VI.
In order to console ourselves here, we have read some charming letters; here is one of them from the little Duc du Maine, seven years old, whom Mme. de Maintenon had brought here to be cured. He wrote to his mother Mme. de Montespan, and the letter must certainly pass under the king’s eyes. What a school of style was that court!
“I am going off to write all the news of the house for thy diversion, my dear little heart, and I shall write far better when I shall think that it is for you, madame. Mme. de Maintenon spends all her time in spinning, and, if they would let her, she would also give up her nights to it, or to writing. She toils daily for my mind; she has good hope of making something of it, and the darling too, who will do all he can to have some brains, for he is dying with the desire of pleasing the king and you. On the way here I read the history of Cæsar, am at present reading that of Alexander, and shall soon commence that of Pompey. La Couture does not like to lend me Mme. de Maintenon’s petticoats, when I want to disguise myself as a girl. I have received the letter you write to the dear little darling; I was delighted with it; I will do what you bid me, if only to please you, for I love you superlatively. I was, and am still, charmed with the little nod that the king gave me on leaving, but was very ill pleased that thou didst not seem to me sorry: thou wast beautiful as an angel.”
Could any one be more gracious, more flattering, insinuating or precocious? To please was a necessity at that time, to please people of the world, quick-witted people. Never were men more agreeable; because there was never greater need of being agreeable. This youth, brought up among petticoats, took on from the beginning a woman’s vivacity, her coquetry and smiles. You see that he gets upon their knees, receives and gives embraces, and is amusing; there is no prettier trinket in the salon.
Mme. de Maintenon, devout, circumspect and politic, also writes, but with the clearness and brevity of a worldly abbess or a president in petticoats. “You see that I take courage in a place more frightful than I can tell you; to crown the misery, we are freezing here. The company is poor; they respect and bore us. All the women are ill continually; they are loungers who have found the world really great as soon as ever they have been at Etampes.”
We have amused ourselves with this raillery, dry, disdainful, clear-cut and somewhat too short, and I have maintained to Paul that Mme. de Maintenon resembles the yews at Versailles, brushy extinguishers that are too closely clipped. Whereupon I spoke very ill of the landscapes of the seventeenth century, of Le Nôtre, Poussin and his architectural nature, Leclerc, Perelle, and of their abstract, conventional trees, whose majestically rounded foliage agrees with that of no known species. He lectured me severely, according to his custom, and called me narrow-minded; he maintains that all is beautiful; that all that is necessary is to put yourself at the right point of view. His reasoning was nearly as follows:
He claims that things please us by contrast, and that beautiful things are different for different souls. “One day,” said he, “I was travelling with some English people in Champagne, on a cloudy day in September. They found the plains horrible, and I admirable. The dull fields stretched out like a sea to the very verge of the horizon, without encountering a hill. The stalks of the close-reaped wheat dyed the earth with a wan yellow; the plain seemed covered with an old wet mantle. Here were lines of deformed elms; here and there a meagre square of fir-trees; further off a cottage of chalk with its white pool: from furrow to furrow the sun trailed its sickly light, and the earth, emptied of its fruits, was like a woman dead in child-bed whose infant they have taken away.
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“My companions were utterly bored, and called down curses on France. Their minds, strained by the rude passions of politics, by the national arrogance, and the stiffness of scriptural morality, needed repose. They wanted a smiling and flowery country, meadows soft and still, fine shadows, largely and harmoniously grouped on the slopes of the hills..The sunburnt peasants, dull of countenance, sitting near a pool of mud, were disagreeable to them. For repose, they dreamed of pretty cottages set in fresh turf, fringed with rosy honeysuckle. Nothing could be more reasonable. A man obliged to hold himself upright and unbending finds a sitting posture the most beautiful..
“You go to Versailles, and you cry out against the taste of the seventeenth century. Those formal and monumental waters, the firs turned in the lathe, the rectangular staircases heaped one above another, the trees drawn up like grenadiers on parade, recall to you the geometry class and the platoon school. Nothing can be better. But cease for an instant to judge according to your habits and wants of the day. You live alone, or at home, on a third floor in Paris, and spend four hours weekly in the saloons of some thirty different people. Louis XIV. lived eight hours a day, every day the whole year long, in public, and this public included all the lords of France. He held his drawing-room in the open air; the drawing-room is the park at Versailles. Why ask of it the charms of a valley? These squared hedges of hornbeam are necessary that the embroidered coats may not be caught. This levelled and shaven turf is necessary that high-heeled shoes may not be wetted. The duchesses will form a circle about these circular sheets of water. Nothing can be better chosen than these immense and symmetrical staircases for showing off the gold and silver laced robes of three hundred ladies. These large alleys, which seem empty to you, were majestic when fifty lords in brocade and lace displayed here their cordons bleus and their graceful bows. No garden is better constructed for showing one’s self in grand costume and in great company, for making a bow, for chatting and concocting intrigues of gallantry and business. You wish perhaps to rest, to be alone, to dream; you must go elsewhere; you have come to the wrong gate: but it would be the height of absurdity to blame a drawing-room for being a drawing-room.
“You understand then that our modern taste will be as transitory as the ancient; that is to say, that it is precisely as reasonable and as foolish. We have the right to admire wild, uncultivated spots, as once men had the right of getting tired in them. Nothing uglier to the seventeenth century than a true mountain. It recalled a thousand ideas of misfortune.
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“The men who had come out from the civil wars and semi-barbarism thought of famines, of long journeys on horseback through rain and snow, of the wretched black bread mingled with straw, of the foul hostelries, infested with vermin. They were tired of barbarism as we of civilization. To-day the streets are so clean, the police so abundant, the houses drawn out in such regular lines, manners are so peaceful, events so small and so clearly foreseen, that we love grandeur and the unforeseen. The landscape changes as literature does: then literature furnished long sugary romances and elegant dissertations; now-a-days it offers spasmodic poetry and a physiological drama. Landscape is an unwritten literature; the former like the latter is a sort of flattery addressed to our passions, or a nourishment proffered to our needs.
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“These old wasted mountains, these lacerating points, bristling by myriads, these formidable fissures whose perpendicular wall plunges with a spring down into invisible depths; this chaos of monstrous ridges heaped together, and crushing each other like an affrighted herd of leviathans; this universal and implacable domination of the naked rock, the enemy of all life, refreshes us after our pavements, our offices and our shops. You only love them from this cause, and this cause removed, they would be as unpleasant to you as to Madame de Maintenon.”
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So that there are fifty sorts of beauty,—one for every age.
“Certainly.”
Then there is no such thing as beauty.
“That is as if you were to say that a woman is nude because she has fifty dresses.”
