The Human Comedy: Selected Stories Read online

  “Does a creature of fashion not need a fine mind?” asked the Polish count.

  “More than anything else, she must have very fine taste,” answered Madame d’Espard.

  “And in France, to have taste is to have something more than a fine mind,” said the Russian.

  “This woman’s conversation is the triumph of a very plastic art,” Blondet went on. “You won’t know what she said, but you will be enchanted. She will have nodded her head, or sweetly raised her white shoulders, she will have gilded an insignificant sentence with the smile of a charming little pout, or she will have expressed an entire Voltairean epigram in one ah!, one hmm?, one well! A cock of the head will be her most vigorous interrogation; she will impart meaning to the movement by which she tosses a vinaigrette attached to her finger by a ring. With her all is artificial grandeur, wrought by magnificent trifles; she nobly lets her hand droop, hanging over the arm of a chair, like dewdrops on the rim of a flower, and with this everything has been said, she has pronounced an unappealable judgment, eloquent enough for the most insensitive soul. She has heard you out, she has afforded you the opportunity to sparkle, and—I appeal to your modesty—such moments are all too rare.”

  The young Pole’s wide-eyed stare sent all the tablemates into gales of laughter.

  “With a bourgeoise, you haven’t been chatting half an hour before she ushers in her husband, in one form or another,” Blondet went on, grave as ever. “But even if you know your creature of fashion to be married, she will have the delicacy to conceal her husband so utterly that it will require a labor worthy of Columbus to discover him. Often you can’t manage it single-handed. If you’ve found no one to question, at the end of the evening you’ll see her staring significantly at a bemedalled middle-aged man, who will nod and go out. She’s asked for her coach, and now she goes on her way. You’re not her one and only, but you’ve been near her, and you go to bed beneath the gilded paneling of a delicious dream that will perhaps continue when Sleep, with her mighty finger, opens the ivory gates to the temple of fantasies. At home, no creature of fashion can be seen before four o’clock, when she receives visitors. She is no fool: She will always keep you waiting. You will find the signs of good taste all around you; luxury is her constant companion, replaced as necessary. You will see nothing under glass domes, nor the shapeless mass of a wrap hung on the wall like a feedbag. The stairway will be warm. Everywhere flowers will gladden your gaze—flowers, the only gift she accepts, and from only a few people. Bouquets live for just a day, give pleasure, and must then be changed; for her they are, as in the Orient, a symbol, a promise. You will see a display of costly and fashionable bagatelles, but nothing of the museum or the curiosity shop. You will discover her by the fireside, on her love seat, and she will greet you without rising. Her conversation will no longer be that of the ball. There she was your creditor; at home, her wit owes you a debt of pleasure. Creatures of fashion master these nuances wonderfully. She loves in you a man who will broaden her social circle, the sole object of care and concern that creatures of fashion permit themselves today. Thus, to keep you in her drawing room, she will prove a delightful flirt. In this, above all else, you sense the terrible isolation of women today, you understand why they want a little world of their own, for which they serve as a constellation. Without generalities, no conversation is possible.”

  “Yes,” said de Marsay. “There you have put your finger on the great flaw of our age. The epigram, that book in one word, no longer centers on people or things, as it did in the eighteenth century, but on trivial events, and it dies at day’s end.”

  “And so the wit of the creature of fashion, when she has any,” Blondet continued, “consists in doubting all things, just as that of the bourgeoise serves to affirm them for her. Here lies the great difference between the two: The bourgeoise’s virtue is a thing beyond question, the creature of fashion is not certain she hasn’t lost hers nor that she never will; she hesitates and resists, where the other simply refuses to succumb. This hesitancy in all things is one of the last touches of elegance that our horrible age has allowed her. She is rarely in church, but will talk of religion and attempt to convert you should you have the good taste to play the freethinker, for you will thereby have opened the floodgates for well-worn pronouncements, for soulful gazes, for all the conventional gestures that every woman knows: ‘Ah! Come now! I thought you far too deep a man to attack religion! Society is crumbling, and you would rob it of its one underpinning. But religion today is nothing but you and me, it’s property, it’s our children’s future. Ah! It is time we stopped thinking always of ourselves. Individualism is the malady of our age, and religion its only cure, it unites the families that your laws drive apart,’ and so on. She then launches into a neo-Christian oration, generously laced with political concerns, something neither Catholic nor Protestant, but moralistic—oh, moralistic as can be!—in which you will recognize a patch of every fabric woven by our many competing modern doctrines.”

  The women could not repress a laugh at the simpers by which Émile illustrated his caricature.

  “From that oration, my dear Count Adam,” said Blondet to the Pole, “you will see that the creature of fashion is an embodiment of intellectual no less than political confusion, just as the glittering, flimsy objects around her are produced by an industry forever bent on destroying its own creations, so as to replace them. You will leave her house thinking, ‘A woman of superior mind, no doubt about it!’ You will believe this all the more firmly because she will have sounded your heart and your mind with a delicate hand, she will have sought out your secrets, for the creature of fashion gives the impression of knowing nothing in order to learn everything; there are some things that she never knows, even when she does. But you will be uneasy, for you will know nothing of the state of her heart. The grande dame of old loved with banners and broadsheets; today the creature of fashion’s ardors are as orderly as a page of sheet music: half note, quarter note, eighth note, rest. She is but a vulnerable woman, and careful not to compromise her love, nor her husband, nor her children’s future. The flags of name, rank, and fortune no longer command respect enough to ensure safe passage for the goods on board. No more does the entire aristocracy step forward to act as a screen for a fallen woman. And so unlike the late, lamented grande dame, the creature of fashion never goes too far, she can trample nothing underfoot, it is she who would be broken and crushed. She is thus the woman of the Jesuitical mezzo termine, of dubious compromises, respect for the niceties, anonymous passions conducted between two treacherous shorelines. She’s afraid of her servants, like some Englishwoman who might at any moment find herself hauled up for criminal conversation. So free at the ball, so pretty as she strolls the streets, this woman is a slave in her own home; she enjoys her independence only behind closed doors or in her thoughts. She wants to remain a woman of fashion. That’s her watchword. And today a woman abandoned by her husband, reduced to a meager pension, no carriage, no luxuries, no box at the theater, with none of the divine accessories that make up her raiment, today such a woman is no longer a woman at all, or a girl, or a bourgeoise: She is dissolved and becomes simply a thing. The Carmelites will have nothing to do with a married woman; that would be bigamy. Will her lover still want her? That is the question. The creature of fashion can perhaps be a subject of slander but never of gossip.”

  “All that is horribly true,” said the Princess de Cadignan.

  “And so,” Blondet resumed, “the creature of fashion lives between British hypocrisy and the elegant brazenness of the eighteenth century; a bastard system all too typical of an age when nothing that comes along resembles what is lost, in which transitions lead to nothing, in which there are only shades of gray, in which all greatness pales, in which all distinctions are purely personal. I am convinced that no woman, even born near the throne, can hope to acquire before age twenty-five the encyclopedic knowledge of trifles, the gift for machinations, the great little things, the music of the
voice and the harmonies of color, the angelic deviltries and innocent impostures, the language and the silence, the seriousness and the mockery, the wit and witlessness, the diplomacy and ignorance, that make up the creature of fashion.”

  “And where, in this system you’ve just laid out for us,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to Émile Blondet, “would you place the woman writer? Is she a creature of fashion?”

  “Save the occasional genius, she is a creature to be shunned,” answered Émile Blondet, accompanying his response with an urbane glance that may just as well have been overt flattery for Camille Maupin. “That’s not my opinion but Napoleon’s,” he added.

  “Oh, don’t blame Napoleon,” said Canalis, with a sententious gesture. “It was one of his pettinesses to be jealous of literary genius, for pettinesses he had. Who will ever succeed in explaining, portraying, understanding Napoleon? A man always depicted in idleness, and who did all there is to do! Who was the finest power ever known, the most concentrated power, the most mordant, the most acid of all powers; a singular genius who led armed civilization everywhere and established it nowhere; a man who could do everything because he wanted everything; a prodigious phenomenon of will, taming an illness by a battle, and who would nonetheless die of an illness in his bed after a life lived amid shot and shell; a man who had in his head a code and a sword, word and deed; a visionary who foresaw everything but his own fall; an eccentric statesman who wasted men without number for the sake of economy, and who spared at all costs the heads of Talleyrand, of Pozzo di Borgo, and of Metternich, diplomats whose deaths would have saved the French Empire, and who in his mind outweighed thousands of soldiers; a man to whom, by a rare favor, Nature had left a heart in his body of bronze; a jovial, gentle man at midnight among women, and who the next morning toyed with Europe like a young girl amusing herself by splashing her bathwater! Perfidious and honorable, fond of flash and simplicity, devoid of taste and protective of the arts; and for all these antitheses, great in all things, by instinct or by conformation; Caesar at age twenty-five, Cromwell at thirty; and all the while, like a shopkeeper buried at Père Lachaise, ‘a devoted father and a loving husband.’ In short, he improvised monuments, empires, kings, codes, verses, a novel, his reach ever exceeding his grasp. Did he not seek to make all of Europe France? And then, once he had given us a weight on this earth that altered the laws of gravity, he left us poorer than the day he first laid hands on us. And he, who had acquired an empire along with his name, lost his name at the very edge of his empire in a sea of blood and soldiers. A man of pure thought and pure action, Desaix and Fouché rolled into one!”

  “Purely arbitrary and purely just, every inch a king!” said de Marsay.

  “Ach! Vaht a bleasure to zit hier tichesting vile you talk!” said the Baron de Nucingen.

  “And you do realize, this is no common fare we’re serving you?” said Joseph Bridau. “If you had to pay for the pleasures of conversation as you pay for the pleasures of music or dance, your fortune would never suffice! There’s no repeat performance for a tour de force of wit.”

  “Are we women really so diminished as these gentlemen believe?” said the Princess de Cadignan, addressing the others of her sex with a smile both dubious and mocking. “Today, under a regime that reduces all things, you like little dishes, little apartments, little paintings, little articles, little newspapers, little books, but does that mean women must be small as well? Why should the human heart change, simply because you’ve changed your dress? The passions are the same in every age. I know of magnificent devotions, sublime sufferings; they’re simply not public knowledge, they lack the celebrity, if you like, that ennobled the missteps of some of our women of old. But even without saving a king of France, a woman can still be Agnès Sorel! Do you believe that our beloved Marquise d’Espard is not in every way the equal of Madame Doublet or Madame du Deffand, in whose salons so many wicked things were said and done? Is Marie Taglioni not just as fine a dancer as La Camargo? Is Malibran not a soprano to rival La Saint-Huberti? Are our poets not superior to those of the eighteenth century? If, at this moment, by the fault of the shopkeepers who govern our land, we have no style all our own, did the Empire not have its special cachet, no less than the century of Louis XV, and was its splendor not as grand? Have the sciences lost ground?”

  “I share your opinion, madame; the women of this age are truly great,” answered General de Montriveau. “When posterity has put us all behind it, will Madame Recamier not shine as brightly as the loveliest women of times past? We have made so much history that the historians will never see! The century of Louis XIV had only one Madame de Sévigné; today we have thousands in Paris alone, who surely write better than she and do not publish their letters. Whether we call her a creature of fashion or a grande dame, the woman of France will always be the woman par excellence. Émile Blondet has painted us a portrait of the charms of a woman of today, but should the need arise, this woman who simpers and struts and chatters the ideas of Messieurs X, Y, and Z could be a heroine! And, let us say, your missteps, mesdames, are all the more poetic in that they will always and forever be surrounded by the greatest perils. I’ve seen much of society, perhaps I’ve observed it too late, but in those circumstances where the illicitness of your sentiments might be excused, I have always found that some sort of chance, something you might call Providence, inevitably undoes those we call faithless women.”

  “I hope,” said Madame de Vandenesse, “that we can be great in some other way.”

  “Oh! Let the Marquis de Montriveau preach to us,” cried Madame d’Espard.

  “Especially because he has so often practiced what he preaches,” added the Baronne de Nucingen.

  “Indeed,” the general resumed, “among all the dramas, since you’re so fond of that word,” he said, looking at Blondet, “in which I have seen the finger of God at work, the most terrible was almost my own doing.”

  “Oh, tell us!” cried Lady Barimore. “I so like a good shiver.”

  “A fitting fondness for a virtuous woman,” replied de Marsay, looking at Lord Dudley’s charming daughter.