Part 17

And Favette twisted her hand from his grasp with petulant sorrow, and dashed away her tears--the tears of sixteen--as bright and free from bitterness as the water-drops on the violet-bells.

"_I_ cruel--and to you! My heart must indeed be badly echoed by my lips, if you have cause to fancy so a single moment. Cruel to you? Favette, Favette! is a man ever cruel to the dearest thing in his life, the dearest name in his thoughts? If I smiled I meant no sneer; I love you as you are, mignonne; the picture is so fair, one touch added, or one touch effaced, would mar the whole in _my_ eyes. I love you as you are! with no knowledge but what the good sisters teach you in their convent solitude, and what the songs of the birds, the voices of the flowers, whisper to you of their woodland lore. I love you as you are! Every morning when I am far away from you, and from Lorraine, I shall think of you gathering the summer roses, calling the birds about you, bending over the fountain to see it mirror your own beauty; every evening I shall think of you leaning from the window, chanting softly to yourself the Ora pro nobis, while the shadows deepen, and the stars we have so often watched together come out above the pine-hills. Favette, Favette! exile will have the bitterness of death to me; to give me strength to bear it, tell me that you love me more dearly than as the brother you have always called me; that you will so love me when I shall be no longer here beside you, but shall have to trust to memory and fidelity to guard for me in absence the priceless treasure of your heart?"

Favette's head drooped, and her hands played nervously with the now torn and twisted braid of rushes: he saw her heart beat under its muslin corsage, like a bee caught and caged in the white leaves of a lily; and she glanced at him under her lashes with a touch of naive coquetry.

"If I tell you so, what gage have I, Monsieur Leon, that, a few months gone by, you will even remember it? In those magnificent cities you will soon forget Lorraine; with the _grandes dames_ of the courts you will soon cease to care for Favette?"

"Look in my eyes, Favette, they alone can answer you as I would answer! Till we meet again none shall supplant you for an hour, none rob you of one thought; you have my first love, you will have my last. Favette, you believe me?"

"Yes--I believe!" murmured Favette, resting her large eyes fondly on him. "We will meet as we part, though you are the swallow, free to take flight over the seas to foreign lands, and I am the violet, that must stay where it is rooted in the Lorraine woods!"

"Accept the augury," he whispered, resting his lips upon her low smooth brow. "Does not the swallow ever return to the violet, holding it fairer than all the gaudy tropical flowers that may have tempted him to rest on the wing and delay his homeward flight? Does not the violet ever welcome him the same, in its timid winning spring-tide loveliness, when he returns to, as when he quitted, the only home he loves? Believe the augury, Favette; we shall meet as we part!"

And they believed the augury, as they believed in life, in love, in faith; they who were beginning all, and had proved none of the treacherous triad!

What had he dreamed of in his solitary ancestral woods fairer than this Lorraine violet, that had grown up with him, side by side, since he, a boy of twelve, gathered heaths from the clefts of the rocks that the little child of six years old cried for and could not reach? What had she seen that she loved half so well as M. le Chevalier from the Castle, whom her uncle, the Cure, held as his dearest and most brilliant pupil, whose eyes always looked so lovingly into hers, and whose voice was always lavishing fond names on his petite Favette?

They believed the augury, and were happy even in the sweet sorrow of parting--sorrow that they had never known before--as they sat together in the morning sunlight, while the water bubbled among the violet tufts, among the grasses and wild thyme, and the dragon-flies fluttered their green and gold and purple wings amidst the tendrils of the vines, and the rose-leaves, drifted gently by the wind, floated down the brook, till they were lost in deepening shadow under the drooping boughs.

II.

THE SECOND MORNING.

"Savez-vous que Favart va ecrire une nouvelle comedie--La Chercheuse d'Esprit?"

"Vraiment? Il doit bien ecrire cela, car il s'occupe toujours a le _chercher_, et n'arrive jamais a le trouver!"

The mot had true feminine malice, but the lips that spoke it were so handsome, that had even poor Favart himself, the poet-pastrycook who composed operas and comedies while he made meringues and fanfreluches, and dreamed of libretti while he whisked the cream for a supper, been within hearing, they would have taken the smart from the sting; and, as it was, the hit only caused echoes of softly-tuned laughter, for the slightest word of those lips it was the fashion through Paris just then to bow to, applaud, and re-echo.

Before her Psyche, shrouded in cobweb lace, powdered by Martini, gleaming with pearls and emeralds, scented with most delicate amber, making her morning toilette, and receiving her morning levee according to the fashion of the day, sat the brilliant satirist of poor Favart. The _ruelle_ was crowded; three marshals, De Richelieu, Lowendal, and Maurice de Saxe; a prince, De Soubise; a poet, Claude Dorat; an abbe, Voisenon; a centenarian, Saint-Aulaire; peers uncounted, De Bievre, De Caylus, De Villars, D'Etissac, Duras, D'Argenson--a crowd of others--surrounded and superintended her toilette, in a glittering troop of courtiers and gentlemen. Dames d'atours (for she had her maids of honor as well as Marie Leczinska) handed her her flacons of perfume, or her numberless notes, on gold salvers, chased by Reveil; the ermine beneath her feet, humbly sent by the Russian ambassador--far superior to what the Czarina sent to Madame de Mailly--had cost two thousand louis; her bedroom outshone in luxury any at Versailles, Choisy, or La Muette, with its Venetian glass, its medallions of Fragonard, its plaques of Sevres, its landscapes of Watteau, framed in the carved and gilded wainscoting, its Chinese lamps, swinging by garlands of roses, its laughing Cupids, buried under flowers, painted in fresco above the alcove, its hangings of velvet, of silk, of lace; and its cabinets, its screens, its bonbonnieres, its jewel-boxes, were costly as those of the Marquises de Pompadour or De Prie.

Who was she?--a Princess of the Blood, a Duchess of France, a mistress of the King?

Lords of the chamber obeyed her wishes, ministers signed lettres de cachet at her instance; "_ces messieurs_," la Queue de la Regence, had their rendezvous at her suppers; she had a country villa that eclipsed Trianon; she had fetes that outshone the fetes at Versailles; she had a "_droit de chasse_" in one of the royal districts; she had the first place on the easels of Coypel, Lancret, Pater, Vanloo, La Tour; the first place in the butterfly odes of Crebillon le Gai, Claude Dorat; Voisenon.

Who was she?--the Queen of France? No; much more--the Queen of Paris!

She was Thargelie Dumarsais; matchless as Claire Clairon, beautiful as Madeleine Gaussin, resistless as Sophie Arnould, great as Adrienne Lecouvreur. She was a Power in France--for was she not the Empress of the Comedie? If Madame Lenormand d'Etioles ruled the government at Versailles, Mademoiselle Thargelie Dumarsais ruled the world at Paris; and if the King's favorite could sign her enemies, by a smile, to the Bastille, the Court's favorite could sign hers, by a frown, to For-l'Eveque.

The foyer was nightly filled while she played in _Zaire_, or _Polyeucte_, or _Les Folies Amoureuses_, with a court of princes and poets, marshals and marquises, beaux esprits and abbes galants; and mighty nobles strewed with bouquets the path from her carriage to the coulisses; bouquets she trod on with nonchalant dignity, as though flowers only bloomed to have the honor of dying under her foot. Louis Quinze smilingly humored her caprices, content to wait until it was her pleasure to play at his private theatre; dukes, marquises, viscounts, chevaliers, vied who should ruin himself most magnificently and most utterly for her; and lovers the most brilliant and the most flattering, from Richelieu, Roi de Ruelles, to Dorat, poet of boudoir-graces and court-Sapphos, left the titled beauties of Versailles for the self-crowned Empress of the Francais. She had all Paris for her chentela, from Versailles to the Caveau; for even the women she deposed, the actors she braved, the journalists she consigned to For-l'Eveque, dared not raise their voice against the idol of the hour. A Queen of France? Bah! Pray what could Marie Leczinska, the pale, dull pietist, singing canticles in her private chapel, compare for power, for sway, for courtiers, for brilliant sovereignty, for unrivalled triumph, with Thargelie Dumarsais, the Queen of the Theatre?

Ravishingly beautiful looked the matchless actress as she sat before her Psyche, flashing _oeillades_ on the brilliant group who made every added aigrette, every additional bouquet of the coiffure, every little _mouche_, every touch to the already perfect toilette, occasion for flattering simile and soft-breathed compliment; ravishingly beautiful, as she laughed at Maurice de Saxe, or made a disdainful _moue_ at an impromptu couplet of Dorat's, or gave a blow of her fan to Richelieu, or asked Saint-Aulaire what he thought of Vanloo's portrait of her as _Rodugune_; ravishingly beautiful, with her charms that disdained alike rouge and marechale powder, and were matchless by force of their own coloring, form, and voluptuous languor, when, her toilette finished, followed by her glittering crowd, she let Richelieu lead her to his carriage.

There was a review of Guards on the plain at Sablons that morning, a fete afterwards, at which she would be surrounded by the most brilliant staff of an army of Noblesse, and Richelieu was at that moment the most favored of her troop of lovers. M. le Duc, as every one knows, never sued at court or coulisse in vain, and the love of Thargelie Dumarsais, though perhaps with a stronger touch of romance in it than was often found in the atmosphere of the foyer, was, like the love of her time and her class, as inconstant and vivacious, now settling here, now lighting there, as any butterfly that fluttered among the limes at Trianon. Did not the jest-loving _parterre_ ever salute with gay laughter two lines in a bagatelle-comedy of the hour--

Oui l'Amour papillonne, sans entraves, a son gre; Charge longtemps de fers, de soie meme, il mourrait!--

when spoken by Thargelie Dumarsais--laughter that hailed her as head-priestess of her pleasant creed, in a city and a century where the creed was universal?

"Ah, bonjour! You have not seen her before, have you, semi-Englishman? You have found nothing like her in the foggy isles, I wager you fifty louis!" cried one of Thargelie Dumarsais's court, the Marquis de la Thorilliere, meeting a friend of his who had arrived in Paris only the day before, M. le Chevalier de Tallemont des Reaux, as Richelieu's cortege rolled away, and the Marquis crossed to his own carriage.

"Her? Whom? I have not been in Paris for six years, you know. What can I tell of its idols, as I remember of old that they change every hour?"

"True! but, bon Dieu! not to know la Dumarsais! What it must be to have been buried in those benighted Britannic Isles! Did you not see her in Richelieu's carriage?"

"No. I saw a carriage driving off with such an escort and such fracas, that I thought it could belong to nobody less than to Madame Lenormand d'Etioles; but I did not observe it any further. Who is this beauty I ought to have seen?"

"Thargelie Dumarsais, for whom we are all ruining ourselves with the prettiest grace in the world, and for whom you will do the same when you have been once to the Francais; that is, if you have the good fortune to attract her eyes and please her fancy, which you may do, for the fogs have agreed with you, Leon!--I should not wonder if you become the fashion, and set the women raving of you as 'leur zer zevalier!'"

"Thanks for the prophecy, but I shall not stay long enough to fulfil it, and steal your myrtle crowns. I leave again to-morrow."

"_Leave?_ Sapristi! See what it is to have become half English, and imbibed a taste for spleen and solitude! Have you written another satire, or have you learned such barbarism as to dislike Paris?"

"Neither; but I leave for Lorraine to-morrow. It is five years since I saw my old pine-woods."

"Dame! it is ten years since _I_ saw the wilds of Bretagne, and I will take good care it shall be a hundred before I see them again. _Hors de Paris, c'est hors du monde._ Come with me to La Dumarsais's _petit souper_ to-night, and you will soon change your mind."

"My good Armand, you have not been an exile, as I have; you little know how I long for the very scent of the leaves, the very smell of the earth at Grande Charmille! But bah! I talk in Hebrew to you. You have been lounging away your days in titled beauties, _petits salons_, making butterfly verses, learning their broidery, their lisp, and their perfumes, talking to their parrots, and using their cosmetiques, till you care for no air but what is musk-scented! But what of this Dumarsais of yours--does she equal Lecouvreur?"

"Eclipses her!--with Paris as with Maurice de Saxe. Thargelie Dumarsais is superb, mon cher--unequalled, unrivalled! We have had nothing like her for beauty, for grace, for talent, nor, pardieu! for extravagance! She ruined _me_ last year in a couple of months. Richelieu is in favor just now--with what woman is he not? Thargelie is very fond of the Marshals of France! Saxe is fettered to her hand and foot, and the Duchesse de Bouillon hates her as rancorously as she does Adrienne. Come and see her play _Phedre_ to-night, and you will renounce Lorraine. I will take you to supper with her afterwards; she will permit any friend of mine entry, and then, generous man that I am, I shall have put you _en chemin_ to sun yourself in her smiles and ingratiate yourself in her favor. Don't give me too much credit for the virtue though, for I confess I should like to see Richelieu supplanted."

"Does his reign threaten to last long, then?"

The Marquis shrugged his shoulders, and gave his badine an expressive whisk.

"Dieu sait! we are not prophets in Paris. It would be as easy to say where that weathercock may have veered to-morrow, as to predict where la Dumarsais's love may have lighted ere a month! Where are you going, may I ask?"

"To see Lucille de Verdreuil. I knew her at Luneville; she and Madame de Boufflers were warm friends till Stanislaus, I believe, found Lucille's eyes lovelier than Madame la Marquise deemed fit, and then they quarrelled, as women ever do, with virulence in exact proportion to the ardor of their friendship."

"As the women quarrel at Choisy for _notre maitre_! They will be friends again when both have lost the game, like Louise de Mailly and the Duchesse de Chateauroux. The poor Duchess! Fitz-James and Maurepas, Chatillon and Bouillon, Rochefoucauld and le Pere Perussot, all together, were too strong for her. All the gossip of that Metz affair reached you across the water, I suppose? Those pests of Jesuits! if they want him to be their Very Christian King, and to cure him of his worship of Cupidon, they will have to pull down all the stones of La Muette and the Parc aux Cerfs! What good is it to kill _one_ poor woman when women are as plentiful as roses at Versailles? And now let me drive you to Madame de Vaudreuil; if _she_ do not convert you from your fancy for Lorraine this morning, Thargelie Dumarsais will to-night."

"_Mon zer zevalier, Paris at ado'able! Vous n'etes pas se'ieux en voulant le quitter, z'en suis sure!_" cried the Comtesse de Vaudreuil, in the pretty lisp of the day, a charming little blonde, patched and powdered, nestled in a chair before a fire of perfumed wood, teasing her monkey Zulme with a fan of Pater's, and giving a pretty little sign of contempt and disbelief with some sprays of jessamine employed in the chastisement of offenders more responsible and quite as audacious as Zulme.

Her companion, her "zer zevalier," was a young man of seven-and-twenty, with a countenance frank, engaging, nobly cast, far more serious, far more thoughtful in its expression, than was often seen in that laughing and mocking age. Exiled when a mere boy for a satirical pamphlet which had provoked the wrath of the Censeur Royal, and might have cost him the Bastille but for intercession from Luneville, he had passed his youth less in pleasure than in those philosophical and political problems then beginning to agitate a few minds; which were developed later on in the "Encyclopedie," later still in the Assemblee Nationale. Voltaire and Helvetius had spoken well of him at Madame de Geoffrin's; Claudine de Tencin had introduced him the night before in her brilliant salons; the veteran Fontenelle had said to him, "_Monsieur, comme censeur royal je refusai mon approbation a votre brochure; comme homme libre je vous en felicite_"--all that circle was prepared to receive him well, the young Chevalier de Tallemont might make a felicitous season in Paris if he chose, with the romance of his exile about him, and Madame de Vaudreuil smiling kindly on him.

"The country!" she cried; "the country is all very charming in eclogues and pastorals, but out of them it is a desert of ennui! What _can_ you mean, Leon, by leaving Paris to-morrow? Ah, mechant, there must be something we do not see, some love besides that of the Lorraine woods!"

"Madame, is there not my father?"

"_Bien zoli!_ But at your age men are not so filial. There is some other reason--but what? Any love you had there five years ago has hardly any attractions now. Five years! Ma foi, five months is an eternity that kills the warmest passion!"

"May there not be some love, madame, that time only strengthens?"

"I never heard of it if there be. It would be a very dreary affair, I should fancy, smouldering, smouldering on and on like an ill-lit fire. Nobody would thank you for it, mon cher, _here_! Come, what is your secret? Tell it me."

Leon de Tallemont smiled; the smile of a man who has happy thoughts, and is indifferent to ridicule.

"Madame, one can refuse you nothing! My secret? It is a very simple one. The greatest pang of my enforced exile was the parting from one I loved; the greatest joy of my return is that I return to her."

"_Bon Dieu! comme c'est drole!_ Here is a man talking to me of love, and of a love not felt for _me_!" thought Madame la Comtesse, giving him a soft glance of her beautiful blue eyes. "You are a very strange man. You have lived out of France till you have grown wretchedly serious and eccentric. Loved this woman for five years? Leon! Leon! you are telling me a fairy tale. Who is she, this enchantress? She must have some mysterious magic. Tell me--quick!"

"She is no enchantress, madame, and she has no magic save the simple one of having ever been very dear to me. We grew up together at Grande Charmille; she was the orphan niece of the Priest, a fond, innocent, laughing child, fresh and fair, and as untouched by a breath of impure air as any of the violets in the valley. She was scarcely out of the years of childhood when I left her, with beauty whose sweetest grace of all was its own unconsciousness. Through my five long years of exile I have remembered Favette as I saw her last under the elm-boughs in the summer light, her eyes dim with the tears of our parting, her young heart heaving with its first grief. I have loved her too well for others to have power to efface or to supplant her; of her only have I thought, of her only have I dreamed, holding her but the dearer as the years grew further from the hour of our separation, nearer to the hour of our reunion. I have heard no word of her since we parted; but of what value is love without trust and fidelity in trial? The beauty of her childhood may have merged into the beauty of womanhood, but I fear no other change in Favette. As we parted so we vowed to meet, and I believe in her love as in my own. I know that I shall find my Lorraine violet without stain or soil. Madame, Favette is still dearer to me now, Heaven help me, than five years ago. Five years--five years--true! it _is_ an eternity! Yet the bitterness of the past has faded for ever from me _now_, and I only see--the future!"

Madame de Vaudreuil listened in silence; his words stirred in her chords long untouched, never heard amidst the mots, the madrigals, the laughter of her world of Paris, Versailles, and Choisy. She struck him a little blow with her jessamine-sprays, with a mist gathering over her lovely blue eyes.

"Hush, hush, Leon! you speak in a tongue unknown here. A word of the heart amongst us sounds a word of a _Gaulois_ out of fashion--forbidden!"

III.

MIDNIGHT.

The Francais was crowded. Thargelie Dumarsais, great in _Electre_, _Chimene_, _Ines_, as in "_Ninette a la Cour_," "_Les Moissonneurs_," or "_Annette et Lubin_," was playing in "_Phedre_." Louis Quinze was present, with all the powdered marquises, the titled wits, the glittering gentlemen of the Court of Versailles; but no presence stayed the shout of adoration with which the parterre welcomed the idol of the hour, and Louis le Bien-aime (des femmes!) himself added his royal quota to the ovation, and threw at her feet a diamond, superb as any in his regalia. It was whispered that the Most Christian King was growing envious of his favorite's favor with la Dumarsais, and would, ere long, supersede him.

The foyer was filled with princes of the blood, marshals of France, dukes, marquises, the elite of her troop of lovers; lords and gentlemen crowded the passages, flinging their bouquets for her carpet as she passed; and poor scholars, young poets, youths without a sou--amongst them Diderot, Gilbert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau--pressed forward to catch a glimpse, by the light of the links, of this beauty, on which only the eyes of grands seigneurs who could dress Cupidon in a court habit _parfile d'or_ were allowed to gaze closely, as she left the Francais, after her unmatched and uninterrupted triumphs, and went to her carriage with Richelieu. The suppers of Thargelie Dumarsais were renowned through Paris; they equalled in magnificence the suppers of the Regency, rivalled them for license, and surpassed them for wit. All the world might flock to her fetes where she undisguisedly sought to surpass the lavishness of Versailles, even by having showers of silver flung from her windows to the people in the streets below; but to her _soupers a huis clos_ only a chosen few were admitted, and men would speak of having supped with la Dumarsais as boastfully as women of having supped with the King at Choisy.

"What you have lost in not seeing her play _Phedre_! Helvetius would have excused you; all the talk of his salons is not worth one glance at la Dumarsais. Mon ami! you will be converted to Paris when once you have seen her," said the Marquis de la Thorilliere, as his carriage stopped in the Chaussee d'Antin.

Leon de Tallemont laughed, and thought of the eyes that would brighten at his glance, and the heart that would beat against his once more under the vine shadows of Lorraine. No new magic, however seductive, should have strength to shake his allegiance to that Memory, and, true to his violet in Lorraine, he defied the Queen of the Foyer.