THE PRINCESS GOES TO WORK
D'Arthez allowed love to enter his heart after the manner of my Uncle Toby, without making the slightest resistance; he proceeded by adoration without criticism, and by exclusive admiration.The princess, that noble creature, one of the most remarkable creations of our monstrous Paris, where all things are possible, good as well as evil, became--whatever vulgarity the course of time may have given to the expression--the angel of his dreams.To fully understand the sudden transformation of this illustrious author, it is necessary to realize the simplicity that constant work and solitude leave in the heart; all that love--reduced to a mere need, and now repugnant, beside an ignoble woman--excites of regret and longings for diviner sentiments in the higher regions of the soul.D'Arthez was, indeed, the child, the boy that Madame de Cadignan had recognized.An illumination something like his own had taken place in the beautiful Diane.At last she had met that superior man whom all women desire and seek, if only to make a plaything of him,--that power which they consent to obey, if only for the pleasure of subduing it; at last she had found the grandeurs of the intellect united with the simplicity of a heart all new to love; and she saw, with untold happiness, that these merits were contained in a form that pleased her.She thought d'Arthez handsome, and perhaps he was.Though he had reached the age of gravity (for he was now thirty-eight), he still preserved a flower of youth, due to the sober and ascetic life which he had led.Like all men of sedentary habits, and statesmen, he had acquired a certainly reasonable embonpoint.When very young, he bore some resemblance to Bonaparte; and the likeness still continued, as much as a man with black eyes and thick, dark hair could resemble a sovereign with blue eyes and scanty, chestnut hair.But whatever there once was of ardent and noble ambition in the great author's eyes had been somewhat quenched by successes.The thoughts with which that brow once teemed had flowered; the lines of the hollow face were filling out.Ease now spread its golden tints where, in youth, poverty had laid the yellow tones of the class of temperament whose forces band together to support a crushing and long-continued struggle.If you observe carefully the noble faces of ancient philosophers, you will always find those deviations from the type of a perfect human face which show the characteristic to which each countenance owes its originality, chastened by the habit of meditation, and by the calmness necessary for intellectual labor.The most irregular features, like those of Socrates, for instance, become, after a time, expressive of an almost divine serenity.
To the noble simplicity which characterized his head, d'Arthez added a naive expression, the naturalness of a child, and a touching kindliness.He did not have that politeness tinged with insincerity with which, in society, the best-bred persons and the most amiable assume qualities in which they are often lacking, leaving those they have thus duped wounded and distressed.He might, indeed, fail to observe certain rules of social life, owing to his isolated mode of living; but he never shocked the sensibilities, and therefore this perfume of savagery made the peculiar affability of a man of great talent the more agreeable; such men know how to leave their superiority in their studies, and come down to the social level, lending their backs, like Henry IV., to the children's leap-frog, and their minds to fools.
If d'Arthez did not brace himself against the spell which the princess had cast about him, neither did she herself argue the matter in her own mind, on returning home.It was settled for her.She loved with all her knowledge and all her ignorance.If she questioned herself at all, it was to ask whether she deserved so great a happiness, and what she had done that Heaven should send her such an angel.She wanted to be worthy of that love, to perpetuate it, to make it her own forever, and to gently end her career of frivolity in the paradise she now foresaw.As for coquetting, quibbling, resisting, she never once thought of it.She was thinking of something very different!--of the grandeur of men of genius, and the certainty which her heart divined that they would never subject the woman they chose to ordinary laws.
Here begins one of those unseen comedies, played in the secret regions of the consciousness between two beings of whom one will be the dupe of the other, though it keeps on this side of wickedness; one of those dark and comic dramas to which that of Tartuffe is mere child's play, --dramas that do not enter the scenic domain, although they are natural, conceivable, and even justifiable by necessity; dramas which may be characterized as not vice, only the other side of it.
The princess began by sending for d'Arthez's books, of which she had never, as yet, read a single word, although she had managed to maintain a twenty minutes' eulogism and discussion of them without a blunder.She now read them all.Then she wanted to compare these books with the best that contemporary literature had produced.By the time d'Arthez came to see her she was having an indigestion of mind.
Expecting this visit, she had daily made a toilet of what may be called the superior order; that is, a toilet which expresses an idea, and makes it accepted by the eye without the owner of the eye knowing why or wherefore.She presented an harmonious combination of shades of gray, a sort of semi-mourning, full of graceful renunciation,--the garments of a woman who holds to life only through a few natural ties, --her child, for instance,--but who is weary of life.Those garments bore witness to an elegant disgust, not reaching, however, as far as suicide; no, she would live out her days in these earthly galleys.
