She was a beautiful woman, about twenty-eight or thirty years of age, with fine blue eyes, and light auburn hair, as soft and shining as silk, braided in two thick wavy masses of imprisoned curls. She was very pale, as if she had lived much in darkened rooms; but her lips were red, and so were her nostrils. She was about the middle size; one of those women with small bones and soft outlines who keep young and supple to the last. She was negligent but coquettish in her dress; with such taste in all her arrangements, that, when she received her visitors in a white muslin dressing-gown and small morning-cap, clinging, like trellis-work against flowers, to the curling hair, she seemed to be far better dressed than the Miss Grandvilles in their silks and satins, and jewellery and lace, and grander than their grand carriage with a footman six feet high. She was excessively indolent in her habits; at least the Langthwaite world said so; never, by any chance, “dressed” at eleven or twelve o’clock, which was the general time for paying morning visits in that part of the world; and always receiving her monde, as she called them, upstairs in her dressing-room, in this kind of pretty negligence—very often wearing slippers, not shoes; little slippers of blue, or rose, or brown satin, trimmed round with lace and ribbon, clacking on the ground as she walked, for they had no heels. And indeed it was said that Madame Floriani had been seen in the middle of the day, and even in the evening, in the same undress, which was very near to a crime in Langthwaite. But her abode was worse than her attire. She had fitted up Whitefield House with all her Roman treasures, and they scandalised Langthwaite. The Miss Grandvilles said they were quite shocked, and Mr. Bentley spoke through his nose, and sighed as he called the pretty woman “heathenish.” She had casts of many of the best statuary set about her apartments—Saint Catherine’s Marriage, the Madonna, Saint Sebastian, the Judgment of Paris, a Venus or two, and a few martyrdoms. All this was like fire to stubble among the people of Langthwaite. But Madame Floriani, totally unconscious of the effect she was producing, only thought the Langthwaitians very cold in matters of art, and strangely ignorant of real merit.
She was an artist herself; and sometimes when they came in their grand, stiff, expensive, and ungraceful toilettes, they found her dressed in a man’s brown holland blouse, girded with a broad leathern band: while a little blue velvet cap, with a long tassel, was stuck jauntily on the top of her graceful head, just above those curly handfuls of bright auburn hair. Whereat they were doubly shocked; and the Miss Grandvilles, very tall, bony and desiccated gladiators, said she was really very unfeminine, and that it positively was not proper.
Madame Floriani’s worst enemy was Mr. Bentley. Mr. Bentley was the young incumbent of Langthwaite. He was not more than thirty as it was, and he looked like twenty. He was a tall, round, boyish person, with a round face, and round cheeks highly coloured, an innocent little snub nose, with those wide flat nostrils that make a greybeard look a youth, light-grey eyes, narrow shoulders, red hands—very red—with the fingers always swollen, as if from chronic chilblains, and a full, unformed mouth, swollen, too, like a boy’s. But in spite of this round face, with its ludicrous boyishness, Mr. Bentley had taken up the condemnatory and ascetic side. His sermons breathed more than Judaic severity; hatred of pleasure, hatred of art, hatred of liberation, hatred of everything but extreme Calvinistic tenets, church-going, and missionary meetings. This was Mr. Bentley’s profession of faith as far as he dare utter it even in Langthwaite. Yet his solemn looks and severe words were in such ludicrous contrast to that round, red, apple-face of his, which nature intended to express jollity, that more than once Madame Floriani looked up and laughed, saying, with her sweet voice and foreign accent, “But, Monsieur l’Abbé, assuredly you do not believe in yourself when you speak so!”
Which words used to make Mr. Bentley furious. As he said to the Miss Grandvilles, his fast allies, it was very painful to see Madame Floriani’s unconverted state of mind. Thus the war between the pretty foreign woman and the grave young clergyman went on, and Langthwaite stood aghast.
Madame Floriani thought she must do something for the place; so, after every one had called, she began to give parties. Everyone went to the first out of curiosity. Even Mr. Bentley who disapproved of her so much that he called nearly every day at Whitefield—to try and convert her—even he went. Though in general he was never seen at any evening party, where the object was not to sing hymns and hear a chapter expounded. But he made an exception. Madame Floriani had arranged her rooms very prettily. She had brought in all the flowers from the greenhouse, and placed them about the hall and drawing-room. She had wreathed the chandeliers with evergreens mixed in with flowers; while large baskets of flowers, evergreens, and moss, were placed on pedestals all about, and brilliantly lighted. The rooms were a flood of light, all excepting the little room off the drawing-room, which old Jacob White had called the study, and which Madame Rosa said was her boudoir; and this was dark. One candelabrum of two wax-lights only, placed on a beautiful little buhl table, reflected by two large mirrors set in deep gold frames of grapes and vine leaves, and falling on a marble statue of Ariadne, set within a draperied recess—this was all the light which Madame Floriani allowed in her boudoir. Many objects of art were about; there were models of the Coliseum and the Tower of Pisa, of the Lion in the Rock of Lucerne, of the Parthenon at Athens, and there were busts of famous men—Dante, and Petrarch, and Tasso—and pictures; a Magdalen by Giorgione, a Venus by Correggio, and views of Italy and Greece; and there was a carved book-case full of splendidly bound books, one was clasped with ivory and one had precious stones upon the cover; these, with curtains and draperies of rich rose-coloured silk, made up the furniture of Madame Rosa’s boudoir. A new style of room in Langthwaite. They could not understand it. The soft dim light, the living beauty on the walls, the wealth, the art, the management of effect, all perplexed the worthy mountaineers, and went far to convict Madame Floriani of some undesirable characteristics. The Miss Grandvilles, who led public opinion on matters of taste and propriety, peered into it curiously, but stepped back again immediately, as if it had been a sorcerer’s cave; and by way of being facetiously condemnatory, spoke to Madame Floriani of the “great white woman in the corner” as something they did not understand, nor quite approve of.
The widow looked at them with the surprised open-eyed look that had become familiar to her since she came to Langthwaite, and then with her silvery good-humoured laugh cried out, “Why, my dear mademoiselle, that is Ariadne!”
“I wonder how you can like those horrible Greek stories!” said the eldest Miss Grandville severely. “We who know so much better things, to encourage those dreadful superstitions and idolatries in any way—it is shocking!”
“But, my dear demoiselle, you don’t think that I believe in Ariadne as the Greeks did!” said Madame Rosa. “It’s the art, not the goddess one loves!”
“Art!” cried Miss Grandville, disdainfully, “art! What is art, I should like to know, but the worship of the creature. Art is more nearly successful, Madame Floriani, than I am afraid you think it is?”
“Ah, mademoiselle! pity me, spare me! I have been brought up among the great things of art, and opened my eyes on the Coliseum—I have lived where Michelangelo worked—I have drank in love of art with my first breath. I cannot forget its rich lessons in this ascetic doctrine of yours. On the contrary, I find in your beautiful country so much to love and admire, that I wonder you are so little gifted with the power of appreciating and reproducing the beauty He has created.”