4
When I return to the drawing-room, Blanche calls me with a laugh of delight:
"Oh, look!" she cries. "I've found a book with a portrait of my beloved Elizabeth Browning. Look at that sweet, gentle face, surrounded with ringlets: it's just as I imagined her. I love her all the better now."
They had opened other books written by women and, leaning over the table, were comparing the frontispiece portraits of the authors, interesting or handsome, grave or smiling, young or old. Even so do certain little volumes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries open nearly always with an engraving faded by time and representing charming faces all of the same class and often with similar expressions and features: a delicate nose, a bow-shaped, smiling mouth, intelligent eyes with no mysterious depths, dimpled cheeks, a string of pearls round the neck, a loosely-tied kerchief just revealing a swelling bosom, wanton curls dancing against a dark background in a frame of roses upheld by Cupids. And the quiver and the arrows and the flying ribbons and the turtle-doves: all this, joined to the letters, the maxims or the verses, often grave or even sad, sometimes calm and reasonable, sometimes passionate, brings before us in a few strokes the harmonious picture of woman's life.
"It is no longer the fashion in these days," murmured Blanche. "And yet is there not an intimate relation between a woman's work and her appearance?"
"That is the reason, no doubt," replied Marcienne, "why it seems, unlike man's, to grow smaller as it passes out of the present. We see the immortal pages disappear like the fallen petals of a flower. It's sad, don't you think?"
Struck with the beauty of her closing words, we listened to her in silence. She continued to turn the leaves at random and resumed:
"But, oh, the exquisite art which a woman's work can show when she is not only beautiful, but truly wise, when a lovely hand indites stately verse, when a life holds or breathes nothing but high romance ... and love! For it is love and love alone that makes a woman's brain conceive."
Cecilia, who was gradually losing her shyness, made a gesture to silence us and said, slowly:
"I'll tell you something!"
A general peal of laughter greeted this phrase with which the young Dutchwoman, according to the custom of her country, always ushers in her least words. To make yourself better understood by slow and absent minds, is it not well to give a warning? It is a sort of little spring that goes off first and arouses people's attention. Then the thought is there, ready for utterance. And sometimes, amid the silence, an announcement is made that it will be fine to-morrow, or that it is hot and that a storm is threatening.
But Cecilia is much too clever to cast aside those little mannerisms of her native race which so charmingly accentuate her special type of beauty. So she joined in our laughter with a good grace and, after repeating her warning, observed, in her hesitating language, that, by thus admitting ourselves to be the mere creatures of love, we were justifying the opinion of the men who treat us as "looking-glasses."
"Looking-glasses? Men's looking-glasses? And why not?" I exclaimed. "It is not for us women to decry that looking-glass side of us. It is serious, more serious than you think, for on the beauty of our reflection often depend our ardour, our courage, our very character and all the energies that create or affect our actions. Besides, whether men or women, we can only reflect one another and we ourselves do not become conscious of our powers until the day of the supreme love, as if, till then, we had only seen ourselves in pocket-mirrors which never reflect more than a morsel of our lives, a movement, a gesture ... and which always distort it!"
Every mouth quivered with laughter. I insisted:
"If women often have so much difficulty in learning to know their own characters, it is because most men are scornful mirrors, occupied with nothing smaller than the universe and never dreaming of reflecting women except in a grudging and imperfect fashion."
"It is true," said Marcienne, thinking of her lover, a man whose domineering temper often made him unjust to her. "Men's lives would be less serenely confident if our amiable and accommodating souls did not afford them a vision incessantly embellished by love ... and always having infinity for a background!"
And, with a satirical smile, she added:
"Let us accept the part of looking-glasses, but let us place our gods in a still higher light! They will not complain; and we shall at least have the advantage of seeing beyond them a little space and brightness."
The conversation then assumed a more personal character, each of us thinking of the well-beloved: Marcienne, ever mournful and passionate; the gentle Blanche, anxious, secretly plighted to an absent lover; and Cecilia, all absorbed in her young happiness with the husband of her choice.