The Princesse de Laon came as a guest to Amyôt with most summers or autumns. She knew that her host disliked her, and would willingly, had it been possible, never have seen her face; she knew that his wife disliked her scarcely less, but that knowledge increased her whim to be often at their houses, and she never gave them any possible pretext to break with or to slight her. Her name was included, as a matter of course, in their first series of guests every season, and usually she was accompanied by Laon himself; a man of small brains and admirable manners, who adored her, and would no more have dared resent the liberties she took with his honour than he would have dared to enter her presence uninvited.
'J'ai étudié vos moyens de punir votre meute,' she said once to the châtelaine of Amyôt, with a malice equal to her own. 'Et je les ai imités; tant bien que mal!'
She was the only person in whom Nadine had ever found her equal in high-bred insolence, in merciless raillery, in unsparing allusions, couched in the subtilties of drawing-room banter or of drawing-room compliment. Blanche de Laon was the only one who could fence with those slender foils of her own, which could strike so surely and wound so profoundly. Blanche de Laon, outwardly her devoted admirer and friend, was the sole living being who could irritate her, could annoy her, and could make her feel that Time, to use the words of Madame de Grignan, robbed her every day of something which she would never recover and could ill afford to lose.
Before this insolent youth of Blanchette she, who had been Nadège Napraxine, felt almost old.
She was not old; she was still at the height of her own powers to charm. She proved it every day that she drove through the streets, every night that she passed down a ball-room. Still Blanchette, twelve years younger than she, reigning in her own world, repeating her own triumphs, awarding the cotillion to her own lovers, made a certain sense of coming age approach her. Age was not at her elbow yet, but she saw his shadow in the doorway. She forgot that approaching shadow at every other time, but Blanchette had the power to point it out to her in a thousand ways imperceptible to all spectators. Hundreds of other young beauties grew up and entered her society, and met her daily and nightly, and she never thought once about them, except when she wanted them for a costume quadrille at her ball in Paris or tableaux vivants at Amyôt. But Blanchette forced her to think of her; forced her to see in her a rival, perhaps an equal, in those kingdoms where she was wont to reign alone. Blanchette, when she let her myosotis-coloured eyes gaze at her, said to her with cruel pertinacity and candour:
'You are a beautiful woman still, but you owe something to art now; you will have to owe more and more every year; you would not dare be seen at sunrise after the cotillion now; soon you will dance the cotillions no longer, but your daughter will dance them instead of you. How will you like it? You have too much esprit to be Cleopatra. You will not give and take love philtres at forty. You will have too much wit. But when your empire passes you will be wretched.'
All this the blue keen eyes of Blanche de Laon alone of all women said to her, anticipating the years that were to come, asking in irony—
'How wilt thou bear from pity to implore
What once thy power from rapture could command?'
This is the question which every woman has to ask herself in the latter half of her life. A woman is like a carriage horse; all her beaux jours are crowded into the first years of her life; afterwards every year is a descent more or less rapid or gradual; after being made into an idol, after living on velvet, after knowing only the gilded oats and the rosewood stall and the days of delight, she and the horse both drift to neglect, and hunger, and rainy weather, and the dull plodding world between the shafts. The horse comes to the cab and the cart; the woman comes to middle age and old age; he is ungroomed, she is unsought; he stands in the streets dumbly wondering why his fate is so changed; she sits in the ball-room chaperons' seat silently chafing against the lot which has become hers.