‘I will be an honest woman; it is much more chic,’ she had said to herself in the first year of her marriage in the height of a Paris winter, as she had looked around her on society, with her brilliant indolent eyes, which saw so clearly and so far, and surveyed and appraised her contemporaries.
It would be eccentric, but distinguished. To her delicate, satirical, fastidious taste, there was a sort of vulgarity in being compromised. She did not go farther than that, or higher than that. The thing was common, was low; that was quite enough against it. Something that was half spirituality, half hauteur, made the decision easy to her. A certain chillness of temper aiding, her resolve had been kept. She had been as loyal a wife to Prince Napraxine as though she had loved him. Men did not obtain any hold on her. She flirted desperately sometimes, amused herself always, but that was all. When they tried to pass from courtiers into lovers, they found a barrier, impalpable but impassable, compounded of her indifference and her raillery, ever set between her and them. She fancied that it would be quite intolerable to her for any living being to believe himself necessary to her happiness; besides, she did not much believe in happiness. The world was pleasant enough; like a well-cushioned saloon carriage on a well-ordered line of rail; nothing more. You travelled onward, malgré vous, and you slept comfortably, and your ultimate destination you could not avoid; but if you escaped any great disaster by the way, and if nobody woke you with a shock, it was all you wanted. She did not believe in the possibility of any great beatitude coming to you on that very monotonous route.
She had that admirable tact coupled with that refined but unsparing insolence which daunts the world in general to silence and respect. The greatest blagueur on the Boulevards never dared to hint at a weakness or a concession on the part of the Princess Napraxine. And women, though they envied her bitterly, reviled her unsparingly, and shivered under the sting of her delicate impertinence or her pregnant epigram, yet were perfectly conscious that she had never shared their follies. Passion had as yet no place in her complex and delicate organism. She could not, or would not, understand why passion should not be content to amuse and worship her, just as a furnace fire may only bake a porcelain cup or call to life a gardenia blossom.
Now and then this refusal of hers to comprehend what she inspired ended in dire tragedy. Now and then some one killed himself because she had laughed. Now and then two people were silly enough to fight a duel about a glove she had dropped, or the right to take her down the stairs at the opera. But this was always lamentable and foolish in her sight; only its consequences, though she regretted them, did not alter her. If she had loved her husband her victims would have been less mortified; but they all knew very well that Platon Napraxine was no more to her than one of the chairs in her drawing-room. If she had even loved the world she lived in, her coldness would have been more intelligible; but she did not. Her magnificent jewels, her marvellous toilettes, her many beautiful houses, her power of gratifying any whim as it formed itself, the way people looked after her postillions in their blue velvet jackets, the perpetual fête of which society was made up for her, all diverted her but moderately. She was mondaine to the tips of her fingers, but not enthusiastically so, only so from habit—as she wore silk stockings or had rose-water in her bath.
‘I have seen the whole thing since I was sixteen; how can it entertain me much?’ she said to those who marvelled at her indifference. When it was objected to her that there were many who had seen it from sixteen to sixty, and yet thought nothing else worth seeing, she shrugged her shoulders. On the whole she understood the sect of the Skoptzi better; they had an ideal. What ideal had her world?
She kept her exquisite tint and her lovely eyes unspoiled by the endless late hours and the incessant excitations in which women of the monde où l’on s’amuse lose their youth in a year or two. She ate very simply, drank little but water, rode or drove no matter what weather, refused forty-nine out of fifty of all the invitations she received, seldom or never made any house visits, and spent many hours in perfect repose.
‘Why should you go and stay in other people’s houses?’ she always said to her English friends, in whom this mania is more rampant than amongst any other nationality. ‘Another person’s house is hardly better than an hotel; indeed, very often it is worse. If you don’t like the dinner-hour, you cannot change it; if you are given slow horses, you cannot complain; if you dislike your rooms, you cannot alter them; if you think the chef a bad one, you cannot say so; if you find all the house party bore you, you cannot get rid of them. You must pretend to eat all day long; you must pretend to feel amiable from noon to midnight; you must have all kinds of plans made for you, and submit to them; you can never read but in your own room, and, generally speaking, there is nothing in the library—if it be an English library—except Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Mr. Darwin. I cannot imagine how any reasonable being subjects herself to such a martyrdom only because somebody else finds their country place dull without people.’
She had also ingeniously established a reputation for very delicate health, which she found beyond anything useful to spare her from being bored, and to excuse her absence from any gathering which did not specially attract her.
‘I have a santé de fer,’ she said once to a friend, ‘but happily I look very fragile, and physicians, if they think you wish it, will always promise you angina pectoris or tubercles on your lungs. I have an enchanting doctor in Paris—you know him, de Thiviers—he is very famous; he will shake his head over me as if I were doomed to die in ten minutes, and he frightens Platon out of his wits—he gets a great many rouleaux at the end of the season—and he and I look as grave as the two augurs, though, like the augurs, we are both longing to laugh. It is so useful to be thought very delicate, you have an excuse for everything. If at the last moment you don’t wish to go anywhere, nobody can say anything if it be your health that gives way. They would never forgive me my continual absence from the Court at Petersburg, and I certainly should not receive my perpetual passport, if they did not sincerely believe in the tubercles which de Thiviers has so obligingly found for me. Do go to de Thiviers if you are quite well and want to be ill; he understands all that sort of thing so well, and he never betrays you. He has convinced Platon that I am poitrinaire.’
And between her reputation for a dangerous disease in her system, and her really intelligent care of her health, she had the paths of life made very smooth to her, and was infinitely freer from any genuine indisposition than might have been expected from the fragility of her aspect, and her Russian love of hot rooms and yellow tea. Still, as a great comedian will so identify himself with his part that he at times believes himself the thing which he represents, she did at times almost persuade herself, as she completely persuaded others, that she had some great constitutional delicacy to contend with, and she would play at medicine with little needles for morphia, or a few glasses of water at Baden-Baden or Ems, as she would play now and then at baccarat or roulette in her drawing-rooms.