The Marquis de Villemer

by George Sand

But it seems to me that I have described the Marquis to you sufficiently, and that you can now very well represent him to yourself. To answer all your questions, I am going to tell you how my days are passed.

The first fortnight was a little hard, I confess, now that I have obtained a very necessary modification of my duties. You know how much need I have of exercise, and how active I have been for the last six years; but here, alas! I have no house to keep in order and to run over from top to bottom a hundred times a day, no child to walk with and to make play, not even a dog with which I can run, under the pretext of amusing it. The Marchioness has a horror of animals; she goes out but once or twice a week to ride up and down the avenue of the Champs-Élysées. She calls that taking exercise. Infirm and unable to go up stairs, except with the aid of a servant's arm,—a thing dreadful enough to her, for she was once let fall in doing it,—she pays no visits, though she passes her life in receiving them. All the activity, all the vigor of her existence, is in her head, and much in her speech; she talks remarkably well and she knows it; but she is not on that account guilty of any weak vanity, and thinks less of making herself heard than of venting the ideas and sentiments which agitate her.

She has, you see, an energetic nature and a singular earnestness in her opinions of all things, even of those which seem to me of very little account. She could never be quite happy; she has been seeking to be so too long; and living with her incessantly is tiresome, in spite of the attraction which she exercises. Her hands are perfectly idle; nevertheless her sight is sharp and her fingers are still nimble, for she plays tolerably upon the piano; but she eschews everything that interferes with talking and no longer asks me to read or to play. She says that she holds my talents in reserve for the country, where she finds herself more alone and whither we are to go in two months. I look forward to this change with real pleasure, as here the life of the body is too much suppressed. And then the good Marchioness has the habit of living in a temperature of Senegal, besides covering herself with perfumes, and her apartment is filled with the most odorous of flowers; they are very beautiful to see, but in the absence of air, it is not so easy a thing to breathe.

Moreover I have to be idle, like her. I tried at first to embroider while with her; that, I saw very soon, disturbed her nerves. She asked me if I was working by the day, if there was any hurry for what I was doing, if it was very useful, and she interrupted a dozen times with no other motive than to see me stop the work which annoyed her. At last I had to abandon it altogether or it would have thrown her into a fit of illness. She was well pleased at this, and in order to insure herself against a renewal of the attempt on my part, she gave me a very frank exposition of her way of thinking in such matters. She holds that women who busy their hands and eyes with needlework put a great deal more of their minds into it than they are themselves willing to acknowledge. It is, according to her, a way of stultifying one's self in order to escape the tedium of existence. She does not understand it except in the hands of unhappy persons and of prisoners. And then she sweetened the draught for me by adding that this sort of work gave me the appearance of a lady's maid and that she wished me to be in the eyes of all her visitors her companion and her friend. So she puts me forward in conversation, referring to me frequently in order to force me to "show my intelligence,"—what I am especially careful not to do, for I feel that I have none at all when people are looking at me and listening to me.

I do my best, however, not to sit stolidly motionless, and I regret deeply that my old friend—since my friend she really is—does not consent to receive from me the most trifling service; she even rings for her maid to pick up her pocket-handkerchief, unless I hasten to seize it, and yet she reproaches me with devoting myself to her too much, not perceiving that I suffer for the want of something to which I can devote myself.

You may ask why, therefore, she has taken me into her service; I will tell you: she does not receive before four o'clock, and up to that time—that is, as soon as the Marquis leaves her—she hears the reading of the newspapers and attends to her correspondence; it is I, then, who read and write for her. Why she does not read and write herself, I am sure I do not know, for she is very able to do both. I think, however, I can see that she cannot endure solitude, and that the dread with which it inspires her cannot be counteracted by any occupation whatever. Certainly there is in her something strange which does not appear, but which exists in the secret places of her heart or head. Hers is perhaps a nature a little perverted by the relations it has been forced to sustain toward others. It is too late to teach her to be busy, and perhaps she cannot even think when she is alone.

It is certain that when I enter her apartment at the stroke of noon I find her very different from what I left her the night before in the midst of her drawing-room. She seems to grow ten years older every night. I know that her maids make a long toilet for her, during which she does not speak a single word to them, for she has a great contempt for people whose language is vulgar. She becomes so annoyed by the presence of these poor women (perhaps she has been sleepless, which also annoys her desperately), that she appears half dead and is frightfully pale when I first see her; but at the end of ten minutes this is no longer the case; she becomes thoroughly waked up, and by the time the Marquis arrives she has regained the ten years of the night.

Her correspondence, of which I ought to say nothing, although there is not the least secret about it, is by no means a necessity of her position or of her interests. It merely gratifies her need to talk with her absent friends. It is, she says, a manner of speaking, of exchanging ideas, which varies the only pleasure she knows, namely, that of being in continual communication with the minds of others.

So be it! but, for my part, that would not be my taste, if I were troubled with leisure. I would please myself only with those I loved, and certainly the Marchioness cannot love very much the forty or fifty persons to whom she writes, and the two or three hundred whom she receives every week.

My taste, however, does not come into the question, and I will not criticise her to whom I have given my liberty. That would be cowardly, for, after all, if I did not esteem or respect her, I should be free to betake myself elsewhere. Besides, supposing my respect and esteem are cumbered by the endurance of certain eccentricities,—as I might everywhere meet with eccentricities, and probably worse things,—I do not see why I should look with a magnifying-glass upon those which I want to put up with cheerfully and philosophically. Then, dear sister, if I have happened to blame or ridicule any one or anything here, take it as having escaped me inadvertently, and believe that with you I have not cared to restrain myself; for, be assured, nothing troubles me or gives me any real suffering.