"In a fool's paradise! Ah-ha! Madame la Marquise!" laughed the other—the old Duc de Clos-Vougeot—taking a chocolate sweetmeat out of his emerald-studded bonbonnière as they walked on, while the lime-blossoms shook off in the summer night wind and dropped dead on the grass beneath, laughing at the story of the box D'Artagnan had found in Lauzun's rooms when he seized his papers, containing the portraits of sixty women of high degree who had worshipped the resistless Captain of the Guard, with critical and historical notices penned under each; notices D'Artagnan and his aide could not help indiscreetly retailing, in despite of the Bourbon command of secrecy—secrecy so necessary where sixty beauties and saints were involved!
"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc de Clos-Vougeot, tapping his bonbonnière, enamelled by Petitot: the Duc was old, and knew women well, and knew the value and length of a paradise dependent on that most fickle of butterflies—female fidelity; he had heard Ninon de Lenclos try to persuade Scarron's wife to become a coquette, and Scarron's wife in turn beseech Ninon to discontinue her coquetteries; had seen that, however different their theories and practice, the result was the same; and already guessed right, that if Paris had been universally won by the one, its monarch would eventually be won by the other.
"A fool's paradise!"
The courtier was right, but the priest, had he heard him, would never have believed; his heaven shone in those dazzling eyes: till the eyes closed in death, his heaven was safe! He had never loved, he had seen nothing of women; he had come straight from the monastic gloom of a Dominican abbey, in the very heart of the South, down in Languedoc, where costly missals were his only idol, and rigid pietists, profoundly ignorant of the ways and thoughts of their brethren of Paris, had reared him up in anchorite rigidity, and scourged his mind with iron philosophies and stoic-like doctrines of self-mortification that would have repudiated the sophistries and ingenuities of Sanchez, Escobar, and Mascarenhas, as suggestions of the very Master of Evil himself. From the ascetic gloom of that Languedoc convent he had been brought straight, by superior will, into the glare of the life at Versailles, that brilliant, gorgeous, sparkling, bizarre life, scintillating with wit, brimful of intrigue, crowded with the men and women who formed the Court of that age and the History of the next; where he found every churchman an abbé galant, and heard those who performed the mass jest at it with those who attended it; where he found no lines marked of right and wrong, but saw them all fused in a gay, tangled web of two court colors—Expediency and Pleasure. A life that dazzled and tired his eyes, as the glitter of lights in a room dazzles and tires the eyes of a man who comes suddenly in from the dark night air, till he grew giddy and sick, and in the midst of the gilded salons, or soft confessions of titled sinners, would ask himself if indeed he could be the same man who had sat calm and grave with the mellow sun streaming in on his missal-page in the monastic gloom of the Languedoc abbey but so few brief months before, when all this world of Versailles was unknown? The same man? Truly not—never again the same, since Madame la Marquise had bent her brown eyes upon him, been amused with his singular difference from all those around her, had loved him as women loved at Versailles, and bowed him down to her feet, before he guessed the name of the forbidden language that stirred in his heart and rushed to his lips, untaught and unbidden.
"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc, sagaciously tapping his gold bonbonnière. But many a paradise like it has dawned and faded, before and since the Versailles of Louis Quatorze.
He loved, and Madame la Marquise loved him. Through one brief tumult of struggle he passed: struggle between the creed of the Dominican abbey, where no sin would have been held so thrice accursed, so unpardonable, so deserving of the scourge and the stake as this—and the creed of the Bourbon Court, where churchmen's gallantries were every-day gossip; where the Abbé de Rancé, ere he founded the saintly gloom of La Trappe, scandalized town and court as much as Lauzun; where the Père de la Chaise smiled complacently on La Fontanges' ascendancy; where three nobles rushed to pick up the handkerchief of that royal confessor, who washed out with holy water the royal indiscretions, as you wash off grains of dust with perfumed water; where the great and saintly Bishop of Condom could be checked in a rebuking harangue, and have the tables turned on him by a mischievous reference to Mademoiselle de Mauléon; where life was intrigue for churchmen and laymen alike, and where the abbé's rochet and the cardinal's scarlet covered the same vices as were openly blazoned on the gold aiglettes of the Garde du Corps and the costly lace of the Chambellan du Roi. A storm, brief and violent as the summer storms that raged over Versailles, was roused between the conflicting thoughts at war within him, between the principles deeply rooted from long habit and stern belief, and the passions sprung up unbidden with the sudden growth and gorgeous glow of a tropical flower—a storm, brief and violent, a struggle, ended that night, when he stood on the balcony with the woman he loved, felt her lips upon his, and bowed down to her feet delirious and strengthless.
"I have won my wager with Adeline; I have vanquished mon beau De Launay," thought Madame la Marquise, smiling, two days after, as she sat, en negligé, in her broidered chair, pulling Osmin's ears, and stirring the frothy chocolate handed to her by her negro, Azor, brought over in the suite of the African embassy from Ardra, full of monkeyish espièglerie, and covered with gems—a priceless dwarf, black as ink, and but two feet high, who could match any day with the Queen's little Moor. "He amuses me with his vows of eternal love. Eternal love?—how de trop we should find it, here in Versailles! But it is amusing enough to play at for a season. No, that is not half enough—he adores! This poor Gaston!"
So in the salons of Versailles, and in the world, where Ninon reigned, by the Court ladies, while they loitered in the new-made gardens of Marly, among other similar things jested of was this new amour of Madame de la Rivière for the young Père de Launay. "She was always eccentric, and he was very handsome, and would have charming manners if he were not so grave and so silent," the women averred; while the young nobles swore that these meddling churchmen had always the best luck, whether in amatory conquest, or on fat lands and rich revenues. What the Priest of Languedoc thought a love that would outlast life, and repay him for peace of conscience and heaven both lost, was only one of the passing bubbles of gossip and scandal floating for an hour, amidst myriads like it, on the glittering, fast-rushing, diamond-bright waters of life at Versailles!
A new existence had dawned for him; far away in the dim dusky vista of forgotten things, though in reality barely distant a few short months, lay the old life in Languedoc, vague and unremembered as a passed dream; with its calm routine, its monastic silence, its unvarying alternations of study and prayer, its iron-bound thoughts, its rigid creed. It had sunk away as the peaceful gray twilight of a summer's night sinks away before the fiery burst of an artificial illumination, and a new life had dawned for him, radiant, tumultuous, conflicting, delicious—that dazzled his eyes with the magnificence of boundless riches and unrestricted extravagance; that charmed his intellect with the witty coruscations, the polished esprit, of an age unsurpassed for genius, grace, and wit; and that swayed alike his heart, his imagination, and his passions with the subtle intoxication of this syren of Love, whose forbidden song had never before, in faintest echo, fallen on his ear.
Far away in the dim, lifeless, pulseless past, sank the memory of the old Dominican abbey, of all it had taught him, of all it had exacted, in its iron, stoical, merciless creed. A new life had arisen for him, and Gaston de Launay, waking from the semi-slumber of the living death he had endured in Languedoc, and liked because he knew no other, was happy—happy as a prisoner is in the wild delight with which he welcomes the sunlight after lengthened imprisonment, happy as an opium-eater is in the delicious delirium that succeeds the lulling softness of the opiate.