Part 29

The moonlight glittered on the fountains, falling with measured splash into their marble basins; the lime-leaves, faintly stirred by the sultry breezes, perfumed the night with their voluptuous fragrance, and the roses, twining round the carved and gilded balustrade, shook off their bowed head drops of dew, that gleamed brightly as the diamonds among the curls of the woman who leaned above, resting her delicate rouged cheek on her jewelled hand, alone--a very rare circumstance with the Marquise de la Riviere. Osmin did not admire the rare solitude, for he rattled his silver bells and barked--an Italian greyhound's shrill, fretful bark--as his quick ears caught the distant sound of steps coming swiftly over the turf below, and his mistress smiled as she patted his head:

"Ah, Osmin!--here he is?"

A man came out from under the heavy shadow of lime sand chestnuts, whose darkness the moon's rays had no power to pierce, crossed the lawn just under the balcony, and, coming up the terrace-steps, stood near her--a man, young, fair, handsome, whose age and form the uniform of a Captain of the Guards would have suited far better than the dark robes of a priest, which he wore; his lips were pressed closely together, and his face was pale with a pallor that consorted painfully with the warm passionate gleam of his eyes.

"So! You are late in obeying my commands, monsieur!"

Surely no other man in France would have stood silent beside her, under the spell of her dazzling glances, with such a picture before him as Madame la Marquise, in her azure silk and her point d'Angleterre, with her diamond pendants shaking among her hair, and her arched eyebrows lifted imperiously! But he did; his lips pressed closer, his eyes gleaming brighter. She changed her tone; it was soft, seductive, reproachful, and the smile on her lips was tender--as tender as it ever could be with the mockery that always lay under it; and it broke at last the spell that bound him, as she whispered, "Ah! Gaston, you love me no longer!"

"Not love you? O God!"

They were but five words, but they told Madame la Marquise of a passion such as she had never roused, despite all her fascinations and intrigues, in the lovers that crowded round her in the salons within, or at Versailles, over the trees yonder, where love was gallantry, and all was light comedy, with nothing so foolish as tragedy known.

He clasped her hands so closely that the sharp points of the diamond rings cut his own, though he felt them not.

"Not love you? Great Heaven! Not love you? Near you, I forget my oath, my vows, my God!--I forget all, save you, whom I adore, as, till I met you, I adored my Church. Torture endured with you were dearer than Paradise won alone! Once with you, I have no strength, you bow me to your will as the wind bows the lime-leaf. Oh! woman, woman! could you have no mercy, that with crowds round you daily worshipping your slightest smile, you must needs bow _me_ down before your glance, as you bow those who have no oaths to bind them, no need to scourge themselves in midnight solitude for the mere crime of Thought? Had you no mercy, that with all hearts yours, you must have mine to sear it and destroy it? Have you not lives enough vowed to you, that you seek to blast mine for ever? I was content, untroubled, till I met you; no woman's glance stirred my heart, no woman's eyes haunted my vigils, no woman's voice came in memory between my soul and prayer! What devil tempted you to throw your spells over me--could you not leave _one_ man in peace?"

"Ah bah! the tempted love the game of temptation generally full as well as the tempters!" thought Madame la Marquise, with an inward laugh.

Why did she allow such language to go unrebuked? Why did she, to whom none dared to breathe any but words the most polished, and love vows the most honeyed, permit herself to be addressed in such a strain? Possibly it was very new to her, such energy as this, and such an outbreak of passion amused her. At any rate she only drew her hands away, and her brilliant brown eyes filled with tears;--tears _were_ to be had at Versailles when needed, even her friend Montespan knew how to use them as the worst weapons against the artillery of the Eveque de Comdom--and her heart heaved under the filmy lace.

"Ah, Gaston! what words! 'What devil tempted me?' I know scarcely whether love be angel or devil; he seems either or both! But you love me little, unless in that name you recognize a plea for every madness and every thought!"

The scarlet blood flushed over his face, and his eyes shone and gleamed like fire, while he clenched his hands in a mortal anguish.

"Angel or devil? Ay! which, indeed! The one when it comes to us, the other when it leaves us! You have roused love in me I shall bear to my grave; but what gage have I that you give it me back? How do I know but that even now you are trifling with me, mocking at me, smiling at the beardless priest who is unlearned in all the gay gallantries of libertine churchmen and soldierly courtiers? My Heaven! how know, as I stand beside you, whether you pity or disdain me, love or scorn me?"

The passionate words broke in a torrent from his lips, stirred the stillness of the summer eve with a fiery anguish little akin to it.

"Do I not love you?"

Her answer was simple; but as Leontine de Rennecourt spoke it, leaning her cheek against his breast, with her eyes dazzling as the diamonds in her hair, looking up into his by the light of the stars, they had an eloquence far more dangerous than speech, and delirious to the senses as magician's perfumes. His lips lingered on hers, and felt the loud fast throbs of the heart she had won as he bent over her, pressing her closer and closer to him--vanquished and conquered, as men in all ages and of all creeds have been vanquished and conquered by women, all other thoughts fleeing away into oblivion, all fears dying out, all vows forgotten in the warm, living life of passion and of joy, that, for the first time in a brief life, flooded his heart with its golden voluptuous light.

"You love me? So be it," he murmured; "but beware what you do, my life lies in your hands, and you must be mine till death part us!"

"Till my fancy change rather!" thought Madame la Marquise, as she put her jewelled hand on his lips, her hair softly brushing his cheek, with a touch as soft, and an odor as sweet, as the leaves of one of the roses twining below.

Two men strolling below under the limes of Petite Foret--discussing the last scandals of Versailles, talking of the ascendency of La Fontanges, of the Spanish dress his Majesty had reassumed to please her, of the Brinvilliers' Poudre de Succession, of the new chateau given to Pere de la Chaise, of D'Aubigny's last extravagance and Lauzun's last mot, and the last gossip about Bossuet and Mademoiselle de Mauleon, and all the chit-chat of that varied day, glittering with wit and prolific of poison--glanced up to the balcony by the light of the stars.

"That cursed priest!" muttered the younger, le Vicomte de Saint-Elix, as he struck the head off a lily with his delicate cane.

"In a fool's paradise! Ah-ha! Madame la Marquise!" laughed the other--the old Duc de Clos-Vougeot--taking a chocolate sweetmeat out of his emerald-studded bonbonniere as they walked on, while the lime-blossoms shook off in the summer night wind and dropped dead on the grass beneath, laughing at the story of the box D'Artagnan had found in Lauzun's rooms when he seized his papers, containing the portraits of sixty women of high degree who had worshipped the resistless Captain of the Guard, with critical and historical notices penned under each; notices D'Artagnan and his aide could not help indiscreetly retailing, in despite of the Bourbon command of secrecy--secrecy so necessary where sixty beauties and saints were involved!

"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc de Clos-Vougeot, tapping his bonbonniere, enamelled by Petitot: the Duc was old, and knew women well, and knew the value and length of a paradise dependent on that most fickle of butterflies--female fidelity; he had heard Ninon de Lenclos try to persuade Scarron's wife to become a coquette, and Scarron's wife in turn beseech Ninon to discontinue her coquetteries; had seen that, however different their theories and practice, the result was the same; and already guessed right, that if Paris had been universally won by the one, its monarch would eventually be won by the other.

"A fool's paradise!"

The courtier was right, but the priest, had he heard him, would never have believed; _his_ heaven shone in those dazzling eyes: till the eyes closed in death, his heaven was safe! He had never loved, he had seen nothing of women; he had come straight from the monastic gloom of a Dominican abbey, in the very heart of the South, down in Languedoc, where costly missals were his only idol, and rigid pietists, profoundly ignorant of the ways and thoughts of their brethren of Paris, had reared him up in anchorite rigidity, and scourged his mind with iron philosophies and stoic-like doctrines of self-mortification that would have repudiated the sophistries and ingenuities of Sanchez, Escobar, and Mascarenhas, as suggestions of the very Master of Evil himself. From the ascetic gloom of that Languedoc convent he had been brought straight, by superior will, into the glare of the life at Versailles, that brilliant, gorgeous, sparkling, bizarre life, scintillating with wit, brimful of intrigue, crowded with the men and women who formed the Court of that age and the History of the next; where he found every churchman an _abbe galant_, and heard those who performed the mass jest at it with those who attended it; where he found no lines marked of right and wrong, but saw them all fused in a gay, tangled web of two court colors--Expediency and Pleasure. A life that dazzled and tired his eyes, as the glitter of lights in a room dazzles and tires the eyes of a man who comes suddenly in from the dark night air, till he grew giddy and sick, and in the midst of the gilded salons, or soft confessions of titled sinners, would ask himself if indeed he could be the same man who had sat calm and grave with the mellow sun streaming in on his missal-page in the monastic gloom of the Languedoc abbey but so few brief months before, when all this world of Versailles was unknown? The same man? Truly not--never again the same, since Madame la Marquise had bent her brown eyes upon him, been amused with his singular difference from all those around her, had loved him as women loved at Versailles, and bowed him down to her feet, before he guessed the name of the forbidden language that stirred in his heart and rushed to his lips, untaught and unbidden.

"A fool's paradise!" said the Duc, sagaciously tapping his gold bonbonniere. But many a paradise like it has dawned and faded, before and since the Versailles of Louis Quatorze.

He loved, and Madame la Marquise loved him. Through one brief tumult of struggle he passed: struggle between the creed of the Dominican abbey, where no sin would have been held so thrice accursed, so unpardonable, so deserving of the scourge and the stake as this--and the creed of the Bourbon Court, where churchmen's gallantries were every-day gossip; where the Abbe de Rance, ere he founded the saintly gloom of La Trappe, scandalized town and court as much as Lauzun; where the Pere de la Chaise smiled complacently on La Fontanges' ascendancy; where three nobles rushed to pick up the handkerchief of that royal confessor, who washed out with holy water the royal indiscretions, as you wash off grains of dust with perfumed water; where the great and saintly Bishop of Condom could be checked in a rebuking harangue, and have the tables turned on him by a mischievous reference to Mademoiselle de Mauleon; where life was intrigue for churchmen and laymen alike, and where the abbe's rochet and the cardinal's scarlet covered the same vices as were openly blazoned on the gold aiglettes of the Garde du Corps and the costly lace of the Chambellan du Roi. A storm, brief and violent as the summer storms that raged over Versailles, was roused between the conflicting thoughts at war within him, between the principles deeply rooted from long habit and stern belief, and the passions sprung up unbidden with the sudden growth and gorgeous glow of a tropical flower--a storm, brief and violent, a struggle, ended that night, when he stood on the balcony with the woman he loved, felt her lips upon his, and bowed down to her feet delirious and strengthless.

"I have won my wager with Adeline; I have vanquished _mon beau_ De Launay," thought Madame la Marquise, smiling, two days after, as she sat, en neglige, in her broidered chair, pulling Osmin's ears, and stirring the frothy chocolate handed to her by her negro, Azor, brought over in the suite of the African embassy from Ardra, full of monkeyish espieglerie, and covered with gems--a priceless dwarf, black as ink, and but two feet high, who could match any day with the Queen's little Moor. "He amuses me with his vows of eternal love. Eternal love?--how _de trop_ we should find it, here in Versailles! But it is amusing enough to play at for a season. No, that is not half enough--he adores! This poor Gaston!"

So in the salons of Versailles, and in the world, where Ninon reigned, by the Court ladies, while they loitered in the new-made gardens of Marly, among other similar things jested of was this new amour of Madame de la Riviere for the young Pere de Launay. "She was always eccentric, and he _was_ very handsome, and would have charming manners if he were not so grave and so silent," the women averred; while the young nobles swore that these meddling churchmen had always the best luck, whether in amatory conquest, or on fat lands and rich revenues. What the Priest of Languedoc thought a love that would outlast life, and repay him for peace of conscience and heaven both lost, was only one of the passing bubbles of gossip and scandal floating for an hour, amidst myriads like it, on the glittering, fast-rushing, diamond-bright waters of life at Versailles!

A new existence had dawned for him; far away in the dim dusky vista of forgotten things, though in reality barely distant a few short months, lay the old life in Languedoc, vague and unremembered as a passed dream; with its calm routine, its monastic silence, its unvarying alternations of study and prayer, its iron-bound thoughts, its rigid creed. It had sunk away as the peaceful gray twilight of a summer's night sinks away before the fiery burst of an artificial illumination, and a new life had dawned for him, radiant, tumultuous, conflicting, delicious--that dazzled his eyes with the magnificence of boundless riches and unrestricted extravagance; that charmed his intellect with the witty coruscations, the polished esprit, of an age unsurpassed for genius, grace, and wit; and that swayed alike his heart, his imagination, and his passions with the subtle intoxication of this syren of Love, whose forbidden song had never before, in faintest echo, fallen on his ear.

Far away in the dim, lifeless, pulseless past, sank the memory of the old Dominican abbey, of all it had taught him, of all it had exacted, in its iron, stoical, merciless creed. A new life had arisen for him, and Gaston de Launay, waking from the semi-slumber of the living death he had endured in Languedoc, and liked because he knew no other, was happy--happy as a prisoner is in the wild delight with which he welcomes the sunlight after lengthened imprisonment, happy as an opium-eater is in the delicious delirium that succeeds the lulling softness of the opiate.

"He loves me, poor Gaston! Bah! But how strangely he talks! If love were this fiery, changeless, earnest thing with us that it is with him, what in the world should we do with it? We should have to get a lettre de cachet for it, and forbid it the Court; send it in exile to Pignerol, as they have just done Lauzun. Love in earnest? We should lose the best spice for our wine, the best toy for our games, and, mon Dieu! what embroilments there would be! Love in earnest? Bagatell! Louise de la Valliere shows us the folly of that; but for its Quixotisms she would now be at Vaujours, instead of buried alive in that Rue St. Jacques, with nothing to do but to weep for 'Louison,' count her beads, and listen to M. de Condom's merciless eloquence! Like the king,

J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit.

People have no right to reproach each other with inconstancy; one's caprices are not in one's own keeping; and one can no more help where one's fancy blows, than that lime-leaf can help where the breeze chooses to waft it. But poor Gaston! how make _him_ comprehend that?" thought Madame la Marquise, as she turned, and smiled, and held out her warm, jewelled hands, and listened once again to the words of the man who was in her power as utterly as the bird in the power of the snake when it has once looked up into the fatal eyes that lure it on to its doom.

"You will love me ever?" he would ask, resting his lips on her white low brow.

"Ever!" would softly answer Madame la Marquise.

And her lover believed her: should his deity lie? He believed her! What did he, fresh from the solitude of his monastery, gloomy and severe as that of the Trappist abbey, with its perpetual silence, its lowered glances, its shrouded faces, its ever-present "memento mori," know of women's faith, of women's love, of the sense in which _they_ meant that vow "for ever"? He believed her, and never asked what would be at the end of a path strewn with such odorous flowers. Alone, it is true, in moments when he paused to think, he stood aghast at the abyss into which he had fallen, at the sin into which, a few months before, haughty and stern in virtue against the temptation that had never entered his path, he would have defied devils in legion to have lured him, yet into which he had now plunged at the mere smile of a woman! Out of her presence, out of her spells, standing by himself under the same skies that had blooded over his days of peace in Languedoc, back on his heart, with a sickening anguish, would come the weight of his sin; the burden of his broken oaths, the scorch of that curse eternal which, by his creed, he held drawn down on him here and hereafter; and Gaston de Launay would struggle again against this idolatrous passion, which had come with its fell delusion betwixt him and his God; struggle--vainly, idly--struggle, only to hug closer the sin he loved while he loathed; only to drink deeper of the draught whose voluptuous perfume was poison; only to forget all, forsake all, dare all, at one whisper of her voice, one glance of her eyes, one touch of the lips whose caress he held would be bought by a curse through eternity.

Few women love aught "for ever," save, perchance, diamonds, lace, and their own beauty, and Madame la Marquise was not one of those few; certainly not--she had no desire to make herself singular in her generation, and could set fashions much more likely to find disciples, without reverting to anything so eccentric, plebeian, and out of date. Love _one_ for ever! She would have thought it as terrible waste of her fascinations, as for a jewel to shine in the solitude of its case, looked on by only one pair of eyes, or for a priceless enamel, by Petitot, to be only worn next the heart, shrouded away from the light of day, hidden under the folds of linen and lace.

"Love one for ever?"--Madame la Marquise laughed at the thought, as she stood dressed for a ball, after assisting at the representation of a certain tragedy, called "Berenice" (in which Mesdames Deshoulieres and De Sevigne, despite their esprit, alone of all Paris and the Court could see no beauty), and glanced in the mirror at her radiant face, her delicate skin, her raven curls, with their pendants shaking, her snow-white arms, and her costly dress of the newest mode, its stomacher gleaming one mass of gems. "Love one for ever? The droll idea! Is it not enough that I have loved him once?"

It was more than enough for his rivals, who bitterly envied him; courtly abbes, with polished smiles, and young chanoines, with scented curls and velvet toques, courtiers, who piqued themselves on reputations only second to Lauzun's, and men of the world, who laughed at this new caprice of Madame la Marquise, alike bore no good will to this Languedoc priest, and gave him a significant sneer, or a compliment that roused his blood to fire, and stung him far worse than more open insult, when they met in the salons, or crossed in the corridors, at Versailles or Petite Foret.

"Those men! those men! Should he ever lose her to any one of them?" he would think over and over again, clenching his hand, in impotent agony of passion that he had not the sword and the license of a soldier to strike them on the lips with his glove for the smile with which they dared to speak her name; to make them wash out in blood under the trees, before the sun was up, the laugh, the mot, the delicate satire, which were worse to bear than a blow to the man who could not avenge them.

"Pardieu! Madame must be very unusually faithful to her handsome Priest; she has smiled on no other for two months! What unparalleled fidelity!" said the Vicomte de Saint-Elix, with petulant irritation.

"Jealous, Leonce?" laughed the old Duc, whom he spoke to, tapping the medallion portrait on his bonbonniere. "Take comfort: when the weather has been so long fixed, it is always near a change. Ah! M. de Launay overhears! He looks as if he would slay us. Very unchristian in a priest!"

Gaston de Launay overheard, as he stood by a _croisee_ at Petite Foret, playing with Osmin--he liked even the dog, since the hand he loved so often lay on its slender neck, and toyed with its silver chain. And, sworn as he was to the service of his Church, sole mistress as his Church had been, till Leontine de Rennecourt's eyes had lured him to his desertion of her, apostate in his own eyes as such a thought confessed him to have grown, he now loathed the garb of a priest, that bound his hands from vengeance, and made him powerless before insult as a woman. Fierce, ruthless longing for revenge upon these men seized on him; devilish desires, the germ of which till that hour he never dreamt slumbered within him, woke up into dangerous, vigorous life. Had he lived in the world, its politic reserve, its courtly sneer, its light gallantries, that passed the time and flattered amour-propre, its dissimulated hate that smiled while plotting, and killed with poisoned bonbons, would never have been learnt by him; and having long lived out of it, having been suddenly plunged into its whirl, not guessing its springs, ignorant of its diplomacies, its suave lies, termed good breeding, its legeres philosophies, he knew nothing of the wisdom with which its wise men forsook their loves and concealed their hatreds. Both passions now sprung up in him at one birth, both the stronger for the long years in which a chill, artificial, but unbroken calm, had chained his very nature down, and fettered into an iron monotony, an unnatural and colorless tranquillity, a character originally impetuous and vivid, as the frosts of a winter chill into one cold, even, glassy surface, the rapids of a tumultuous river. With the same force and strength with which, in the old days in Languedoc, he had idolized and served his Church, sparing himself no mortification, believing every iota of her creed, carrying out her slightest rule with merciless self-examination, so--the tide once turned the other way--so the priest now loved, so he now hated.