Letters of Two Brides Read online

  There, I’ve told you all. But those forms are delicate and firm, the bright, pure flame of good health burns in those sinewy limbs, life and blue blood pulse in abundance beneath a transparent skin. But next to me blond Eve’s blondest daughter is a Negress! But I have a foot like a gazelle! But every curve is delicate, and I have the regular features of a Greek portrait. My skin tones are not perfectly even, it’s true, mademoiselle, but they glow: I am a very pretty green fruit, with the same green freshness. In short, I resemble the figure emerging from a violet-tinged lily in my aunt’s missal. My blue eyes are not mindless but proud, in two settings of living nacre shaded by pretty little fibrils; my long, close-set lashes are like silken fringe. My brow gleams, my hair’s roots are perfectly sown, creating little waves of pale gold, browner in the middle, with an occasional rebellious lock slipping free to assert with some eloquence that I am not an insipid, fainting blond but a southern, hot-blooded blond, a blond who strikes before she can be struck. The coiffeur even wanted to part it in the middle, smooth it down, and adorn my brow with a pearl on a golden chain, telling me I would seem something straight from the Middle Ages. “Allow me to inform you that I am too young to be in the middle of any age, or to require an ornament to make me seem younger!” My nose is thin, the nostrils neatly cut out and separated by a charming pink partition: a haughty and superior nose, its tip too fine to ever grow fat or red. My doe, if that’s not enough to have a girl snatched up with no dowry, then I don’t know what’s what. My ears make teasing twists and turns, a pearl would look yellow against the lobe. I have a long neck, endowed with the kind of serpentine motion that confers such majesty on a woman. In the shadow, the white turns to gold. Ah! my mouth might be just a bit wide, but it’s so expressive, the color of my lips is so lovely, my teeth are so quick to laugh! And, my dear, all the rest is in harmony: there’s a walk, there’s a voice! One remembers the miraculous oscillations of one’s ancestor’s skirt, unaided by her hand; in brief, I am beautiful and full of grace. Depending on my mood, I can laugh as we so often laughed, and I will be respected: there will be something commanding in the dimples put into my white cheeks by Amusement’s deft fingers. I can lower my eyes and give myself a heart of ice beneath my snowy brow. I can display a swan’s melancholy neck as I strike a Madonnaesque pose, and the painters’ Virgins will be left far behind; I will be above them in the heavens. Any man who would speak to me will have to put music in his voice.

  And so I am armed from head to toe, and I can play the full keyboard of coquetry, from the gravest tones to the most fluting. It’s an enormous advantage not to be uniform. My mother is neither frolic-some nor virginal: she is nothing other than dignified and grand. She cannot break out and turn leonine; when she wounds, she has no gift for healing. I will be able to wound and to heal both. I could not be less like my mother—and so no rivalry is possible between us, unless we were to quarrel over the relative perfections of our limbs, which are similar. I am far more like my quick-witted, astute father. I have my grandmother’s manners and charming voice, a head voice when it’s forced, a mellifluous chest voice in the medium of the tête-à-tête. I feel as if I had only today left the convent behind. I do not yet exist for society, I am an unknown. What a delicious moment! I still belong to myself, like a new-bloomed flower, as yet unseen. My angel, as I glided through my drawing room, looking at myself, seeing the ingenue defrock the convent-school girl, I can’t say what I felt in my heart: regrets of the past, concerns for the future, fears of the wide world, farewells to the pale daisies we so gaily gathered, so innocently plucked, there was all of that, but also a few of those wild fancies I force back down into the depths of my soul, where I do not dare go, and whence they come.

  My Renée, I have a trousseau! Everything is very tidily put away and perfumed in the lacquer-fronted cedar drawers of my delicious dressing room. I have ribbons, shoes, gloves, everything in profusion. My father has generously given me a young lady’s most precious jewels: a makeup case, a toiletry kit, a vinaigrette, a fan, a parasol, a book of prayers, a golden chain, a cashmere shawl. He promised that I would learn to ride. And finally, I know how to dance! Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow evening, I will be introduced to society. I will be dressed in white chiffon. In my hair will be a garland of white roses in the Greek style. I will put on my Madonna look: I want to be quite un-worldly and have all the women on my side.

  My mother knows nothing of what I write you here; she thinks me incapable of reflection. Were she to read my letter, she would be struck dumb with surprise. My brother honors me with a deep disregard and never fails to give me the gift of his indifference. He is a fine-looking young man, but gloomy and irascible. I know his secret, which neither the duke nor the duchess have guessed. Although young and a duke, he is jealous of his father, he has no place in the state, no duties at court, no call to say “I’m off to the chamber.” I alone in this house have sixteen hours a day to devote to reflection: my father is occupied with matters of state and his own pleasures, and my mother is busy as well. No one ever examines themselves in this house, everyone is always out and about, there is no time for life. I am exceedingly curious to know what invincible attraction society holds, that it can detain you each evening from nine o’clock to two or three in the morning, that it can make you spend such vast sums and endure such exhaustion. In the days when I longed to come to this place, I never imagined such distances, such intoxications, but I am forgetting that this is Paris, and in Paris people can live together as a family and never know each other. Then an almost-nun arrives, and in two weeks she sees what a man of state does not see in his own house. Or perhaps he does, and perhaps there is a fatherly benevolence in his willful blindness. I will explore that dark corner.

  4

  FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

  December 15

  Yesterday, at two o’clock, I went out for a drive down the Champs-Élysées and through the Bois de Boulogne, on one of those autumn days we so admired by the banks of the Loire. At long last, I have seen Paris! The Place Louis XV[11] is truly beautiful, but only with the beauty that men create. I was elegantly dressed, pensive but ready to laugh, my face serene beneath a charming hat, my arms crossed. I did not arouse the slightest smile, I did not leave one poor little young man standing stock-still in wonderment, no one turned around to look at me, despite the carriage’s leisurely pace, in harmony with my pose. No, I’m wrong, there was one charming duke who abruptly turned around as he passed by. That man who rescued my vanity in the eyes of the passing crowd was my father, whose pride, he told me, had just been pleasantly tickled. I came across my mother, who gave me a little greeting with one fingertip, like a kiss. My Griffith was peering about every which way, little caring who was watching. I believe a young lady must always know where she is aiming her gaze. I was furious. One man very meticulously studied my carriage and never once glanced my way. That flatterer was very likely a coach maker. Clearly I was overrating my forces: beauty, that rare privilege given by God alone, is more widespread in Paris than I believed. Simperers were graciously saluted. Men said to themselves “There she is!” on catching sight of a mottled, flushed face. My mother was greatly admired. There is an answer to this mystery, and I will seek it out.

  The men, my dear, seemed to me generally very ugly. The handsome ones resemble us, in a less comely form. I know not what misguided mind invented their garb, which is surprisingly graceless compared to centuries past. It has no style, no color or poetry; it speaks neither to the senses nor to the mind nor to the eye, and it must be impractical: it’s too tight and too short. I was especially struck by the hat they all wear, a truncated column, entirely unsuited to the shape of the head, but I have been told it is easier to bring about a revolution than to make a hat elegant. In France, the most valiant heart quails at the idea of wearing a round-topped felt hat, and lacking the courage for one day, men go their whole lives ridiculously coiffed. And to think the French are said to be carefree! But then, whatever their hats, they ar
e perfectly horrible. I saw only hard, tired faces, with nothing serene or tranquil about them: the lines are angular, and the wrinkles bespeak disappointed ambitions and defeated vanities. Fine brows are rare.

  “So these are the Parisians I’ve heard so much about,” I said more than once to Miss Griffith.

  “Very amiable gentlemen, very amusing,” she answered.

  I said nothing. There is a great deal of indulgence in the heart of an unmarried thirty-six-year-old woman.

  In the evening I went to the ball. I stayed close by my mother, who gave me her arm with well-rewarded devotion. All the homages were for her, I was a pretext for the most pleasant flatteries. She showed a rare gift for pairing me with imbecilic dance partners who spoke to me of the warmth as if I were freezing and of the beauty of the ball as if I were blind. Not one failed to fall into ecstasies over a strange, incredible, extraordinary, singular, bizarre thing, which was seeing me at the ball for the first time. My dress, which so thrilled me as I paraded alone through my white-and-gold drawing room, was scarcely noticeable among the splendid gowns on most of the women. They all had their faithful admirers, they all watched one another out of the corners of their eyes, several of them stood out by their triumphant beauty, my mother among them. A young woman counts for nothing at the ball: she is a dancing machine. With a few rare exceptions, the men are no better than on the Champs-Élysées. They are worn, their faces have no character, or rather they all have the same character. The proud, vigorous faces we see in our ancestors’ portraits, wedding physical vitality to force of mind, those faces no longer exist. But there was one man of great talent in that assembly, a man who stood out in the crowd by the fineness of his face; nonetheless, he did not move me in the least. I know nothing of his work, and he is not of the true nobility. However brilliant or fine a commoner or newly minted noble[12] may be, I do not have a single drop of blood in my veins for him. Not to mention that I found him so deeply occupied with himself and so little with others that I concluded that we women must be mere things, and not people, for such great adventurers of the mind. When a man of talent is in love, he must no longer write, or else he is not in love. There is something in his mind that comes before his mistress. I thought I could see all that in this man’s demeanor, he who is, I am told, a teacher, a talker, an author, whose ambition makes him a servant of any power. I made my decision then and there: I thought it most unworthy of me to blame the world around me for my lack of success, and I began to dance without troubling myself about such things. I very much liked dancing, as it happens. I heard a great deal of dull gossip about people I didn’t know, but perhaps I simply still have much to learn, for I saw most of the men and women taking a very keen pleasure in saying or hearing one thing or another. Society offers a host of enigmas whose solution seems very difficult to find. The mysteries proliferate. My eyes are keen enough, and my ear sharp; as for the quickness of my mind, you know it well, Mademoiselle de Maucombe!

  I came home tired, and glad of that tiredness. I very naively told my mother of my state, and she advised me to say such things only to her. “My dear girl,” she added, “good taste means knowing what mustn’t be said as much as what may be.”

  On hearing that counsel, I conceived an idea of all the feelings we must tell no one of, perhaps not even our own mother. With one glance I surveyed the whole vast realm of feminine dissimulations. I can assure you, my dear doe, that with the effrontery of our innocence we would seem two very bold little misses here. How much there is to learn from a finger pressed to the lips, from a word, from a glance! All at once I was greatly intimated. So I must say nothing of the very natural happiness caused by the movements of the dance? What, then, I wondered, of our sentiments? I went to bed dispirited. I am still reeling from the shock of my open, lighthearted nature’s first collision with society’s hard laws. A bit of my white wool has already been snagged on the brambles by the roadside. Farewell, my angel!

  5

  FROM RENÉE DE MAUCOMBE TO LOUISE DE CHAULIEU

  October

  How moved I was by your letter, and above all by the differences in our two destinies! What a glittering world will be yours! In what a quiet repair I will live out my little life! Two weeks after I arrived at the Château de Maucombe—of which I have already told you too much to say anything more, and where I found my bedroom much as before, though I was now able to appreciate the sublime landscape of the valley of Gémenos, which as a child I looked at and never saw—my father and mother, accompanied by my two brothers, took me to dine at the home of a neighbor, an aged Monsieur de l’Estorade, a nobleman who has grown very rich in the time-honored provincial fashion: by the good graces of avarice. That old man had not succeeded in protecting his only son from Bonaparte’s clutches; he saved him from conscription but was obliged to surrender him to the army in 1813 for the Honor Guard—and then, after the Battle of Leipzig, Baron de l’Estorade heard nothing more from him. In 1814 he went to see Monsieur de Montriveau, who claimed he had seen his son captured by the Russians. Madame de l’Estorade died of grief as the fruitless search she had ordered in Russia was still going on. The baron, a very Christian old man, practiced that beautiful theological virtue we cultivated in Blois: Hope! With Hope’s aid, he saw his son in his dreams; for that son, he saved up his income and set aside a share of the inheritances that came to him from the late Madame de l’Estorade’s family. No one ever made so bold as to mock the old man for it. I soon came to realize that this son’s unexpected return was the cause of my own. If someone had told us that while our thoughts were racing wildly hither and yon my future husband was trudging homeward through Russia, Poland, and Germany! His ordeal came to an end only in Berlin, where the French minister helped him make his way back to France. Being a minor nobleman of Provence with an annual income of ten thousand livres, Monsieur de l’Estorade père lacks the Europe-wide renown that might have inspired someone to take an interest in the Chevalier de l’Estorade, whose name sounds so oddly like an adventurer’s alias.

  With an annual interest income of twelve thousand livres from Madame de l’Estorade’s assets, and his father’s savings on top of that, the poor Honor Guard has what is considered in Provence a sizable fortune, something like two hundred and fifty thousand livres, not counting his land. The day before he was to be reunited with the chevalier, l’Estorade bought a neglected but very fine estate, where he plans to plant the ten thousand mulberry trees he had been cultivating in his nursery to that end, having long foreseen this purchase. Once he was reunited with his son, the baron could think of only one thing: finding him a wife, and not just any wife but a young woman of the nobility. My father and mother fell in with their neighbor’s plans for me as soon as he announced his intention to take Renée de Maucombe with no dowry, and to claim receipt of the sum due the aforementioned Renée in their wills. On attaining the age of majority, my younger brother, Jean de Maucombe, was accorded an advance on his parental inheritance equal to one third of their legacy. This is how the noble families of Provence evade Monsieur de Bonaparte’s shameful civil code, which will put as many noble girls in the convent as it has caused to be married.[13] From what little I have heard on the subject, French nobility is deeply divided on these very serious matters. That dinner, my dear darling, was a business meeting between your doe and the exile. Let us begin at the beginning. Count de Maucombe’s servants dressed in their old corded livery and ribboned hats; the coachman donned his big flared boots. We fit five people into the old coach and majestically arrived toward two o’clock for a three o’clock dinner at the bastide[14] that is Baron de l’Estorade’s home. The father-in-law has no château, only a simple country house at the foot of one of our hills, at the end of our beautiful valley, whose glory is certainly the old de Maucombe castel. That bastide is a true bastide: four rubble-stone walls faced with dull yellow mortar, topped with curved tiles of a beautiful red. The roof sags under the weight of that brickyard. Set into those walls without the slightest regard
for symmetry the windows are flanked by enormous yellow-painted shutters. The garden is a typical Provençal garden, enclosed by low walls built of big round stones stacked in layers, the mason’s genius being expressed in his manner of arranging them alternatively lying flat or standing on end; here and there the layer of mud that covers them is falling away. What gives that bastide the air of a true estate is a tall metal gate at the entrance to the grounds, just by the road. It took a great deal of begging to have that gate built; it is so frail that it made me think of Sister Angélique. The house has a stone staircase in front, and the doorway is decorated with an awning that no peasant of the Loire would ever want for his elegant house of white stone, its blue slate roof glinting in the sunlight. The garden and grounds are horribly dusty, the trees scalded by the sun. Clearly the baron’s life has long consisted in rising, retiring, and rising again the next day with no thought in mind but saving up his sous. He eats the same meals as his two domestics, a Provençal boy and his late wife’s aged chambermaid. The rooms are sparsely furnished. Nonetheless, the house of l’Estorade went all out for the occasion. They emptied their cupboards and enlisted every last one of their serfs for this dinner, which was served to us on tarnished, dented silver.

  The exile, my beloved darling, is like the gate, very frail! He is pale, he has suffered, he says little. At thirty-seven, he might pass for fifty. The ebony of his ex-beautiful hair is streaked with white, like the wing of a lark. His fine blue eyes are sunken, he is slightly deaf, and all told he seems a little like the Knight of the Sad Countenance; nonetheless, I have graciously consented to become Madame de l’Estorade, to allow myself to be endowed with two hundred and fifty thousand livres, but only on the condition that I be given authority to oversee the furnishing and decoration of the bastide and to create a park on the grounds. I formally demanded that my father grant me a small supply of water, which will flow here from Maucombe. In a month I shall be Madame de l’Estorade, for I proved to his liking, my dear. After the snows of Siberia, a man may well find merit in these black eyes of mine, which, as you used to say, ripened any fruit that I gazed upon. Louis de l’Estorade seems exceedingly happy to be marrying the beautiful Renée de Maucombe, for such is your friend’s glorious cognomen. While you are preparing to reap the joys of the grandest existence, that of a young de Chaulieu lady in Paris, which you will have kneeling at your feet, your poor doe Renée, that girl of the desert, has fallen from the Empyrean realm into which we once launched ourselves and landed in the everyday realities of a life as humble as a daisy’s. Yes, I have sworn to console that young man who never had a youth, who went from his mother’s arms to the war’s, from the joys of his bastide to the snows and privations of Siberia. The sameness of my days will be varied by the modest pleasures of the countryside. I will bring the oasis that is the valley of Gémenos to my very house, which will be majestically shaded by beautiful trees. I will have perpetually green lawns in Provence; my park will climb to the very top of the hill, where I will place some pretty belvedere from which I might perhaps gaze on the shining Mediterranean. Orange trees, lemon trees, all of botany’s most sumptuous creations will beautify my retreat, and there I will be mother to a family. A natural, indestructible poetry will surround us. So long as I remain true to my duties, there is no sadness to fear. My father-in-law and the Chevalier de l’Estorade share my Christian sentiments. Ah! my darling, I see my life to come as one of those great highways of France, flat and smooth, shaded by age-old trees. There will not be two Bonapartes in this century; should I have children, I will be allowed to keep them, to raise them, to make men of them, and through them I will enjoy the pleasures of life. Assuming you do not fail your destiny, you who will be the wife of some great and important man, your Renée’s children will have a tireless protector.