The Blue Duchess

by Paul Bourget

While these thoughts were in my mind the door opened. An old servant, very simply dressed, after some hesitation told me she would see if the ladies were at home and showed me into a little drawing-room. It was full of furniture, too full in fact. If I had raised the covers from the furniture I should have seen that the quality of the upholstery and the gilded wood betokened former opulence. A beautiful tapestry covered one of the walls. It had been necessary to double it up to adapt it to the size of the room, the ceiling of which I could almost reach with my cane. The grand piano, the great bronze clock, and the too lofty candelabra had also come from a financier’s mansion. These mute witnesses of vanished splendour told by their presence alone of the melancholy of the ruin with more eloquence than any phrases could do. Besides, I had scarcely time to meditate upon what Claude Larcher, in his evil days of pedantry, had called the psychology of this furniture before a woman of about fifty entered the drawing-room. I could see at a glance that she was Camille’s mother.

Madam Favier at an interval of a quarter of a century resembled her child with a similarity of features which became almost sad in its aging and deformation. There is something very sorrowful in finding oneself face to face with the anticipated spectre of a fine young beauty, whom one admires and is beginning to love. Still the mother’s and daughter’s expression were so different that the likeness was at once corrected. Just as Camille’s blue eyes, with their pupils in turn very clear or very dark, very animated and very languishing, revealed a passionate inequality of soul, and profound troubles, so did the peaceful and sluggish azure of Madam Favier’s eyes tell of passive serenity, resigned acceptance, and above all happiness. This woman, the widow of the stock-broker, whose life ended in a tragedy, was the image of internal peace. Seeing her as I saw her, a little fat, with the fresh colour of health in her full cheeks, and if not elegant at any rate very tasteful in a dress which was almost fashionable, it was impossible at first to imagine that this woman had endured the trials of a drama, of ruin and suicide, and that this tranquil and irreproachable dowager was simply an actress’ mother.

But we have changed all that, as my friend used to say. Did I myself look like a painter who believed in the ancient traditions, or did my comrades? Does the aspiring clubman, dressed like a tailor’s fashionplate as Jacques Molan, look any more like Henry Murger’s Bohemians? But do we not live in the days when a successful play brings in an income for years equal to the capital and revenue of a farm in Beauce, when the portrait of an American brings in 15,000, 20,000, or 30,000 francs, and when an associate of the Comédie Française draws the salary of an Ambassador before retiring with the red ribbon in his button-hole, while actresses on tour abroad are received at monarch’s receptions. The barrier of prejudices or principles which separated the artistic life from the world of society has been broken down, to the applause of the democrats and progressives? The example of Jacques and my studies have convinced me that it is on the contrary one of the worst errors of the period. The artist has always gained by being treated almost like an outcast. His natural taste for the brilliant, which is the inevitable ransom of his powers of imagination, so soon turns to vanity when it is the dupe of decorum, luxury and the praises of the smart woman in particular, which is also a flattery irresistible to his self-respect and senses! When he does not succumb to the temptation, he goes to the other excess, quite as natural to this irritable class and no less dangerous, that of revolted and misanthropic pride.

But I am falling into a great failing of mine, that of indefinite and never-ending reverie. Let us go back to that which remains the true corrective of all vices, intellectual and otherwise, “Reality.” So I was sitting facing the respectable Madam Favier, in the drawing-room with its covered up furniture, with a rather sheepish look at finding myself with the mother when I had come to see the daughter. The widow, however, soon reassured me as she entertained me with commonplace conversation suitable to her appearance and birth. I have found out since that she was the daughter of a small business man in the north, and had been married for her beauty by the romantic father of the romantic Camille after a chance meeting.

“Camille is coming directly,” she said to me. “The dressmaker is with her trying a dress on. The poor child is not very well to-day. Her profession, sir, is a very trying one, and she wants a rest already. We were wrong not to go to the seaside this year. Do you know Yport, sir? It is very pretty, and very quiet, but we have been there six summers. I like, when I go into the country, to go to a familiar place. You are so much better treated if you do, and feel more at home. When my dear husband was alive we spent two months every year in Switzerland. We always went on July 16 and came back on September 15. I have never been there since, for it would bring sad memories back to my mind. Have you come to talk to Camille about her portrait?”

“Has she spoken about it to you then? She has not forgotten?” I said.

“No, certainly not,” her mother answered, “and I was very pleased and astonished when she told me, for it is very difficult to get her to sit for her portrait. Did you think of showing Camille’s portrait at the annual exhibition of pictures? It will be an excellent thing, I think, for you, and not bad for her. We are waiting, before moving back to our old neighbourhood where we have a few friends, till Camille has signed a definite engagement. The Théâtre-Français has offered her one, but as they let her go after she had won two prizes, she has been advised to make them pay her a large salary now she is famous. I am willing for her to do so; but I tell her that the house of Moliére is to the other theatres what a great shop like the Louvre or the Bon Marché is to one belonging to a small retailer.”

I am not quite sure I am reproducing these phrases in their right order. But on looking at them I am very sure of their tenor, and more so still of the mind which inspired them, as well as the phrases which followed. Poor Madam Favier was so simple as to be sometimes almost common, and so trusting as to be almost loquacious. Her mind was a very solid and sensible one and that of a woman who had retained her good sense through her ruin. This phenomenon is rarer even than sentiment in an actress. Usually these sudden falls from the Olympus of opulence have as a result a moral bewilderment which last for the rest of life. Ruined people seem to lose with their money every faculty of adaptation to the narrow circle of activity in which their social downfall imprisons them. It is particularly so when their wealth has only been an episode between two periods of poverty.

This alternation of situations is like a phantasmagoria in which judgment is warped. To have withstood such a shock Madam Favier must have been absolutely, as her youthful smile, her fresh cheeks, and the harmonious lines of her face showed her to be, a simple creature tranquil in her positivism, and quite the opposite of this girl whose future she foresaw as she would have foreseen the future of a son who had joined the army. Her steps from the Conservatoire to the Odéon, Vaudeville and Comédie Française were fixed in this good woman’s mind with a regularity which was the more astonishing because her education had been such as to make her think of another type of destiny for a woman. How had such a revolution been accomplished in her mind? Is it necessary to explain that there are certain natures whose primordial instinct is to model themselves on circumstances, just as the instinct of others is to struggle and rebel against them? The latter case was that of the poor Blue Duchess. This essential difference between their two characters had prevented any real intimacy between the two women. They had not and could not have real intercourse. I realized this only too well when after ten minutes conversation with her mother, I saw Camille enter with a pale face and eyes red from weeping, for her trouble was so obvious, and yet her mother never even, suspected it!

“It is your turn to try on now, mother,” she said. “We will wait for you. M. la Croix has a few minutes to spare us I am sure.” But when the good lady had shut the door she said “Have you seen Jacques?”