Letters of Two Brides Read online

  As you see, my dear, I am teaching him well. That style is of recent vintage; in a year it will be better. Louis is still in the throes of his first transports, while I wait for him to join me in the steady, un-troubled contentment that a happy marriage cannot help but offer when, sure of each other, truly knowing each other, a man and a woman have found the secret of varying the infinite, of making life’s simplest things magical. I can half glimpse that beautiful secret, and I want to possess it. As you see, he thinks himself loved as if he were not my husband, the smug simpleton! But in fact I have progressed no further than the kind of material attachment that gives us the strength to endure many things. Nonetheless, Louis is lovable, there is a great steadiness in his character. Things that most men would boast of he does very simply. Even if I do not love him, I believe I could grow fond of him.

  Here, then, is my black hair, here are my black eyes, whose lashes, you used to say, part like the slats of a jalousie, here is my imperious air and my person elevated to the rank of a sovereign power. We shall see if in ten years we are not both of us very happy and gay in that Paris of yours, from which I will sometimes take you away to my beautiful Provençal oasis. Oh, Louise, do not compromise the fine future that awaits us! Do not fall into the follies you threaten. I am marrying an old young man; you must marry some young old man of the peerage. On that point at least, you are entirely right.

  14

  FROM THE DUKE DE SORIA TO BARON DE MACUMER

  Madrid

  My dear brother, you have made me the Duke de Soria, and I intend to act like a Duke de Soria. If I knew you to be drifting from town to town with none of the comforts money provides us wherever we go, I would curse my own happiness. Neither Maria nor I will consent to be married until we hear that you have accepted the funds sent you by way of Urraca. Those two million come from your own savings, and Maria’s. We have both knelt at the same altar and prayed—oh! God knows with what fervor!—for your happiness. Oh my brother! Our prayers will surely be granted. The love you seek will descend from the heavens and console you for your exile. Maria wept as she read your letter; she admires you with all her heart. For my part, I accept your generous gesture for the sake of our house and not for my own. The king did just as you supposed. Ah! You so scornfully flung his pleasure in his face, as one flings a tiger its prey; I long to tell him how small he seemed next to you at that moment. The one thing I took for myself, dear brother, is my joy, is Maria. And so before you I will always be what a mere man is before his Creator. In my life and Maria’s, there will be one day as beautiful as the day of our happy marriage: the day we learn that your heart has been understood, that a woman loves you as you should and want to be loved. Do not forget that, if you live through us, we live no less through you. You may write us in all confidence by way of the papal nuncio; address all your future letters to Rome. The French ambassador in Rome will forward them to the secretariat of state, Monsignore Bemboni, who has been alerted to this arrangement by our legate. Any other method would be a grave mistake. Farewell, dear despoiled one, dear exile. If you cannot be happy yourself, be proud, at least, of the happiness you have given us. God will surely hear our prayers, which are full of you.

  Fernand

  15

  FROM LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO MADAME DE L’ESTORADE

  March

  Oh! my angel, I see marriage has made you philosophical? . . . Your dear face must have been grim and gray as you penned those somber thoughts on the subject of human existence and duty. Do you believe you will convert me to the cause of marriage with these subterranean labors you’re planning? Alas! is this where our overworldly daydreams have led you? We left Blois armored in our innocence and armed with the daggers of thought: the sharp point of that purely abstract experience of the world has turned back on you! If I did not know you to be the purest, most angelic creature in this world, I would tell you that there is something depraved in your calculations. Can it be, my dear? For the sake of your life in the country, you order your pleasures in regular parcels, you do with love as you’ll do with your forests! Oh! Better to die in the violence of my heart’s whirlwinds than to live in the draft of your tidy arithmetic. Like me, you were the best-taught of all girls, since we devoted such deep thought to few things, but, my child, philosophy without love, or disguised by a feigned love, is the most horrible conjugal hypocrisy I can imagine. I am not convinced that even the greatest imbecile on earth would not sometimes glimpse the owl of wisdom hiding beneath your pile of roses, an unenticing discovery, capable of routing the most ardent passion. You are shaping your destiny, rather than submit to its whims. We are undergoing a curious change, you and I: much philosophy and little love, that’s your system; much love and little philosophy, that’s mine. To think that I took Jean-Jacques’s Julie for a teacher! She is a mere student next to you. O feminine virtue! Have you ever once taken the measure of life?

  Alas! here I am mocking you, and you may well be right. You have thrown away your youth in one day and made yourself a miser before your time. Your Louis will no doubt be happy. If he loves you, and I have no doubt he does, then he will never see that you’re acting in the interest of your family exactly as a courtesan acts in the interest of her fortune; and surely courtesans do make men happy, if we are to believe the mad dissipations they inspire. No doubt a husband who knew all would not lose his passion for you, but would he not in the end absolve himself of the duty to be grateful to a woman who makes of dishonesty a sort of spiritual corset, as necessary to her life as the other kind is to her body? Now, as I see it, my dear, love is the guiding principle of all the virtues we associate with the divine! Like all principles, love is beyond calculation; it is the infinity of our soul. Are you not seeking some way to justify the terrible lot of a girl married to a man for whom she can feel only esteem? Duty, that is your rule and your yardstick, but is acting out of necessity not the morality of an atheistic society? And is acting out of love and sentiment not womankind’s secret law? You have made yourself a man, and your Louis will find that he is the woman! Oh my dear, your letter has plunged me into endless meditations. I have seen that the convent can never replace a mother for girls. I beg you, my noble, dark-eyed angel, so pure and so proud, so grave and so elegant, think of these first cries ripped from my breast by your letter! I consoled myself with the thought that, even as I lamented, love was perhaps toppling the scaffolding of your reason. I will perhaps do worse without reasoning, without calculating; passion is a way of life that must have a logic every bit as implacable as yours.

  Monday

  Yesterday evening, just before bed, I stood at my window to gaze at the sky, which was sublimely pure. The stars were like silver nails holding up a blue veil. I heard breathing in the silence of the night, and by the half-light of the stars I saw my Spaniard perched like a squirrel in the branches of a tree on the little side street by the boulevard; no doubt he was gazing admiringly at my windows. The first effect of that discovery was to send me scurrying back into my room, my feet and hands numb with fright, but deep beneath that terror I felt a delicious joy. I was shocked and happy. Not one of those fine Frenchmen who want to marry me was ever so fine as to spend his nights in an elm tree, at the risk of being dragged away by the night watch. My Spaniard must have been there for some time. Ah! he is done giving me lessons, he wants me to teach him, and so I shall. If he knew all I’ve said to myself about his outward ugliness! I too, Renée, have philosophized. I have reflected that there is something ignoble about loving a handsome man. Is that not an admission that love is three-quarters sensual, when it should be divine? Recovering from my first rush of fear, I put my head out the window to see him again, and how glad I am that I did! Using a hollow cane, he blew a letter to me, artistically rolled around a lead pellet. “My God! Will he think I left my window open on purpose?” I asked myself. “And if I now slam it shut, that will make me his accomplice.” I did better: I came back to my window as if I hadn’t heard the sound of his note landing
, as if I’d seen nothing, and I said very audibly, “Griffith, come and look at the stars!” Griffith was sleeping like an old maid. Hearing me, the Moor slithered down the tree as fast as a shadow. He must have been half dead with fear, and so was I, not having heard him walk off; he must still have been close by the elm’s trunk. After a good fifteen minutes, during which I plunged into the blue of the sky and swam in the ocean of curiosity, I closed my window and lay down to unroll the fine paper, cautious as any scholar of ancient volumes in Naples. I felt fire beneath my fingers. What a horrible power that man has over me! I told myself. I immediately held the paper to my lamp, intending to burn it without reading it. . . . A thought stayed my hand. What is he writing me, that he must write me in secret? Well, my dear, I burned the letter, thinking that if every other girl on earth would have devoured it, I, Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu, mustn’t read it.

  The next day, at Les Italiens, he was at his post, but, first constitutional minister though he once was, I do not believe he could see the slightest agitation in my soul from my manner: I behaved exactly as if I’d seen nothing and received nothing the evening before. I felt more than a little pleased with myself, but he was very sad. Poor man, it’s so natural in Spain for love to come in through the window! At intermission he came up to stroll through the corridors. The first secretary of the Spanish embassy informed me of that as he was telling me of a sublime thing he had done. Being the Duke de Soria, he was to marry one of the wealthiest heiresses in Spain, the young Princess Maria Hérédia, whose fortune would have eased the sorrows of his exile, but it would seem that, contrary to the wishes of their fathers, who had settled their marriage when they were but children, Maria loved his young brother, and my Felipe forswore all claim to Princess Maria, allowing the King of Spain to deprive him of his titles.

  “I imagine he did that noble deed as if it were the most natural thing in the world,” I said to the young man.

  “You know him, then?” he answered, naively. My mother smiled.

  “What will become of him?” I asked. “After all, he is condemned to die.”

  “Though he be a dead man in Spain, he has the right to live in Sardinia.”

  “Ah! so there are also tombs in Spain?” I said, to suggest I was taking all this as a joke.[30]

  “There is a bit of everything in Spain, even old-fashioned Spaniards,” my mother answered.

  “He required some convincing, but the King of Sardinia granted Baron de Macumer a passport,” the young diplomat continued. “In the end, he became a Sardinian subject; he owns a magnificent fiefdom, with the right to deliver justice both high and low. He has a palace in Sassari. If Ferdinand VII were to die, Macumer would very possibly enter the diplomacy and the royal court of Turin would make of him an ambassador. Although still young, he—”

  “Ah! so he’s young!”

  “Yes, mademoiselle, although young, he is one of the most distinguished men of Spain!”

  I was looking all around the theater as I listened to the secretary, and seemed to be only half paying attention, but, between us, I was distraught at having burned that letter. How does a man such as this speak when he is in love? And he is indeed in love. What a thing it is to be loved, to be secretly adored, to have in this theater, where all of Paris’s finest are gathered, a man of one’s own, unknown to all! Oh! Renée, at that moment I understood life in Paris, its balls and festivities. All at once everything made perfect sense to me. You need other people around you when you’re in love, if only to sacrifice them to your beloved. I felt another, happy self inside me. How flattering all this was for my vanity, my pride, my self-regard! God knows what a gaze I cast upon the world! “Clever little vixen!” the duchess smilingly whispered in my ear. Yes, my very shrewd mother had glimpsed some secret joy in my manner, and I surrendered to that most astute woman. Those few words taught me more about the world than all I had gleaned in the previous year, for it’s now March. Alas! In a month we will no longer have the Italiens. What can one do with oneself without that adorable music when one’s heart is full of love?

  My dear, on my return, with a resolve worthy of a Chaulieu, I opened my window to admire a rain shower. Oh! If men only knew the power of seduction exerted on us by heroic acts, they would do great things indeed; the greatest cowards would be heroes. What I’d learned of my Spaniard had fired my blood. I thought he must be outside, ready to send a new letter my way. And this time I burned nothing: I read it. Here, then, is the first love letter I have ever received, my very well-reasoned madame: to each our own.

  Louise, I do not love you for your sublime beauty; I do not love you for the breadth of your mind, the nobility of your sentiments, the infinite grace you impart to all things, nor for your pride, your regal disdain for all that is not of your world, which does not make you unkind, for you have the charity of the angels. Louise, I love you because you relaxed that sovereign superiority for the sake of a poor exile; because, with one gesture, one glance, you consoled a man so far beneath you that he deserved only your pity, generous though that pity be. You are the only woman in the world who has tempered the hardness in her eyes for my sake, and because you allowed that beneficent gaze to land on me when I was nothing more than a grain of dust among all the others, something never granted me when I had all the power a subject may have, I must tell you, Louise, that you have found a place in my heart, that I love you for yourself alone and with no other thought, far beyond your requirements for a perfect love. Know, then, O idol whom I have placed in the highest reaches of heaven, that there is in this world an offspring of the Saracen race whose life belongs to you, of whom you may ask anything, as you would a slave, and who will be honored to carry out your orders. I have given myself to you forever and solely for the pleasure of giving myself, for one single glance from you, for the hand you extended one day to your Spanish teacher. You have a servant, Louise, and nothing else. No, I dare not suppose I will ever be loved, but perhaps I will be tolerated, and only for my devotion. Ever since that morning when you smiled like a noble girl on discovering the misery of my lonely, wronged heart, I placed you on a throne: you are the absolute ruler of my life, the queen of my thoughts, the divinity of my heart, the light that shines in my rooms, the flower of my flowers, the perfume of the air I breathe, the richness of my blood, the glow in which I sleep. That happiness was troubled by one single thought. You did not know you had a boundless devotion to serve you, a loyal arm, a blind slave, a mute agent, a treasury, for I am now only the caretaker of all that is mine; you did not realize, in other words, that you owned a heart in which you may always confide. The heart of an aged ancestress of whom you may ask whatever you please, the heart of a father from whom you may demand any protection, the heart of a friend, of a brother: I know you have no such sentiments around you. I have discovered your secret solitude! My boldness was born only of my desire to show you all that you owned. Accept everything, Louise, and you will give me the only life there can be for me in this world, a life of complete devotion. You commit yourself to nothing by placing the yoke of servitude over my neck: never will I ask anything more than the pleasure of knowing I am yours. Do not even tell me that you will never love me. That is how it must be, I know; I must love from afar, with no hope, and for myself alone. I long to know if you will accept me as your servant, and I have struggled to find some way to prove that your dignity will not be compromised by telling me that you do, for I became yours many days ago, and you had no idea. I will understand that your answer is yes if, some night at the Italiens, you hold in your hand a bouquet of one white and one red camellia—the image of all a man’s blood at the beck and call of a beloved purity. With that everything will be said: at any time, in ten years or tomorrow, whatever you would it were possible for a man to do will be done, the moment you ask it of your happy servant,

  Felipe Hénarez

  P.S. You must admit, my dear, highborn men truly know how to love! What a leap, worthy of an African lion! What repressed ardor! What
faith! What sincerity! What greatness of the soul in that humility! Reading those lines, I felt small, and I wondered, lost: What must I do? . . . It is in the nature of a great man to upset all our little plans. He is sublime and endearing, naive and titanic. With one single letter he goes beyond all of Lovelace’s hundred letters, beyond even Saint-Preux.[31] Oh! Here is true love, without half measures: it is or it is not, but when it is, it must exist in all its immensity. My wiles are of no use to me now. Decline or accept! I must do one or the other, with no pretext behind which to hide my indecision. All discussion is silenced in advance. This is no longer Paris, it’s Spain, it’s the Orient; there is the voice of the Abencerrage, kneeling before the Catholic Eve and offering her his scimitar, his horse, and his head. Will I accept this survivor of the Moors? Reread that Hispano-Saracen letter over and over, my Renée; you will see that love sweeps away all the Judaic provisos of your philosophy. See there, Renée, I cannot drive your letter from my mind, you have bourgeoisified my life. Is there any need to dither? Am I not the eternal mistress of that lion, its roars now become meek, lovestruck sighs? Oh! How he must have roared in his lair on the rue Hillerin-Bertin! I know where he lives, I have his card: F., BARON DE MACUMER. He has left me no occasion for an answer, I can only throw two camellias in his face. What infernal talent pure, true, naive love possesses! Here is everything that is most momentous for a woman’s heart reduced to one plain, simple act. O, Asia! I have read the Thousand and One Nights, and here is its spirit: with two flowers all is said. We race through the fourteen volumes of Clarissa with one single bouquet. That letter makes me squirm like a rope in the fire. Take your two camellias, or do not. Yes or no, kill or give life! In the end, a voice cries out to me: “Test him!” And so I shall!