VIII.
EDGAR DE MEILHAN
to the
PRINCE DE MONBERT,
Saint Dominique street, Paris.
RICHEPORT, May 31st, 18—.
Now that you are a sort of Amadis de Gaul, striking attitudes upon a barren rock, as a sign of your lovelorn condition, you have probably forgotten, my dear Roger, my encounter upon the cars with an ideal grisette, who saved me from the horrors of starvation by generously dividing with me a bag of sugar-plums. But for this unlooked-for aid, I should have been reduced, like a famous handful of shipwrecked mariners, to feed upon my watch-chain and vest-buttons. To a man so absorbed in his grief, as you are, the news of the death from starvation of a friend upon the desert island of a railway station, would make very little impression; but I not being in love with any Irene de Chateaudun, have preserved a pleasant recollection of this touching scene, translated from the Æneid in modern and familiar prose.
I wrote immediately,—for my beauty, of an infinitely less exalted rank than yours, lodges with the post-mistress,—several fabulous letters to problematic people, in countries which do not exist, and are only designated upon the map by a dash.
Madame Taverneau has conceived a profound respect for a young man who has correspondents in unknown lands, barely sighted in 1821 at the Antarctic pole, and in 1819 at the Arctic pole, so she invited me to a little soirée musicale et dansante, of which I was to be the bright particular star. An invitation to an exclusive ball, given at an inaccessible house, never gave a woman with a doubtful past or an uncertain position, half the pleasure that I felt from the entangled sentences of Madame Taverneau in which she did not dare to hope, but would be happy if—.
Apart from the happiness of seeing Madame Louise Guérin (my charmer's name), I looked forward to an entirely new recreation, that of studying the manners of the middle class in their intimate relations with each other. I have lived with the aristocracy and with the canaille; in the highest and lowest conditions of life are found entire absence of pretension; in the highest, because their position is assured; in the lowest, because it is simply impossible to alter it. None but poets are really unhappy because they cannot climb to the stars. A half-way position is the most false.
I thought I would go early to have some talk with Louise, but the circle was already completed when I arrived; everybody had come first.
The guests were assembled in a large, gloomy room, gloriously called a drawing-room, where the servant never enters without first taking off her shoes at the door, like a Turk in a mosque, and which is only opened on the most solemn occasions. As it is doubtful whether you have ever set foot in a like establishment, I will give you, in imitation of the most profound of our novel-writers (which one? you will say; they are all profound now-a-days), a detailed description of Madame Taverneau's salon.
Two windows, hung in red calico, held up by some black ornaments, a complication of sticks, pegs and all sorts of implements on stamped copper, gave light to this sanctuary, which commanded through them an animated look-out—in the language of the commonalty—upon the scorching, noisy highway, bordered by sickly elms sprinkled with dust, from the constant passage of vehicles which shake the house to its centre; wagons loaded with noisy iron, and droves of hogs, squeaking under the drover's whip.
The floor was painted red and polished painfully bright, reminding one of a wine-merchant's sign freshly varnished; the walls were concealed under frightful velvet paper which so religiously catches the fluff and dust. The mahogany furniture stood round the room, a reproach against the discovery of America, covered with sanguinary cloth stamped in black with subjects taken from Fontaine's fables. When I say subjects I basely flatter the sumptuous taste of Madame Taverneau; it was the same subject indefinitely repeated—the Fox and the Stork. How luxurious it was to sit upon a stork's beak! In front of each chair was spread a piece of carpet, to protect the splendor of the floor, so that the guests when seated bore a vague resemblance to the bottles and decanters set round the plated centrepiece of a banquet given to a deputy by his grateful constituents.
An atrocious troubadour clock ornamented the mantel-piece representing the templar Bois-Guilbert bearing off a gilded Rebecca upon a silver horse. On either side of this frightful time-piece were placed two plated lamps under globes.
This magnificence filled with secret envy more than one housekeeper of Pont de l'Arche, and even the maid trembled as she dusted. We will not speak of the spun-glass poodles, little sugar St. Johns, chocolate Napoleons, a cabinet filled with common china, occupying a conspicuous place, engravings representing the Adieux to Fontainebleau, Souvenirs and Regrets, The Fisherman's Family, The Little Poachers, and other hackneyed subjects. Can you imagine anything like it? For my part, I never could understand this love for the common-place and the hideous. I know that every one does not dwell in Alhambras, Louvres, or Parthenons, but it is so easy to do without a clock to leave the walls bare, to exist without Manrin's lithographs or Jazet's aquatints!
The people filling the room, seemed to me, in point of vulgarity, the queerest in the world; their manner of speaking was marvellous, imitating the florid style of the defunct Prudhomme, the pupil of Brard and St. Omer. Their heads spread out over their white cravats and immense shirt collars recalled to mind certain specimens of the gourd tribe. Some even resemble animals, the lion, the horse, the ass; these, all things considered, had a vegetable rather than an animal look. Of the women I will say nothing, having resolved never to ridicule that charming sex.
Among these human vegetables, Louise appeared like a rose in a cabbage patch. She wore a simple white dress fastened at the waist by a blue ribbon; her hair arranged in bandeaux encircled her pure brow and wound in massive coils about her head. A Quakeress could have found no fault with this costume, which placed in grotesque and ridiculous contrast the hearselike trappings of the other women. It was impossible to be dressed in better taste. I was afraid lest my Infanta should seize this opportunity to display some marvellous toilette purchased expressly for the occasion. That plain muslin gown which never saw India, and was probably made by herself, touched and fascinated me. Dress has very little weight with me. I once admired a Granada gypsy whose sole costume consisted of blue slippers and a necklace of amber beads; but nothing annoys me more than a badly made dress of an unbecoming shade.
The provincial dandies much preferring the rubicund gossips, with their short necks covered with gold chains, to Madame Taverneau's young and slender guest, I was free to talk with her under cover of Louisa Pugett's ballads and sonatas executed by infant phenomena upon a cracked piano hired from Rouen for the occasion.
Louisa's wit was charming. How mistaken it is to educate instinct out of women! To replace nature by a school-mistress! She committed none of those terrible mistakes which shock one; it was evident that she formed her sentences herself instead of repeating formulae committed to memory. She had either never read a novel or had forgotten it, and unless she is a wonderful actress she remains as the great fashioner, Nature, made her—a perfect woman. We remained a greater part of the evening seated together in a corner like beings of another race. Profiting by the great interest betrayed by the company in one of those soi-disant innocent games where a great deal of kissing is done, the fair girl, doubtless fearing a rude salute on her delicate cheek, led me into her room, which adjoins the parlor and opens into the garden by a glass door.
On a table in the room, feebly lighted by a lamp which Louisa modestly turned up, were scattered pell-mell, screens, boxes from Spa, alabaster paper-weights and other details of the art of illuminating, which profession my beauty practises; and which explains her occasional aristocratic airs, unbecoming an humble seamstress. A bouquet just commenced showed talent; with some lessons from St. Jean or Diaz she would easily make a good flower painter. I told her so. She received my encomiums as a matter of course, evincing none of that mock-modesty which I particularly detest.
She showed me a bizarre little chest that she was making, which at first-sight seemed to be carved out of coral; it was constructed out of the wax-seals cut from old letters pasted together. This new mosaic was very simple, and yet remarkably pretty. She asked me to give her, in order to finish her box, all the striking seals I possessed, emblazoned in figures and devices. I gave her five or six letters that I had in my pocket, from which she dexterously cut the seals with her little scissors. While she was thus engaged I strolled about the garden—a Machiavellian manoeuvre, for, in order to return me my letters, she must come in search of me.
The gardens of Madame Taverneau are not the gardens of Armida; but it is not in the power of the commonalty to spoil entirely the work of God's hands; trees, by the moonbeams of a summer-night, although only a few steps from red-cotton curtains and a sanhedrim of merry tradespeople, are still trees. In a corner of the garden stood a large acacia tree, in full bloom, waving its yellow hair in the soft night-breeze, and mingling its perfume with that of the flowers of the marsh iris, poised like azure butterflies upon their long green stems.
The porch was flooded with silver light, and when Louise, having secured her seals, appeared upon the threshold, her pure and elegant form stood out against the dark background of the room like an alabaster statuette.
Her step, as she advanced towards me, was undulating and rhythmical like a Greek strophe. I took my letters, and we strolled along the path towards an arbor.
So glad was I to get away from the templar Bois-Guilbert carrying off Rebecca, and the plated lamps, that I developed an eloquence at once persuasive and surprising. Louise seemed much agitated; I could almost see the beatings of her heart—the accents of her pure voice were troubled—she spoke as one just awakened from a dream. Tell me, are not these the symptoms, wherever you have travelled, of a budding love?
I took her hand; it was moist and cool, soft as the pulp of a magnolia flower,—and I thought I felt her fingers faintly return my pressure.
I am delighted that this scene occurred by moonlight and under the acacia's perfumed branches, for I affect poetical surroundings for my love scenes. It would be disagreeable to recall a lovely face relieved against wall-paper covered with yellow scrolls; or a declaration of love accompanied, in the distance, by the Grace de Dieu; my first significant interview with Louise will be associated in my thoughts with moonbeams, the odor of the iris and the song of the cricket in the summer grass.
You, no doubt, pronounce me, dear Roger, a pitiable Don Juan, a common-place Amilcar, for not profiting by the occasion. A young man strolling at night in a garden with a screen painter ought at least to have stolen a kiss! At the risk of appearing ridiculous, I did nothing of the kind. I love Louise, and besides she has at times such an air of hauteur, of majestic disdain that the boldest commercial traveller steeped to the lips in Pigault-Lebrun, a sub-lieutenant wild with absinthe would not venture such a caress—she would almost make one believe in virtue, if such a thing were possible. Frankly, I am afraid that I am in earnest this time. Order me a dove-colored vest, apple-green trowsers, a pouch, a crook, in short the entire outfit of a Lignon shepherd. I shall have a lamb washed to complete the pastoral.
How I reached the château, whether walking or flying, I cannot tell. Happy as a king, proud as a god, for a new love was born in my heart.
EDGAR DE MEILHAN.