The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

  If the nobility meant to establish a great oligarchical government, the Faubourg should have searched within its ranks for the coin of Napoleon, turned itself inside out to find a constitutional Richelieu. If this genius was not among its members, it should have sought him as far as the cold garret where he might lie dying, and it should have assimilated him, just as the English House of Lords constantly assimilates the chance aristocrat. Then they should have ordered this man to be ruthless, to chop off the dead wood, to prune the aristocratic tree. But in the first place, the great system of English Toryism was too large for small minds and to import it required too much time, for in France tardy success is no better than a fiasco. Besides, far from adopting a policy of redemption and seeking force where God has put it, these petty greats hated any capacity that did not issue from them; in brief, instead of being rejuvenated, the Faubourg Saint-Germain grew aged.

  Etiquette, the other most crucial but secondary institution, might have been maintained if it had been kept for great occasions, but it became a daily battle, and instead of being a matter of art or ceremony, it became a marker of power. If from the outset the throne lacked a councillor equal to the circumstances, the aristocracy above all lacked the knowledge of its general interests, an instinct that might have made up for any deficiency. It balked at the marriage of Monsieur de Talleyrand, the only man who had one of those anvil minds in which new political systems are forged and nations gloriously revived. The Faubourg mocked ministers who were not gentlemen and did not provide gentlemen superior enough to be ministers. It could have rendered real service to the country by ennobling justices of the peace, by fertilizing the soil, by constructing roads and canals, by making itself an active territorial power, but it sold its lands to play the stock exchange. The Faubourg might have raided the bourgeoisie of its men of action and talent, whose ambition only undermined its authority, by opening its ranks to them. Instead, it preferred to fight them, unarmed, for tradition was all it had left of the reality it formerly possessed. To its misfortune, the nobility retained just enough of its former wealth to sustain its arrogance. Content with its memories, none of these families seriously thought to urge its older sons to take up arms, which the nineteenth century tossed so plentifully into the public square. The youth, excluded from political life, danced at Madame’s while they should have been in Paris, working under the influence of young, conscientious talents, innocents of the Empire and the Republic, work that the head of each family should have begun in their administrative counties. There they might have won back the recognition of their titles by unremitting pleas in favor of local interests, by conforming to the spirit of the century, by reshaping the caste system to suit the taste of the times.

  But gathered in its Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the spirit of ancient feudal conflicts and the former court lived on, the aristocracy was not at ease in the Tuileries and so was even easier to conquer in one place, in the Upper House, poorly organized as it was. Woven into the fabric of the countryside, it would have become indestructible; driven into its Faubourg, its back to the Château, or spread over the budget, one blow was enough to break the thread of its sputtering life, and the homely face of a small-time lawyer came forward to wield the ax. In spite of Monsieur Royer-Collard’s admirable speeches, the hereditary peerage and its system fell under the lampoons of a man who boasted of having saved a few heads from the guillotine but who clumsily killed great institutions. Here we find examples and lessons for the future. If the French oligarchy hadn’t had a future, it would be wretched cruelty to torture it after its demise; thoughts would turn only to its sarcophagus. Even though the surgeon’s scalpel cuts deep, it sometimes gives the dying back their life. The Faubourg Saint-Germain could find that if it wants to have a leader and a system, it may be more powerful persecuted than it was triumphant.

  Now it is easy to summarize this semipolitical aperçu. The nobility’s lack of broader perspectives and its mass of small defects; everyone’s blinkered desire to reestablish great wealth; a serious need for religion to sustain policy—all combined with a thirst for pleasure that tainted the religious spirit and spawned hypocrisy. The partial resistance of some loftier and clearer-thinking minds opposed the court rivalries, and the provincial nobility, often of a purer strain than the court nobility, was too often insulted and became disaffected: All of these causes merged to make the Faubourg Saint-Germain internally at odds. It was neither compact in its organization nor consequential in its acts, neither completely moral nor frankly dissolute, neither corrupt nor corrupting; it would neither wholly abandon its harmful practices nor adopt ideas that would have saved it. In short, however moronic a few persons might be, the party itself was nonetheless armed with all the great principles that constitute the life of nations. Then what did it take to make it lose its strength? It made difficulties in choosing those to be presented at court. The Faubourg had good taste, elegant disdain, but its fall was surely nothing very startling or chivalrous. The emigration of 1789 still exhibited some feeling; in 1830, the internal immigration exhibited nothing but interests. A few famous men of letters, a few oratorical triumphs at the speaker’s platform, Monsieur de Talleyrand in the congress of Vienna, the conquest of Algeria, and several names that again became historic on the battlefields showed the French aristocracy the ways they could still participate in national life and once again win recognition of their titles, if it deigned to do so. The work of internal harmony prevails among living organisms. When a man is lazy, the laziness is revealed in everything he does. Similarly, the nature of a class of men is clearly written on its face, on the soul that animates the body.

  Under the Restoration, the woman of the Faubourg Saint-Germain displayed neither the proud boldness of the former court ladies even in their lapses nor the modest grandeur of the belated virtues by which they expiated their sins and shed such brightness around them. There was nothing very frivolous or very serious about this woman. Her passions, with a few exceptions, were hypocritical; she compromised, as it were, with her pleasures. Several of these noble families led the bourgeois life of the Duchesse d’Orléans, whose marriage bed was so ridiculously displayed to visitors of the Palais Royal. At the most, two or three kept up the licentious customs of the Regency, inspiring a sort of disgust in cleverer women. This grand dame of the new school had no influence on the manners of the times, but she still could do much; as a last resort she could have offered the dignified spectacle of the women of the English aristocracy, but she foolishly hesitated among the old traditions, became necessarily devout, and concealed everything, even her finer qualities.

  None of these Frenchwomen could create a salon in which society’s leaders might take lessons in taste and elegance. Their voices, which formerly ruled in literature—that vivid expression of societies—now counted for nothing. When a literature has no general system, it fails to create a corpus and dies out with its century. When a people in any era is thus separately constituted in the midst of a nation, the historian almost always finds a central figure who embodies the virtues and vices of the group to which it belongs: for instance, Coligny among the Huguenots, Cardinal de Retz during the Fronde, Marshal de Richelieu under Louis XV, Danton during the Terror. This match between a man and his historical moment is in the nature of things. To lead a party in any era a man needs to be in agreement with its ideas, to shine in his time he must represent its ideas. The wise and prudent head of parties is always obliged to bow to the prejudices and follies of its following, and this is the cause of actions for which he later incurs the reproach of certain historians who sit removed from the terrible popular ferment, coldly judging the passions most crucial to the conduct of great secular struggles. And if this is true in the historical drama of the centuries, it is equally true in the more restricted sphere of disconnected scenes of the national drama called “The Manners of the Age.”

  At the beginning of the ephemeral life led by the Faubourg Saint-Germain during the Restoration, and to which, if ther
e is any truth in the above reflections, it could give no stability, there was for a time a woman who was the most perfect type of her caste: at once strong and weak, great and petty. She was a woman artificially educated but in reality ignorant, full of lofty feelings but lacking any thought to coordinate them. She squandered the richest treasures of her soul in obedience to convention, ready to brave society but hesitant and in the end artificial in bowing to her scruples. She had more willfulness than character, was more impressionable than enthusiastic, with more head than heart, supremely woman, supremely coquette, and above all Parisian. This woman loved spectacle and celebration, was unreflective or reflective too late, of an imprudence verging on the poetic, ravishingly insolent but deeply humble. Like a very straight reed she had a certain strength, but like that reed she was ready to bend under a powerful hand. She spoke a great deal about religion but disliked it, and yet she was ready to accept it as a forgone conclusion. How can we explain such a complex creature, capable of heroism and forgetting to be heroic for the sake of backbiting; young and sweet-natured, not so much old at heart as aged by the maxims of those around her, schooled in their egotistical philosophy without any practice, with all the vices of a courtesan and all the nobility of an adolescent girl? She trusted nothing and no one, yet at times she allowed herself to believe in everything.

  How could such a portrait of this woman be anything but incomplete, a woman in whom the play of shifting hues clashed yet produced a poetic confusion, for there was in her a divine light, a radiance of youth that gave these muddled traits a kind of wholeness. In her, grace served as unity. Nothing was feigned. Those passions, that vague desire for greatness, the actual pettiness, the cool sentiments and warm impulses were natural and spontaneous, as much the result of her own situation as of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She knew she was all alone and set herself proudly above the social world, sheltered by her name. There was something like the egotism of Medea in her life, as in the life of the aristocracy that lay dying and refused to sit up or hold out its hand to any political physician, to touch or to be touched. It felt so weak, conscious that it was already dust.

  The Duchesse de Langeais, for that was her name, had been married for about four years when the Restoration was fully installed in 1816. By that time the uprising of the Hundred Days had enlightened Louis XVIII, who understood his situation and his century, in spite of his entourage. These courtiers nevertheless triumphed over this Louis XI lacking his battle-ax when he was felled by illness. The Duchesse de Langeais, a Navarreins by birth, came from a ducal family that from the time of Louis XIV had made it a principle never to abdicate its title through marriage. The daughters of this house were bound sooner or later to have, like their mother, a place at court. At the age of eighteen, Antoinette de Navarreins came out of the protected retreat where she had lived in order to marry the Duc de Langeais’s elder son. The two families at this time were living far from the fashionable world, but the invasion of France allowed the Royalists to assume the return of the Bourbons as the sole conceivable conclusion possible to the miseries of the war. The Ducs de Navarreins and de Langeais, ever faithful to the exiled Bourbons, had nobly resisted all the temptations of imperial glory. And under the circumstances, they naturally followed the old family policy, and Mademoiselle Antoinette de Navarreins, beautiful and poor, was married to Monsieur le Marquis de Langeais only a few months before his father’s death.

  Upon the return of the Bourbons, the two families resumed their rank, their responsibilities, and their functions at court, and entered once again into the social whirl from which until then they had held themselves aloof. They became the most dazzling stars of this new political world. In that era of cowardice and sham conversions, the public consciousness was pleased to recognize in these two families their spotless fidelity, the consistency between private life and political character to which all parties reflexively render homage. But through a misfortune rather common in a time of transition, the most disinterested persons whose lofty views and wise principles would have gained France’s confidence in the generosity of bold, new policies were turned away from affairs of state, and these fell into the hands of people interested in furthering extreme principles in order to give proof of their devotion. The Langeais and Navarreins families remained in the highest circle of the court, condemned to fulfill the obligations of etiquette amid the reproaches and mockeries of the Liberals. They were accused of gorging themselves on honors and wealth while their family estates grew no larger, and liberal allowances from the civil list were consumed as the expense of representation necessary to keep up every European monarchy, even a republican one.

  In 1818, Monsieur le Duc de Langeais was in command of a military division, and the duchess, who was under the protection of a princess, had a place that authorized her, free of scandal, to remain in Paris far from her husband. The duke, in addition to his appointment, had a responsibility at court, where he came during leave, passing his command to an aide-de-camp. So the duke and the duchess lived entirely apart, in fact and in feeling, unbeknownst to the world. This marriage of convenience shared the usual fate of these family alliances. Two more antipathetic dispositions could not have been brought together; secretly they hurt each other’s feelings, were secretly wounded, and went their separate ways. Each one then obeyed his nature, along with appearances. The Duc de Langeais, with a mind as methodical as the Chevalier de Folard himself, methodically surrendered to his tastes, to his pleasures, and left his wife free to follow hers, once he recognized in her an eminently proud spirit, a cold heart, a tendency to submit to the customs of the social world, a youthful loyalty that was bound to stay pure under the watchful eyes of great relatives, in the bright light of a prudish and bigoted court.

  So the duke calmly played the grand seigneur of the previous century, abandoning to her own devices a twenty-two-year-old injured woman who had as part of her character one dreadful quality: She never forgave an injury when all her female vanities, her self-love, perhaps her virtues as well had been misunderstood and secretly wounded. When an outrage is public, a woman likes to forget it, she has opportunities to behave generously, she is womanly in her clemency. But women never pardon a secret offense because they despise secret cowardice, secret virtues, and secret loves.

  Such was the position, unknown to society, in which Madame la Duchesse de Langeais found herself, without much reflecting on it, during the celebrations given on the occasion of the Duc de Berry’s marriage. At this moment, the court and the Faubourg Saint-Germain roused themselves from their apathy and reserve. This was the true beginning of an unexpected splendor, which the government of the Restoration indulged to excess. At that time, the Duchesse de Langeais, whether out of calculation or vanity, never appeared in society without being surrounded or accompanied by three or four women equally distinguished by their name and fortune. As queen of fashion, the duchess had her ladies-in-waiting, who modeled their manners and wit on hers. She had chosen them cleverly from among several women who were as yet neither part of the court’s inner circle nor at the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, yet had the ambition to be so, simple angels of the second order who wished to rise within the neighborhood of the throne and mingle with the seraphic powers of the upper sphere known as le petit château. In this setting, the Duchesse de Langeais was stronger, more dominant and secure. Her ladies defended her against scandal and helped her to play the detestable part of the woman of fashion. She could toy with men and their passions, gather the praise that nourishes every feminine nature, and yet remain her own mistress.

  In Paris among the loftiest company a woman is still a woman; she lives on incense, adulation, and honors. No genuine beauty, no admirable face is anything if it is not admired: Flattery and a lover are the proofs of her power. And what is power without recognition? Nothing. Imagine the prettiest woman alone in the corner of a salon—she would be sadness itself. When one of these creatures finds herself at the center of social glory, she w
ants to reign over all hearts, often because she cannot be the happy sovereign of one. That finery, that frippery, that style were all meant to please the poorest creatures you could meet, the mindless fops whose pretty face is their only merit, for whom all women would throw themselves away. These gilded wooden idols of the Restoration, with a few exceptions, had neither the antecedents of the petits-maîtres at the time of the Fronde nor the wit and manners of their grandfathers, yet they wished to be effortlessly something similar. They were brave, like all young Frenchmen, capable if they were put to the test, yet under the reign of worn-out old men they were kept on a leash. This was a cold, petty era, lacking all poetry. Perhaps it takes a long time for a restoration to become a monarchy.

  For eighteen months, the Duchesse de Langeais had led this empty life, exclusively filled with balls, visits after the ball, objectless triumphs, ephemeral passions that are born and die in the course of an evening. When she entered a salon, all eyes turned toward her; she harvested flattering words and several passionate expressions, which she encouraged by gesture or glance but never allowed to go more than skin deep. Her tone, her manners, everything about her was authoritative. She lived in a sort of fever of vanity and perpetual enjoyment that deafened her. She was daring enough in conversation, she would listen to anything, depraved, as it were, to the surface of her heart. Yet upon returning home, she often blushed at what had made her laugh, at some scandalous story that supplied the details used to discuss theories of love she knew nothing about. Complaisant hypocrites commented to her on the subtle distinctions of modern passion—for women say everything among themselves, and more of them are ruined by each other than are corrupted by men. There was a moment, however, when the duchess understood that until a woman is loved, the world fails to recognize her beauty and wit. What did a husband prove? Simply that a young girl or a woman had a generous dowry or was well brought up, had a clever mother or satisfied the man’s ambitions. But a lover constantly bears witness to her personal perfections. So Madame de Langeais learned while still young that a woman could be loved without being complicit, without proving it, giving pleasure only by the most meager displays of love. And there was more than one saintly hypocrite who showed her how to act out these dangerous dramas.