Jacques, too, in his way is a force of nature. His artistic vitality will always overwhelm me, and it did so this evening in proportion with such a hypnotism. For between the formidable exterminating monster which waves its column of smoke above the devastated Pompeii, and the inoffensive cerebral volcano whose smoky eruptions overflow into yellow volumes, or crystallize into three, four or five act plays, the difference is really very great. Without ironical extenuation such a comparison would be rather comic. Whether justified or not, I gave myself up to this sensation without discussion. Wearied as I was by my day of moral lassitude, was not this way of spending my evening an unexpected pleasure? The comedy might interest me, for this foppish egoist had great talent. The actress might be pretty, although doubtless Jacques’ fatuity had transformed for my astonishment a Conservatoire fool into a bird of paradise. I had too often accompanied Claude Larcher into Colette Rigaud’s dressing-room not to know these footlight-mistresses and their vulgarity. But there are always exceptions, and Madam Pierre de Bonnivet might be an exception to her class, although a rich woman who collects celebrities was hardly likely to please me. In any case, it was worth the trouble of accompanying Molan to the Vaudeville simply to have the pleasure of seeing him enter the theatre.
“We will go in by the stage door,” he said “in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. It is very charming here in the two little stage boxes, and upon the stage behind the curtain. We can get to the boxes through the wings, if either of them is vacant.”
He got out of the carriage before me as he said this; he greeted the door-keeper and went through a doorway and up a staircase with the gait which is unique in the world: that of the fashionable author visiting his paper, his editor, or his theatre. Every gesture seemed to say, “The house belongs to me”; his foot was lighter, his cane waved in his hand, and his shoulders involuntarily swaggered. These things are in themselves of no importance, but we painters who have studied portraiture make it our business to seize upon these trifles. The theatre staff, when they saw “their author” pass, displayed inexpressible and unconscious respect. How I should like to inspire some picture dealer with like respect! When shall I have in displaying my pictures to a friend, the peaceful and innocently puerile pride which Jacques displayed in opening for me the door of one of the stage boxes, fortunately unoccupied, where we sat down while he whispered to me—
“The first act has been in progress for five minutes. You will follow it directly. A former mistress of the Duke’s is trying to make the Duchess jealous. Was I lying to you when I said that little Favier is pretty? She has caught sight of me. Fortunately she has nothing to say for a minute or two, or she would have forgotten her lines. She is looking at you. You interest her. She knows the three or four friends I usually bring. Now hear her speak. Is not the timbre, the music of her voice, exquisite? Listen to what she is saying.”
I have heard La Duchesse Blue many times since till I know by heart every phrase. It is a fine delicate play in spite of the affectation of the title. It contains an extremely good study of a rare but very human jealousy. It is the story of a friend who is amorous of his friend’s wife, and who remains faithful to his friendship in his love. He never mentioned his feelings to the woman. He has never admitted it to himself, and he cannot bear any one else to pay court to this young woman. He ends by saving her from a irreparable mistake, without her knowing the reason or who he is. The first scene in which the childish Duchess confides in her husband’s former mistress, without suspecting the recollections she is awakening by the avowal of her own joys, is a marvel of moving, vibrating analysis, which might be called tenderly cruel. This play is a little masterpiece of to-day by Marivaux—a Marivaux whose airy gaiety would be like lace upon a wound. But I did not perceive the real value of the comedy on this first evening; although Molan was present to comment upon its smallest details. The painter in me was too keenly attracted by the extraordinary appearance of this Camille Favier, whom my friend had so carelessly called his mistress. The box being almost on the stage allowed me to follow the smallest movements of her face, her most furtive winks, and the most rapid knitting of her brows. I could see the layers of cream and rouge unequally distributed on her face, and the lengthening of her lashes with black crayon. Even made up in this way she realized in an extraordinary way the ideal type created by the most refined English artists: Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Morris. Her fine features were almost too slight for the perspective of the stage. Her large, slightly convex forehead seemed clouded with dreams. The elongated oval of her face made her smile float into her cheeks. Her straight nose, rather short, ennobled her profile. Her full lips drooped at the corners and were at the same time sad and sensual, voluptuous, and bitter. This make up even gave to her beauty a particular charm, which touched me strangely in its mixture of the real and the artificial. Her rosy cheeks were visible through her rouge, the fringe of her long lashes beneath the crayon, the fresh purple of her lips through the carmine, just as in her playing of the part she represented; a true, sincere and tender woman, was visible or seemed to be visible.
“It is the thunder-clap,” he said, “you have just felt! You can listen, too. Your sublimes will amalgate, as Saint Simon said of some one. But now turn and look with your glasses in the fourth box of the first tier on the left. You see a woman in white, fanning herself with a fan, with silk muslin flounces, white too, and an invention of her own? That is Madam Pierre de Bonnivet. What do you think of her? It is amusing, is it not, to play the game of love and hazard with these two pretty creatures as partners?”
I looked in the direction Jacques indicated, and I soon had my glasses fixed on the fashionable rival of the Bohemian Camille Favier.
The fatuous insolence which my comrade affected then appeared to me justified, and more than justified, by the beauty of this elegant female who coquetted with him, as he told me. I knew he was too daring a fellow not to go on quickly from liberty to liberty. If Camille recalled, even with her rouge and patches, the Psyches and Galateas of the most suave of the Pre-raphaelite Brothers, Madam Pierre de Bonnivet, with her arched nose, her wilful chin, the fine line of the cheek, her elegant haughty mouth, had beauty enough to justify the most aristocratic pretensions. How, coming of a poor family—I have found out since that she was a Taraval—she inevitably recalled one of those princesses so dear to Van Dyck, that incomplete master, whom no other has equalled, in the art of portraying breeding, and the indomitable pride and heroic energy concealed beneath the fragility of feminine grace. The habits of wealth for two or three generations produce these mirages.
It is certain that the painter of the divine Marquise Paola Brignole, of the Red Palace at Genoa, never found a model more suited to his genius. His brush alone could have properly reproduced the glory of that tint whose dead white was not anæmic—the red lips told that—with the cloud of blonde hair which paled in the light. The simple sight of the thick rolls of golden hair lying upon her neck, when she turned her head, betokened that physiological vitality of one of those slender persons who conceal beneath the tenderness of a siren the courage of a captain of dragoons. Her neck, though a little long, was well developed, and the fingers of her nervous hands were a little long also; her bust, which was outlined at each movement by her supple white corsage, was so young, so elegant, and so full. But the most significant thing to me about this creature of luxury was her blue eyes, as blue as those of the other woman, with this difference, that the blue of Camille Favier’s eyes recalled the blue of the petals of a flower; while Madam de Bonnivet’s eyes were the azure of metal or precious stone. They gave one the idea of something implacable, in spite of their charm, something hard and frigidly dangerous in their magnetism. To complete this singular sensation of graceful cruelty, when the young woman laughed her lips were raised a little too much at the corners displaying sharp white teeth close together, almost too small, like those of a precious animal of the chase.
In to-day trying to exactly reproduce the impressions, which I felt in the presence of Jacques Molan’s two partners in his favourite game of heartless love, I am taking into account that my actual knowledge of their characters influences my recollection of this first meeting. I do not think I am giving too powerful a touch to this souvenir. I can still hear myself say, while applause was being showered upon little Favier, to Jacques—