All the imperious blood which was in her changed to fire as she thought of the certain comments of the courts and drawing-rooms in which she had been so long so arrogant a leader, so dreaded a wit; she knew that eagerly as hounds at the curée would all her flatterers, friends, and lovers join her foes in exultantly rejoicing over her insulted dignity.
How many and many a time she had heard society laugh over just such a story as this! How well she knew all the cruel derision, all the gay contempt, all the equivocal jests, all the affected pity! How well she knew that precisely in measure to the homage which they yield us is the pleasure of others in our pain!
CHAPTER XLVII.
Blanche de Laon that morning rode her English horse slowly down one of the unfrequented roads in the Bois de Boulogne, and beside her paced the handsome Tunisian mare of Loris Loswa. They were good friends, although, or rather because, they went for their loves and their vices elsewhere than to each other. He was conscious of the use it was to him to be caressed and favoured by this pre-eminent leader of la jeunesse crâne; and she found in him a suppleness, a malice, and an ingenuity, in tormenting and in defaming, which made him an ever amusing and an often useful companion to a lady who had no better sport than the harassing of her friends and acquaintances.
Loswa was acutely sensible of the necessity which exists for any artist who would continue famous and fashionable to make his court to the new sovereigns of the great world, as turn by turn they succeed to their leadership. The obligations of old loyalties and the memories of old favours did not weigh a feather with his wise and self-loving nature; a woman's influence was the measure of her beauty in his eyes, and had Helen's self been sur le retour she would have commanded no smile from him. He saw in the Princesse de Laon an influence which would grow with every fear for the next decade, so entirely were her qualities those which her generation most admires and fears. Therefore to no one was he in semblance more devoted, and no one had he flattered more ingeniously, and immortalised more frequently with all the most delicate homage of his art, though in his secret thoughts he denounced as detestable the irregular colourless impertinent features of her minois chiffonné, and her myosotis-coloured insolent eyes which stared so arrogantly and so inquisitively on all living things.
'It is a vile type,' said Loswa in his own mind. 'It is a vile type, all this jeunesse du monde. It is without grace and without seduction; it is insolent and noisy; it is over-dressed and over-drawn; it screams and it gambles; it wears the gowns of Goldoni's Venice with the head-dresses of the Directoire; it empties the bazaars of Japan into its salons of Louis Quinze; a vile type, with nothing in it of the great lady, and nothing of the honest woman, only a diable d'entrain which carries it away as a broomstick carries a witch!'
But, all the same, he was not willing to be left behind in the excursions of the broomstick, and was very conscious that unless cette jeunesse made him one of them, he would cease to be the painter whom fashion loved. It is so easy to become old-fashioned! so easy to become one of that joyless and disregarded band—'les vieux!'
Therefore to all the young beauties, even if he owned them hideous, he was careful to pay devoted court, and to none more, since none were so powerful as she, than to Blanchette de Laon. His last portrait of her was then upon his easel half finished; a study of pale tints, with her pale face seen above a necklace of opals, with a great mass of lemon-coloured chrysanthemum around and below, one of those dexterous and daring violations of conventional art of which he possessed the secret; and in it he had flattered her so delicately, yet so immoderately, that her museau de chatte had become actually beautiful in his treatment of it.
'That is what one wants when one goes to be painted,' she had said herself with cynical honesty.