She had a keen eye for artistic effects. She loved painting, although her taste was sensuous and voluptuous—character is shown in the choice of pictures as much as in that of books or of companions.
There was a painting of Vanloo—a lot of full-blooded horses in a field of clover; they had broken fence, and were luxuriating in the rich, forbidden pasture. The triumph of Cleopatra over Antony, by Le Brun, was a great favorite with Angélique, because of a fancied, if not a real, resemblance between her own features and those of the famous Queen of Egypt. Portraits of favorite friends, one of them Le Gardeur de Repentigny, and a still more recent acquisition, that of the Intendant Bigot, adorned the walls, and among them was one distinguished for its contrast to all the rest—the likeness, in the garb of an Ursuline, of her beautiful Aunt Marie des Meloises, who, in a fit of caprice some years before, had suddenly forsaken the world of fashion, and retired to a convent.
The proud beauty threw back her thick golden tresses as she scanned her fair face and magnificent figure in the tall Venetian mirror. She drank the intoxicating cup of self-flattery to the bottom as she compared herself, feature by feature, with every beautiful woman she knew in New France. The longer she looked the more she felt the superiority of her own charms over them all. Even the portrait of her aunt, so like her in feature, so different in expression, was glanced at with something like triumph spiced with content.
“She was handsome as I!” cried Angélique. “She was fit to be a queen, and made herself a nun—and all for the sake of a man! I am fit to be a queen too, and the man who raises me nighest to a queen's estate gets my hand! My heart?” she paused a few moments. “Pshaw!” A slight quiver passed over her lips. “My heart must do penance for the fault of my hand!”
Petrified by vanity and saturated with ambition, Angélique retained under the hard crust of selfishness a solitary spark of womanly feeling. The handsome face and figure of Le Gardeur de Repentigny was her beau-ideal of manly perfection. His admiration flattered her pride. His love, for she knew infallibly, with a woman's instinct, that he loved her, touched her into a tenderness such as she felt for no man besides. It was the nearest approach to love her nature was capable of, and she used to listen to him with more than complacency, while she let her hand linger in his warm clasp while the electric fire passed from one to another and she looked into his eyes, and spoke to him in those sweet undertones that win man's hearts to woman's purposes.
She believed she loved Le Gardeur; but there was no depth in the soil where a devoted passion could take firm root. Still she was a woman keenly alive to admiration, jealous and exacting of her suitors, never willingly letting one loose from her bonds, and with warm passions and a cold heart was eager for the semblance of love, although never feeling its divine reality.
The idea of a union with Le Gardeur some day, when she should tire of the whirl of fashion, had been a pleasant fancy of Angélique. She had no fear of losing her power over him: she held him by the very heart-strings, and she knew it. She might procrastinate, play false and loose, drive him to the very verge of madness by her coquetries, but she knew she could draw him back, like a bird held by a silken string. She could excite, if she could not feel, the fire of a passionate love. In her heart she regarded men as beings created for her service, amazement, and sport,—to worship her beauty and adorn it with gifts. She took everything as her due, giving nothing in return. Her love was an empty shell that never held a kernel of real womanly care for any man.
Amid the sunshine of her fancied love for Le Gardeur had come a day of eclipse for him, of fresh glory for her. The arrival of the new Intendant, Bigot, changed the current of Angélique's ambition. His high rank, his fabulous wealth, his connections with the court, and his unmarried state, fanned into a flame the secret aspirations of the proud, ambitious girl. His wit and gallantry captivated her fancy, and her vanity was full fed by being singled out as the special object of the Intendant's admiration.
She already indulged in dreams which regarded the Intendant himself as but a stepping-stone to further greatness. Her vivid fancy, conjured up scenes of royal splendor, where, introduced by the courtly Bigot, princes and nobles would follow in her train and the smiles of majesty itself would distinguish her in the royal halls of Versailles.
Angélique felt she had power to accomplish all this could she but open the way. The name of Bigot she regarded as the open sesame to all greatness. “If women rule France by a right more divine than that of kings, no woman has a better right than I!” said she, gazing into the mirror before her. “The kingdom should be mine, and death to all other pretenders! And what is needed after all?” thought she, as she brushed her golden hair from her temples with a hand firm as it was beautiful. “It is but to pull down the heart of a man! I have done that many a time for my pleasure; I will now do it for my profit, and for supremacy over my jealous and envious sex!”