CHAPTER XVII

AN ARISTOCRATIC RESORT

The little watering-place of Eaux St. Fer, which stood on the slope of a hill some few leagues outside Montpelier, and nearer than that city to the southern sea-board, was very full this summer; so full, indeed, that hardly could the visitors to it be accommodated with the apartments they required. So full that, already it had incurred the displeasure of many of those patrons--who were mostly of the ancient nobility of France--at their being forced to rub shoulders with, and also live cheek by jowl with, such common persons as--to go no lower--those of the upper bourgeoisie. Yet it had to be done--the doing of it could not be avoided; for this very year the waters of Eaux St. Fer had bubbled forth a degree warmer than they had ever been known to do before; they tasted more of saltpetre than any visitor could recollect their having done previously, and tasted also more unutterably nauseous; while marvellous cures of gout and rheumatism, and complaints brought on by overeating and overdrinking and late hours, as well as other indulgences, were reported daily. Even at this very moment the gossips staying at The Garland (the fashionable hostelry) were relating how Madame la Marquise de Montesprit, who was noted for eating a pâté of snipe every night of her life for supper, was already free from pain and able to sit up in her bed and play piquet with the Abbé Leri, whose carbuncles were fast disappearing from his face; while, too, the Chevalier Rancé d'Irval had lost eight pounds of his terrible weight, and the Vicomtesse de Fraysnes had announced that in another week she would actually appear without her veil, so much improved was her complexion. Likewise, it was whispered that, only a day or so before, three casks of the atrociously tasting water had been sent up to Paris to no less a person than the Regent himself.

Wherefore Eaux St. Fer was full to suffocation; dukes, duchesses, and all the other members of what was even then called the old régime, were huddled together pell-mell with bankers, merchants, even eminent shopkeepers and tradesmen; and, except that in the principal alley, or walk, it was understood that the nobility kept to one side of it, and those whom they termed the "refuse" to the other, one could hardly have told which were the people who boasted the blood of centuries in their veins, and which were those who, if they knew who their grandfathers were, knew no more. And, after all, when one's blood is corrupted by every indulgence that human weakness can give way to until the body is like a barrel, and the legs are like bolsters, and the face is a mass of swollen impurity, or as white as that of a corpse within its shroud, it matters very little whether that blood is drawn from ancestors who fought at Ascalon and Jerusalem or peddled vulgar wares in the lowest purlieus of cities.

"Mon ami!" exclaimed one of the high-born dames, who kept to the right side of the alley, to an aristocrat who sat on a bench beneath a tree close by where one of the fountains of Eaux St. Fer bubbled forth its waters, "Mon ami, you do not look well this morning. Yet see how the sun shines around; observe how it shows the wrinkles beneath the eyes of Mademoiselle de Ste. Ange over there, and also the paint on the face of the old Marquis de Pontvert. You should be gay, mon ami, this morning."

"I am not well," replied the personage whom she addressed. "Neither in health nor mind. Sometimes I wish I were a soldier again, living a life of----"

"Neither in health nor mind!" the lady who had accosted him repeated. "Come, now. That is not as it should be. Let us see. Tell me your symptoms. First, for the health. What ails that?" and, as she asked the question, she peered into the man's dull eyes with her own large clear ones. Then she continued, "Remember, Monsieur le Duc, that, although an arrangement once subsisting between us will never come to a settlement now, we are still to be very good--friends. Is it not so?" Yet, even as she asked the question, especially as she mentioned the word "friends," she turned her face away from him on the pretence of flicking off some dust from her farthest sleeve, and smiled, while biting her full, red nether lip with her brilliantly white teeth.

Then she turned back to him, saying: "Now for the health. What is the worst?"

"Diane, I suffer. I burn----"

"_Already!_" she exclaimed. And the Marquise laughed aloud at her own cruel joke; a merry little, rippling laugh, and one more befitting a girl of twenty than a woman nearly double that age. And her blue eyes flashed saucily--though some might, however, have said, sinisterly. Then she begged the other's pardon, and desired him to continue.

But, annoyed, petulant at her scoff, he would not do so; instead, he turned his white face away from where she had taken a seat beside him, and watched the other members of his own order strolling about under the trees, their hats, when men, under their arms, their dresses, when women, held up in many cases by little page boys.

She, on her part, did not press him to continue. She had strolled forth that morning from The Garland, where she had been fortunate enough to secure rooms for herself and her maid, with the full determination of meeting Monsieur le Duc Desparre and of conversing with him on a certain topic, her own share in which conversation she had rehearsed a thousand times in the last seven months, and she meant to do so still; but as for his health, or his mental troubles, she cared not one jot. Indeed, had Diane Grignan de Poissy been asked what gift of Fate she most desired should be accorded to her old lover at the present time, she would doubtless have suggested that a long, lingering illness, which should prevent him from ever again being able to enjoy, in the slightest degree, the fortune and position he had lately inherited, would be most agreeable to her. For this man sitting by her side had, in his poverty, been her lover, he had accepted substantial offerings from her under the guise of her future husband, and, in his affluence, had refused to fulfil his pledge to her--a Grignan de Poissy by marriage, a Saint Fresnoi de Buzanval by birth--a woman notorious, famous, for her beauty even now!

No wonder she hated the "cadaverous infidel"--as often enough she termed him in her own thoughts--the man now seated by her side.

Her presence in this resort of the sick and ailing was, like that of many others, simply for her own purpose. Some of those others came to keep assignations; some to win money off well-to-do invalids who, although rushing with swift strides to their tombs, could not, nevertheless, exist without gaming; some to carry on here the same life which they led in Paris, but which life there was now at a standstill and would be so until the leaves began to fall in the woods round and about the capital. As for her, Diane Grignan de Poissy, she needed neither to drink unpleasant waters that tasted of iron and saltpetre, nor to bathe in them, nor to follow any regimen; though, to suit her own ends, she gave out that she did thus need to do so. Instead, and actually, in all her thirty-eight years she had never know either ache or pain or ailment, but had revelled always in superb health, notwithstanding the fact that she had been a maid of honour once at Versailles to a daughter of the old King--that now-forgotten "Roi Soleil!"--and had taken part since in many of the supper parties given by Philippe le Débonnaire.

Yet in spite of all, she was here, at Eaux St. Fer.

Presently she spoke again, saying in a soft, subdued voice, into which she contrived to throw a contrite tone--

"Armand, dear friend, you are not going to quarrel with me for a foolish word; a silly joke! Armand, the memories of the past brought me here--to see you. I heard that you were suffering, and also--that--that--you--could not recover from the trick put upon you by that girl--Laure Vauxc----"

"Silence!" he said, turning swiftly round on her. "Silence! Never mention that name, that episode again in my hearing. It has damned me in the eyes of Paris--of France--for ever. It has heaped ridicule on me from which I can never recover. It is that--that--that--which has broken me down. Neither Tokay, nor late nights--as I cause it to be given out--nor----" He paused in his furious words, then said a moment later, "Yet, so far as he, as she, are concerned, I have paid the score. He is dead, she worse than dead."

"I know, I know," she murmured, her blue eyes almost averted, so that he should not observe the glance that she felt, that she knew, must be in them. "I know. Let us talk of it no more. Armand, forget it."

"Forget it! I shall never forget it. What can I do to drive it from my own thoughts or to drive the memory of my humiliation by that beggar's brat from out the memory of men--of all Paris!"

"Ignore it. Again I say, forget. Thus you cause others to do so." Then, as though she, at least, had no intention of saying aught that might re-open, or help to re-open, the wounds caused to his vanity by the events of the winter, she picked up idly a book he had been glancing at when she drew near him, and which had fallen on to the crushed-shell path of the alley as they conversed. She picked it up and began turning its fresh white pages over.

"It amuses you?" she asked. "This thing?" And she read out the title of one of Piron's latest productions, the comic opera, "Arlequin Deucalion."

"One must do something--to pass the time. If we cannot see a play, the next best thing is to read one."

"Alas," his companion exclaimed, "the plays of to-day are so stupid--so puerile! No plot, no characters bearing truth to life. Now I! Now I--ah!----" she broke off. "Look at that! And just as we speak, too, of plays and playwriters. Behold, Papa de Crébillon. Mon Dieu! What is the matter with him. He jabbers like a monkey. Yet still he bows with grace--the grace of a gentleman."

"He suffers from gout atrociously," Desparre muttered.

In truth, the figure which now approached the pair seated in the alley might have been either of the things which Diane Grignan de Poissy had mentioned, a monkey or a gentleman. His face was a drawn and twitching one, filled with innumerable lines and with, set into it, deep sunken eyes, while his manners were--for the period--perfect, his bow that of a courtier, and worthy of the most refined member of the late Louis' court. For the rest, he was a man of over forty years of age, and was renowned already as the author of the popular dramas "Electra," "Atreus," and "Idomeneus." By his side walked a lad, his son, Claude Prosper, destined to be better known even than his father, though not so creditably.

"Good morning, Monsieur de Crébillon," cried the bright and joyous Diane--bright and joyous as she assumed to be!--while the dramatist drew near to where she and her companion were seated beneath the acacias. "You are most welcome. 'Tis but now we were talking of plays and dramas--lamenting, too----"

"Ah! Madame la Marquise!" exclaimed the dramatist at the word "lamenting," while his face twitched worse than before, since assumed horror was added to it now. "Lamenting; no! no! madame! lament nothing. At least there is, I trust, nothing to lament in our modern drama."

"Ay, but there is though!" the Marquise said. Then assuming an air of playful reproof, she went on: "How is it that you all miss plot in your productions now? Why have you no secrets reserved for the end--for the dénouement, for the last moment ere they make ready to extinguish the lights. Eh! Answer me that. Hardy was the last. Since then it is all pompous declamation, heavy versification, dull pomp, and thunder. Hardy belonged to a past day, but at least he excited his listeners, kept them awake for what was to come--what they knew would come--what they knew must come."

"Madame has said it----" the dramatist bowed at this moment to three ladies of the aristocracy who passed by, while Desparre rose from his seat to greet them with stiff courtesy, and Diane Grignan de Poissy smiled affectionately. "Hardy did belong to a past day. We have changed all that, Corneille changed it." At the name of Corneille he bowed again solemnly. "Yet," he said, "plot is no bad thing. A little vulgar and straining, perhaps, yet sufficiently interesting."

"Monsieur de Crébillon," Desparre exclaimed here, he not having spoken a word before or acknowledged the dramatist's presence, except by a glance, "you may be seated. There is a sufficiency of room upon this bench."

With a gleam from his sunken eyes--which might have meant to testify thanks to Monsieur le Duc, or might have meant to convey contempt--was he not already a popular favourite among the highest ranks of the aristocracy in Paris, and, even here, in Eaux St. Fer, one of those to whom the fashionable side of the alley was thrown open as a right!--he took his seat upon the vacant space on the other side of the Marquise. Then, from out the hollow caverns of his eye-sockets he regarded her steadily, while he said--

"Has Madame la Marquise by chance any protegé among her many friends who has written a play with a plot? An embryo Hardy, for example. Almost, if a poor poet might be permitted to have a thought," and again his glance rested with contempt on Desparre; "I would wager such to be the case. Some gentleman of her house who deems that he has the sacred fire within him----"

"Supposing," interrupted Diane, "that one who is no poor gentleman--but--but--as a matter of fact--myself--had conceived a good drama, a--a--story so strange that she imagined it might amuse--nay--interest an audience. Suppose that! Would it be possible to----?"

"Madame," exclaimed le Duc Desparre, "have you turned dramatist. Are you about to become a bluestocking?"

"Why not?" she asked, with a swift glance that met his; a glance that reminded him--he knew not why--of the blue steely glitter of a rapier. "Why not? Have not other women of France, of my class, done such things?"

"Frequently," de Crébillon replied, answering the question addressed to the other. "Frequently. Yet--yet--never that I can recall in public, before the lower orders, the people. But to pass a soirée away, to amuse one's friends in the country. That would be another thing. A little comedy now,--with a brilliant, startling conclusion--"

"Mine is not a comedy!"

"Perhaps," questioned the dramatist, "a great classical tragedy? With a dénouement such as was used in early days?"

"Nay, a drama. One of our own times."

Still, as she spoke, she kept her eyes fixed full blaze upon de Crébillon--yet--out of the side of them--she watched Monsieur le Duc. And it might be that the sun was flickering the shadows of the acacia leaves upon his face and, thereby, causing that face to look now as though it were more yellow than white. She thought, at least, that this was the tinge it was assuming. Yet--she might be mistaken.

"Will you not tell us, Madame la Marquise, something of this plot, at least?" the duke asked, "give us some premonition of what this subject is. Or prepare us for what we are to expect when this drama sees the day?"

And she knew that his voice trembled as he spoke. "Nay, nay, Monsieur le Duc," the dramatist exclaimed, "to do that would destroy the pleasure of the representation. It would remove expectancy--the salt of such things." Then, turning to the Marquise, he asked: "Is Madame's little play written, or, at present, only conceived? If so, I should be ravished to read it; to myself alone, or to a number of Madame's friends. There are many here, in Eaux St. Fer. And the after dinner hours are a little dull; such an afternoon would compensate for much."

"The plot is alone conceived. It is in the air only. Yet it is all here," and she tapped with her finger on her white forehead over which the golden hair curled crisply.

"Will Madame la Marquise permit that I construct a little play for the benefit of her friends? The saloon of The Garland will hold all she chooses to invite. Doubtless, Monsieur le Duc will agree with me that no more ravishing entertainment could be provided in Eaux St. Fer, which is a little--one may say--a little _triste_--sometimes."

Heavily, stolidly, Monsieur le Duc bowed his head acquiescingly; though, had it been in his power to do so, he would have thrown obstacles in the way of the Marquise's little plot ever falling into de Crébillon's hands. He had seen something in that steely glitter of her blue eyes which disturbed him, though he scarcely knew why such should be the case--yet, also, he could not forget that this was a woman whom he had wronged in the worst way possible to wrong such as she--by scorning her in his prosperity. Therefore he was disturbed.

Half an hour later the alley was deserted, the visitors were going to their dinners, it was one o'clock. The Duc had departed to his, the Marquise Grignan de Poissy was strolling slowly towards The Garland, there to partake of hers; de Crébillon and his son walked by her side. And, as they did so, the dramatist said a word.

"Always," he remarked quietly, "I have thought that Madame la Marquise was possessed of the deepest friendship for Monsieur le Duc."

"_Vraiment!_" she exclaimed, transfixing him with her wondrous eyes. "_Vraiment!_ And has Monsieur de Crébillon seen fit to alter that opinion?" To which the other made no answer, unless a shrug of his lean shoulders was one.