第26章

Montriveau on his side was quite happy to win the vaguest promise, glad once for all to sweep aside, with all scruples of conjugal fidelity, her stock of excuses for refusing herself to his love.He had gained ground a little, and congratulated himself.And so for a time he took unfair advantage of the rights so hardly won.More a boy than he had ever been in his life, he gave himself up to all the childishness that makes first love the flower of life.He was a child again as he poured out all his soul, all the thwarted forces that passion had given him, upon her hands, upon the dazzling forehead that looked so pure to his eyes; upon her fair hair; on the tufted curls where his lips were pressed.And the Duchess, on whom his love was poured like a flood, was vanquished by the magnetic influence of her lover's warmth; she hesitated to begin the quarrel that must part them forever.She was more a woman than she thought, this slight creature, in her effort to reconcile the demands of religion with the ever-new sensations of vanity, the semblance of pleasure which turns a Parisienne's head.Every Sunday she went to Mass;she never missed a service; then, when evening came, she was steeped in the intoxicating bliss of repressed desire.Armand and Mme de Langeais, like Hindoo fakirs, found the reward of their continence in the temptations to which it gave rise.

Possibly, the Duchess had ended by resolving love into fraternal caresses, harmless enough, as it might have seemed to the rest of the world, while they borrowed extremes of degradation from the licence of her thoughts.How else explain the incomprehensible mystery of her continual fluctuations? Every morning she proposed to herself to shut her door on the Marquis de Montriveau; every evening, at the appointed hour, she fell under the charm of his presence.There was a languid defence; then she grew less unkind.Her words were sweet and soothing.They were lovers--lovers only could have been thus.For him the Duchess would display her most sparkling wit, her most captivating wiles;and when at last she had wrought upon his senses and his soul, she might submit herself passively to his fierce caresses, but she had her nec plus ultra of passion; and when once it was reached, she grew angry if he lost the mastery of himself and made as though he would pass beyond.No woman on earth can brave the consequences of refusal without some motive; nothing is more natural than to yield to love; wherefore Mme de Langeais promptly raised a second line of fortification, a stronghold less easy to carry than the first.She evoked the terrors of religion.Never did Father of the Church, however eloquent, plead the cause of God better than the Duchess.Never was the wrath of the Most High better justified than by her voice.She used no preacher's commonplaces, no rhetorical amplifications.No.She had a "pulpit-tremor" of her own.To Armand's most passionate entreaty, she replied with a tearful gaze, and a gesture in which a terrible plenitude of emotion found expression.She stopped his mouth with an appeal for mercy.She would not hear another word; if she did, she must succumb; and better death than criminal happiness.

"Is it nothing to disobey God?" she asked him, recovering a voice grown faint in the crises of inward struggles, through which the fair actress appeared to find it hard to preserve her self-control."I would sacrifice society, I would give up the whole world for you, gladly; but it is very selfish of you to ask my whole after-life of me for a moment of pleasure.Come, now!

are you not happy?" she added, holding out her hand; and certainly in her careless toilette the sight of her afforded consolations to her lover, who made the most of them.

Sometimes from policy, to keep her hold on a man whose ardent passion gave her emotions unknown before, sometimes in weakness, she suffered him to snatch a swift kiss; and immediately, in feigned terror, she flushed red and exiled Armand from the sofa so soon as the sofa became dangerous ground.

"Your joys are sins for me to expiate, Armand; they are paid for by penitence and remorse," she cried.

And Montriveau, now at two chairs' distance from that aristocratic petticoat, betook himself to blasphemy and railed against Providence.The Duchess grew angry at such times.

"My friend," she said drily, "I do not understand why you decline to believe in God, for it is impossible to believe in man.Hush, do not talk like that.You have too great a nature to take up their Liberal nonsense with its pretension to abolish God."Theological and political disputes acted like a cold douche on Montriveau; he calmed down; he could not return to love when the Duchess stirred up his wrath by suddenly setting him down a thousand miles away from the boudoir, discussing theories of absolute monarchy, which she defended to admiration.Few women venture to be democrats; the attitude of democratic champion is scarcely compatible with tyrannous feminine sway.But often, on the other hand, the General shook out his mane, dropped politics with a leonine growling and lashing of the flanks, and sprang upon his prey; he was no longer capable of carrying a heart and brain at such variance for very far; he came back, terrible with love, to his mistress.And she, if she felt the prick of fancy stimulated to a dangerous point, knew that it was time to leave her boudoir; she came out of the atmosphere surcharged with desires that she drew in with her breath, sat down to the piano, and sang the most exquisite songs of modern music, and so baffled the physical attraction which at times showed her no mercy, though she was strong enough to fight it down.

At such times she was something sublime in Armand's eyes; she was not acting, she was genuine; the unhappy lover was convinced that she loved him.Her egoistic resistance deluded him into a belief that she was a pure and sainted woman; he resigned himself; he talked of Platonic love, did this artillery officer!