Book: The Parisians, Book 3.

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THE PARISIANS

By Edward Bulwer-Lytton

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

The next day the guests at the Morleys' had assembled when Vane entered.
His apology for unpunctuality was cut short by the lively hostess. "Your
pardon is granted without the humiliation of asking for it; we know that
the characteristic of the English is always to be a little behindhand."

She then proceeded to introduce him to the American Minister, to a
distinguished American poet, with a countenance striking for mingled
sweetness and power, and one or two other of her countrymen sojourning at
Paris; and this ceremony over, dinner was announced, and she bade Graham
offer his arm to Mademoiselle Cicogna.

"Have you ever visited the United States, Mademoiselle?" asked Vane, as
they seated themselves at the table.

"No."

"It is a voyage you are sure to make soon."

"Why so?"

"Because report says you will create a great sensation at the very
commencement of your career; and the New World is ever eager to welcome
each celebrity that is achieved in the Old,--more especially that which
belongs to your enchanting art."

"True, sir," said an American senator, solemnly striking into the
conversation; "we are an appreciative people; and if that lady be as fine
a singer as I am told, she might command any amount of dollars."

Isaura coloured, and turning to Graham, asked him in a low voice if he
were fond of music.

"I ought of course to say 'yes,' answered Graham, in the same tone; "but
I doubt if that 'yes' would be an honest one. In some moods, music--if a
kind of music I like--affects me very deeply; in other moods, not at all.
And I cannot bear much at a time. A concert wearies me shamefully; even
an opera always seems to me a great deal too long. But I ought to add
that I am no judge of music; that music was never admitted into my
education; and, between ourselves, I doubt if there be one Englishman in
five hundred who would care for opera or concert if it were not the
fashion to say he did. Does my frankness revolt you?"

"On the contrary, I sometimes doubt, especially of late, if I am fond of
music myself."

"Signorina,--pardon me,--it is impossible that you should not be. Genius
can never be untrue to itself, and must love that in which it excels,
that by which it communicates joy, and," he added, with a half-suppressed
sigh, "attains to glory."

"Genius is a divine word, and not to be applied to a singer," said
Isaura, with a humility in which there was an earnest sadness.

Graham was touched and startled; but before he could answer, the American
Minister appealed to him across the table, asking if he had quoted
accurately a passage in a speech by Graham's distinguished father, in
regard to the share which England ought to take in the political affairs
of Europe.

The conversation now became general, very political and very serious.
Graham was drawn into it, and grew animated and eloquent.

Isaura listened to him with admiration. She was struck by what seemed to
her a nobleness of sentiment which elevated his theme above the level of
commonplace polemics. She was pleased to notice, in the attentive
silence of his intelligent listeners, that they shared the effect
produced on herself. In fact, Graham Vane was a born orator, and his
studies had been those of a political thinker. In common talk he was but
the accomplished man of the world, easy and frank and genial, with a
touch of good-natured sarcasm; but when the subject started drew him
upward to those heights in which politics become the science of humanity,
he seemed a changed being. His cheek glowed, his eye brightened, his
voice mellowed into richer tones, his language be came unconsciously
adorned. In such moments there might scarcely be an audience, even
differing from him in opinion, which would not have acknowledged his
spell.

When the party adjourned to the salon, Isaura said softly to Graham, "I
understand why you did not cultivate music; and I think, too, that I can
now understand what effects the human voice can produce on human minds
without recurring to the art of song."

"Ah," said Graham, with a pleased smile, "do not make me ashamed of my
former rudeness by the revenge of compliment; and, above all, do not
disparage your own art by supposing that any prose effect of voice in its
utterance of mind can interpret that which music alone can express, even
to listeners so uncultured as myself. Am I not told truly by musical
composers, when I ask them to explain in words what they say in their
music, that such explanation is impossible, that music has a language of
its own untranslatable by words?"

"Yes," said Isaura, with thoughtful brow but brightening eyes, "you are
told truly. It was only the other day that I was pondering over that
truth."

"But what recesses of mind, of heart, of soul, this untranslatable
language penetrates and brightens up! How incomplete the grand nature of
man--though man the grandest--would be, if you struck out of his reason
the comprehension of poetry, music, and religion! In each are reached
and are sounded deeps in his reason otherwise concealed from himself.
History, knowledge, science, stop at the point in which mystery begins.
There they meet with the world of shadow. Not an inch of that world can
they penetrate without the aid of poetry and religion, two necessities of
intellectual man much more nearly allied than the votaries of the
practical and the positive suppose. To the aid and elevation of both
those necessities comes in music, and there has never existed a religion
in the world which has not demanded music as its ally. If, as I said
frankly, it is only in certain moods of my mind that I enjoy music, it is
only because in certain moods of my mind I am capable of quitting the
guidance of prosaic reason for the world of shadow; that I am so
susceptible as at every hour, were my nature perfect, I should be to the
mysterious influences of poetry and religion. Do you understand what I
wish to express?"

"Yes, I do, and clearly."

"Then, Signorina, you are forbidden to undervalue the gift of song. You
must feel its power over the heart, when you enter the opera-house; over
the soul, when you kneel in a cathedral."

"Oh," cried Isaura, with enthusiasm, a rich glow mantling over her lovely
face, "how I thank you! Is it you who say you do not love music? How
much better you understand it than I did till this moment!"

Here Mrs. Morley, joined by the American poet, came to the corner in
which the Englishman and the singer had niched themselves. The poet
began to talk, the other guests gathered round, and every one listened
reverentially till the party broke up. Colonel Morley handed Isaura to
her carriage; the she-mountebank again fell to the lot of Graham.

"Signor," said she, as he respectfully placed her shawl round her
scarlet-and-gilt jacket, "are we so far from Paris that you cannot spare
the time to call? My child does not sing in public, but at home you can
hear her. It is not every woman's voice that is sweetest at home."

Graham bowed, and said he would call on the morrow. Isaura mused in
silent delight over the words which had so extolled the art of the
singer. Alas, poor child! she could not guess that in those words,
reconciling her to the profession of the stage, the speaker was pleading
against his own heart.

There was in Graham's nature, as I think it commonly is in that of most
true orators, a wonderful degree of intellectual conscience which
impelled him to acknowledge the benignant influences of song, and to set
before the young singer the noblest incentives to the profession to which
he deemed her assuredly destined; but in so doing he must have felt that
he was widening the gulf between her life and his own. Perhaps he wished
to widen it in proportion as he dreaded to listen to any voice in his
heart which asked if the gulf might not be overleapt.

CHAPTER II.

ON the morrow Graham called at the villa at A------. The two ladies
received him in Isaura's chosen sitting-room.

Somehow or other, conversation at first languished. Graham was reserved
and distant, Isaura shy and embarrassed. The Venosta had the frais of
making talk to herself. Probably at another time Graham would have been
amused and interested in the observation of a character new to him, and
thoroughly southern,--lovable not more from its naive simplicity of
kindliness than from various little foibles and vanities, all of which
were harmless, and some of them endearing as those of a child whom it is
easy to make happy, and whom it seems so cruel to pain; and with all the
Venosta's deviations from the polished and tranquil good taste of the
beau monde, she had that indescribable grace which rarely deserts a
Florentine, so that you might call her odd but not vulgar; while, though
uneducated, except in the way of her old profession, and never having
troubled herself to read anything but a libretto and the pious books
commended to her by her confessor, the artless babble of her talk every
now and then flashed out with a quaint humour, lighting up terse
fragments of the old Italian wisdom which had mysteriously embedded
themselves in the groundwork of her mind.

But Graham was not at this time disposed to judge the poor Venosta kindly
or fairly. Isaura had taken high rank in his thoughts. He felt an
impatient resentment mingled with anxiety and compassionate tenderness at
a companionship which seemed to him derogatory to the position he would
have assigned to a creature so gifted, and unsafe as a guide amidst the
perils and trials to which the youth, the beauty, and the destined
profession of Isaura were exposed. Like most Englishmen--especially
Englishmen wise in the knowledge of life--he held in fastidious regard
the proprieties and conventions by which the dignity of woman is fenced
round; and of those proprieties and conventions the Venosta naturally
appeared to him a very unsatisfactory guardian and representative.

Happily unconscious of these hostile prepossessions, the elder Signora
chatted on very gayly to the visitor. She was in excellent spirits;
people had been very civil to her both at Colonel Morley's and M.
Louvier's. The American Minister had praised the scarlet jacket. She
was convinced she had made a sensation two nights running. When the
_amour propre_ is pleased, the tongue is freed.

The Venosta ran on in praise of Paris and the Parisians; of Louvier and
his soiree and the pistachio ice; of the Americans, and a certain _creme
de maraschino_ which she hoped the Signor Inglese had not failed to
taste,--the _creme de maraschino_ led her thoughts back to Italy. Then
she grew mournful. How she missed the native _beau ciel_! Paris was
pleasant, but how absurd to call it "le Paradis des Femmes,"--as if les
Femmes could find Paradise in a _brouillard_!

"But," she exclaimed, with vivacity of voice and gesticulation, "the
Signor does not come to hear the parrot talk; he is engaged to come that
he may hear the nightingale sing. A drop of honey attracts the fly more
than a bottle of vinegar."

Graham could not help smiling at this adage. "I submit," said he, "to
your comparison as regards myself; but certainly anything less like a
bottle of vinegar than your amiable conversation I cannot well conceive.
However, the metaphor apart, I scarcely know how I dare ask Mademoiselle
to sing after the confession I made to her last night."

"What confession?" asked the Venosta.

"That I know nothing of music and doubt if I can honestly say that I am
fond of it."

"Not fond of music! Impossible! You slander yourself. He who loves not
music would have a dull time of it in heaven. But you are English, and
perhaps have only heard the music of your own country. Bad, very bad--a
heretic's music! Now listen."

Seating herself at the piano, she began an air from the "Lucia," crying
out to Isaura to come and sing to her accompaniment.

"Do you really wish it?" asked Isaura of Graham, fixing on him
questioning, timid eyes.

"I cannot say how much I wish to hear you."

Isaura moved to the instrument, and Graham stood behind her. Perhaps he
felt that he should judge more impartially of her voice if not subjected
to the charm of her face.

But the first note of the voice held him spell-bound. In itself the
organ was of the rarest order, mellow and rich, but so soft that its
power was lost in its sweetness, and so exquisitely fresh in every note.

But the singer's charm was less in voice than in feeling; she conveyed to
the listener so much more than was said by the words, or even implied by
the music. Her song in this caught the art of the painter who impresses
the mind with the consciousness of a something which the eye cannot
detect on the canvas.

She seemed to breathe out from the depths of her heart the intense pathos
of the original romance, so far exceeding that of the opera,-the human
tenderness, the mystic terror of a tragic love-tale more solemn in its
sweetness than that of Verona.

When her voice died away no applause came,--not even a murmur. Isaura
bashfully turned round to steal a glance at her silent listener, and
beheld moistened eyes and quivering lips. At that moment she was
reconciled to her art. Graham rose abruptly and walked to the window.

"Do you doubt now if you are fond of music?" cried the Venosta.

"This is more than music," answered Graham, still with averted face.
Then, after a short pause, he approached Isaura, and said, with a
melancholy half-smile,--

"I do not think, Mademoiselle, that I could dare to hear you often; it
would take me too far from the hard real world: and he who would not be
left behindhand on the road that he must journey cannot indulge frequent
excursions into fairyland."

"Yet," said Isaura, in a tone yet sadder, "I was told in my childhood, by
one whose genius gives authority to her words, that beside the real world
lies the ideal. The real world then seemed rough to me. 'Escape,' said
my counsellor, 'is granted from that stony thoroughfare into the fields
beyond its formal hedgerows. The ideal world has its sorrows, but it
never admits despair.' That counsel then, methought, decided my choice
of life. I know not now if it has done so."

"Fate," answered Graham, slowly and thoughtfully, "Fate, which is not
the ruler but the servant of Providence, decides our choice of life, and
rarely from outward circumstances. Usually the motive power is within.
We apply the word 'genius' to the minds of the gifted few; but in all of
us there is a genius that is inborn, a pervading something which
distinguishes our very identity, and dictates to the conscience that
which we are best fitted to do and to be. In so dictating it compels
our choice of life; or if we resist the dictate, we find at the close
that we have gone astray. My choice of life thus compelled is on the
stony thoroughfares, yours in the green fields."

As he thus said, his face became clouded and mournful. The Venosta,
quickly tired of a conversation in which she had no part, and having
various little household matters to attend to, had during this dialogue
slipped unobserved from the room; yet neither Isaura nor Graham felt the
sudden consciousness that they were alone which belongs to lovers.
"Why," asked Isaura, with that magic smile reflected in countless dimples
which, even when her words were those of a man's reasoning, made them
seem gentle with a woman's sentiment,--"why must your road through the
world be so exclusively the stony one? It is not from necessity, it can.
not be from taste; and whatever definition you give to genius, surely it
is not your own inborn genius that dictates to you a constant exclusive
adherence to the commonplace of life."

"Ah, Mademoiselle, do not misrepresent me. I did not say that I could
not sometimes quit the real world for fairyland,--I said that I could not
do so often. My vocation is not that of a poet or artist."

"It is that of an orator, I know," said Isaura, kindling; "so they tell
me, and I believe them. But is not the orator somewhat akin to the poet?
Is not oratory an art?"

"Let us dismiss the word orator; as applied to English public life, it is
a very deceptive expression. The Englishman who wishes to influence his
countrymen by force of words spoken must mix with them in their beaten
thoroughfares; must make himself master of their practical views and
interests; must be conversant with their prosaic occupations and
business; must understand how to adjust their loftiest aspirations to
their material welfare; must avoid as the fault most dangerous to himself
and to others that kind of eloquence which is called oratory in France,
and which has helped to make the French the worst politicians in Europe.
Alas! Mademoiselle, I fear that an English statesman would appear to you
a very dull orator."

"I see that I spoke foolishly,--yes, you show me that the world of the
statesman lies apart from that of the artist. Yet--"

"Yet what?"

"May not the ambition of both be the same?"

"How so?"

"To refine the rude, to exalt the mean; to identify their own fame with
some new beauty, some new glory, added to the treasure-house of all."

Graham bowed his head reverently, and then raised it with the flush of
enthusiasm on his cheek and brow.

"Oh, Mademoiselle," he exclaimed, "what a sure guide and what a noble
inspirer to a true Englishman's ambition nature has fitted you to be,
were it not--" He paused abruptly.

This outburst took Isaura utterly by surprise. She had been accustomed
to the language of compliment till it had begun to pall, but a compliment
of this kind was the first that had ever reached her ear. She had no
words in answer to it; involuntarily she placed her hand on her heart as
if to still its beatings. But the unfinished exclamation, "Were it not,"
troubled her more than the preceding words had flattered, and
mechanically she murmured, "Were it not--what?"

"Oh," answered Graham, affecting a tone of gayety, "I felt too ashamed of
my selfishness as man to finish my sentence."

"Do so, or I shall fancy you refrained lest you might wound me as woman."

"Not so; on the contrary, had I gone on it would have been to say that a
woman of your genius, and more especially of such mastery in the most
popular and fascinating of all arts, could not be contented if she
inspired nobler thoughts in a single breast,--she must belong to the
public, or rather the public must belong to her; it is but a corner of
her heart that an individual can occupy, and even that individual must
merge his existence in hers, must be contented to reflect a ray of the
light she sheds on admiring thousands. Who could dare to say to you,
'Renounce your career; confine your genius, your art, to the petty circle
of home'? To an actress, a singer, with whose fame the world rings, home
would be a prison. Pardon me, pardon--"

Isaura had turned away her face to hide tears that would force their way;
but she held out her hand to him with a childlike frankness, and said
softly, "I am not offended." Graham did not trust himself to continue
the same strain of conversation. Breaking into a new subject, he said,
after a constrained pause, "Will you think it very impertinent in so new
an acquaintance, if I ask how it is that you, an Italian, know our
language as a native; and is it by Italian teachers that you have been
trained to think and to feel?"

"Mr. Selby, my second father, was an Englishman, and did not speak any
other language with comfort to himself. He was very fond of me; and had
he been really my father I could not have loved him more. We were
constant companions till--till I lost him."

"And no mother left to console you!"

Isaura shook her head mournfully, and the Venosta here re-entered.
Graham felt conscious that he had already stayed too long, and took
leave.

They knew that they were to meet that evening at the Savarins'.

To Graham that thought was not one of unmixed pleasure; the more he knew
of Isaura, the more he felt self-reproach that he had allowed himself to
know her at all.

But after he had left, Isaura sang low to herself the song which had so
affected her listener; then she fell into abstracted revery, but she felt
a strange and new sort of happiness. In dressing for M. Savarin's
dinner, and twining the classic ivy wreath in her dark locks, her Italian
servant exclaimed, "How beautiful the Signorina looks to-night!"

CHAPTER III.

M. Savarin was one of the most brilliant of that galaxy of literary men
which shed lustre on the reign of Louis Philippe.

His was an intellect peculiarly French in its lightness and grace.
Neither England nor Germany nor America has produced any resemblance to
it. Ireland has, in Thomas Moore; but then in Irish genius there is so
much that is French.

M. Savarin was free from the ostentatious extravagance which had come
into vogue with the Empire. His house and establishment were modestly
maintained within the limit of an income chiefly, perhaps entirely,
derived from literary profits.

Though he gave frequent dinners, it was but to few at a time, and without
show or pretence. Yet the dinners, though simple, were perfect of their
kind; and the host so contrived to infuse his own playful gayety into the
temper of his guests, that the feasts at his house were considered the
pleasantest at Paris. On this occasion the party extended to ten, the
largest number his table admitted.

All the French guests belonged to the Liberal party, though in changing
tints of the tricolor. _Place aux dames_! first to be named were the
Countess de Craon and Madame Vertot, both without husbands. The Countess
had buried the Count, Madame Vertot had separated from Monsieur. The
Countess was very handsome, but she was sixty; Madame Vertot was twenty
years younger, but she was very plain. She had quarrelled with the
distinguished author for whose sake she had separated from Monsieur, and
no man had since presumed to think that he could console a lady so plain
for the loss of an author so distinguished.

Both these ladies were very clever. The Countess had written lyrical
poems entitled "Cries of Liberty," and a drama of which Danton was the
hero, and the moral too revolutionary for admission to the stage; but at
heart the Countess was not at all a revolutionist,--the last person in
the world to do or desire anything that could bring a washerwoman an inch
nearer to a countess. She was one of those persons who play with fire in
order to appear enlightened.

Madame Vertot was of severer mould. She had knelt at the feet of M.
Thiers, and went into the historico-political line. She had written a
remarkable book upon the modern Carthage (meaning England), and more
recently a work that had excited much attention upon the Balance of
Power, in which she proved it to be the interest of civilization and the
necessity of Europe that Belgium should be added to France, and Prussia
circumscribed to the bounds of its original margraviate. She showed how
easily these two objects could have been effected by a constitutional
monarch instead of an egotistical Emperor. Madame Vertot was a decided
Orleanist.

Both these ladies condescended to put aside authorship in general
society. Next amongst our guests let me place the Count de Passy and
_Madame son espouse_. The Count was seventy-one, and, it is needless to
add, a type of Frenchman rapidly vanishing, and not likely to find itself
renewed. How shall I describe him so as to make my English reader
understand? Let me try by analogy. Suppose a man of great birth and
fortune, who in his youth had been an enthusiastic friend of Lord Byron
and a jocund companion of George IV.; who had in him an immense degree of
lofty romantic sentiment with an equal degree of well-bred worldly
cynicism, but who, on account of that admixture, which is so rare, kept a
high rank in either of the two societies into which, speaking broadly,
civilized life divides itself,--the romantic and the cynical. The Count
de Passy had been the most ardent among the young disciples of
Chateaubriand, the most brilliant among the young courtiers of Charles X.
Need I add that he had been a terrible lady-killer?

But in spite of his admiration of Chateaubriand and his allegiance to
Charles X., the Count had been always true to those caprices of the
French noblesse from which he descended,--caprices which destroyed them
in the old Revolution; caprices belonging to the splendid ignorance of
their nation in general and their order in particular. Speaking without
regard to partial exceptions, the French _gentilhomme_ is essentially a
Parisian; a Parisian is essentially impressionable to the impulse or
fashion of the moment. Is it _a la mode_ for the moment to be Liberal or
anti-Liberal? Parisians embrace and kiss each other, and swear through
life and death to adhere forever to the mode of the moment. The Three
Days were the mode of the moment,--the Count de Passy became an
enthusiastic Orleanist. Louis Philippe was very gracious to him. He was
decorated; he was named _prefet_ of his department; he was created
senator; he was about to be sent Minister to a German Court when Louis
Philippe fell. The Republic was proclaimed. The Count caught the
popular contagion, and after exchanging tears and kisses with patriots
whom a week before he had called _canaille_, he swore eternal fidelity to
the Republic. The fashion of the moment suddenly became Napoleonic, and
with the _coup d'etat_ the Republic was metamorphosed into an Empire.
The Count wept on the bosoms of all the _Vieilles Moustaches_ he could
find, and rejoiced that the sun of Austerlitz had re-arisen. But after
the affair of Mexico the sun of Austerlitz waxed very sickly.
Imperialism was fast going out of fashion. The Count transferred his
affection to Jules Favre, and joined the ranks of the advanced Liberals.
During all these political changes, the Count had remained very much the
same man in private life; agreeable, good-natured, witty, and, above all,
a devotee of the fair sex. When he had reached the age of sixty-eight he
was still _fort bel homme_, unmarried, with a grand presence and charming
manner. At that age he said, "Je me range," and married a young lady of
eighteen. She adored her husband, and was wildly jealous of him; while
the Count did not seem at all jealous of her, and submitted to her
adoration with a gentle shrug of the shoulders.

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