the masculine pseudonym of a woman of genius, so

Camille Maupin was the mask behind which was long hidden a charming

young woman, very well-born, a Breton, named Felicite des Touches, the

person who was now causing such lively anxiety to the Baronne du

Guenic and the excellent rector of Guerande. The Breton des Touches

family has no connection with the family of the same name in Touraine,

to which belongs the ambassador of the Regent, even more famous to-day

for his writings than for his diplomatic talents.

Camille Maupin, one of the few celebrated women of the nineteenth

century, was long supposed to be a man, on account of the virility of

her first writings. All the world now knows the two volumes of plays,

not intended for representation on the stage, written after the manner

of Shakespeare or Lopez de Vega, published in 1822, which made a sort

of literary revolution when the great question of the classics and the

romanticists palpitated on all sides,in the newspapers, at the

clubs, at the Academy, everywhere. Since then, Camille Maupin has

written several plays and a novel, which have not belied the success

obtained by her first publicationnow, perhaps, too much forgotten.

To explain by what net-work of circumstances the masculine incarnation

of a young girl was brought about, why Felicite des Touches became a

man and an author, and why, more fortunate than Madame de Stael, she

kept her freedom and was thus more excusable for her celebrity, would

be to satisfy many curiosities and do justice to one of those abnormal

beings who rise in humanity like monuments, and whose fame is promoted

by its rarity,for in twenty centuries we can count, at most, twenty

famous women. Therefore, although in these pages she stands as a

secondary character, in consideration of the fact that she plays a

great part in the literary history of our epoch, and that her

influence over Calyste was great, no one, we think, will regret being

made to pause before that figure rather longer than modern art

permits.

Mademoiselle Felicite des Touches became an orphan in 1793. Her

property escaped confiscation by reason of the deaths of her father

and brother. The first was killed on the 10th of August, at the

threshold of the palace, among the defenders of the king, near whose

person his rank as major of the guards of the gate had placed him. Her

brother, one of the body-guard, was massacred at Les Carmes.

Mademoiselle des Touches was two years old when her mother died,

killed by grief, a few days after this second catastrophe. When dying,

Madame des Touches confided her daughter to her sister, a nun of

Chelles. Madame de Faucombe, the nun, prudently took the orphan to

Faucombe, a good-sized estate near Nantes, belonging to Madame des

Touches, and there she settled with the little girl and three sisters

of her convent. The populace of Nantes, during the last days of the

Terror, tore down the chateau, seized the nuns and Mademoiselle des

Touches, and threw them into prison on a false charge of receiving

emissaries of Pitt and Coburg. The 9th Thermidor released them.

Felicite's aunt died of fear. Two of the sisters left France, and the

third confided the little girl to her nearest relation, Monsieur de

Faucombe, her maternal great-uncle, who lived in Nantes.

Monsieur de Faucombe, an old man sixty years of age, had married a

young woman to whom he left the management of his affairs. He busied

himself in archaeology,a passion, or to speak more correctly, one of

those manias which enable old men to fancy themselves still living.

The education of his ward was therefore left to chance. Little cared-

for by her uncle's wife, a young woman given over to the social

pleasures of the imperial epoch, Felicite brought herself up as a boy.

She kept company with Monsieur de Faucombe in his library; where she

read everything it pleased her to read. She thus obtained a knowledge

of life in theory, and had no innocence of mind, though virgin

personally. Her intellect floated on the impurities of knowledge while

her heart was pure. Her learning became extraordinary, the result of a

passion for reading, sustained by a powerful memory. At eighteen years

of age she was as well-informed on all topics as a young man entering

a literary career has need to be in our day. Her prodigious reading

controlled her passions far more than conventual life would have done;

for there the imaginations of young girls run riot. A brain crammed

with knowledge that was neither digested nor classed governed the

heart and soul of the child. This depravity of the intellect, without

action upon the chastity of the body, would have amazed philosophers

and observers, had any one in Nantes even suspected the powers of

Mademoiselle des Touches.

The result of all this was in a contrary direction to the cause.

Felicite had no inclinations toward evil; she conceived everything by

thought, but abstained from deed. Old Faucombe was enchanted with her,

and she helped him in his work,writing three of his books, which the

worthy old gentleman believed were his own; for his spiritual

paternity was blind. Such mental labor, not agreeing with the

developments of girlhood, had its effect. Felicite fell ill; her blood

was overheated, and her chest seemed threatened with inflammation. The

doctors ordered horseback exercise and the amusements of society.

Mademoiselle des Touches became, in consequence, an admirable

horsewoman, and recovered her health in a few months.

At the age of eighteen she appeared in the world, where she produced

so great a sensation that no one in Nantes called her anything else

than "the beautiful Mademoiselle des Touches." Led to enter society by

one of the imperishable sentiments in the heart of a woman, however

superior she may be, the worship she inspired found her cold and

unresponsive. Hurt by her aunt and her cousins, who ridiculed her

studies and teased her about her unwillingness for society, which they

attributed to a lack of the power of pleasing, Felicite resolved on

making herself coquettish, gay, volatile,a woman, in short. But she

expected in return an exchange of ideas, seductions, and pleasures in

harmony with the elevation of her own mind and the extent of its

knowledge. Instead of that, she was filled with disgust for the

commonplaces of conversation, the silliness of gallantry; and more

especially was she shocked by the supremacy of military men, to whom

society made obeisance at that period. She had, not unnaturally,

neglected the minor accomplishments. Finding herself inferior to the

pretty dolls who played on the piano and made themselves agreeable by

singing ballads, she determined to be a musician. Retiring into her

former solitude she set to work resolvedly, under the direction of the

best master in the town. She was rich, and she sent for Steibelt when

the time came to perfect herself. The astonished town still talks of

this princely conduct. The stay of that master cost her twelve

thousand francs. Later, when she went to Paris, she studied harmony

and thorough-bass, and composed the music of two operas which have had

great success, though the public has never been admitted to the secret

of their authorship. Ostensibly these operas are by Conti, one of the

most eminent musicians of our day; but this circumstance belongs to

the history of her heart, and will be mentioned later on.

The mediocrity of the society of a provincial town wearied her so

excessively, her imagination was so filled with grandiose ideas that

although she returned to the salons to eclipse other women once more

by her beauty, and enjoy her new triumph as a musician, she again

deserted them; and having proved her power to her cousins, and driven

two lovers to despair, she returned to her books, her piano, the works

of Beethoven, and her old friend Faucombe. In 1812, when she was

twenty-one years of age, the old archaeologist handed over to her his

guardianship accounts. From that year, she took control of her

fortune, which consisted of fifteen thousand francs a year, derived

from Les Touches, the property of her father; twelve thousand a year

from Faucombe (which, however, she increased one-third on renewing the

leases); and a capital of three hundred thousand francs laid by during

her minority by her guardians.

Felicite acquired from her experience of provincial life, an

understanding of money, and that strong tendency to administrative

wisdom which enables the provinces to hold their own under the

ascensional movement of capital towards Paris. She drew her three

hundred thousand francs from the house of business where her guardian

had placed them, and invested them on the Grand-livre at the very

moment of the disasters of the retreat from Moscow. In this way, she

increased her income by thirty thousand francs. All expenses paid, she

found herself with fifty thousand francs a year to invest. At twenty-

one years of age a girl with such force of will is the equal of a man

of thirty. Her mind had taken a wide range; habits of criticism

enabled her to judge soberly of men, and art, and things, and public

questions. Henceforth she resolved to leave Nantes; but old Faucombe

falling ill with his last illness, she, who had been both wife and

daughter to him, remained to nurse him, with the devotion of an angel,

for eighteen months, closing his eyes at the moment when Napoleon was

struggling with all Europe on the corpse of France. Her removal to

Paris was therefore still further postponed until the close of that

crisis.

As a Royalist, she hastened to be present at the return of the

Bourbons to Paris. There the Grandlieus, to whom she was related,

received her as their guest; but the catastrophes of March 20

intervened, and her future was vague and uncertain. She was thus

enabled to see with her own eyes that last image of the Empire, and

behold the Grand Army when it came to the Champ de Mars, as to a Roman

circus, to salute its Caesar before it went to its death at Waterloo.

The great and noble soul of Felicite was stirred by that magic

spectacle. The political commotions, the glamour of that theatrical

play of three months which history has called the Hundred Days,

occupied her mind and preserved her from all personal emotions in the

midst of a convulsion which dispersed the royalist society among whom

she had intended to reside. The Grandlieus followed the Bourbons to

Ghent, leaving their house to Mademoiselle des Touches. Felicite, who

did not choose to take a subordinate position, purchased for one

hundred and thirty thousand francs one of the finest houses in the rue

Mont Blanc, where she installed herself on the return of the Bourbons

in 1815. The garden of this house is to-day worth two millions.

Accustomed to control her own life, Felicite soon familiarized herself

with the ways of thought and action which are held to be exclusively

the province of man. In 1816 she was twenty-five years old. She knew

nothing of marriage; her conception of it was wholly that of thought;

she judged it in its causes instead of its effect, and saw only its

objectionable side. Her superior mind refused to make the abdication

by which a married woman begins that life; she keenly felt the value

of independence, and was conscious of disgust for the duties of

maternity.

It is necessary to give these details to explain the anomalies

presented by the life of Camille Maupin. She had known neither father

nor mother; she had been her own mistress from childhood; her guardian

was an old archaeologist. Chance had flung her into the regions of

knowledge and of imagination, into the world of literature, instead of

holding her within the rigid circle defined by the futile education

given to women, and by maternal instructions as to dress, hypocritical

propriety, and the hunting graces of their sex. Thus, long before she

became celebrated, a glance might have told an observer that she had

never played with dolls.

Toward the close of the year 1817 Felicite des Touches began to

perceive, not the fading of her beauty, but the beginning of a certain

lassitude of body. She saw that a change would presently take place in

her person as the result of her obstinate celibacy. She wanted to

retain her youth and beauty, to which at that time she clung. Science

warned her of the sentence pronounced by Nature upon all her

creations, which perish as much by the misconception of her laws as by

the abuse of them. The macerated face of her aunt returned to her

memory and made her shudder. Placed between marriage and love, her

desire was to keep her freedom; but she was now no longer indifferent

to homage and the admiration that surrounded her. She was, at the

moment when this history begins, almost exactly what she was in 1817.

Eighteen years had passed over her head and respected it. At forty she

might have been thought no more than twenty-five.

Therefore to describe her in 1836 is to picture her as she was in

1817. Women who know the conditions of temperament and happiness in

which a woman should live to resist the ravages of time will

understand how and why Felicite des Touches enjoyed this great

privilege as they study a portrait for which were reserved the

brightest tints of Nature's palette, and the richest setting.

Brittany presents a curious problem to be solved in the predominance

of dark hair, brown eyes, and swarthy complexions in a region so near

England that the atmospheric effects are almost identical. Does this

problem belong to the great question of races? to hitherto unobserved

physical influences? Science may some day find the reason of this

peculiarity, which ceases in the adjoining province of Normandy.

Waiting its solution, this odd fact is there before our eyes; fair

complexions are rare in Brittany, where the women's eyes are as black

and lively as those of Southern women; but instead of possessing the

tall figures and swaying lines of Italy and Spain, they are usually

short, close-knit, well set-up and firm, except in the higher classes

which are crossed by their alliances.

Mademoiselle des Touches, a true Breton, is of medium height, though

she looks taller than she really is. This effect is produced by the

character of her face, which gives height to her form. She has that

skin, olive by day and dazzling by candlelight, which distinguishes a

beautiful Italian; you might, if you pleased, call it animated ivory.

The light glides along a skin of that texture as on a polished

surface; it shines; a violent emotion is necessary to bring the

faintest color to the centre of the cheeks, where it goes away almost

immediately. This peculiarity gives to her face the calm impassibility

of the savage. The face, more long than oval, resembles that of some

beautiful Isis in the Egyptian bas-reliefs; it has the purity of the

heads of sphinxes, polished by the fire of the desert, kissed by a

Coptic sun. The tones of the skin are in harmony with the faultless

modelling of the head. The black and abundant hair descends in heavy

masses beside the throat, like the coif of the statues at Memphis, and

carries out magnificently the general severity of form. The forehead

is full, broad, and swelling about the temples, illuminated by

surfaces which catch the light, and modelled like the brow of the

hunting Diana, a powerful and determined brow, silent and self-

contained. The arch of the eye-brows, vigorously drawn, surmounts a

pair of eyes whose flame scintillates at times like that of a fixed

star. The white of the eye is neither bluish, nor strewn with scarlet

threads, nor is it purely white; it has the texture of horn, but the

tone is warm. The pupil is surrounded by an orange circle; it is of

bronze set in gold, but vivid gold and animated bronze. This pupil

has depth; it is not underlaid, as in certain eyes, by a species of

foil, which sends back the light and makes such eyes resemble those of

cats or tigers; it has not that terrible inflexibility which makes a

sensitive person shudder; but this depth has in it something of the

infinite, just as the external radiance of the eyes suggests the

absolute. The glance of an observer may be lost in that soul, which

gathers itself up and retires with as much rapidity as it gushed for a

second into those velvet eyes. In moments of passion the eyes of

Camille Maupin are sublime; the gold of her glance illuminates them

and they flame. But in repose they are dull; the torpor of meditation

often lends them an appearance of stupidity[*]; in like manner, when

the glow of the soul is absent the lines of the face are sad.

[*] George Sand says of herself, in "L'Histoire de Ma Vie," published

long after the above was written: "The habit of meditation gave me

/l'air bete/ (a stupid air). I say the word frankly, for all my

life I have been told this, and therefore it must be true."TR.

The lashes of the eyelids are short, but thick and black as the tip of

an ermine's tail; the eyelids are brown and strewn with red fibrils,

which give them grace and strength,two qualities which are seldom

united in a woman. The circle round the eyes shows not the slightest

blemish nor the smallest wrinkle. There, again, we find the granite of

an Egyptian statue softened by the ages. But the line of the cheek-

bones, though soft, is more pronounced than in other women and

completes the character of strength which the face expresses. The

nose, thin and straight, parts into two oblique nostrils, passionately

dilated at times, and showing the transparent pink of their delicate

lining. This nose is an admirable continuation of the forehead, with

which it blends in a most delicious line. It is perfectly white from

its spring to its tip, and the tip is endowed with a sort of mobility

which does marvels if Camille is indignant, or angry, or rebellious.

There, above all, as Talma once remarked, is seen depicted the anger

or the irony of great minds. The immobility of the human nostril

indicates a certain narrowness of soul; never did the nose of a miser

oscillate; it contracts like the lips; he locks up his face as he does

his money.

Camille's mouth, arching at the corners, is of a vivid red; blood

abounds there, and supplies the living, thinking oxide which gives

such seduction to the lips, reassuring the lover whom the gravity of

that majestic face may have dismayed. The upper lip is thin, the

furrow which unites it with the nose comes low, giving it a centre

curve which emphasizes its natural disdain. Camille has little to do

to express anger. This beautiful lip is supported by the strong red

breadth of its lower mate, adorable in kindness, swelling with love, a

lip like the outer petal of a pomegranate such as Phidias might have

carved, and the color of which it has. The chin is firm and rather

full; but it expresses resolution and fitly ends this profile, royal

if not divine. It is necessary to add that the upper lip beneath the

nose is lightly shaded by a charming down. Nature would have made a

blunder had she not cast that tender mist upon the face. The ears are

delicately convoluted,a sign of secret refinement. The bust is

large, the waist slim and sufficiently rounded. The hips are not

prominent, but very graceful; the line of the thighs is magnificent,

recalling Bacchus rather than the Venus Callipyge. There we may see

the shadowy line of demarcation which separates nearly every woman of

genius from her sex; there such women are found to have a certain

vague similitude to man; they have neither the suppleness nor the soft

abandonment of those whom Nature destines for maternity; their gait is

not broken by faltering motions. This observation may be called

bi-lateral; it has its counterpart in men, whose thighs are those of

women when they are sly, cunning, false, and cowardly. Camille's neck,

instead of curving inward at the nape, curves out in a line that

unites the head to the shoulders without sinuosity, a most signal

characteristic of force. The neck itself presents at certain moments

an athletic magnificence. The spring of the arms from the shoulders,

superb in outline, seems to belong to a colossal woman. The arms are

vigorously modelled, ending in wrists of English delicacy and charming

hands, plump, dimpled, and adorned with rosy, almond-shaped nails;

these hands are of a whiteness which reveals that the body, so round,

so firm, so well set-up, is of another complexion altogether than the

face. The firm, cold carriage of the head is corrected by the mobility

of the lips, their changing expression, and the artistic play of the

nostrils.

And yet, in spite of all these promiseshidden, perhaps, from the

profanethe calm of that countenance has something, I know not what,

that is vexatious. More sad, more serious than gracious, that face is

marked by the melancholy of constant meditation. For this reason

Mademoiselle des Touches listens more than she talks. She startles by

her silence and by that deep-reaching glance of intense fixity. No

educated person could see her without thinking of Cleopatra, that dark

little woman who almost changed the face of the world. But in Camille

the natural animal is so complete, so self-sufficing, of a nature so

leonine, that a man, however little of a Turk he may be, regrets the

presence of so great a mind in such a body, and could wish that she

were wholly woman. He fears to find the strange distortion of an

abnormal soul. Do not cold analysis and matter-of-fact theory point to

passions in such a woman? Does she judge, and not feel? Or, phenomenon

more terrible, does she not feel and judge at one and the same time?

Able for all things through her brain, ought her course to be

circumscribed by the limitations of other women? Has that intellectual

strength weakened her heart? Has she no charm? Can she descend to

those tender nothings by which a woman occupies, and soothes and

interests the man she loves? Will she not cast aside a sentiment when

it no longer responds to some vision of infinitude which she grasps

and contemplates in her soul? Who can scale the heights to which her

eyes have risen? Yes, a man fears to find in such a woman something

unattainable, unpossessable, unconquerable. The woman of strong mind

should remain a symbol; as a reality she must be feared. Camille

Maupin is in some ways the living image of Schiller's Isis, seated in

the darkness of the temple, at whose feet her priests find the dead

bodies of the daring men who have consulted her.

The adventures of her life declared to be true by the world, and which

Camille has never disavowed, enforce the questions suggested by her

personal appearance. Perhaps she likes those calumnies.

The nature of her beauty has not been without its influence on her

fame; it has served it, just as her fortune and position have

maintained her in society. If a sculptor desires to make a statue of

Brittany let him take Mademoiselle des Touches for his model. That

full-blooded, powerful temperament is the only nature capable of

repelling the action of time. The constant nourishment of the pulp, so

to speak, of that polished skin is an arm given to women by Nature to

resist the invasion of wrinkles; in Camille's case it was aided by the

calm impassibility of her features.

In 1817 this charming young woman opened her house to artists, authors

of renown, learned and scientific men, and publicists,a society

toward which her tastes led her. Her salon resembled that of Baron

Gerard, where men of rank mingled with men of distinction of all

kinds, and the elite of Parisian women came. The parentage of

Mademoiselle des Touches, and her fortune, increased by that of her

aunt the nun, protected her in the attempt, always very difficult in

Paris, to create a society. Her worldly independence was one reason of

her success. Various ambitious mothers indulged in the hope of

inducing her to marry their sons, whose fortunes were out of

proportion to the age of their escutcheons. Several peers of France,

allured by the prospect of eighty thousand francs a year and a house

magnificently appointed, took their womenkind, even the most

fastidious and intractable, to visit her. The diplomatic world, always

in search of amusements of the intellect, came there and found

enjoyment. Thus Mademoiselle des Touches, surrounded by so many forms

of individual interests, was able to study the different comedies

which passion, covetousness, and ambition make the generality of men

perform,even those who are highest in the social scale. She saw,

early in life, the world as it is; and she was fortunate enough not to

fall early into absorbing love, which warps the mind and faculties of

a woman and prevents her from judging soberly.

Ordinarily a woman feels, enjoys, and judges, successively; hence

three distinct ages, the last of which coincides with the mournful

period of old age. In Mademoiselle des Touches this order was

reversed. Her youth was wrapped in the snows of knowledge and the ice

of reflection. This transposition is, in truth, an additional

explanation of the strangeness of her life and the nature of her

talent. She observed men at an age when most women can only see one

man; she despised what other women admired; she detected falsehood in

the flatteries they accept as truths; she laughed at things that made

them serious. This contradiction of her life with that of others

lasted long; but it came to a terrible end; she was destined to find

in her soul a first love, young and fresh, at an age when women are

summoned by Nature to renounce all love.

Meantime, a first affair in which she was involved has always remained

a secret from the world. Felicite, like other women, was induced to

believe that beauty of body was that of soul. She fell in love with a

face, and learned, to her cost, the folly of a man of gallantry, who

saw nothing in her but a mere woman. It was some time before she

recovered from the disgust she felt at this episode. Her distress was

perceived by a friend, a man, who consoled her without personal after-

thought, or, at any rate, he concealed any such motive if he had it.

In him Felicite believed she found the heart and mind which were

lacking to her former lover. He did, in truth, possess one of the most

original minds of our age. He, too, wrote under a pseudonym, and his

first publications were those of an adorer of Italy. Travel was the

one form of education which Felicite lacked. A man of genius, a poet

and a critic, he took Felicite to Italy in order to make known to her

that country of all Art. This celebrated man, who is nameless, may be

regarded as the master and maker of "Camille Maupin." He bought into

order and shape the vast amount of knowledge already acquired by

Felicite; increased it by study of the masterpieces with which Italy

teems; gave her the frankness, freedom, and grace, epigrammatic, and

intense, which is the character of his own talent (always rather

fanciful as to form) which Camille Maupin modified by delicacy of

sentiment and the softer terms of thought that are natural to a woman.

He also roused in her a taste for German and English literature and

made her learn both languages while travelling. In Rome, in 1820,

Felicite was deserted for an Italian. Without that misery she might

never have been celebrated. Napoleon called misfortune the midwife of

genius. This event filled Mademoiselle des Touches, and forever, with

that contempt for men which later was to make her so strong. Felicite

died, Camille Maupin was born.

She returned to Paris with Conti, the great musician, for whom she

wrote the librettos of two operas. But she had no more illusions, and

she became, at heart, unknown to the world, a sort of female Don Juan,

without debts and without conquests. Encouraged by success, she

published the two volumes of plays which at once placed the name of

Camille Maupin in the list of illustrious anonymas. Next, she related

her betrayed and deluded love in a short novel, one of the

masterpieces of that period. This book, of a dangerous example, was

classed with "Adolphe," a dreadful lamentation, the counterpart of

which is found in Camille's work. The true secret of her literary

metamorphosis and pseudonym has never been fully understood. Some

delicate minds have thought it lay in a feminine desire to escape fame

and remain obscure, while offering a man's name and work to criticism.

In spite of any such desire, if she had it, her celebrity increased

daily, partly through the influence of her salon, partly from her own

wit, the correctness of her judgments, and the solid worth of her

acquirements. She became an authority; her sayings were quoted; she

could no longer lay aside at will the functions with which Parisian

society invested her. She came to be an acknowledged exception. The

world bowed before the genius and position of this strange woman; it

recognized and sanctioned her independence; women admired her mind,

men her beauty. Her conduct was regulated by all social conventions.

Her friendships seemed purely platonic. There was, moreover, nothing

of the female author about her. Mademoiselle des Touches is charming

as a woman of the world,languid when she pleases, indolent,

coquettish, concerned about her toilet, pleased with the airy nothings

so seductive to women and to poets. She understands very well that

after Madame de Stael there is no place in this century for a Sappho,

and that Ninon could not exist in Paris without /grands seigneurs/ and

a voluptuous court. She is the Ninon of the intellect; she adores Art

and artists; she goes from the poet to the musician, from the sculptor

to the prose-writer. Her heart is noble, endowed with a generosity

that makes her a dupe; so filled is she with pity for sorrow,filled

also with contempt for the prosperous. She has lived since 1830, the

centre of a choice circle, surrounded by tried friends who love her

tenderly and esteem each other. Far from the noisy fuss of Madame de

Stael, far from political strifes, she jokes about Camille Maupin,

that junior of George Sand (whom she calls her brother Cain), whose

recent fame has now eclipsed her own. Mademoiselle des Touches admires

her fortunate rival with angelic composure, feeling no jealousy and no

secret vexation.

Until the period when this history begins, she had led as happy a life

as a woman strong enough to protect herself can be supposed to live.

From 1817 to 1834 she had come some five or six times to Les Touches.

Her first stay was after her first disillusion in 1818. The house was

uninhabitable, and she sent her man of business to Guerande and took a

lodging for herself in the village. At that time she had no suspicion

of her coming fame; she was sad, she saw no one; she wanted, as it

were, to contemplate herself after her great disaster. She wrote to

Paris to have the furniture necessary for a residence at Les Touches

sent down to her. It came by a vessel to Nantes, thence by small boats

to Croisic, from which little place it was transported, not without

difficulty, over the sands to Les Touches. Workmen came down from

Paris, and before long she occupied Les Touches, which pleased her

immensely. She wanted to meditate over the events of her life, like a

cloistered nun.

At the beginning of the winter she returned to Paris. The little town

of Guerande was by this time roused to diabolical curiosity; its whole

talk was of the Asiatic luxury displayed at Les Touches. Her man of

business gave orders after her departure that visitors should be

admitted to view the house. They flocked from the village of Batz,

from Croisic, and from Savenay, as well as from Guerande. This public

curiosity brought in an enormous sum to the family of the porter and

gardener, not less, in two years, than seventeen francs.

After this, Mademoiselle des Touches did not revisit Les Touches for

two years, not until her return from Italy. On that occasion she came

by way of Croisic and was accompanied by Conti. It was some time

before Guerande became aware of her presence. Her subsequent

apparitions at Les Touches excited comparatively little interest. Her

Parisian fame did not precede her; her man of business alone knew the

secret of her writings and of her connection with the celebrity of

Camille Maupin. But at the period of which we are now writing the

contagion of the new ideas had made some progress in Guerande, and

several persons knew of the dual form of Mademoiselle des Touches'

existence. Letters came to the post-office, directed to Camille Maupin

at Les Touches. In short, the veil was rent away. In a region so

essentially Catholic, archaic, and full of prejudice, the singular

life of this illustrious woman would of course cause rumors, some of

which, as we have seen, had reached the ears of the Abbe Grimont and

alarmed him; such a life could never be comprehended in Guerande; in

fact, to every mind, it seemed unnatural and improper.

Felicite, during her present stay, was not alone in Les Touches. She

had a guest. That guest was Claude Vignon, a scornful and powerful

writer who, though doing criticism only, has found means to give the

public and literature the impression of a certain superiority.

Mademoiselle des Touches had received this writer for the last seven

years, as she had so many other authors, journalists, artists, and men

of the world. She knew his nerveless nature, his laziness, his utter

penury, his indifference and disgust for all things, and yet by the

way she was now conducting herself she seemed inclined to marry him.

She explained her conduct, incomprehensible to her friends, in various

ways,by ambition, by the dread she felt of a lonely old age; she

wanted to confide her future to a superior man, to whom her fortune

would be a stepping-stone, and thus increase her own importance in the

literary world.

With these apparent intentions she had brought Claude Vignon from

Paris to Les Touches, as an eagle bears away a kid in its talons,to

study him, and decide upon some positive course. But, in truth, she

was misleading both Calyste and Claude; she was not even thinking of

marriage; her heart was in the throes of the most violent convulsion

that could agitate a soul as strong as hers. She found herself the

dupe of her own mind; too late she saw life lighted by the sun of

love, shining as love shines in a heart of twenty.

Let us now see Camille's convent where this was happening.