第10章 THE HISTORY OF A FORTUNATE WOMAN(1)

Among the remarkable men who owed their destiny to the Restoration,but whom,unfortunately,the restored monarchy kept,with Martignac,aloof from the concerns of government,was Felix de Vandenesse,removed,with several others,to the Chamber of peers during the last days of Charles X.This misfortune,though,as he supposed,temporary,made him think of marriage,towards which he was also led,as so many men are,by a sort of disgust for the emotions of gallantry,those fairy flowers of the soul.There comes a vital moment to most of us when social life appears in all its soberness.

Felix de Vandenesse had been in turn happy and unhappy,oftener unhappy than happy,like men who,at their start in life,have met with Love in its most perfect form.Such privileged beings can never subsequently be satisfied;but,after fully experiencing life,and comparing characters,they attain to a certain contentment,taking refuge in a spirit of general indulgence.No one deceives them,for they delude themselves no longer;but their resignation,their disillusionment is always graceful;they expect what comes,and therefor they suffer less.Felix might still rank among the handsomest and most agreeable men in Paris.He was originally commended to many women by one of the noblest creatures of our epoch,Madame de Mortsauf,who had died,it was said,out of love and grief for him;but he was specially trained for social life by the handsome and well-known Lady Dudley.

In the eyes of many Parisian women,Felix,a sort of hero of romance,owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him.Madame de Manerville had closed the list of his amorous adventures;and perhaps her dismissal had something to do with his frame of mind.At any rate,without being in any way a Don Juan,he had gathered in the world of love as many disenchantments as he had met with in the world of politics.That ideal of womanhood and of passion,the type of which--perhaps to his sorrow--had lighted and governed his dawn of life,he despaired of ever finding again.

At thirty years of age,Comte Felix determined to put an end to the burden of his various felicities by marriage.On that point his ideas were extremely fixed;he wanted a young girl brought up in the strictest tenets of Catholicism.It was enough for him to know how the Comtesse de Granville had trained her daughters to make him,after he had once resolved on marriage,request the hand of the eldest.He himself had suffered under the despotism of a mother;he still remembered his unhappy childhood too well not to recognize,beneath the reserves of feminine shyness,the state to which such a yoke must have brought the heart of a young girl,whether that heart was soured,embittered,or rebellious,or whether it was still peaceful,lovable,and ready to unclose to noble sentiments.Tyranny produces two opposite effects,the symbols of which exist in two grand figures of ancient slavery,Epictetus and Spartacus,--hatred and evil feelings on the one hand,resignation and tenderness,on the other.

The Comte de Vandenesse recognized himself in Marie-Angelique de Granville.In choosing for his wife an artless,innocent,and pure young girl,this young old man determined to mingle a paternal feeling with the conjugal feeling.He knew his own heart was withered by the world and by politics,and he felt that he was giving in exchange for a dawning life the remains of a worn-out existence.Beside those springtide flowers he was putting the ice of winter;hoary experience with young and innocent ignorance.After soberly judging the position,he took up his conjugal career with ample precaution;indulgence and perfect confidence were the two anchors to which he moored it.Mothers of families ought to seek such men for their daughters.A good mind protects like a divinity;disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a surgeon;experience as foreseeing as a mother.Those three qualities are the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage.All that his past career had taught to Felix de Vandenesse,the observations of a life that was busy,literary,and thoughtful by turns,all his forces,in fact,were now employed in making his wife happy;to that end he applied his mind.

When Marie-Angelique left the maternal purgatory,she rose at once into the conjugal paradise prepared for her by Felix,rue du Rocher,in a house where all things were redolent of aristocracy,but where the varnish of society did not impede the ease and "laisser-aller"which young and loving hearts desire so much.From the start,Marie-Angelique tasted all the sweets of material life to the very utmost.

For two years her husband made himself,as it were,her purveyor.He explained to her,by degrees,and with great art,the things of life;he initiated her slowly into the mysteries of the highest society;he taught her the genealogies of noble families;he showed her the world;he guided her taste in dress;he trained her to converse;he took her from theatre to theatre,and made her study literature and current history.This education he accomplished with all the care of a lover,father,master,and husband;but he did it soberly and discreetly;he managed both enjoyments and instructions in such a manner as not to destroy the value of her religious ideas.In short,he carried out his enterprise with the wisdom of a great master.At the end of four years,he had the happiness of having formed in the Comtesse de Vandenesse one of the most lovable and remarkable young women of our day.