COULEUR DE ROSE
Sainte-Beuve, in one of his early Lundis, tells a touching story of Madame de Pompadour, the frail and pretty lady who was forced by circumstances rather than native bent into becoming a Minister of State, and one, at that, who had to measure swords with the great Frederick of Prussia. At one stage of her career she had hopes of a match between a daughter of her married state and a natural son of Louis. There seemed to be the makings of a Duc du Maine in the lad, of a Duchess consequently for her family. And that was the simple objective of those of her faction who favoured the scheme. But her own was simpler still. She spoke her real mind about it to Madame de Hausset, her lady-in-waiting, from whose Mémoires Sainte-Beuve quotes it.
“Un brevet de duc pour mon fils,” she said, “c’est bien peu; et c’est à cause que c’est son fils que je le préfère, ma bonne, à tous les petits ducs de la Cour. Mes petits enfants participeraient en ressemblance du grand-père et de la grand’-mère, et ce mélange que j’ai l’espoir de voir ferait mon bonheur un jour.”
Interesting revelation. “Les larmes lui vinrent aux yeux,” says Madame de Hausset. She was bourgeoise, you see, this poor Pompadour, with the homely instincts, the longing for the snug interior, the home, the family life which characterise the plainly-born. She had been a Mademoiselle Poisson. Poisson indeed! What had a Mademoiselle Poisson to do with a Fils de Saint-Louis, or in a Parc aux Cerfs? Nothing whatever in first intention, at least; rather she was all for love and the world well lost. She had had her dreams, wherein Louis was to be her “jo,” and they were to climb the hill together. The ideal remained with her, for ever unrealised, always, it seemed, just realisable; and her foreign and military adventures, the certain ruin of her country, were so many shifts to arrive—she and Louis together, hand in hand—at some Island of the Blest. No beautiful end will justify means so unbeautiful, but to some extent it excuses them.
Exactly on a level with that tale is one which I read somewhere lately: also a French tale. It was about the exorbitantly-loved mistress of some officer, who craved the rights of a wife, and worried him until she had them—with the result that she obtained also the wrongs. She in fact became what the man’s wife was at the moment: in her turn she was trompée. And what were the rights for which she risked, and indeed lost, everything she had? To preside at his breakfast-table, to dine vis-à-vis at home instead of at a restaurant, to sleep with her head on his shoulder. That was all. And when she had it, her pride and joy became his ineffable weariness. He carried his vice elsewhere. There is the whole difference between two classes there—between Louis le Désiré and his Poisson; between two instincts—Sentiment and Curiosity; between two ideals—Distraction and Fulfilment. There is very nearly all the essential difference that exists between men and women, the active and the passive principle in human nature.
Behind the sentimental there is always a moral reality. It may not be all the sentimentalists believe it; they may mistake appearance of the thing for the thing itself; but there is a reality. To preside over a man’s tea-cups is symbolic; to be his wife is more than symbolic, for a symbol may be a sacrament—and that is a reality. The wedding-ring is a sacrament for those who seek fulfilment of their being. To those who seek distraction of it, it simply puts a point to their need. To the seekers of distraction there is neither end, nor symbol, nor sacrament. Mr. Hardy once wrote a parable upon the theme—the Pursuit of the Well-Beloved it was called; and after his manner he gave a mocking twist to it. In it a nympholept, a sort of Louis XV, pursued successively a woman, her daughter and her grand-daughter, and having caught them one after another, found that there was nothing in it. Last of all, the man died also, but not without feeling pretty sure that if he could have waited for the great-grand-daughter all would have been well with him. Such shadows we are, pursuing shadows. But women are realists. They can see detail and fulfil themselves with that, failing the great thing. That is a strength which is also a weakness, fatal to them in many cases. Only, even so, it is not always easy to decide which it is. Was it strength or weakness in Romney’s wife? She nursed him through a fever, herself then a young girl, and he married her for her pains. He lived with her for five years, gave her a family, and left her. He hardly saw her again for forty years, when he returned, broken and old, to Kendal, where he had left her, to be nursed once more out of illness. So far as we know, she had no reproaches for him. He died in her arms. What reality she may have found to support her constancy one can hardly say; but at least she had more than the nympholept had ever found in his forty years in the wilderness. Enough indeed to give her fulfilment at the last.
I have touched a thing there, or I am the more deceived, which Mr. Lucas has entirely overlooked in a recent book of his. By so doing he has turned what might have been a touching piece of sentiment into something which, luckily for us, exists mainly in club arm-chairs. We have had Science from an Easy-Chair, and none the worse for being so delivered. But arm-chair ethics is another matter. In Mr. Lucas’s Rose and Rose a doctor, with a good cook (an important factor) and an Epicurean friend, who has the knack of making cynicisms sound true, by using a genial manner, becomes guardian of a child, who grows up into a nice girl, and in due course falls in love. She chooses a man whom the doctor dislikes, whom she, however, prefers to several other candidates, against whom there are really only nods and winks from the doctor and the Epicurean on the sofa. She marries, and isn’t happy. Her husband, without being a prig—he had not enough colour for that—was a precisian, careful of his money, who did his own housekeeping. He had not such a good cook as the doctor had, and may have felt that Rose’s education in housewifery had been neglected. Probably it had. A good cook will coddle her clients, but not impart her mystery. I daresay the husband was trying; but he seems to have been good-tempered and honourable; he paid his way, and he gave Rose I a Rose II. That at least should have been an asset on his side of the account. But not at all. After a time, not clearly illuminated, in which nothing particular seems to have happened—except one thing—Rose I ups and elopes with the one thing, leaving her husband and Rose II in the lurch. She had known her lover before marriage. He had very white teeth, and she had nursed him through an illness. Well, when she found him again, his teeth were still quite white, and he had another illness. So there you were. She went off with him, I think to Singapore, and did not reappear until the last chapter, by which time her ailing lover had cleaned his teeth for the last time. The doctor, who still had the good cook, and had adopted and brought up Rose II to the marriage-point, then received back with a beating heart his Rose I.
A doctor of seventy, with a good cook and digestion, an arm-chair and a rather good cellar of port, fortified also by the caustic wit of an epicurean patient, is capable of much. He might think (as Mr. Lucas’s did) that it was all right. He would be for the line of least resistance, and that would certainly be the baby. He happened to like them—which put him in a strong position. But his Rose I went much further than even Jean-Jacques had gone. He took his superfluous children to the Enfants Trouvés. Rose simply dropped hers. “De Charon pas un mot!” And so far as I can find out not a word afterwards, until she came home in the last chapter, as if nothing had happened. Then, if you please, Rose II takes the prodigal mother to her bosom, and they all lived happily ever after. Life is not so simple as all that. It could not be while women were women.
The poor “unfortunate females” with whom I began this article are against it. Mrs. Romney is against it. To the best of my belief the middle-class, to which the Roses belong, is still against it. Many marriages are unhappy, and many children left to shift; but not yet in the middle-class to any dangerous extent. A doctor in an easy-chair, with a good cook and cellar, does not count. His cook has unclassed him.