Men are so fortunate there. The very best of their life often comes in its later years. If a man be a poet, a soldier, a statesman, all the gilded laurels of fame are reserved for his later years; honours crowd on him in his autumn as fast as the leaves can fall in the woods. Even as a lover it is often in his later years that his greatest successes and his happiest passions come to him. This is always what creates the immense disparity between men and women. For men age may become an apotheosis. For women it is only a débâcle.
This will always cause disparity and discord between them. When love has said its last word to her, it is still weaving all kinds of first chapters to new stories for him. Nobody can help it. It is nature. The fault lies in the ordinances of modern civilisation, which have made their laws without any recognition of this fact, and indeed affects altogether to ignore its existence.
She said such things as these in jest very often; but beneath the jest there was a sorrowful and impatient foreboding. The days of darkness had not come to her, but they would certainly come. Having been in her way omnipotent as any Cæsar, she would see her laurels drop, her sceptre fall, her empire diminish. A woman holds her power to charm as Balzac's hero held the peau de chagrin; little by little, at first imperceptibly, then faster with each hour, it shrinks and shrinks until one day there is nothing left—and life is over.
Life is over: though the automatic joyless mechanism of living may go on for half a century more.
It is useless to say that the affections will compensate for this decadence. They will do no such thing. As intelligence is more and more highly cultured, and taste made more fastidious, the power to console of the ties of family grows less and less; the mind becomes too subtle, the sympathies become too exacting and refined, to accept blindly such companionship or compensation as these ties may afford.
Every woman who has had the power to make herself beloved has known a height of ecstasy beside which all the rest of life must for ever look pale and dull. You say to a woman, 'When your lovers fall away from you, console yourself with your children.' It is as though you said to her, 'As you can no longer have the passion-music of the great orchestras, listen to the little airs of the chamber harmonium.'
While your lover loves you he is all yours; you are his sun and moon, his dawn and darkness, his idol, his lawgiver, his ecstasy—what can compensate to you for the loss of that power? Whether time or marriage or other women kill that for you, whenever it goes utterly, you are more beggared than any queen driven from her kingdom naked in winter snows, like Elizabeth of Hungary. And it always goes; always, always! We reach the height, but we cannot stay at it. We live for a few instants with the stars, then down we drop like stones.
So she would think at times; and the presence of Blanche de Laon had power to recall and emphasise such thoughts more irritatingly than had that of any other woman. In a thousand hinted insolences, couched in bland phrase, Blanchette again and again reminded her that 'le jour est aux jeunes.'
The day was indeed still her own, but twilight was near.
It was the Princesse de Laon's fashion of vengeance—pending any other.