As for Montriveau, he sprang at a bound across the courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeais and went unannounced upstairs, straight to the duchess’s bedroom.
“This is unheard-of,” she said, hastily wrapping her dressing gown around her. “Armand! This is abominable of you! Come, leave the room, I beg you. Just go out, and go at once. Wait for me in the drawing room. Come now!”
“Dear angel, has a plighted lover no privilege whatsoever?”
“But monsieur, it is in the worst possible taste for a plighted lover or a husband to break in like this on his wife.”
He came to the duchess, took her in his arms, and held her tightly to him.
“Forgive me, my dear Antoinette, but a host of dreadful suspicions are tearing at my heart.”
“Doubts? Never . . . never!”
“Suspicions all but justified. If you loved me, would you quarrel with me like this? Would you not be glad to see me? Would your heart fail to be moved? I, who am not a woman, feel a thrill deep inside at the mere sound of your voice. Often in a ballroom a longing has come over me to rush to your side and put my arms around your neck.”
“Oh! If you suspect me so long as I am not ready to rush into your arms before the world, I shall be suspect all my life, I suppose. Why, Othello was a mere child compared with you!”
“Ah!” he cried despairingly. “You do not love me.”
“Admit, at any rate, that at this moment you are not lovable.”
“Then I must still find favor in your sight?”
“Oh, I should think so. Come,” she added with an imperious air, “go out of the room, leave me. I am not like you; I wish always to find favor in your eyes.”
Never did a woman better understand the art of mingling charm and insolence, charm doubling the effect. Would this not infuriate the coolest of men? At this moment, her eyes, the sound of her voice, her attitude bore witness to a kind of perfect freedom that a loving woman never feels in the presence of the man who alone makes her heart leap at the mere sight of him. Enlightened by Ronquerolles’s advice, helped also by a sort of second sight that passion brings at moments to the least instructed—while fuller with the strong—he guessed the terrible truth betrayed by the duchess’s nonchalance, and his heart swelled with a storm of rage, like a lake rising in flood.
“If you were telling the truth yesterday, be mine, my dear Antoinette,” he cried, “I want—”
“First of all,” she said, pushing him away forcefully and calmly when she saw him advancing, “do not compromise me. My chambermaid might overhear you. Respect me, I beg you. Your familiarity is all very well in my boudoir in the evening. But here, no. And what does this ‘I want’ mean? I want! No one has yet spoken to me like that. It seems to me quite ridiculous, perfectly ridiculous.”
“You will not grant me anything on this point?”
“Ah! You call our freedom to dispose ourselves ‘a point’—a point indeed. You will allow me to be entirely my own mistress on this point.”
“And if, believing in your promises to me, I required it?”
“Ah! Then you would prove that I had been greatly in the wrong to make you the slightest promise, I would not be fool enough to keep it, and I would beg you to leave me in peace.”
Montriveau blanched, about to throw himself on her; the duchess rang, her chambermaid appeared, and smiling with mocking grace the duchess told him, “Please be good enough to come back when I am ready to be seen.”
Armand de Montriveau felt then the hardness of this cold and steely woman, crushing in her contempt. In a moment she had broken the bonds that held firm only for her lover. The duchess had read on Armand’s brow the secret demands of this visit, and had judged that the moment had come to make this imperial soldier feel that duchesses could certainly lend themselves to love but did not give themselves to it, and that their conquest was more difficult to accomplish than the conquest of Europe.
“Madame,” said Armand, “I have no time to wait. I am, as you yourself have said, a spoiled child. When I seriously resolve to have what we were just speaking about, I will have it.”
“You will have it?” she said, with a haughtiness mingled with some surprise.
“I will have it.”
“Ah! You would do me a great pleasure by ‘resolving’ to have it. For curiosity’s sake, I would be charmed to know how you will go about it.”
“I am delighted,” replied Montriveau, laughing in a way that frightened the duchess, “to inject some interest in your life. Will you permit me to escort you to the ball this evening?”
“A thousand thanks, but Monsieur de Marsay has already asked, and I have promised.”
Montriveau bowed gravely and withdrew.
“So Ronquerolles was right,” he thought, “we are now going to play a game of chess.”
From this moment on, he hid his emotions beneath complete composure. No man was strong enough to bear such changes, which make the soul swing quickly from the greatest sense of well-being to supreme misery. Had he glimpsed such happiness only to feel more intensely the emptiness of his former life? This was a terrible storm, but he knew how to suffer and endured the assault of his tumultuous thoughts the way a granite boulder endures the breakers of the angry sea.
“I had nothing to say. In her presence I lose my wits. She does not know how vile and contemptible she is. No one has dared to bring this creature face-to-face with herself. She has certainly toyed brilliantly with men, and I will avenge them all.”
For the first time, perhaps, love and vengeance mingled in a man’s heart so equally that Montriveau found it impossible to know whether he was carried away by vengeance or love. That very evening he was at the ball where the Duchesse de Langeais was supposed to be, and he was nearly desperate to touch her heart. He was tempted to attribute something demonic to this woman, who was gracious to him and full of agreeable smiles, surely because she had no wish to let society think that she had compromised herself with Monsieur de Montriveau. Coolness on both sides is a sign of love. But while the duchess was the same as ever and the marquis was sullen and morose, was it not plain to everyone that she had conceded nothing? Society knows how to read the unhappiness of rejected men and not to mistake it for the distance that certain women order their lovers to display with the hope of concealing a mutual love. And everyone mocked Montriveau, who had not consulted his minder and remained abstracted and uneasy. Monsieur de Ronquerolles would perhaps have prescribed some compromise with the duchess by responding to her false gestures of friendship with passionate demonstrations. But Armand de Montriveau left the ball filled with a horror of human nature, and still he could hardly believe in such utter perversity.
“If there is no executioner for such crimes,” he said, as he looked up at the lit window of the ballroom where the most enchanting women in Paris were dancing, laughing, and chatting, “I will take you by the back of your neck, madame la duchesse, and make you feel an iron more biting than the blade of the place de Grève. Steel against steel—we shall see whose heart will be cut more deeply.”
3. THE TRUE WOMAN
For a week or so, Madame de Langeais hoped to see the Marquis de Montriveau, but Armand was content to send his card to the Hôtel de Langeais each morning. And each time this card was brought to the duchess, she could not stop herself from trembling, struck by dark thoughts that were as yet somewhat vague, like a presentiment of unhappiness. Reading his name, sometimes she thought she felt this implacable man’s hand in her hair, sometimes his name foretold vengeance, and her lively mind would surrender to atrocious imaginings. She had studied him too well not to fear him. Would she be assassinated? Would this bull-necked man eviscerate her by flinging her over his head? Trample her under his feet? When, where, how would he catch her? Would he make her suffer horribly, and what kind of suffering was he thinking to impose on her?
She repented. At certain hours, if he had come she would have thrown herself into his arms with complete abandon. Every evening, as sh
e was falling asleep, she would see Montriveau’s face from a different angle. Sometimes his bitter smile, sometimes the Jupiter-like contraction of his brows, his leonine look, or some haughty movement of his shoulders made him terrible to her. The next day, his card seemed covered with blood. She became agitated by this name more than she had been by the spirited, opinionated, demanding lover. Then her apprehensions grew greater in the silence, and she was forced to prepare herself alone for a hideous, unspeakable struggle. This soul, proud and hard, was more sensitive to the titillations of hatred than she had been formerly to the caresses of love. Ha! If the general could have seen his mistress at the moment when her brow was creased with lines as she was plunged into bitter thoughts, in the depths of that boudoir where he had tasted such joys, perhaps he might have had great hopes. Is pride not one of the human feelings that can engender only noble acts? Although Madame de Langeais kept her thoughts secret, we are allowed to suppose that Monsieur de Montriveau was no longer an object of indifference. Is it not an immense conquest for a man to be constantly in a woman’s thoughts? He is bound to make progress one way or the other.
Put any feminine creature under the feet of a furious horse or another terrible beast, and she will naturally fall to her knees and await death. But if the beast is forgiving and does not kill her altogether, she will love the horse, the lion, the bull, she will speak of it at her ease. The duchess felt she was under the lion’s feet: She trembled, but she did not hate him. These two people, so singularly posed face-to-face, met in society three times that week. Every time, in response to coquettish questions, the duchess received Armand’s respectful bow and smiles tinged with such cruel irony that they confirmed all the apprehensions inspired that morning by his visiting card. Life is only what we make of it with our feelings; their feelings had hollowed out an abyss between them.
The Comtesse de Sérizy, sister of the Marquis de Ronquerolles, gave a great ball at the beginning of the week to which Madame de Langeais had promised to come. The first figure the duchess saw upon entering was that of Armand—this time Armand was waiting for her, at least she thought so. The two of them exchanged a look, and a cold sweat suddenly broke from all her pores. She had believed Montriveau capable of some unimaginable vengeance in proportion to their positions; this vengeance had been discovered, it was ready, it was boiling hot. The betrayed lover shot lightning bolts at her, his face radiant with exultant hatred. And the duchess had a doleful look, in spite of her determination to be cold and impertinent. She went to stand next to the Comtesse de Sérizy, who could not prevent herself from saying to her, “What is the matter, my dear Antointette? You look frightful.”
“I will revive after a quadrille,” she answered, giving her hand to a young man who had just appeared.
Madame de Langeais began to waltz with a kind of frenzy and abandon that made Montriveau scrutinize her even more intensely. He remained standing in front of the onlookers, who amused themselves watching the dancing couples. Each time his mistress passed him, his eyes plunged onto her turning head, like those of a tiger on his prey. Once the waltz was done, the duchess came to sit beside the countess, and the marquis never stopped watching her as he spoke with a stranger.
“Monsieur,” he was saying to him, “one of the things that has struck me most on this journey . . .”
The duchess was all ears.
“ . . . is the remark the guard at Westminster makes while showing you the ax used by a masked executioner, they say, to cut off the head of Charles I. The king apparently said these words to an inquisitive person and they are repeated in his memory.”
“What did he say?” asked Madame de Sérizy.
“Do not touch the ax,” answered Montriveau in a threatening tone of voice.
“In truth, monsieur le marquis,” said the Duchesse de Langeais, “you are looking at my neck in such a melodramatic way as you repeat this old story, known to everyone who goes to London, that I seem to see an ax in your hand.”
These last words were pronounced in laughter, although the duchess had broken out in a cold sweat.
“But circumstances have made this story quite new,” he answered.
“How so? I beg you, for pity’s sake, in what way?”
“In this way, madame: You have touched the ax,” Montriveau said to her in a low voice.
“What a ravishing prophecy!” she replied smiling with affected grace. “And when is my head to fall?”
“I have no wish to see your pretty head fall, madame. I fear for you only some great misfortune. If you were shorn, would you feel no regrets for the charming golden hair you turn to such good effect—”
“There are men to whom women love to make these sacrifices, and often even to men who do not know how to make allowances for an outbreak of temper.”
“Very well. And if some wag suddenly spoiled your beauty by some chemical process and made you look a hundred years old when we know you are only eighteen—”
“But, monsieur,” she said, interrupting him, “the smallpox is our Waterloo. Afterward, we know who truly loves us.”
“You would not regret this lovely face that—”
“Oh yes, very much, but less for my sake than for him who might have taken joy in it. However, if I were loved sincerely, well, what would beauty matter to me? What do you say, Clara?”
“This is a dangerous sort of speculation,” replied Madame de Sérizy.
“Might one ask His Majesty the King of Sorcerers,” Madame de Langeais went on, “when I committed the sin of touching the ax, since I have never gone to London?”
“Non so,” he answered in Italian, with a burst of ironic laughter.
“And when will the punishment begin?”
Here Montriveau coldly pulled out his watch and checked the time with a truly terrifying conviction.
“Before this day is done, a horrible misfortune will befall you.”
“I am not a child who is so easily frightened, or rather I am a child who does not know danger,” said the duchess, “and goes on dancing fearlessly at the edge of the abyss.”
“I am delighted, madame, to know you have such character,” he replied, seeing her go to take her place in a quadrille.
In spite of her apparent disdain for Armand’s dark predictions, the duchess was in the grip of very real terror. Her lover’s presence filled her morally and almost physically with a sense of oppression that scarcely ceased when he left the ball. Nonetheless, after enjoying a moment’s pleasure breathing more easily, she was surprised to feel regret for the emotions of fear, so avid is female nature for extreme sensations. This regret was not love, but it surely belonged to the feelings that precede it. Then, as if the duchess again felt the effect of Montriveau’s presence, she remembered the air of conviction with which he had just looked at the clock and, suddenly gripped by a spasm of dread, she took her leave.
It was by then around midnight. One of her servants wrapped her pelisse around her and went ahead to call her carriage. Then, when she was seated inside, she fell into a rather natural daydream, provoked by Monsieur de Montriveau’s prediction. Having arrived in her courtyard, she entered a vestibule almost identical to the one in her residence, but all of a sudden she did not recognize her staircase. The moment she turned around to call her people, several men quickly assailed her and threw a handkerchief over her mouth, tied her hands and feet, and carried her off. She cried for help.
“Madame, we have orders to kill you if you cry out,” someone spoke in her ear.
The duchess’s fear was so great that she could never explain to herself how or where she was transported. When she came to her senses, she found herself bound hand and foot with silken ropes, lying on the couch of a bachelor’s quarters. She could not restrain a cry when she met the eyes of Armand de Montriveau, wrapped in his dressing gown as he sat calmly in an armchair smoking a cigar.
“Do not cry out, duchess,” he said coldly, removing his cigar from his mouth. “I have a migraine. Besides, I am
going to untie you. But listen carefully to what I have the honor to tell you.” He delicately untied the knots that bound the duchess’s feet. “What good would your cries do? No one can hear you. You are too well bred to make futile grimaces. If you should not keep quiet, if you should wish to fight me, I will bind you again, hand and foot. I think that, all things considered, you have enough self-respect to stay on that couch as if you were at home on yours, cold as ever, if you like . . . You have made me shed many tears on this couch, tears that I hid from all eyes.”
While Montriveau was speaking to her, the duchess cast around her a woman’s furtive glance, a glance that can take everything in while appearing distracted. She liked this room that seemed so much like a monk’s cell. The man’s mind and soul hovered there. No decoration could change the gray paint on the blank walls. On the floor was a green rug. A black couch, a table covered with papers, two large armchairs, a dresser with an alarm clock as ornament, a very low bed with a red coverlet bordered in a black key design flung over it—the texture of these furnishings displayed the habits of a life reduced to its simplest expression. An Egyptian-style triple sconce on the mantel recalled the vastness of the deserts where this man had wandered so long. Beside the bed, its foot shaped like an enormous sphinx paw jutting from folds of cloth, was a door near the corner of the room, hidden by a green curtain with red-and-black fringes hanging from large rings circling a spear handle. The door through which the strangers had entered was similarly concealed, but its curtain was tied back from an ordinary rod. The duchess took a last look at the two curtains to compare them, and she perceived that the door next to the bed was open, and that a reddish light illuminating the other room flickered beneath the fringed borders. Naturally her curiosity was aroused by this somber light, which scarcely allowed her to distinguish the strange shapes that played there among the shadows. But at this moment she did not imagine that any danger to herself could come from that quarter and wanted to satisfy an increasingly ardent curiosity.