CHAPTER XXXVI.
When the three black horses of the Princess Napraxine, with their manes flying in the wind, their eyes flashing, and their nostrils breathing fire, dashed down the Champs Elysées to make the tour du Bois, all Paris looked after her, and multitudes who only knew her by repute took off their hats to her as they had used to do in a bygone time to the golden-haired empress.
‘Ah, if I had been in that woman’s place in ‘seventy-one,’ she thought once, ‘I would not have run away in a cab with Evans the dentist; I would have put on a white gown and all my diamonds, and gone out before them on to the terrace of the Tuileries—they would have forgotten Sedan, and would have worshipped me! I cannot forgive people who have the happiness of great opportunities for not rising to be equal to them. One can but die once, and it must be essentially delightful to die amidst a roll of drums, a blaze of sunset, a storm of welcome. The death of Desaix at Marengo is the ideal death.’
There was at the bottom of her soul, despite her languor, ennui, and pessimism, a certain heroic element; life seemed to her so poor a thing, so stupid, so illogical, that if it went out in fire it vindicated itself in a measure.
‘Sometimes, do you know,’ she said once to a sympathetic companion, ‘I think I might have been something great if I had been born in the time for it; all depends upon that. Mdlle. de Sombreuil would have lived and died like ten thousand other Frenchwomen, in the monotony of the vie de château, if she had not happened to be alive under the Terror. What possibility of any greatness is there for a woman who lives nowadays in what calls itself the great world? The very men who have any genius in it are dwarfed by it. Modern life is so trivial, yet so absorbing; it is such a bed of down and such a bed of prickles; it is such a sleeping-potion and such a whip of nettles, that we have no time to think about anything but itself. You must live “à l’abri des hommes,” if you want to be of higher stature than they are. Bismarck is a colossus, because he shuts himself up in Varzin so constantly. It is very hard even for men to resist the presence of the world; even Tennyson leaves Farringford in the primrose month to court a vulgar apotheosis in the London drawing-rooms; and for a woman who finds herself from birth upward in that milieu there is no resistance possible. We are born to dress, to drive, to dine, to dance, to set the fashion in all kinds of things,—and that is all. If we are clever, we do mischief in meddling with the hidden cards of diplomacy or statecraft, and if we are light-minded we do a different manner of mischief in making all sorts of vices look pretty and distinguished to those below us, who are always endeavouring to imitate us; but more than that we cannot do. The morphine has been injected into our veins; we cannot resist its influence; there is a kind of excitement and somnolence, both at once, in the routine of our world which none of us can resist. If we have any brains, perhaps we make resolutions to resist, but we do not keep them; the world we live in is idiotic but it is irresistible. When we wake, we see the heap of invitation cards on our table; we yawn, but we yield, and we fill up our book of engagements; the day is crowded, so is the year; and so life slips away hurried, tired, thinking itself amused. Sometimes I think I should like to live amongst the corn-fields and the larchwoods, and do good, and I dare say I shall when I am old, or, what is still worse than old, middle-aged. But you know one does not do good in that way; one always gets imposed on, and the Jew money-lender in the centre of the village would be really the person who would profit by one’s charities. It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. But when you have some intelligence, and have read something besides your breviary, and have studied the philosophy of life a little, it is much more difficult to content yourself. My friends who are putting on blisters and bandages at the hospitals, fancy they are on the way to eternal salvation, but a political economist would tell them that they were only doing a vast deal of mischief, upsetting the nicely-balanced arrangements of Nature. Myself, I think, Nature has very little to do with the world as it is in the nineteenth century in Europe. I do not think Nature, left to herself, would create either cripples or cancers, any more than she would yoke bullocks or cut terriers’ tails.’
She had accompanied her friends the Dames du Calvaire more than once to those hospitals, where patrician hands touched the leper’s sores and the idiot’s ulcers; but her delicate taste had been revolted, and her intelligence, nurtured on shrewd and satiric philosophies, had rejected the idea that any good was done by great ladies transforming themselves into sick nurses of disease. She thought it must be infinitely delightful to be able to delude yourself in that kind of way, to think that you pleased Deity by putting on a poultice and averted a social cataclysm by washing a cretin, but she did not believe in that kind of thing herself. She did not see how any one could do so who had thought about life, and the rest of it.
‘I dare say I am quite useless,’ she would reply to those who tried to convince her, ‘but then so many things are. Who has ever found out the use of butterflies, or of daisies, or of a nautilus, or of a nightingale, or of those charming rosy clouds which drift about at sunset? I do not see the utility of prolonging the horrible and miserable lives of lepers and of idiots in hospitals and asylums. Humanity is not in the least served; it is much more often profoundly noxious and disgusting. Even the people who talk about its sanctity, do not believe in what they say, or war would become an impossibility, and so would all the factories which, as Victor Hugo has said, take the soul out of man to put it into machinery.’
When she spoke in this way she was very much in earnest, and her arguments were very hard to refute; and even Melville went out of her presence with an uncomfortable, though unacknowledged, sense that his whole life had been a mistake based on a bubble which had all the hues of the rainbow, indeed, but no more than a bubble’s solidity. When the men of science, with whom she sometimes amused herself by playing the part of the great Catherine to the Encyclopædists, came into her presence, they fared no better than the priests, and she did not believe in them a whit the more.
‘Five hundred years hence, your ideas and your discoveries will all be refuted and ridiculed,’ she said to them, ‘as you now refute and ridicule the physiology of the Greeks and Latins; you will not find the key to the mystery of creation by torturing dogs or chaining horses on a bed of agony.’
And she listened to them, but she laughed at them. To the satirical clearness of her highly-trained intelligence the delirium of science was quite as much a malady of the mind as were the rhapsodies of religion.