Ernest Maltravers, Book 2
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Ernest Maltravers, Book 2
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BOOK II.
"He, of wide-blooming youth's fair flower possest,
Owns the vain thoughts--the heart that cannot rest!"
SIMONIDES, /in Tit. Hum/.
CHAPTER I.
"Il y eut certainement quelque chose de singulier dans mes
sentimens pour cette charmante femme."*--ROUSSEAU.
* There certainly was something singular in my sentiments for this
charming woman.
IT was a brilliant ball at the Palazzo of the Austrian embassy at
Naples: and a crowd of those loungers, whether young or old, who attach
themselves to the reigning beauty, was gathered round Madame de
Ventadour. Generally speaking, there is more caprice than taste in the
election of a beauty to the Italian throne. Nothing disappoints a
stranger more than to see for the first time the woman to whom the world
has given the golden apple. Yet he usually falls at last into the
popular idolatry, and passes with inconceivable rapidity from indignant
scepticism into superstitious veneration. In fact, a thousand things
beside mere symmetry of feature go to make up the Cytherea of the hour.
--tact in society--the charm of manner--nameless and piquant
brilliancy. Where the world find the Graces they proclaim the Venus.
Few persons attain pre-eminent celebrity for anything, without some
adventitious and extraneous circumstances which have nothing to do with
the thing celebrated. Some qualities or some circumstances throw a
mysterious or personal charm about them. "Is Mr. So-and-So really such
a genius?" "Is Mrs. Such-a-One really such a beauty?" you ask
incredulously. "Oh, yes," is the answer. "Do you know all about him or
her? Such a thing is said, or such a thing has happened." The idol is
interesting in itself, and therefore its leading and popular attribute
is worshipped.
Now Madame de Ventadour was at this time the beauty of Naples: and
though fifty women in the room were handsomer, no one would have dared
to say so. Even the women confessed her pre-eminence--for she was the
most perfect dresser that even France could exhibit. And to no
pretensions do ladies ever concede with so little demur, as those which
depend upon that feminine art which all study, and in which few excel.
Women never allow beauty in a face that has an odd-looking bonnet above
it, nor will they readily allow any one to be ugly whose caps are
unexceptionable. Madame de Ventadour had also the magic that results
from intuitive high breeding, polished by habit to the utmost. She
looked and moved the /grande dame/, as if Nature had been employed by
Rank to make her so. She was descended from one of the most illustrious
houses of France; had married at sixteen a man of equal birth, but old,
dull, and pompous--a caricature rather than a portrait of that great
French /noblesse/, now almost if not wholly extinct. But her virtue was
without a blemish--some said from pride, some said from coldness. Her
wit was keen and court-like--lively, yet subdued; for her French high
breeding was very different from the lethargic and taciturn
imperturbability of the English. All silent people can seem
conventionally elegant. A groom married a rich lady; he dreaded the
ridicule of the guests whom his new rank assembled at his table--an
Oxford clergyman gave him this piece of advice, "Wear a black coat and
hold your tongue!" The groom took the hint, and is always considered
one of the most gentlemanlike fellows in the county. Conversation is
the touchstone of the true delicacy and subtle grace which make the
ideal of the moral mannerism of a court. And there sat Madame de
Ventadour, a little apart from the dancers, with the silent English
dandy Lord Taunton, exquisitely dressed and superbly tall, bolt upright
behind her chair; and the sentimental German Baron von Schomberg,
covered with orders, whiskered and wigged to the last hair of
perfection, sighing at her left hand; and the French minister, shrewd,
bland, and eloquent, in the chair at her right; and round on all sides
pressed, and bowed, and complimented, a crowd of diplomatic secretaries
and Italian princes, whose bank is at the gaming-table, whose estates
are in their galleries, and who sell a picture, as English gentlemen cut
down a wood, whenever the cards grow gloomy. The charming De Ventadour!
she had attraction for them all! smiles for the silent, badinage for the
gay, politics for the Frenchman, poetry for the German, the eloquence of
loveliness for all! She was looking her best--the slightest possible
tinge of rouge gave a glow to her transparent complexion, and lighted up
those large dark sparkling eyes (with a latent softness beneath the
sparkle) seldom seen but in the French--and widely distinct from the
unintellectual languish of the Spaniard, or the full and majestic
fierceness of the Italian gaze. Her dress of black velvet, and graceful
hat with its princely plume, contrasted the alabaster whiteness of her
arms and neck. And what with the eyes, the skin, the rich colouring of
the complexion, the rosy lips and the small ivory teeth, no one would
have had the cold hypercriticism to observe that the chin was too
pointed, the mouth too wide, and the nose, so beautiful in the front
face, was far from perfect in the profile.
"Pray was Madame in the Strada Nuova to-day?" asked the German, with as
much sweetness in his voice as if he had been vowing eternal love.
"What else have we to do with our mornings, we women?" replied Madame de
Ventadour. "Our life is a lounge from the cradle to the grave; and our
afternoons are but the type of our career. A promenade and a
crowd,--/voila tout/! We never see the world except in an open
carriage."
"It is the pleasantest way of seeing it," said the Frenchman, drily.
"I doubt it; the worst fatigue is that which comes without exercise."
"Will you do me the honour to waltz?" said the tall English lord, who
had a vague idea that Madame de Ventadour meant she would rather dance
than sit still. The Frenchman smiled.
"Lord Taunton enforces your own philosophy," said the minister.
Lord Taunton smiled because every one else smiled; and, besides, he had
beautiful teeth: but he looked anxious for an answer.
"Not to-night,--I seldom dance. Who is that very pretty woman? What
lovely complexions the English have! And who," continued Madame de
Ventadour, without waiting for an answer to the first question, "who is
that gentleman,--the young one I mean,--leaning against the door?"
"What, with the dark moustache?" said Lord Taunton. "He is a cousin of
mine."
"Oh, no; not Colonel Bellfield; I know him--how amusing he is!--no; the
gentleman I mean wears no moustache."
"Oh, the tall Englishman with the bright eyes and high forehead," said
the French minister. "He is just arrived--from the East, I believe."
"It is a striking countenance," said Madame de Ventadour; "there is
something chivalrous in the turn of the head. Without doubt, Lord
Taunton, he is '/noble/'?"
"He is what you call '/noble/,'" replied Lord Taunton--"that is, what we
call a 'gentleman;' his name is Maltravers. He lately came of age; and
has, I believe, rather a good property."
"Monsieur Maltravers; only Monsieur?" repeated Madame de Ventadour.
"Why," said the French minister, "you understand that the English
/gentilhomme/ does not require a De or a title to distinguish him from
the /roturier/."
"I know that; but he has an air above a simple /gentilhomme/. There is
something /great/ in his look; but it is not, I must own, the
conventional greatness of rank: perhaps he would have looked the same
had he been born a peasant."
"You don't think him handsome?" said Lord Taunton, almost angrily (for
he was one of the Beauty-men, and Beauty-men are sometimes jealous).
"Handsome! I did not say that," replied Madame de Ventadour, smiling;
"it is rather a fine head than a handsome face. Is he clever, I
wonder?--but all you English, milord, are well educated."
"Yes, profound--profound: we are profound, not superficial," replied
Lord Taunton, drawing down his wrist-bands.
"Will Madame de Ventadour allow me to present to her one of my
countrymen?" said the English minister approaching--"Mr. Maltravers."
Madame de Ventadour half smiled and half blushed, as she looked up, and
saw bent admiringly upon her the proud and earnest countenance she had
remarked.
The introduction made--a few monosyllables exchanged. The French
diplomatist rose and walked away with the English one. Maltravers
succeeded to the vacant chair.
"Have you been long abroad?" asked Madame de Ventadour.
"Only four years; yet long enough to ask whether I should not be most
abroad in England."
"You have been in the East--I envy you. And Greece, and Egypt,--all the
associations! You have travelled back into the Past; you have escaped,
as Madame D'Epinay wished, out of civilisation and into romance."
"Yet Madame D'Epinay passed her own life in making pretty romances out
of a very agreeable civilisation," said Maltravers, smiling.
"You know her Memoirs, then," said Madame de Ventadour, slightly
colouring. "In the current of a more exciting literature few have had
time for the second-rate writings of a past century."
"Are not those second-rate performances often the most charming," said
Maltravers, "when the mediocrity of the intellect seems almost as if it
were the effect of a touching, though too feeble, delicacy of sentiment?
Madame D'Epinay's Memoirs are of this character. She was not a virtuous
woman--but she felt virtue and loved it; she was not a woman of
genius--but she was tremblingly alive to all the influences of genius.
Some people seem born with the temperament and the tastes of genius
without its creative power; they have its nervous system, but something
is wanting in the intellectual. They feel acutely, yet express tamely.
These persons always have in their character an unspeakable kind of
pathos--a court civilisation produces many of them--and the French
memoirs of the last century are particularly fraught with such examples.
This is interesting--the struggle of sensitive minds against the
lethargy of a society, dull, yet brilliant, that /glares/ them, as it
were, to sleep. It comes home to us; for," added Maltravers, with a
slight change of voice, "how many of us fancy we see our own image in
the mirror!"
And where was the German baron?--flirting at the other end of the room.
And the English lord?--dropping monosyllables to dandies by the doorway.
And the minor satellites?--dancing, whispering, making love, or sipping
lemonade. And Madame de Ventadour was alone with the young stranger in
a crowd of eight hundred persons; and their lips spoke of sentiment, and
their eyes involuntarily applied it!
While they were thus conversing, Maltravers was suddenly startled by
hearing close behind him, a sharp, significant voice, saying in French,
"Hein, hein! I've my suspicions--I've my suspicions."
Madame de Ventadour looked round with a smile. "It is only my husband,"
said she, quietly; "let me introduce him to you."
Maltravers rose and bowed to a little thin man, most elaborately
dressed, and with an immense pair of spectacles upon a long sharp nose.
"Charmed to make your acquaintance, sir!" said Monsieur de Ventadour.
"Have you been long in Naples? . . . Beautiful weather--won't last
long--hein, hein, I've my suspicions! No news as to your parliament--be
dissolved soon! Bad opera in London this year!--hein, hein--I've my
suspicions."
This rapid monologue was delivered with appropriate gesture. Each new
sentence Mons. de Ventadour began with a sort of bow, and when it
dropped in the almost invariable conclusion affirmative of his
shrewdness and incredulity, he made a mystical sign with his forefinger
by passing it upward in a parallel line with his nose, which at the same
time performed its own part in the ceremony by three convulsive
twitches, that seemed to shake the bridge to its base.
Maltravers looked with mute surprise upon the connubial partner of the
graceful creature by his side, and Mons. de Ventadour, who had said as
much as he thought necessary, wound up his eloquence by expressing the
rapture it would give him to see Mons. Maltravers at his hotel. Then,
turning to his wife, he began assuring her of the lateness of the hour,
and the expediency of departure. Maltravers glided away, and as he
regained the door was seized by our old friend, Lumley Ferrers. "Come,
my dear fellow," said the latter; "I have been waiting for you this half
hour. /Allons/. But, perhaps, as I am dying to go to bed, you have
made up your mind to stay supper. Some people have no regard for other
people's feelings."
"No, Ferrers, I'm at your service;" and the young man descended the
stairs and passed along the Chiaja towards their hotel. As they gained
the broad and open space on which it stood, with the lovely sea before
them, sleeping in the arms of the curving shore, Maltravers, who had
hitherto listened in silence to the volubility of his companion, paused
abruptly.
"Look at that sea, Ferrers. . . . What a scene!--what delicious air!
How soft this moonlight! Can you not fancy the old Greek adventurers,
when they first colonised this divine Parthenope--the darling of the
ocean--gazing along those waves, and pining no more for Greece?"
"I cannot fancy anything of the sort," said Ferrers. . . . "And, depend
upon it, the said gentlemen, at this hour of the night, unless they were
on some piratical excursion--for they were cursed ruffians, those old
Greek colonists--were fast asleep in their beds."
"Did you ever write poetry, Ferrers?"
"To be sure; all clever men have written poetry once in their
lives--small-pox and poetry--they are our two juvenile diseases."
"And did you ever /feel/ poetry!"
"Feel it!"
"Yes, if you put the moon into your verses, did you first feel it
shining into your heart?"
"My dear Maltravers, if I put the moon into my verses, in all
probability it was to rhyme to noon. 'The night was at her noon'--is a
capital ending for the first hexameter--and the moon is booked for the
next stage. Come in."
"No, I shall stay out."
"Don't be nonsensical."
"By moonlight there is no nonsense like common sense."
"What! we--who have climbed the Pyramids, and sailed up the Nile, and
seen magic at Cairo, and been nearly murdered, bagged, and Bosphorized
at Constantinople, is it for us, who have gone through so many
adventures, looked on so many scenes, and crowded into four years events
that would have satisfied the appetite of a cormorant in romance, if it
had lived to the age of a phoenix;--is it for us to be doing the pretty
and sighing to the moon, like a black-haired apprentice without a
neckcloth on board of the Margate hoy? Nonsense, I say--we have lived
too much not to have lived away our green sickness of sentiment."
"Perhaps you are right, Ferrers," said Maltravers, smiling. "But I can
still enjoy a beautiful night."
"Oh, if you like flies in your soup, as the man said to his guest, when
he carefully replaced those entomological blackamoors in the tureen,
after helping himself--if you like flies in your soup, well and
good--/buona notte/."
Ferrers certainly was right in his theory, that when we have known real
adventures we grow less morbidly sentimental. Life is a sleep in which
we dream most at the commencement and the close--the middle part absorbs
us too much for dreams. But still, as Maltravers said, we can enjoy a
fine night, especially on the shores of Naples.
Maltravers paced musingly to and fro for some time. His heart was
softened--old rhymes rang in his ear--old memories passed through his
brain. But the sweet dark eyes of Madame de Ventadour shone forth
through every shadow of the past. Delicious intoxication--the draught
of the rose-coloured phial--which is fancy, but seems love!
CHAPTER II.
"Then 'gan the Palmer thus--'Most wretched man
That to affections dost the bridle lend:
In their beginnings they are weak and wan,
But soon, through suffrance, growe to fearfull end;
While they are weak, betimes with them contend.'"
SPENSER.
MALTRAVERS went frequently to the house of Madame de Ventadour--it was
open twice a week to the world, and thrice a week to friends.
Maltravers was soon of the latter class. Madame de Ventadour had been
in England in her childhood, for her parents had been /emigres/. She
spoke English well and fluently, and this pleased Maltravers; for though
the French language was sufficiently familiar to him, he was like most
who are more vain of the mind than the person, and proudly averse to
hazarding his best thoughts in the domino of a foreign language. We
don't care how faulty the accent, or how incorrect the idiom, in which
we talk nothings; but if we utter any of the poetry within us, we
shudder at the risk of the most trifling solecism.
This was especially the case with Maltravers; for, besides being now
somewhat ripened from his careless boyhood into a proud and fastidious
man, he had a natural love for the Becoming. This love was
unconsciously visible in trifles: it is the natural parent of Good
Taste. And it was indeed an inborn good taste which redeemed Ernest's
natural carelessness in those personal matters in which young men
usually take a pride. An habitual and soldier-like neatness, and a love
of order and symmetry, stood with him in the stead of elaborate
attention to equipage and dress.
Maltravers had not thought twice in his life whether he was handsome or
not; and, like most men who have a knowledge of the gentler sex, he knew
that beauty had little to do with engaging the love of women. The air,
the manner, the tone, the conversation, the something that interests,
and the something to be proud of--these are the attributes of the man
made to be loved. And the Beauty-man is, nine times out of ten, little
more than the oracle of his aunts, and the "/Sich/ a love!" of the
housemaids!
To return from this digression, Maltravers was glad that he could talk
in his own language to Madame de Ventadour; and the conversation between
them generally began in French, and glided away into English. Madame de
Ventadour was eloquent, and so was Maltravers; yet a more complete
contrast in their mental views and conversational peculiarities can
scarcely be conceived. Madame de Ventadour viewed everything as a woman
of the world: she was brilliant, thoughtful, and not without delicacy
and tenderness of sentiment; still all was cast in a worldly mould. She
had been formed by the influences of society, and her mind betrayed its
education. At once witty and melancholy (no uncommon union), she was a
disciple of the sad but caustic philosophy produced by /satiety/. In
the life she led, neither her heart nor her head was engaged; the
faculties of both were irritated, not satisfied or employed. She felt
somewhat too sensitively the hollowness of the great world, and had a
low opinion of human nature. In fact, she was a woman of the French
memoirs--one of those charming and /spirituelles/ Aspasias of the
boudoir, who interest us by their subtlety, tact, and grace, their
exquisite tone of refinement, and are redeemed from the superficial and
frivolous, partly by a consummate knowledge of the social system in
which they move, and partly by a half-concealed and touching discontent
of the trifles on which their talents and affections are wasted. These
are the women who, after a youth of false pleasure, often end by an old
age of false devotion. They are a class peculiar to those ranks and
countries in which shines and saddens that gay and unhappy thing--/a
woman without a home/!
Now this was a specimen of life--this Valerie de Ventadour--that
Maltravers had never yet contemplated, and Maltravers was perhaps
equally new to the Frenchwoman. They were delighted with each other's
society, although it so happened that they never agreed.
Madame de Ventadour rode on horseback, and Maltravers was one of her
usual companions. And oh, the beautiful landscapes through which their
daily excursions lay!
Maltravers was an admirable scholar. The stores of the immortal dead
were as familiar to him as his own language. The poetry, the
philosophy, the manner of thought and habits of life--of the graceful
Greek and the luxurious Roman--were a part of knowledge that constituted
a common and household portion of his own associations and peculiarities
of thought. He had saturated his intellect with the Pactolus of
old--and the grains of gold came down from the classic Tmolus with every
tide. This knowledge of the dead, often so useless, has an
inexpressible charm when it is applied to the places where the dead
lived. We care nothing about the ancients on Highgate Hill--but at
Baiae, Pompeii, by the Virgilian Hades, the ancients are society with
which we thirst to be familiar. To the animated and curious Frenchwoman
what a cicerone was Ernest Maltravers! How eagerly she listened to
accounts of a life more elegant than that of Paris!--of a civilisation
which the world never can know again! So much the better;--for it was
rotten at the core, though most brilliant in the complexion. Those cold
names and unsubstantial shadows which Madame de Ventadour had been
accustomed to yawn over in skeleton histories, took from the eloquence
of Maltravers the breath of life--they glowed and moved--they feasted
and made love--were wise and foolish, merry and sad, like living things.
On the other hand, Maltravers learned a thousand new secrets of the
existing and actual world from the lips of the accomplished and
observant Valerie. What a new step in the philosophy of life does a
young man of genius make, when he first compares his theories and
experience with the intellect of a clever woman of the world! Perhaps
it does not elevate him, but how it enlightens and refines!--what
numberless minute yet important mysteries in human character and
practical wisdom does he drink unconsciously from the sparkling
/persiflage/ of such a companion! Our education is hardly ever complete
without it.
"And so you think these stately Romans were not, after all, so
dissimilar to ourselves?" said Valerie, one day, as they looked over the
same earth and ocean along which had roved the eyes of the voluptuous
but august Lucullus.
"In the last days of their Republic, a /coup-d'oeil of their social date
might convey to us a general notion of our own. Their system, like
ours--a vast aristocracy heaved and agitated, but kept ambitious and
intellectual, by the great democratic ocean which roared below and
around it. An immense distinction between rich and poor--a nobility
sumptuous, wealthy, cultivated, yet scarcely elegant or refined; a
people with mighty aspirations for more perfect liberty, but always
liable, in a crisis, to be influenced and subdued by a deep-rooted
veneration for the very aristocracy against which they struggled;--a
ready opening through all the walls of custom and privilege, for every
description of talent and ambition; but so strong and universal a
respect for wealth, that the finest spirit grew avaricious, griping, and
corrupt, almost unconsciously; and the man who rose from the people did
not scruple to enrich himself out of the abuses he affected to lament;
and the man who would have died for his country could not help thrusting
his hands into her pockets. Cassius, the stubborn and thoughtful
patriot, with his heart of iron, had, you remember, an itching palm.
Yet, what a blow to all the hopes and dreams of a world was the
overthrow of the free party after the death of Caesar! What generations
of freemen fell at Philippi! In England, perhaps, we may have
ultimately the same struggle; in France, too (perhaps a larger stage,
with far more inflammable actors), we already perceive the same war of
elements which shook Rome to her centre, which finally replaced the
generous Julius with the hypocritical Augustus, which destroyed the
colossal patricians to make way for the glittering dwarfs of a court,
and cheated the people out of the substance with the shadow of liberty.
How it may end in the modern world, who shall say? But while a nation
has already a fair degree of constitutional freedom, I believe no
struggle so perilous and awful as that between the aristocratic and the
democratic principle. A people against a despot--/that/ contest
requires no prophet; but the change from an aristocratic to a democratic
commonwealth is indeed the wide, unbounded prospect upon which rest
shadows, clouds, and darkness. If it fail--for centuries is the
dial-hand of Time put back; if it succeed--"
Maltravers paused.
"And if it succeed?" said Valerie.
"Why, then, man will have colonised Utopia!" replied Maltravers.
"But at least, in modern Europe," he continued, "there will be fair room
for the experiment. For we have not that curse of slavery which, more
than all else, vitiated every system of the ancients, and kept the rich
and the poor alternately at war; and we have a press, which is not only
the safety-valve of the passions of every party, but the great note-book
of the experiments of every hour--the homely, the invaluable ledger of
losses and of gains. No; the people who keep that tablet well, never
can be bankrupt. And the society of those old Romans; their daily
passions--occupations--humours!--why, the satire of Horace is the glass
of our own follies! We may fancy his easy pages written in the Chaussee
d'Antin, or Mayfair; but there was one thing that will ever keep the
ancient world dissimilar from the modern."