CHAPTER XVII.
They were again at Amyôt in the golden August weather, when no place pleased its mistress better than the cool and stately palace set upon its shining waters and stone piles, with the deep forests of France drawn in an impenetrable screen of verdure around its majestic gardens. She had a constant succession of guests, and a kaleidoscopic infinitude of pastimes. Great singers came down and warbled by moonlight to replace the nightingales grown mute; great actors came down also and played on the stage which had been built and ornamented by Primaticcio; every kind of ingenuity in novelty and diversion was exercised for her by cunning intelligences and brilliant wits. The weeks of Amyôt were likely to become as celebrated in social history as the grandes nuits de Sceaux; everyone invited to them received the highest brevet of fashion that the world could give. Other people were immensely pleased and amused at Amyôt and at her other houses: she alone was not. Her intelligence asked too much; the whole world was dull and finite for her.
She had known the greatest triumphs, the highest heights of passion, the most voluptuous ecstasies, the most brilliant of successes, and they had all seemed to her rather tame, quickly exhausted. Faustina appeared to her as absurd, and commanded her sympathies as little, as Penelope.
Life's little round is all too short for satisfaction in it; it is so soon over; it is so crowded and so transient; to have children who may do less ill or do less well than we, to pursue aims or ambitions which have no novelty in them and little wisdom, to love, to cease to love; to dream and die; this is the whole of it, and the sweetest of all things in it are its childhood which is ignorant that it is happy, and its passion which is no sooner made happy than it pales and falls.
'If only life were like a play!' she thought. 'Any dramatist knows that in his last act his movement must be accelerated, and his incidents accumulated, till they culminate in a climax. But in life, on the contrary, everything waxes slower and slower, everything grows duller and duller, incidents become very scarce, and there is no dénouement at all—unless we call the priests with their holy oil, and the journey to the churchyard behind the mourning-coaches, a dénouement. But it cannot be called a climax: the going out of a spent lamp is not a climax.'
Her lamp was far from spent; and yet a sense of the dullness of life, generally, often came to her. She had everything she had ever wished for, and yet it left her with a vague sentiment of dissatisfaction.
'I wonder if he is really contented,' she thought sometimes doubtfully of Othmar. It seemed to her quite impossible he should be. Why should he be when she was not! And yet there was no one she would have liked better or so well.
The sameness of human nature irritated her. Surveying history, it seemed to her that character, like events, must have been much more varied in other times than hers; say in the Fronde, in the Crusades, in the time of the Italian Republics, even in the days of the Consulate, when all Europe was drunk with war like wine.
Nowadays people are always saying the same thing; entertainments resemble each other like peas; wherever the world gathers it takes its own monotony and tedium with it, and repeats itself with the dull perseverance of a cuckoo-clock.
She endeavoured to infuse some originality into her own society and her own pleasures; but she did not consider that she succeeded. People were too dull. Why was it? Nobody was dull in Charles the Second's time, or in the days of Louis Quinze, or of Henri Quatre. At Amyôt, if anywhere, she succeeded, but, though her invitations to the house parties there were passionately coveted, and everyone else was so exceedingly delighted with them, the utmost she could ever say was that she had not been too greatly bored. Modern existence was not dramatic enough to please her.