Artist and Model (The Divorced Princess)

by René de Pont-Jest

To put against the few men of wit, the occasional writers of the first order, the two or three poets that the South has given us, what noisy, insolent, troublesome parvenus Paris owes to it! It would seem that everything is these people's, of right. They slip in everywhere, shamelessly, jostling one another, greedy of place and honor rather than avaricious. Such of them as are not poets or musicians are hair-dressers, or croupiers at gambling-tables, or statesmen.

This calamitous invasion has come upon us chiefly from the right bank of the Garonne, and the sea-coast; for further inland, toward the mountainous country, these Southerners are of another kind—almost a different race. First they have a less marked accent, and, second, some indisputable qualities are theirs.

One class of these new-comers are of no particular country. They come from everywhere—from South America as well as from the banks of the Nile; from the Gulf of Mexico as well as from the far East; and the sore that eats into our very marrow is owing to the enthusiastic welcome Paris gives to their high-sounding names and suspicious fortunes. Lacking all the good points of the Southerners, whose faults usually spring from exuberant vigor and fancifulness, these foreigners take Paris for a kind of modern Capua. They are the dealers in commonplace, the readers of obscene works, the originators of every debauchery.

The result is seen in voice and gesture, in a freedom of bearing and a frivolity which, in great part, are the cause of our social fall, and, as a consequence, of the success achieved by erotic books, written in a language scarcely intelligible, and by unhealthy volumes which, stinking at one and the same time of the sewer and of opoponax, might have been printed at Lesbos.

Now, as I have no ambition to write one of these books, I will only say what is needful to make myself understood of the passion which had brought Lise Olsdorf and Paul Meyrin together. What I wish to sketch is the moral depths into which a woman quickly sinks when, yielding to her animal desires alone, she throws herself blindly and recklessly into the arms of a man who is of neither her world, race, nor education.

Love, in the pure acceptation of the word, even when it is not legitimate, must occasion an exchange of lofty sentiments, sacrifices, and devotion between those who feel it for one another. It outlives all trials; in the pride of its abnegation it will provoke them on occasion. Passion, on the contrary, when the soul is a stranger to it, is made up of egotism and material gratifications.

In such a case, in the hands of a man who knows he is more desired than loved, the woman is no longer an adorable companion in life who encourages and consoles, a faithful friend whose joy doubles our joys. She becomes an instrument of pleasure, whose jealous owner would have not only all her moments of abandon, but all her smiles and her most trifling thoughts. She must live for him alone, please him only, be beautiful before him alone. Destroying the aspirations of the woman who has thus rashly given herself up to him, her master soon makes of her a slave, whose heart, stifled by its surroundings, ere long ceases to beat. And when the day of satiety and abandon comes, there remains of the ideal creature of God nothing but a worthless woman, soiled in her own eyes, and fated thenceforward to lead a life of weariness and disgust.

But Lise Olsdorf, abandoning herself to the fierce passion that had seized upon her, could not imagine that perhaps such a future loomed before her. The many hunting excursions of the prince left her practically at full liberty, for when the male guests of Pampeln were away hunting, there remained at the château scarcely any one but middle-aged, placid people, who retired early, and who, for that matter, on account of the very reputation of the princess, did not dream of spying upon her.

Moreover, there was an excellent excuse for the lovers being for hours at a time together. The day after that which had settled their fate, the painter had begun the portrait of the mistress of Pampeln, and everybody—Pierre Olsdorf more than any one else—was interested in this work, which promised to be noteworthy.

Under the empire of his passion for her, Paul Meyrin had at first wished to paint the princess as Diana the Huntress, her hair in a Grecian knot, her shoulders bare, her bust scarcely veiled; but, on seeing a sketch of the future picture, Lise Olsdorf was alarmed. It seemed to her that everything in it betrayed at once the painter's love for her, and she begged him not to go on with the work. Paul consented, but on condition that his model, re-enacting for him the shamelessness of the Italian princess for Canova, would let him some day secretly, for themselves alone, reproduce on canvas the splendor of all her beauty. And Lise, having promised in a passionate embrace, Paul Meyrin, going from one extreme to the other, painted her in a riding-habit, severely chaste.