‘Nothing is so useful,’ she would say in moments of confidence. ‘Look at the quantity of weariness that there is in the world from which no other possible plan will set you free. Palace dinners, diplomatic banquets, great marriages, country house visits, self-invited princes, imperial coronations, royal baptisms,—you cannot refuse them; the laws of society forbid; but if you are known to be in delicate health, no one can be offended if, at the last moment, quite unexpectedly, you get a chill and must not stir out of your own room. When there is some unutterable social tedium looming on the horizon, I always telegraph for de Thiviers, and he is always equal to the occasion.’
In this, as in other matters, she arranged her life to her own satisfaction, without any kind of misgiving that this self-absorption was egotistical. Everything had combined to make her an egotist. An only child, adored by her father, admired and a little feared by her mother, whose most intimate secrets she had divined with all the keen intuition of her natural intelligence; surrounded from her earliest years by a court of dependents and servants who seemed only to live to minister to her caprices, flattered from her babyhood by all her father’s friends, secretaries, and attachés, she had imbibed selfishness as inevitably as a young willow sucks in the moisture from the stream by which it grows. There was nothing in a loveless marriage and in the clumsy and irritating devotion of a man who was ardently in love with her, whilst she only viewed him with contempt and dislike, to counteract the influences of her earlier years. The whole world conspired to induce the Princess Napraxine to live only for herself.
That she occasionally had moments of supreme generosity, and a capacity seldom or never called out for heroic courage, did not alter the main fact that her life was essentially selfish. She never did anything that she did not wish to do; the great want in her existence, to herself, was that she so very seldom felt any wish for anything. When she did, she gratified it without any scruple or hesitation.
Her mind was too clear and logical for any creed to obtain any hold upon her; nominally, of course, she was of the Greek Church, and had too much good taste to create any scandal by openly separating herself from it; but her intelligence, as critical and as subtle as Voltaire’s or Bolingbroke’s, would no more have submitted to the bondage of religious superstition and tradition than she would have clothed her graceful person in one of the ‘Décrochez-moi-ça’ that hung in the windows of Paris clothes-shops. In morality, also, she did not much believe; she read Stuart Mill’s plea for the utility of virtue once, and smiled as she closed the book with a mental verdict of ‘non-proven.’
Pride (that pride which has been happily defined by a French writer as pas d’orgueil, mais de la fierté), and the delicacy of her taste, with her profound indifference, supplied the place in her of moral laws, and probably acted on her much more effectively than they would have done. Principle is but a palisade; temperament is a stone bastion.
‘Les honnêtes gens m’ennuient et les mauvaises gens me déplaisent,’ she was wont to say, with a frank confession of what many others have felt, and have not had the courage to say. She had no more rigidity of principle than any other person who has been reared in the midst of a witty, elegant, and corrupt society; but her perfect taste supplied the place of moral convictions, the grossness of vice offended her like a bad odour, or a staring colour; and everything loose or coarse seemed to her an affront to intelligence and to refinement.
Sometimes she almost envied the women who could plunge themselves into the hot springs of a passion, only it seemed to her vulgar; the same sort of vulgarity as swimming in public in a rose-coloured maillot. She could swim like an otter, but she never swam in public. The noisy and ungrateful pleasures which delight modern society seemed to her sheer imbecilities, whilst she would as soon have descended to an intrigue with her cook or her coachman as have made an amorous appointment in a private room at a café, or have mounted the stairs of a hired house to meet a Lovelace of the clubs. ‘Peut-on être plus bête!’ she would say, with supreme disdain, whenever she heard of the vulgarities which usually accompany Apate and Philotes in these the waning years of the nineteenth century. She quite understood the Parisienne in ‘Frou-frou’ who, tempted to make an assignation, awakes to a sense of its coarseness and commonness when she finds that the temple of love is upon the third floor in the Rue du Petit Hurleur, and that the wall-paper has five-and-twenty Poniatowskys jumping into the Elster repeated on every length of it.
‘In that sort of affair,’ she said once, ‘you must have either secrecy or a scandal; both to me seem in bad taste. And then, with the one you are at the mercy of your maid, and with the other you are at the mercy of the newspapers. To be sure,’ she added, ‘I cannot, perhaps, measure the force of the temptation, for I have never in my life seen any human being to meet whom I should have ever thought it worth while even to order out my coupé.’
Innumerable lives had done their uttermost to entwine themselves in hers and had only broken themselves helplessly on the rock of her supreme indifference, like so many ships upon icebergs. She was a charmeresse in the uttermost sense of that expressive word, but she was scarcely a coquette, though the most merciless coquetry might have done much less harm than she did. A coquette desires and strives to please; Nadine Napraxine fascinated other lives to hers without effort if without pity. She had one supreme end—to endeavour to amuse herself; and she had one unending appetite—that of the study of character. She so seldom succeeded in amusing herself that she came naturally to the conclusion that most characters contained no amusing elements.
‘Vous m’ennuyez!’ was her single word of explication to those whose homage she had permitted for a while only to send them adrift without a sign of compassion or contrition. To her the three words seemed entirely comprehensive. When some one more daring than the others had once ventured to remind her that he had not been quite so hateful to her only a brief while before, she had said, with some impatience, ‘Can one know that a book is dull unless one looks at a few pages? It is not one’s fault if it be ill-written. I cannot say why you all weary me, but if you do, it is not my fault either.’