"He loves me, poor Gaston! Bah! But how strangely he talks! If love were this fiery, changeless, earnest thing with us that it is with him, what in the world should we do with it? We should have to get a lettre de cachet for it, and forbid it the Court; send it in exile to Pignerol, as they have just done Lauzun. Love in earnest? We should lose the best spice for our wine, the best toy for our games, and, mon Dieu! what embroilments there would be! Love in earnest? Bagatell! Louise de la Vallière shows us the folly of that; but for its Quixotisms she would now be at Vaujours, instead of buried alive in that Rue St. Jacques, with nothing to do but to weep for 'Louison,' count her beads, and listen to M. de Condom's merciless eloquence! Like the king,
J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit.
People have no right to reproach each other with inconstancy; one's caprices are not in one's own keeping; and one can no more help where one's fancy blows, than that lime-leaf can help where the breeze chooses to waft it. But poor Gaston! how make him comprehend that?" thought Madame la Marquise, as she turned, and smiled, and held out her warm, jewelled hands, and listened once again to the words of the man who was in her power as utterly as the bird in the power of the snake when it has once looked up into the fatal eyes that lure it on to its doom.
"You will love me ever?" he would ask, resting his lips on her white low brow.
"Ever!" would softly answer Madame la Marquise.
And her lover believed her: should his deity lie? He believed her! What did he, fresh from the solitude of his monastery, gloomy and severe as that of the Trappist abbey, with its perpetual silence, its lowered glances, its shrouded faces, its ever-present "memento mori," know of women's faith, of women's love, of the sense in which they meant that vow "for ever"? He believed her, and never asked what would be at the end of a path strewn with such odorous flowers. Alone, it is true, in moments when he paused to think, he stood aghast at the abyss into which he had fallen, at the sin into which, a few months before, haughty and stern in virtue against the temptation that had never entered his path, he would have defied devils in legion to have lured him, yet into which he had now plunged at the mere smile of a woman! Out of her presence, out of her spells, standing by himself under the same skies that had blooded over his days of peace in Languedoc, back on his heart, with a sickening anguish, would come the weight of his sin; the burden of his broken oaths, the scorch of that curse eternal which, by his creed, he held drawn down on him here and hereafter; and Gaston de Launay would struggle again against this idolatrous passion, which had come with its fell delusion betwixt him and his God; struggle—vainly, idly—struggle, only to hug closer the sin he loved while he loathed; only to drink deeper of the draught whose voluptuous perfume was poison; only to forget all, forsake all, dare all, at one whisper of her voice, one glance of her eyes, one touch of the lips whose caress he held would be bought by a curse through eternity.
Few women love aught "for ever," save, perchance, diamonds, lace, and their own beauty, and Madame la Marquise was not one of those few; certainly not—she had no desire to make herself singular in her generation, and could set fashions much more likely to find disciples, without reverting to anything so eccentric, plebeian, and out of date. Love one for ever! She would have thought it as terrible waste of her fascinations, as for a jewel to shine in the solitude of its case, looked on by only one pair of eyes, or for a priceless enamel, by Petitot, to be only worn next the heart, shrouded away from the light of day, hidden under the folds of linen and lace.
"Love one for ever?"—Madame la Marquise laughed at the thought, as she stood dressed for a ball, after assisting at the representation of a certain tragedy, called "Bérénice" (in which Mesdames Deshoulières and De Sévigné, despite their esprit, alone of all Paris and the Court could see no beauty), and glanced in the mirror at her radiant face, her delicate skin, her raven curls, with their pendants shaking, her snow-white arms, and her costly dress of the newest mode, its stomacher gleaming one mass of gems. "Love one for ever? The droll idea! Is it not enough that I have loved him once?"
It was more than enough for his rivals, who bitterly envied him; courtly abbés, with polished smiles, and young chanoines, with scented curls and velvet toques, courtiers, who piqued themselves on reputations only second to Lauzun's, and men of the world, who laughed at this new caprice of Madame la Marquise, alike bore no good will to this Languedoc priest, and gave him a significant sneer, or a compliment that roused his blood to fire, and stung him far worse than more open insult, when they met in the salons, or crossed in the corridors, at Versailles or Petite Forêt.
"Those men! those men! Should he ever lose her to any one of them?" he would think over and over again, clenching his hand, in impotent agony of passion that he had not the sword and the license of a soldier to strike them on the lips with his glove for the smile with which they dared to speak her name; to make them wash out in blood under the trees, before the sun was up, the laugh, the mot, the delicate satire, which were worse to bear than a blow to the man who could not avenge them.