Surely she had magnetism enough, the dear creature, not only in her eyes, which were of uncertain hue, veiled or laughing like the sky of her Paris, but in her voice, in the folds of her dress, in everything, even to the long curl that shaded her straight, graceful statue-like neck and attracted you by its tapering shaded point, deftly curled over a supple finger.
The tea being duly served, while the gentlemen continued their talking and drinking—Père Joyeuse was always very slow in everything that he did, because of his abrupt excursions into the moon—the girls resumed their work, the table was covered with wicker baskets, embroidery, pretty wools whose brilliant coloring brightened the faded flowers in the old carpet, and the group of the other evening was formed anew in the luminous circle of the lamp shade, to the great satisfaction of Paul de Géry. It was the first evening of that sort he had passed in Paris; it reminded him of other far-away evenings, cradled by the same innocent mirth, the pleasant sound of scissors laid upon the table, of the needle piercing the cotton, or the rustling of the leaves of a book as they are turned, and dear faces, vanished forever, clustered in the same way around the family lamp, alas! so suddenly extinguished.
Once admitted into that charming domestic circle, he was not excluded from it again, but took his lessons among the girls, and made bold to talk with them when the good man closed his ledger. There everything tended to give him grateful repose from the seething life in which the Nabob's luxurious worldliness involved him; he bathed in that atmosphere of honesty and simplicity, and strove to cure there the wounds with which a hand more indifferent than cruel was mercilessly riddling his heart.
"Women have hated me, other women have loved me. She who did me the most harm never had either love or hate for me." Paul had fallen in, with the woman of whom Heinrich Heine speaks. Felicia was very hospitable and cordial to him. There was no one whom she welcomed more graciously. She reserved for him a special smile, in which there was the pleased expression of an artist's eye resting upon a type which attracts it, and the satisfaction of a blasé mind which is amused by anything new, however simple it may seem to be. She liked that reserve, most alluring in a Southerner, the straightforwardness of that judgment, entirely free from artistic or worldly formulas and enlivened by a touch of local accent. It was a change for her from the zigzag movement of the thumb, drawing flattery in outline with the gestures of a studio fag, from the congratulations of comrades on the way in which she silenced some poor fellow, and from the affected admiration, the "chawming—veay pretty," with which the young dandies honored her as they sucked the handles of their canes. He, at all events, said nothing of that sort to her. She had nicknamed him Minerva, because of his apparent tranquillity and the regularity of his profile; and as soon as he appeared, she would say: "Ah! there's Minerva. Hail, lovely Minerva. Take off your helmet and let us have a talk."
But that familiar, almost fraternal, tone convinced the young man of the hopelessness of his love. He realized that he could not hope to make any further progress in that feminine good-fellowship in which affection was lacking, and that he should lose something every day of his charm as an unfamiliar type in the eyes of that creature who was born bored, and who seemed to have lived her life already and to find the insipidity of repetition in everything that she heard or saw. Felicia was suffering from ennui. Only her art had the power to divert her, to take her out of herself, to transport her to a fairyland of dazzling beauty from which she returned all bruised and sore, always surprised at the awakening, which resembled a fall. She compared herself to the jelly-fish, whose transparent brilliancy in the coolness and constant movement of the waves, vanishes on the shore in little gelatinous pools. During those intervals of idleness, when the absence of thought leaves the hand inert upon the modelling tool, Felicia, deprived of the sole moral nerve of her intellect, became savage, unapproachable, sullen beyond endurance,—the revenge of paltry human qualities upon great tired brains. After she had brought tears to the eyes of all those whom she loved, had striven to evoke painful memories or paralyzing anxieties, and had reached the brutal, murderous climax of her fatigue,—as it was always necessary, where she was concerned, that something ridiculous should be mingled even with the saddest things, she would blow away the remains of her ennui with a cry like that of a dazed wild beast, a sort of yawning roar which she called "the cry of the jackal in the desert," and which would drive the blood from the excellent Crenmitz's cheeks, taking her by surprise in her torpid placidity.
Poor Felicia! Her life was in very truth a ghastly desert when her art did not enliven it with its visions, a dismal, unrelieved desert, where everything was crushed and flattened beneath the same monotonous immensity, the ingenuous love of a boy of twenty and the caprice of an amorous duke, where everything was covered with dry sand blown about by the scorching winds of destiny. Paul was conscious of that void, he tried to escape from it; but something detained him, like a weight which unwinds a chain, and, notwithstanding the evil things he heard, notwithstanding the strange creature's peculiarities, he hovered about her with a delicious sense of enjoyment, under pain of carrying naught away from that long amorous contemplation save the despair of a believer reduced to the adoration of images.
The place of refuge was in yonder out-of-the-way quarter, where the wind blew so hard without preventing the flame from burning white and straight,—it was in the domestic circle presided over by Grandmamma. Oh! she did not suffer from ennui, she never uttered "the cry of the jackal in the desert." Her life was too well filled: the father to comfort and encourage, the children to teach, all the material cares of a household in which the mother was lacking, the engrossing thoughts which wake with the dawn and which the night puts to sleep, unless it renews them in dreams—one of those instances of indefatigable but apparently effortless devotion, very convenient for poor human selfishness, because it dispenses with all gratitude and hardly makes itself felt, its touch is so light. She was not one of the courageous girls who work to support their parents, give lessons from morning to night and forget the annoyances of the household in the excitement of an engrossing occupation. No, she had formed a different conception of her duty, she was a sedentary bee confining her labors to the hive, with no buzzing around outside in the fresh air and among the flowers. A thousand and one functions to perform: tailor, milliner, mender, keeper of accounts as well,—for M. Joyeuse, being incapable of any sort of responsibility, left the disposition of the family funds absolutely in her hands,—teacher and music mistress.
As is often the case in families which were originally in comfortable circumstances, Aline, being the eldest, had been educated in one of the best boarding-schools in Paris, Élise had remained there two years with her; but the two younger ones, having come too late, had been sent to little day-schools in the quarter and had all their studies to complete; and it was no easy matter, for the youngest laughed on every pretext, an exuberant, healthy, youthful laugh, like the warbling of a lark drunken on green wheat, and flew away out of sight of desk and symbols, while Mademoiselle Henriette, always haunted by her ideas of grandeur, her love of "the substantial," was none too eager for study. That young person of fifteen, to whom her father had bequeathed something of his imaginative faculty, was already arranging her life in anticipation, and declared formally that she should marry some one of birth and should never have more than three children: "A boy for the name, and two little girls—so that I can dress them alike."
"Yes, that's right," Grandmamma would say, "you shall dress them alike. Meanwhile, let us see about our participles."