CHAPTER XXVI.
Meanwhile Melville, who had come to take his leave before proceeding to Paris under orders from the Vatican, found his hostess evidently ennuyée; she was not in her usual serene humour.
‘What has irritated you, Princess?’ that very observant person presumed at last to ask. ‘Have you actually discovered that doubled rose-leaf of whose existence you have been always sure and I always sceptical?’
‘The doubled rose-leaf is that enormous nuisance, la bêtise humaine,’ she replied with ennui, breaking off some blossoms of an odontoglossum standing near her. ‘It is like the fog in London, it penetrates everywhere, you cannot escape it; there has been no rose-glass made which could shut it out. If Balzac had written for centuries, he would never have come to an end of it. Do you ever find any variety in your confessional? I never do in my drawing-rooms.’
‘And yet who should find it, if not Madame Napraxine?’ said Melville, who, when in his worldly moods, did not especially care to be reminded that he was a churchman.
‘I do not know who should,—I know that I never do,’ she replied. ‘I have made la chasse au caractère ever since I was old enough to know what character meant; and my only wonder is how, out of such a sameness of material, St.-Simon and La Bruyère and Ste.-Beuve, and all those people who write so well, ever were able to make such entertaining books. I suppose it is done by the same sort of science which enables mathematicians to make endless permutations out of four numbers. For myself, I should like other numbers than those we know by rote.’
‘Good heavens!’ thought Melville, ‘when men have died because she laughed! Is that so very commonplace? or, is it not tragic enough?’
Aloud he said, in his courtliest manner:
‘Princess, I fear the sameness of human nature tries you so greatly because of the sameness of the emotions which you excite in it; I can imagine that too much adoration may cloy like too much sugar. Also, in your chasse au caractère you have, like all who hunt, left behind you a certain little bourgeois quality called pity; an absurd little quality, no doubt, still one which helps observation. I am sure you have read Tourguenieff’s little story of the quail?’
‘Yes; but one eats them still, you know, just the same as if he had never written it. Pity may be a microscope, I do not know; besides, you must admit that a quail is a much lovelier little life than a man’s, and so can excite it so much more easily. A quail is quite a charming little bird. Myself, I never eat birds at all; it is barbarous.’