the stars, they had an eloquence far more dangerous than speech, and "You love me, Léontine? O Heaven! I have no strength to put away "Till my fancy change rather!" thought Madame la Marquise, as she put her jewelled hand on his lips, her hair, perfumed with Eastern fragrance, softly brushing his cheek, with a touch as soft, and an odour as sweet, as the leaves of one of the roses twining below. Two men strolling below under the limes of Petite Forêt-discussing the last scandales of Versailles, talking of the ascendancy of La Fontanges, of the Spanish dress his Majesty had reassumed to please her, of the Brinvilliers' Poudre de Succession, of the new château given to Père de La Chaise (that gentle royal confessor with absolutions ever ready to stretch to any point); of D'Aubigny's last extravagance and Lauzun's last mot, and the last gossip about Bossuet and Mademoiselle de Mauléon, and all the chit-chat of that varied day, glittering with wit and prolific of poison-glanced up to the balcony by the light of the stars. "That cursed priest!" muttered the younger, le Vicomte de SaintElix, as he struck the head off a lily with his delicate badine. "In a fool's paradise! Ah! Madame la Marquise!" laughed the other -the old Duc de Clos-Vougeot-taking a chocolate dragée out of his emerald-studded bonbonnière as they walked on, while the lime-blossoms shook off in the summer night wind and dropped dead on the grass beneath, laughing at the story of the box D'Artagnan had found in Lauzun's rooms when he seized his papers, containing the portraits of sixty women of high degree who had worshipped the resistless Capitaine des Gardes, from the Queen of Portugal to saintly dévotes, with critical and historical notices penned under each-notices D'Artagnan and his aide could not help indiscreetly retailing en petit comité and over soupers de minuit, in despite of the Bourbon command of secrecy-secrecy so necessary where sixty beauties and saints were involved! "A fool's paradise!" said the Duc de Clos-Vougeot, tapping his bonbonnière, enamelled by Petitot: the Duc was old, and knew women well, and knew the value and length of a paradise dependent on that most fickle of butterflies-female fidelity; he had heard Ninon de Lenclos try to persuade Scarron's wife to become a coquette, and Scarron's wife in turn beseech Ninon to discontinue her coquetteries; had seen that, however different their theories and practice, the result was the same, and already guessed right, that if Paris had been universally won by the one, its monarch would eventually be won by the other. "A fool's E paradise!" The courtier was right, but the priest, had he heard him, would never have believed; his heaven shone in those dazzling eyes: till the eyes closed in death, his heaven was safe! He had never loved, he had seen nothing of women; he had come straight from the monastic gloom of a Dominican abbey, in the very heart of the South, down in Languedoc, where costly missals were his only idol, and rigid pietists, profoundly ignorant of the ways and thoughts of their brethren of Paris, had reared him up in anchorite rigidity, and scourged his mind with iron philosophies and stoic-like doctrines of self-mortification that would have repudiated the sophistries and ingenuities of Sanchez, Escobar, and Mascarenhas, as suggestions of the very Master of Evil himself. From the ascetic gloom of that Languedoc convent he had been brought straight, by superior will, into the dazzling glare of the life at Versailles, that brilliant, gorgeous, sparkling, bizarre life, scintillating with wit, brimful of intrigue, crowded with the men and the women who formed the Court of that age and the History of the next-where diamonds were melted to brighten the wine, and every dish was a plat sucré if aqua toffania bubbled beneath-where he found every churchman an abbé galant, and heard those who performed the mass jest at it with those who attended it -where he found no lines marked of right and wrong, but saw them all fused in a gay, tangled web of two court colours-Expediency and Pleasure; a life that dazzled and tired his eyes, as the glitter of lights in a room dazzles and tires the eyes of a man who comes suddenly in from the dark night air, till he grew giddy and sick, and in the midst of the gilded salons, or the soft confessions of titled pécheresses, would ask himself if indeed he could be the same Gaston de Launay who had sat calm and grave with the mellow sun streaming in on his missal-page in the monastic gloom of the Dominican abbey but so few brief months before, when all this world of Versailles was unknown? The same Gaston de Launay? truly not-never again the same, since Madame la Marquise had asked, "Qui est ce beau prêtre ?" of Saint-Elix, one day, had bent her brown eyes upon him, been amused with his singular difference from all those around her, had loved him, en passant, as women loved at Versailles, and bowed him down to her feet, before he guessed the name of the forbidden language that stirred in his heart and rushed to his lips, untaught and unbidden. He loved, and Madame la Marquise loved him. "A fool's paradise!" said the Duc, sagaciously tapping his gold bonbonnière. But many a paradise like it has dawned and faded, before, and since, the Versailles of Louis Quatorze. He loved, and Madame la Marquise loved him. Through one brief tumult of struggle he passed: struggle between the creed of the Dominican abbey, where no sin would have been held so thrice accursed, so unpardonable, so deserving of the scourge and the stake as this-and the creed of the Bourbon Court, where churchmen's gallantries were everyday gossip; where the Abbé de Rancé, ere he founded the saintly gloom of La Trappe, scandalised town and court as much as Lauzun; where the Père de la Chaise smiled complacently on La Fontanges' ascendancy; where three nobles rushed to pick up the handkerchief of that royal confessor, who washed out with eau bénite the royal faux pas, as you wash off grains of dust with eau parfumée; where the great and saintly Evêque de Condom could be checked in a rebuking harangue, and have the tables turned on him by a mischievous reference to Mademoiselle de Mauléon; where life was intrigue for churchmen and laymen alike, and where the abbe's rochet and the cardinal's scarlet covered the same vices as were openly blazoned on the gold aigulets of the Garde du Corps and the costly lace of the Chambellan du Roi. A storm, brief and violent as the summer storms that raged over Versailles, was roused between the conflicting thoughts at war within him, between the principles deeply rooted from long habit and stern belief, and the passions sprung up unbidden with the sudden growth and gorgeous glow of a tropical flower-a storm, brief and violent, a struggle, ended that night, when he stood on the balcony with the woman he loved, felt her lips upon his, and bowed down to her feet delirious and strengthless. "I have won my wager with Adeline; I have vanquished mon beau De Launay," thought Madame la Marquise, smiling, two days after, as she sat, en negligé, in her broidered fauteuil, pulling Osmin's ears, and stirring the frothy chocolate handed to her by her negro, Azor, brought over in the suite of the African embassy from Ardra, full of monkeyish espièglerie, and covered with gems-a priceless dwarf, black as ink, and but two feet high, who could match any day with the queen's little Moor. "He amuses me with his vows of eternal love. Eternal love? Quel conte bleu ridicule! how de trop we should find it, here in Versailles! But it is amusing enough to play at for a season; and he loves me, mon pauvre Gaston. No, that is not half enough-he adores! He loves me pour moi-même, the others love me pour eux-mêmes: a very great difference; n'est-ce-pas, Osmin?" So, in the salons of Versailles, and in the world, where Ninon reigned (and made her reign so brilliant that she held the court in contemptuous disdain as hors du monde), by the jeunesse dorée, while they laughed over Hathelin's mischievous caricature that had cost its graver the Bastille, and by the dames de la cour, while they loitered in the new-made gardens of Marly, among other similar things jested of was this new amour of Madame de la Rivière for the young Père de Launay. "She was always eccentric in fancy, and he was very handsome, and would have charming manners if he were not so grave and so silent," the women averred; while the young nobles swore that these meddling churchmen had always the best luck, whether in the bonnes fortunes of amatory conquest, or the bonnes bouches of fat lands and rich revenues. What the priest of Languedoc thought a love that would outlast life, and repay him for peace of conscience and heaven both lost, was only one of the passing bubbles of gossip and scandal floating for an hour, amidst myriads like it, on the glittering, fast-rushing, diamond-bright waters of life at Versailles! A new existence had dawned for Gaston de Launay; far away in the dim dusky vista of forgotten things, though in reality barely distant a few short months, lay the old life in Languedoc, vague and unremembered as a passed dream; with its calm routine, its monastic silence, its unvarying alternations of study and prayer, its iron-bound thoughts, its rigid creed, It had sunk away as the peaceful grey twilight of a summer's night sinks away before the fiery burst of an artificial illumination, and a new life had dawned for him, radiant, tumultuous, conflicting, delicious-that dazzled his eyes with the magnificence of boundless riches and unrestricted extravagance; that charmed his intellect with the witty corruscations, the polished esprit, of an age unsurpassed for genius, grace and wit; and that swayed alike his heart, his imagination, and his passions with the subtle intoxication of this syren of Love, whose forbidden song had never before, in faintest echo, fallen on his ear. Far away in the dim, lifeless, pulseless past, sank the memory of the old Dominican Abbey, of all it had taught him, of all it had exacted, in its iron, stoical, merciless creed. A new life had arisen for him, and Gaston de Launay, waking from the semi-slumber of the living death he had endured in Languedoc, and liked because he knew no other, was happy-happy as a prisoner is in the wild delight with which he welcomes the sunlight after lengthened imprisonment, happy as an opium-eater is in the delicious delirium that succeeds the lulling softness of the opiate. "He loves me, poor Gaston! Bah! But how strangely he talks! If love were this fiery, changeless, earnest thing with us that it is with him, what in the world should we do with it? We should have to get a lettre de cachet, and forbid it the Court; send it in exile to Pignerol, as they have just done Peguilan de Lauzun. Love au sérieux? We should lose the best spice for our wine, the best toy for our games, and, mon Dieu! what embrouillemens there would be! Love au sérieux? Bagatelle ! Louise de la Vallière, petite sotte, shows us the folly of that; but for its Quixotisms she would now be at Vaujours, instead of buried alive in that Rue St. Jacques, with nothing to do but to weep for 'Louison,' count her beads, and listen to M. de Condom's merciless eloquence! Like the king, J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit. People have no right to reproach each other with inconstancy; one's caprices are not in one's own keeping; and one can no more help where one's fancy blows, than that lime-leaf can help where the breeze chooses to waft it. But poor Gaston! how make him comprehend that?" thought Madame la Marquise, as she turned, and smiled, and held out her warm jewelled hands, and listened once again to the passionate words of the man who was in her power as utterly as the bird in the power of the snake when it has once looked up into the fatal dazzling eyes that lure it on to its doom. "You will love me ever, Léontine ?" he would ask, resting his lips on her white low brow. "A jamais!" would softly answer Madame la Marquise. And her lover believed her: should his deity lie? He believed her! What did he, fresh from the solitude of his monastery, gloomy and severe as that of the Trappist abbey, with its perpetual silence, its lowered glances, its shrouded faces, its ever-present "Memento mori," know of women's faith, of women's love, of the sense in which they meant that vow "à jamais"? He believed her, and never asked what would be at the end of a path strewn with such odorous flowers. Alone, it is true, in moments when he paused to think, he stood aghast at the abyss into which he had fallen, at the sin into which, a few months before, haughty and stern in virtue against the temptation that had never entered his path, he would have defied devils in legion to have lured him, yet into which he had now plunged at the mere smile of a woman! Out of her presence, out of her spells, standing by himself under the same skies that had brooded over his days of peace in Languedoc, back on his heart, with a sickening anguish, would come the weight of his sin; the burden of his broken oaths, the scorch of that curse eternal which, by his creed, he held drawn down on him here and hereafter; and Gaston de Launay would struggle again against this idolatrous passion, which had come with its fell delusion betwixt him and his God; strugglevainly, idly-struggle-only to hug closer the sin he loved while he loathed; only to drink deeper of the draught whose voluptuous perfume was poison; only to forget all, forsake all, dare all, at one whisper of her voice, one glance of her eyes, one touch of the lips whose caress he held would be bought by a curse through eternity. Few women love aught "for ever," save, perchance, diamonds, lace, and their own beauty, and Madame la Marquise was not one of those few; certainly not-she had no desire to make herself singular in her generation, and could set fashions much more likely to find disciples, without reverting to anything so eccentric, paysanne, and out of date. Love one for ever! She would have thought it as terrible waste of her fascinations, as for a jewel to shine in the solitude of its case, looked on by only one pair of eyes, or for a priceless enamel, by Petitot, to be only worn next the heart, shrouded away from the light of day, hidden under the folds of linen and lace. "Love one for ever ?"-Madame la Marquise laughed at the thought, as she stood dressed for a ball, after assisting at the representation of a certain tragedy, called "Bérénice" (in which Mesdames Deshoulières and De Sévigné, despite their esprit, alone, of all Paris and the court, could see no beauty), and glanced in the mirror at her radiant face, her delicate skin, her raven curls, with their pendants shaking, her snow-white arms, and her costly dress of the newest mode, its stomacher gleaming one mass of gems. "Love one for ever? Ma foi! il est joliment exigeant, monsieur mon prêtre !— mais je l'aime maintenant; c'est assez pour moi, et il faut que ce soit assez pour lui." It was more than enough for his rivals, who, not having rococo Languedoc taste for an amour éternelle, bitterly envied him this amour passagère; courtly abbés, with polished smiles, and young chanoines, with scented curls and velvet toques, courtiers, who piqued themselves on reputations only second to Lauzun's, and hommes du monde, who laughed at this new caprice of Madame la Marquise, alike bore no good-will to this Languedoc priest, and gave him a significant sneer, or a compliment that roused his blood to fire, and stung him far worse than more open insult, when they met in the salons, or crossed in the corridors, at Versailles or Petite Forêt. "Those men! those men! Should he ever lose her to any one of them?" he would think over and over again, clenching his hand, in impotent agony of passion that he had not the sword and the licence of a soldier to strike them on the lips with his glove for the smile with which they dared to speak her name; to make them wash out in blood under the trees, before the sun was up, the laugh, the mot, the delicate satire, which were worse to bear than a blow to the man who could not avenge them. "Pardieu! le plus grand miracle est de guérir de la coquetterie ! Madame must be very unusually faithful to her beau prêtre; she has smiled on no other for two months! What unparalleled fidelity!" said the Vicomte de Saint Elix, twisting his long blonde moustaches with a sneer. |