Part 3

“I’ll explain her to you,” said Emile Blondet. “On a fine morning you are lounging about Paris. It is more than two o’clock, but not yet five. You see a woman coming toward you; the first glance you cast upon her is like the preface to a fine book; it makes you anticipate a world of refined and elegant things. Like the botanist crossing hill and valley as he searches for specimens, among all varieties of Parisian commonness you have found a rare flower. Either this woman is accompanied by two very distinguished-looking men, one of whom is decorated, or by a footman in undress livery who follows her at a little distance. She wears neither startling colors, nor open-worked stockings, nor over-ornamental buckles, nor drawers with embroidered frills visible at her ankles. You notice that her shoes are either prunella, with strings crossed on the instep over thread stockings of extreme fineness, or gray silk stockings that are perfectly plain; or else she wears dainty little boots of exquisite simplicity. Some pretty and inexpensive stuff makes you notice her gown, the shape of which surprises the bourgeois, it is almost always a pelisse, fastened by knots of ribbon and delicately edged with a silken cord or an almost imperceptible binding. The lady has an art of her own in putting on a shawl or a mantle; she knows how to wrap it from her waist to her throat, forming a sort of carapace which would make a bourgeoise look like a tortoise, but under which the _comme il faut_ woman contrives to suggest a beautiful figure while concealing it. How? by what means? That is a secret which she keeps, without the protection of any patent. She walks with a certain concentric and harmonious motion, which makes her sweet alluring figure quiver under the stuffs as an adder at midday makes the green grass-tops above him move. Does she owe to angel or devil that graceful undulation which plays beneath the black silk mantle, sways the lace of its border, and sheds a balmy air which I shall venture to call the breeze-Parisian? You remark upon her arms, about her waist, around her neck, a science of folds draping even a restive stuff, which reminds you of the ancient Mnemosyne. Ah! how well she understands--forgive me the expression--the technique of walking. Examine well the way in which she puts her foot forward, moulding an outline beneath her gown with a decent precision which excites the admiration, restrained by respect, of those who pass her. If an Englishwoman tried that walk she would look like a grenadier marching to the assault of a redoubt. To the woman of Paris belongs the genius of gait. The municipality has long owed her our coming asphalt pavements. You will observe that this lady jostles no one. In order to pass, she stands still, waiting with proud modesty until a way is made for her. Her attitude, both tranquil and disdainful, obliges the most insolent dandy to step aside. Her bonnet, of remarkable simplicity, has fresh strings. Possibly, there may be flowers upon it; but the cleverest of these women wear only ribbons. Feathers require a carriage, flowers attract the eye. Beneath the bonnet you see the cool and restful face of a woman who is sure of herself, but without self-conceit; who looks at nothing, but sees all; and whose vanity, lulled by continual gratification, gives to her countenance an expression of indifference which piques curiosity. She knows she is being studied; she is well aware that nearly everyone, even women, turn round to look at her. She passes through Paris like a film of gossamer, as white and as pearly. This beautiful specimen of her sex prefers the warmest latitudes and the cleanest longitudes in Paris; you will therefore find her between the 10th and the 110th arcade of the rue de Rivoli, along the line of the boulevards, from the equator of the Panorama, where the productions of the Indies flourish and the finest creations of industry are blooming, to the cape of the Madeleine; you will find her also in the least muddy regions of the bourgeoisie, between number 30 and number 150 of the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. During the winter she takes her pleasure on the terrace of the Feuillants, and not upon the bituminous pavements which skirt it. According to weather, she glides through the alleys of the Champs Elysées. Never will you meet this charming variety of woman in the hyperboreal regions of the rue Saint-Denis, never in the Kamchatka of muddy streets small and commercial, and never anywhere in rainy weather. These flowers of Paris, opening to the sun, perfume the promenades and fold their leaves by five in the afternoon like a convolvulus. The women whom you will see later having slightly the same air and trying to imitate them are of another race. This fair unknown, the Beatrice of our day, is the _comme il faut_ woman.

“It is not always easy, my dear count,” said Blondet, interrupting himself for a moment, “for foreigners to perceive the differences by which a connoisseur _emeritus_ distinguishes the two species, for women are born comedians. But those differences strike the eye of all Parisians: hooks are visible, tapes show their yellowish white through a gap at the back of the gown; shoes are worn at heel, bonnet strings have been ironed, the gown puffs out too much, the bustle is flattened. You notice a sort of effort in the premeditated lowering of the eyelids. The attitude is conventional. As for the bourgeoise, it is impossible to confound her with the woman who is _comme il faut_; she makes an admirable foil to her, she explains the charm the unknown lady has cast upon you. The bourgeoise is busy; she is out in all weathers; comes and goes and trots; is undecided whether she will, or whether she will not enter a shop. Where the _comme il faut_ woman knows perfectly well what she wants and what she means to do, the bourgeoise is undecided, pulls up her gown to cross a gutter, drags a child after her, and is forced to watch for carriages; she is a mother in public and lectures her daughter; carries money in a hand-bag and wears open-work stockings, a boa above a fur cape in winter, and a shawl with a scarf in summer--the bourgeoise is an adept at the superfluities of the toilet. As for your Beatrice, you will find her in the evening at the Opera, or in a ballroom. She then appears under an aspect so different that you fancy her two different creations without relationship. The woman has issued from her morning vestments like a butterfly from its larva. She serves, as a dainty morsel to your raptured senses, the form which her shawl scarce outlined in the morning. At the theater the woman of society never goes higher than the second tier of boxes, unless at the Italian opera. You can therefore study at your ease the precise slowness of her movements. This adorable maneuverer uses all the little artifices of woman’s manner with a natural ease that precludes the idea of art and premeditation. Is her hand royally beautiful, the most suspicious man would believe it absolutely necessary to roll, or fasten up, or toss aside whichever ringlet or curl she may touch. Has she nobility of profile, you will think she is merely giving irony or charm to what she says to her neighbor, by turning her head in a manner to produce that magic effect, so dear to great painters, which draws the light to the cheek, defines the nose with a clear outline, illumines the pink of the nostril, carves the forehead with sharp prominence, and leaves a touch of high light on the chin. If she has a pretty foot she throws herself on a sofa with the coquetry of a cat in the sunshine, her feet forward, without your seeing anything more in that pretty pose than a charming model of lassitude for a sculptor. No other woman but the woman _comme il faut_ is ever perfectly at her ease in her clothes; nothing disturbs her. You will never see her putting in place, like a bourgeoise, a rebellious shoulder-knot, or looking to see if the lace of her chemisette fulfills it purpose of unfaithful guardian to the sparkling whiteness of her bosom; never will you find her looking in a mirror to learn whether her coiffure is perfectly intact. Her toilet is always in harmony with her character; she had had time to study herself and to decide what suits her; she has long known what does not suit her. You never see her when the audience of a theater disperses; she departs before the end of the play. If by chance she is seen, calm and sedate, upon the steps of the staircase, some strong sentiment has prompted her. She is there to order; she has some look to give, some promise to receive. Perhaps she is descending slowly to gratify the vanity of a slave whom she occasionally obeys. If you meet her in society, at a ball or a _soirée_, you will gather the honey, real or affected, of her practised voice; you will be enchanted with her idle talk, to which she contrives to impart the semblance of thought with inimitable skill--”

“Then it isn’t necessary for the _comme il faut_ woman to have intellect?” said the young Polish count.

“It is impossible to be that kind of woman without taste,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.

“And to have taste is, in France, to have more than mind,” said the Russian prince.

“The mind of this woman is the triumph of an art that is wholly plastic,” replied Blondet. “You don’t know what she says, but you are charmed. She has nodded her head or sweetly shrugged her handsome shoulders, or gilded some meaningless phrase with a smile or a charming pout, or put Voltaire’s epigram into an ‘Oh!’ an ‘Ah!’ an ‘Is it possible?’ The turn of her head is an active interrogation; she gives meaning of some kind to the movement with which she dances a vinaigrette fastened by a chain to her finger. These are artificial great effects obtained by very small ones: she lets her hand fall nobly from the arm of her chair, and all is said; she has rendered judgment without appeal, fit to move the most insensible. She has listened to you, she has given you an opportunity to show your wit; and--I appeal to your modesty--such moments in society are rare.”

The innocent air of the young Pole whom Blondet was addressing made every one laugh heartily.

“You can’t talk half an hour with a bourgeoise before she brings to light her husband under one form or another,” continued Blondet, whose gravity was not shaken; “but if your _comme il faut_ woman is married she has the tact to conceal her husband, and the perseverance of a Christopher Columbus would hardly enable you to discover him. If you have not been able to question others on this point, you will see her toward the end of the evening fix her eyes steadily on a man of middle age, who inclines his head and leaves the room; she has told her husband to call up the carriage, and she departs. In her own house no _comme il faut_ woman is ever seen before four o’clock, the hour at which she receives. She is wise enough to make you wait even then. You will find good taste throughout her house; her luxury is intended for use, and is renewed when needful; you will see nothing there under glass cases, nor any swathings of protective gauze. The staircase is warm; flowers gladden you everywhere; flowers are the only presents she accepts, and those from a few persons only; bouquets give pleasure and live for a single day and are then renewed. To her they are, as in the East, a symbol and a promise. The costly trifles of fashion are spread about, but her salons are not turned into a museum or an old curiosity shop. You will find her seated on a sofa at the corner of the fireplace, whence she will bow to you without rising. Her conversation is no longer that of the ballroom; in her own house she is bound to entertain you. The _comme il faut_ woman possesses all these shades of behavior in perfection. She welcomes in you a man who will swell the circle of her society, the great object of the cares and anxieties of all women of the world. Consequently, to attach you to her salon she will make herself charmingly coquettish. You will feel above all, in that salon, how isolated women are in the present day and why they endeavor to have a little society about them in which they can shine as constellations. But this is the death of conversation; conversation is impossible without generalities.”

“Yes,” said de Marsay, “you have seized upon the great defect of our epoch. Epigram, that book in a word, no longer falls, as in the eighteenth century, on persons and on things, but on petty events and dies with the day.”

“The wit of the _comme il faut_ woman, when she has any,” resumed Blondet, “consists in putting a doubt on everything, while the bourgeoise uses hers to affirm everything. There lies a great difference between the two women. The bourgeoise is certain of her virtue; the _comme il faut_ woman is not sure whether she has any yet, or whether she has always had it. This hesitation about everything is one of the last graces our horrible epoch has granted her. She seldom goes to church, but she will talk religion to you and try to convert you, if you have the good sense to play the freethinker, for that will open the way to the stereotyped phrases, the motions of the head and the gestures which belong to such women: ‘Ah, fie! I thought you had more intelligence than to attack religion. Society is crumbling already and you remove its prop. But religion at this moment is you and I, it is property, it is the future of our children! Ah! let us not be egotists. Individualism is the disease of our epoch, and religion is the sole remedy; it unites the families that your laws disunite,’ etc., etc. She begins in this way a neo-Christian sermon sprinkled with political ideas, which is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but moral (oh! devilishly moral), in which you will find echoes of every protest that modern doctrines driven to bay have given voice to.”

The women present could not help laughing at the mincing affectations of their sex with which Emile Blondet illustrated his sarcasms.

“Those remarks, my dear Comte Adam,” said Blondet, looking at the young Pole, “will show you that the _comme il faut_ woman represents intellectual hodge-podge as well as political jumble; just as she lives surrounded by the brilliant but not lasting products of modern industry, which aims at the destruction of its work in order to replace it. You will leave her house saying to yourself, ‘She has, decidedly, very superior ideas’; and you think so all the more because she has sounded your heart and mind with a delicate hand; she has sought your secrets--for the _comme il faut_ woman feigns ignorance of everything, in order to discover everything; but she is discreet; there are things she never admits knowing, however well she may know them. Nevertheless you will feel uneasy, you are ignorant of the real state of her heart. Formerly the great ladies loved openly, banners displayed; now the woman _comme il faut_ has her little passion ruled like a sheet of music paper with its signs and notes, its minims, rests, and sharps and flats. Always weak, she will neither sacrifice her love, her husband, or the future of her children. She’s a woman of ambiguous middle-paths, of squint-eyed temporizing with conventions, of unavowed passions carried along between two breakwaters. She fears her servants like an Englishwoman who sees before her the perspective of a divorce suit. This woman, so apparently at her ease in a ballroom, so charming on the street, is a slave at home. She has no independence, unless locked in with her own ideas. She is determined to remain outwardly the woman _comme il faut_. That’s her theory of life. A woman separated from her husband, reduced to a pittance, without carriage or luxury or opera-box, is today neither wife, maid, nor bourgeoise; she dissolves, she becomes a thing. What is to become of her? The Carmelites won’t take married women. Will her lover always want her? That’s a question. Therefore the _comme il faut_ woman may sometimes cause calumny, but never condemnation.”

“That is all true, horribly true,” said the Princesse de Cadignan.

“Consequently, the _comme il faut_ woman,” continued Blondet, “lives between English hypocrisy and the frankness of the eighteenth century--a bastard system emblematic of a period when nothing that comes is like that which goes, when transitions lead nowhere, when the great figures of the past are blotted out, and distinctions are purely personal. In my opinion it is impossible for a woman, even though she be born on the steps of a throne, to acquire before the age of twenty-five, the encyclopedic science of nothings, the art of maneuvering, the various great little things--music of the voice, harmonies of color, angelic deviltries and innocent wickedness, the language and the silence, the gravity and the folly, the wit and the stupidity, the diplomacy and the ignorance which constitute the woman _comme il faut_.”

“Accepting the description you have just given of her,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to Emile Blondet, “where do you class the authoress? Is _she_ a woman _comme il faut_!”

“When she is not gifted with genius, she is a woman _comme il n’en faut pas_,”[3] replied Emile Blondet, accompanying his answer with a glance which might pass for a frank compliment to Camille Maupin. “But that is not my own saying; it belongs to Napoleon, who hated women of genius,” he added.

“Don’t be too hard on Napoleon,” said Canalis, with an emphatic tone and gesture, “It was one of his littlenesses--for he had them--to be jealous of literary fame. Who can explain, or describe, or comprehend Napoleon?--a man represented always with folded arms, yet who did all things; who was the greatest known Power, the most concentrated power, the most corrosive and acid of all powers; a strong genius which led an armed civilization throughout the world and fixed it nowhere; a man who could do all because he willed all; prodigious phenomenon of Will!--subduing disease by a battle, yet doomed to die of disease in his bed after living unscathed amid cannon-balls and bullets; a man who had in his head a Code and a Sword, word and action; a clear-sighted mind which divined all except his own fall; a capricious politician who played his soldiers like pawns and yet respected three heads--Talleyrand, Pozzo di Borgo, and Metternich, diplomatists whose death would have saved the French Empire, but whose life seemed to him of more value than that of thousands of soldiers; a man to whom, by some rare privilege, nature had left a heart in his iron body; a man at midnight kind and laughing among women, and the next day handling Europe without gloves; hypocritical and generous; loving vulgarity and simplicity; without taste, but protecting Art; and, in spite of these antitheses, grand in all things by instinct or by organization; Caesar at twenty-five years of age, Cromwell at thirty, but a good husband and a good father like any bourgeois of Père Lachaise; a man who created great public buildings, empires, kings, codes, poems, and one romance, and all with greater range than accuracy. Did he not attempt to make Europe France; and after bearing our weight upon the earth until it changed the laws of gravitation, has he not left us poorer than the day he put his hand upon us? He who made an empire with his name, lost that name on the borders of his empire in a sea of blood and slaughtered men. A man all thought and action, who was able to comprehend both Desaix and Fouché.”

“Despotic power and legal justice, each in due season, makes the true ruler,” said de Marsay.

“But,” said the Princesse de Cadignan, addressing the other women with a smile both dubious and satirical, “have we women really deteriorated as these gentlemen seem to think? Because today, under a system which belittles everything, you men like little dishes, little apartments, little paintings, little journals, little books, is that any reason why women should be less grand than they have been? Does the human heart change because you change your habits? In all epochs passions remain the same. I know splendid devotions, sublime endurances which lack publicity--fame, if you prefer to call it so. Many a woman is not less an Agnes Sorel because she never saved a king of France. Do you think our Marquise d’Espard worth less than Madame Doublet or Madame du Deffand, in whose salon so much harm was said and done? Isn’t Taglioni the equal of Camargo? and Malibran of Saint-Huberti? Are not our poets superior to those of the eighteenth century? If, at this moment, thanks to the grocers who govern us, we have no style of our own, didn’t the Empire have a style as fully its own as that of Louis XV? And its splendor was surely fabulous. Have the arts and sciences lost ground?”

“I agree with you, madame,” said Général de Montriveau. “In my opinion the women of this epoch are truly great. When posterity gives a verdict upon us will not Madame Recamier’s fame be equal to that of the loveliest women of past ages? We have made history so fast that we lack historians to write it down. The reign of Louis XIV had but one Madame de Sévigné, while we have a thousand today in Paris who can write better letters, but do not publish them. Whether the French woman calls herself _femme comme il faut_ or great lady, she will always be the pre-eminent woman. Emile Blondet has made us a picture of the manners and charms of a woman of the present day; but, if occasion offered, this mincing, affected being, who plays a part and warbles out the ideas of Monsieur this, that, and the other, would show herself heroic! Even your faults, mesdames, seem the more poetic because they are and always will be hedged about with great dangers. I have seen much of the world, perhaps I have studied it too late; but, under circumstances in which the illegality of your sentiments might find excuse, I have always observed the effects of some chance--you may call it Providence if you like--which fatally overtake those women whom we call frail.”

“I hope,” said Madame de Camps, “that we are able to be great in other ways.”

“Oh, let the Marquis de Montriveau preach to us!” cried Madame de Sérizy.

“All the more because he has preached by example,” said the Baronne de Nucingen.

“Alas!” said Général de Montriveau, “of the many dramas--that’s a word you are constantly using,” he said with a nod to Blondet, “in which to my knowledge the hand of God has showed itself, the most terrible was one that was partly my own doing.”

“Oh, tell it to us!” cried Lady Barimore. “I love to shudder.”

“The taste of a virtuous woman,” said de Marsay replying to the charming daughter of Lord Dudley.