The Deputy of Arcis

X

DORLANGE TO MARIE-GASTON

Paris, April, 1839.

Dear Friend,—­For better or for worse, I continue my candidacy without a constituency to elect me.  This surprises my friends and worries me, for it is only a few weeks now to the general election; and if it happens that all this mysterious “preparation” comes to nought, a pretty figure I shall cut in the caricatures of Monsieur Bixiou, of whose malicious remarks on the subject you lately wrote me.

One thing reassures me:  it does not seem likely that any one would have sown two hundred and fifty thousand francs in my electoral furrow without feeling pretty sure of gathering a harvest.  Perhaps, to take a cheerful view of the matter, this very slowness may be considered as showing great confidence of success.

However that may be, I am kept by this long delay in a state of inaction which weighs upon me.  Astride as it were of two existences, —­one in which I have not set foot, the other in which my foot still lingers,—­I have no heart to undertake real work; I am like a traveller who, having arrived before the hour when the diligence starts, does not know what to do with his person nor how to spend his time.  You will not complain, I think, that I turn this enforced far niente to the profit of our correspondence; and now that I am thus at leisure, I shall take up two points in your last letter which did not seem to me of sufficient importance to pay much attention to at the time:  I refer to your warning that my parliamentary pretensions did not meet the approval of Monsieur Bixiou; and to your suggestion that I might expose myself to falling in love with Madame de l’Estorade—­if I were not in love with her already.  Let us discuss, in the first instance, Monsieur Bixiou’s grand disapprobation—­just as we used to talk in the olden time of the grand treachery of Monsieur de Mirabeau.

I’ll describe that man to you in a single word.  Envy.  In Monsieur Bixiou there is, unquestionably, the makings of a great artist; but in the economy of his existence the belly has annihilated the heart and the head, and he is now and forever under the dominion of sensual appetites; he is riveted to the condition of a caricaturist,—­that is to say, to the condition of a man who from day to day discounts himself in petty products, regular galley-slave pot-boilers, which, to be sure, give him a lively living, but in themselves are worthless and have no future.  With talents misused and now impotent, he has in his mind, as he has on his face, that everlasting and despairing grin which human thought instinctively attributes to fallen angels.  Just as the Spirit of darkness attacks, in preference, great saints because they recall to him most bitterly the angelic nature from which he has fallen, so Monsieur Bixiou delights to slaver the talents and characters of those who he sees have courageously refused to squander their strength, sap, and aims as he has done.

But the thing which ought to reassure you somewhat as to the danger of his calumny and his slander (for he employs both forms of backbiting) is that at the very time when he believes he is making a burlesque autopsy of me he is actually an obedient puppet whose wire I hold in my hands, and whom I am making talk as I please.  Being convinced that a certain amount of noisy discussion would advance my political career, I looked about me for what I may call a public crier.  Among these circus trumpets, if I could have found one with a sharper tone, a more deafening blare than Bixiou’s, I would have chosen it.  As it was, I have profited by the malevolent curiosity which induces that amiable lepidopter to insinuate himself into all studios.  I confided the whole affair to him; even to the two hundred and fifty thousand francs (which I attributed to a lucky stroke at the Bourse), I told him all my plans of parliamentary conduct, down to the number of the house I have bought to conform to the requirements of the electoral law.  It is all jotted down in his notebook.

That statement, I think, would somewhat reduce the admiration of his hearers in the salon Montcornet did they know of it.  As for the political horoscope which he has been so kind as to draw for me, I cannot honestly say that his astrology is at fault.  It is very certain that with my intention of following no set of fixed opinions, I must reach the situation so admirably summed up by the lawyer of Monsieur de la Palisse, when he exclaimed with burlesque emphasis:  “What do you do, gentlemen, when you place a man in solitude?  You isolate him.”

Isolation will certainly be my lot, and the artist-life, in which a man lives alone and draws from himself like the Great Creator whose work he toils to imitate, has predisposed me to welcome the situation.  But although, in the beginning especially, it will deprive me of all influence in the lobbies, it may serve me well in the tribune, where I shall be able to speak with strength and freedom.  Being bound by no promises and by no party trammels, nothing will prevent me from being the man I am, and expressing, in all their sacred crudity, the ideas which I think sound and just.  I know very well that before an audience plain, honest truth may fail to be contagious or even welcome.  But have you never remarked that, by using our opportunities wisely, we finally meet with days which may be called the festivals of morality and intelligence, days on which, naturally and almost without effort, the thought of good triumphs?

I do not, however, conceal from myself that, although I may reach to some reputation as an orator, such a course will never lead to a ministry, and that it does not bestow that reputation of being a practical man to which it is now the fashion to sacrifice so much.  But if at arm’s length in the tribune I have but little influence, I shall make my mark at a greater distance.  I shall speak as it were from a window, beyond the close and narrow sphere of parliamentary discussion, and above the level of its petty passions and its petty interests.  This species of success appears to meet the views of the mysterious paternal intentions toward me.  What they seem to require is that I shall sound and resound.  From that point of view, i’ faith, politics have a poetic side which is not out of keeping with my past life.

Now, to take up your other warning:  that of my passion born or to be born for Madame de l’Estorade.  I quote your most judicious deductions for the purpose of answering them fully.

In 1837, when you left for Italy, Madame de l’Estorade was, you say, in the flower of her beauty; and the queer, audacious persistence which I have shown in deriving inspiration from her shows that it has not faded.  Hence, if the evil be not already done, you warn me to be on my guard; from the admiration of an artist to the adoration of the man there is but a step, and the history of the late Pygmalion is commended to my study.

In the first place, learned doctor and mythologian, allow me this remark.  Being on the spot and therefore much better placed than you to judge of the dangers of the situation, I can assure you that the principal person concerned does not appear to feel the least anxiety.  Monsieur de l’Estorade quarrels with me for one thing only:  he thinks my visits too few, and my reserve misanthropy.

Parbleu!  I hear you say, a husband is always the last to know that his wife is being courted.  So be it.  But the high renown of Madame de l’Estorade’s virtue, her cold and rather calculating good sense, which often served to balance the ardent and passionate impetuosity of one you knew well,—­what of that?  And will you not grant that motherhood as it appears in that lady—­pushed to a degree of fervor which I might almost call fanaticism—­would be to her an infallible preservative?

So much for her.  But it is not, I see, for her tranquillity, it is mine for which your friendship is concerned; if Pygmalion had not succeeded in giving life to his statue, a pretty life his love would have made him!

To your charitable solicitude I must answer, (1) by asserting my principles (though the word and the thing are utterly out of date); (2) by a certain stupid respect that I feel for conjugal loyalty; (3) by the natural preoccupation which the serious public enterprise I am about to undertake must necessarily give to my mind and imagination.  I must also tell you that I belong, if not by spiritual height, at least by all the tendencies of my mind and character, to that strong and serious school of artists of another age who, finding that art is long and life is short—­ars longa et vita brevis—­did not commit the mistake of wasting their time and lessening their powers of creation by silly and insipid intrigues.

But I have a better reason still to offer you.  As Monsieur de l’Estorade has told you of the really romantic incidents of my first meeting with his wife, you know already that a memory was the cause of my studying her as a model.  Well, that memory, while it attracted me to the beautiful countess, is the strongest of all reasons to keep me from her.  This appears to you, I am sure, sufficiently enigmatical and far-fetched; but wait till I explain it.

If you had not thought proper to break the thread of our intercourse, I should not to-day be obliged to take up the arrears of our confidence; as it is, my dear boy, you must now take your part in my past history and listen to me bravely.

In 1835, the last year of my stay in Rome, I became quite intimate with a comrade in the Academy named Desroziers.  He was a musician and a man of distinguished and very observing mind, who would probably have gone far in his art if malarial fever had not put an end to him the following year.  Suddenly the idea took possession of us to go to Sicily, one of the excursions permitted by the rules of the school; but as we were radically “dry,” as they say, we walked about Rome for some time endeavoring to find some means of recruiting our finances.  On one of these occasions we happened to pass before the Palazzo Braschi.  Its wide-open doors gave access to the passing and repassing of a crowd of persons of all sorts.

“Parbleu!” exclaimed Desroziers, “here’s the very thing for us.”

And without explaining his words or where he was taking me, he made me follow the crowd and enter the palace.

After mounting a magnificent marble staircase and crossing a very long suite of apartments rather poorly furnished,—­which is customary in Italian palaces, all their luxury being put into ceilings, statues, paintings, and other objects of art,—­we reached a room that was wholly hung with black and lighted by quantities of tapers.  It was, of course, a chambre-ardente.  In the middle of it on a raised platform surmounted by a baldaquin, lay a thing, the most hideous and grotesque thing you can possibly conceive.  Imagine a little old man whose hands and face had reached such a stage of emaciation that a mummy would have seemed to you in comparison plump and comely.

Clothed in black satin breeches, a violet velvet coat cut a la Francaise, a white waistcoat embroidered in gold, from which issued an enormous shirt-frill of point d’Angleterre, this skeleton had cheeks covered with a thick layer of rouge which heightened still further the parchment tones of the rest of his skin.  Upon his head was a blond wig frizzed into innumerable little curls, surmounted by an immense plumed hat jauntily perched to one side in a manner which irresistibly provoked the laughter of even the most respectful visitors.

After one glance given to this ridiculous and lamentable exhibition, —­an obligatory part of all funerals, according to the etiquette of the Roman aristocracy,—­Desroziers exclaimed:  “There’s the end; now come and see the beginning.”

Not replying to any of my questions, because he was arranging a dramatic effect, he took me to the Albani gallery and placed me before a statue representing Adonis stretched on a lion’s skin.

“What do you think of that?” he said.

“What?” I replied at a first glance; “why, it is as fine as an antique.”

“Antique as much as I am!” replied Desroziers.  “It is a portrait in youth of that wizened old being we have just seen dead.”

“Antique or not, it is a masterpiece,” I said.  “But how is all this beauty, or its hideous caricature, to get us to Sicily?  That is the question.”

“I’ll tell you,” replied Desroziers.  “I know the family of that old scarecrow.  His niece married the Comte de Lanty, and they have long wanted to buy this statue which the Albani museum won’t give up at any price.  They have tried to have it copied, but they never got anything satisfactory.  Now, you know the director of the museum well.  Get him to let you make a copy of it.  I give music-lessons to the Comte de Lanty’s daughter, Mademoiselle Marianina, and I’ll talk of your copy.  If you succeed, as of course you will, the count will buy it and pay you forty times the cost of a trip to Sicily.”

Two days later I began the work, and, as it suited my taste, I worked so hotly at it that by the end of three weeks the Lanty family, escorted by Desroziers, came to see my copy.  The count, who seemed to me a good connoisseur, declared himself satisfied with the work and bought it.  Mademoiselle Marianina, who was the heiress and favorite of her grand-uncle, was particularly delighted with it.  Marianina was then about twenty-one years old, and I shall not make you her portrait because you know Madame de l’Estorade, to whom her likeness is extraordinary.  Already an accomplished musician, this charming girl had a remarkable inclination for all the arts.  Coming from time to time to my studio to watch the completion of the statue, a taste for sculpture seized her, as it did the Princesse Marie d’Orleans, and until the departure of the family, which took place a few months before I myself left Rome, Mademoiselle de Lanty took lessons from me in modelling.

I never dreamed of being another Saint-Preux or Abelard, but I must own that I found rare happiness in imparting my knowledge.  Marianina was so gay and happy, her judgment of art so sound, her voice, when she sang, so stirred my heart, that had it not been for her vast fortune, which kept me at a distance, I should have run great danger to my peace of mind.  Admitted into the household on the footing of a certain familiarity, I could see that my beautiful pupil took pleasure in our intercourse, and when the family returned to Paris she expressed the utmost regret at leaving Rome; I even fancied, God forgive me, that I saw something like a tear in her eye when we parted.

On my return to Paris, some months later, my first visit was to the hotel de Lanty.  Marianina was too well bred and too kind at heart to be discourteous to any one, but I felt at once that a cold restrained manner was substituted for the gracious friendliness of the past.  It seemed to me probable that her evident liking, I will not say for me personally, but for my conversation and acquirements, had been noticed by her parents, who had doubtless taught her a lesson; in fact, the stiff and forbidding manner of Monsieur and Madame de Lanty left me no other supposition.

Naturally, I did not call again; but a few months later, when I exhibited my Pandora in the salon of 1837, I one day saw the whole Lanty family approach it.  The mother was on the arm of Comte Maxime de Trailles, a well-known lion. Nil admirari is the natural instinct of all men of the world; so, after a very cursory glance at my work, Monsieur de Trailles began to find shocking faults in it, and in so high and clear a voice that not a word was lost within a certain range.  Marianina shrugged her shoulders as she listened to this profound discourse, and when it was ended she said,—­

“How fortunate you came with us!  Without your enlightened knowledge I might, with the rest of the good public, have thought this statue admirable.  It is a pity the sculptor is not here to learn his business from you.”

“He is here, behind you,” said a stout woman, who had once been my landlady, and was standing near, laughing heartily.  Involuntarily Marianina turned; when she saw me a vivid color came into her cheeks, and I slipped away into the crowd.  A girl who took my part so warmly, and then showed such emotion on being detected in doing so, could not be absolutely indifferent to me; and as on my first visit I had only, after all, been coldly received, I decided, after my great success at the Exhibition, in consequence of which I was made a chevalier of the Legion of honor, to call again upon the Lantys; perhaps my new distinctions would procure me a better reception.

Monsieur de Lanty received me without rising, and with the following astounding apostrophe:—­

“I think you very courageous, monsieur, to venture to present yourself here.”

“I have never been received in a manner that seemed to require courage on my part.”

“You have come, no doubt,” continued Monsieur de Lanty, “in search of your property which you were careless enough to leave in our hands.  I shall return you that article of gallantry.”

So saying, he rose and took from a drawer in his secretary an elegant little portfolio, which he gave to me.

As I looked at it in a sort of stupefaction, he added: 

“Yes; I know the letters are not there; I presume you will allow me to keep them.”

“This portfolio, the letters you mention—­all this is an enigma to me, monsieur.”

At this moment Madame de Lanty entered the room.

“What do you want?” said her husband, roughly.

“I knew monsieur was here, and as I feared some painful explanation, I came to do my duty as a woman, and interpose.”

“You need fear nothing, madame,” I said; “evidently what is taking place is the result of some misunderstanding.”

“Ah! this is too much!” cried Monsieur de Lanty, reopening the drawer from which he had taken the portfolio, and taking out a packet of letters tied with a rose-colored ribbon.  “I think these will put an end to your misunderstanding.”

I looked at the letters; they were not postmarked, and simply bore my name, Monsieur Dorlange, in a woman’s handwriting, which was unknown to me.

“Monsieur,” I said, “you know more than I do; you have in your possession letters that seem to belong to me, but which I have never received.”

“Upon my word,” cried Monsieur de Lanty, “you are an admirable comedian; I never saw innocence better played.”

“But, monsieur,” I said, “who wrote those letters, and why are they addressed to me?”

“It is useless to deny them, monsieur,” said Madame de Lanty; “Marianina has confessed all.”

“Mademoiselle Marianina!” I exclaimed.  “Then the matter is very simple; have the goodness to bring us together; let me hear from her lips the explanation of this singular affair.”

“The evasion is clever,” replied Monsieur de Lanty; “but my daughter is no longer here:  she is in a convent, forever sheltered from your intrigues and the dangers of her own ridiculous passion.  If that is what you came to know, all is said.  Let us part, for my patience and moderation have a limit, if your insolence has none.”

“Monsieur!” I began, angrily; but Madame de Lanty, who was standing behind her husband, made me a gesture as if she would fall upon her knees; and reflecting that perhaps Marianina’s future depended on the attitude I now took, I controlled myself and left the room without further words.

The next morning, before I was out of bed, the Abbe Fontanon was announced to me.  When he entered he proved to be a tall old man with a bilious skin and a sombre, stern expression, which he tried to soften by a specious manner and a show of gentle but icy obsequiousness.

“Monsieur,” he said, “Madame la Comtesse de Lanty, whose confessor I have the honor to be, requests me to give you a few explanations, to which you have an incontestable right, as to the scene that took place last evening between her husband and yourself.”

“I am ready to listen to you, monsieur,” I replied.

“Monsieur de Lanty,” continued the abbe, “is a bad sleeper; and one night last summer he was awakened by the sound of cautious steps.  He opened his door, and called out to know who was there.  He was not mistaken; some one was there, but did not answer, and disappeared before Monsieur de Lanty could obtain a light.  At first it was thought to be an attempt at robbery; but on further inquiry it appeared that a gentleman had taken a room in the neighborhood, and had frequently been seen in company with Mademoiselle Marianina,—­in short, the matter concerned a love affair and not a robbery.  Monsieur de Lanty has long watched his daughter, whose ardent inclinations have given him much anxiety; you yourself, monsieur, caused him some uneasiness in Rome—­”

“Very needless, Monsieur l’abbe,” I said, interrupting him.

“Yes.  I know that your relations to Mademoiselle de Lanty have always been perfectly proper and becoming.  But since their return to Paris another individual has occupied her mind,—­a bold and enterprising man, capable of risking everything to compromise and thus win an heiress.  Being taxed with having encouraged this man and allowed these nocturnal interviews, Mademoiselle de Lanty at first denied everything.  Then, evidently fearing that her father, a violent man, would take some steps against her lover, she threw herself at his feet and admitted the visits, but denied that the visitor was the man her father named to her.  At first she refused obstinately to substitute another name for the one she disavowed.  After some days passed in this struggle, she finally confessed to her mother, under a pledge of secrecy, that her father was right in his suspicions, but she dreaded the results to the family if she acknowledged the truth to him.  The man in question was a noted duellist, and her father and brother would surely bring him to account for his conduct.  It was then, monsieur, that the idea occurred to this imprudent girl to substitute another name for that of her real lover.”

“Ah!  I understand,” I said; “the name of a nobody, an artist, a sculptor, or some insignificant individual of that kind.”

“You do Mademoiselle de Lanty injustice by that remark,” replied the abbe.  “What decided her to make your name a refuge against the dangers she foresaw was the fact that Monsieur de Lanty had formerly had suspicions about you, and she thought that circumstance gave color to her statement.”

“But, Monsieur l’abbe,” I said, “how do you explain those letters, that portfolio, which her father produced yesterday?”

“That again was an invention of Marianina; and I may add that this duplicity assures me that had she remained in the world her future might have been terrible.”

“Am I to suppose that this tale has been told you by Madame de Lanty?”

“Confided to me, monsieur, yes.  You yourself saw Madame de Lanty’s desire to stop your explanations yesterday, lest the truth might appear to her husband.  I am requested by her to thank you for your connivance—­passive, of course—­in this pious falsehood.  She felt that she could only show her profound gratitude by telling you the whole truth and relying upon your discretion.”

“Where is Mademoiselle Marianina?”

“As Monsieur de Lanty told you, in a convent in Italy.  To avoid scandal, it was thought best to send her to some safe retreat.  Her own conduct will decide her future.”

Now what do you think of that history?  Does it not seem to you very improbable?  Here are two explanations which have each come into my mind with the force of a conviction.  First, Marianina’s brother has just married into a grand-ducal family of Germany.  Immense sacrifices must have been required of the de Lanty family to make such an alliance.  Was Marianina’s dot, and the fortune she inherited from that old grand-uncle, required to pay the costs of that princely union?  Secondly, did Marianina really feel an attachment for me?  And did she, in a girlish way, express it on those letters which she never sent?  To punish her, had her parents sent her to a convent?  And to disgust me, and throw me off the track, had the mother invented this history of another love in which she seemed to make me play so mortifying a part?

I may add that the intervention of the Abbe Fontanon authorizes such an interpretation.  I have made inquiries about him, and I find he is one of those mischievous priests who worm themselves into the confidence of families for their own ends; he has already destroyed the harmony of one home,—­that of Monsieur de Granville, attorney-general of the royal court of Paris under the Restoration.

As to the truth or falsehood of these suppositions I know nothing, and, in all probability, shall continue to know nothing.  But, as you can easily understand, the thought of Marianina is a luminous point to which my eye is forever attached.  Shall I love her?  Shall I hate her and despise her?  That is the question perpetually in my mind.  Uncertainty of that kind is far more certain to fix a woman in a man’s soul than to dislodge her.

Well, to sum up in two brief sentences my reply to your warnings:  As for the opinion of Monsieur Bixiou, I care as little for it as for last year’s roses; and as for that other danger which you fear, I cannot tell you whether I love Marianina or not, but this I know, I do not love Madame de l’Estorade.  That, I think, is giving you a plain and honest answer.  And now, let us leave our master the Future to do what he likes.