A STUDY A LA LOUIS QUINZE;

OR,

PENDANT TO A PASTEL BY LA TOUR.

I have, among others hanging on my wall, a pastel of La Tour's; of the artist-lover of Julie Fel, of the monarch of pastellistes, the touch of whose crayons was a "brevet of wit and of beauty," and on whose easel bloomed afresh the laughing eyes, the brilliant tints, the rose-hued lips of all the loveliest women of the "Règne Galant," from the princesses of the Blood of the House of Bourbon to the princesses of the green-room of the Comédie-Française. Painted in the days of Louis Quinze, the light of more than a century having fallen on its soft colors to fade and blot them with the icy brush of time, my pastel is still fresh, still eloquent. The genius that created it is gone—gone the beauty that inspired it—but the picture is deathless! It shows me the face of a woman, of a beautiful woman, else, be sure she would not have been honored by the crayons of La Tour; her full Southern lips are parted with a smile of triumph; a chef-d'[oe]uvre of coquetry, a head-dress of lace and pearls and little bouquets of roses is on her unpowdered hair, which is arranged much like Julie Fel's herself in the portrait that hangs, if I remember right, at the Musée de Saint Quentin; and her large eyes are glancing at you with languor, malice, victory, all commingled. At the back of the picture is written "Mlle. Thargélie Dumarsais;" the letters are faded and yellow, but the pastel is living and laughing yet, through the divine touch of the genius of La Tour. With its perfume of dead glories, with its odor of the Beau Siècle, the pastel hangs on my wall, living relic of a buried age, and sometimes in my mournful moments the full laughing lips of my pastel will part, and breathe, and speak to me of the distant past, when Thargélie Dumarsais saw all Paris at her feet, and was not humbled then as now by being only valued and remembered for the sake of the talent of La Tour. My beautiful pastel gives me many confidences. I will betray one to you—a single leaf from a life of the eighteenth century.

I.

THE FIRST MORNING.

In the heart of Lorraine, nestled down among its woods, stood an old château that might have been the château of the Sleeping Beauty of fairy fame, so sequestered it stood amidst its trees chained together by fragrant fetters of honeysuckle and wild vine, so undisturbed slept the morning shadows on the wild thyme that covered the turf, so unbroken was the silence in which the leaves barely stirred, and the birds folded their wings and hushed their song till the heat of the noonday should be passed. Beyond the purple hills stretching up in the soft haze of distance in the same province of laughing, luxurious, sunlit Lorraine, was Lunéville, the Lunéville of Stanislaus, Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Hénault, of Boufflers, a Versailles in miniature, even possessing a perfect replica of Pompadour in its own pretty pagan of a Marquise. Within a few leagues was Lunéville, but the echo of its mots and madrigals did not reach over the hills, did not profane the sunny air, did not mingle with the vintage-song of the vine-dressers, the silver babble of the woodland brook, the hushed chant of the Ave Maria, the vesper bells chimed from the churches and monasteries, which made the sole music known or heard in this little valley of Lorraine.

The château of Grande Charmille stood nestled in its woods, gray, lonely, still, silent as death, yet not gloomy, for white pigeons circled above its pointed towers, brilliant dragon-flies fluttered above the broken basin of the fountain that sang as gayly as it rippled among the thyme as though it fell into a marble cup, and bees hummed their busy happy buzz among the jessamine that clung to its ivy-covered walls—walls built long before Lorraine had ceased to be a kingdom and a power, long before a craven and effeminated Valois had dared to kick the dead body of a slaughtered Guise. Not gloomy with the golden light of a summer noon playing amidst the tangled boughs and on the silvered lichens; not gloomy, for under the elm-boughs on the broken stone steps that led to the fountain, her feet half buried in violet-roots and wild thyme, leaning her head on her hand, as she looked into the water, where the birds flew down to drink, and fluttered their wings fearless of her presence, was a young girl of sixteen—and if women sometimes darken lives, it must be allowed that they always illumine landscapes!

Aline, when Boufflers saw her in the spring morning, in all the grace of youth and beauty, unconscious of themselves, made not a prettier picture than this young dreamer under the elm-boughs of the Lorraine woods, as she bent over the water, watching it bubble and splash from the fountain-spout, and hide itself with a rippling murmur under the broad green reeds and the leaves of the water-lily. She was a charming picture: a brunette with long ebon tresses, with her lashes drooping over her black, languid, almond-shaped eyes, a smile on her half-pouted lips, and all the innocence and dawning beauty of her sixteen years about her, while she sat on the broken steps, now brushing the water-drops off the violets, now weaving the reeds into a pretty, useless toy, now beckoning the birds that came to peck on the rose-sprays beside her.

"Favette! where are your dreams?"

Favette, the young naïad of the Lorraine elm-woods, looked up, the plait of rushes dropping from her hands, and a warm sudden blush tinging her cheeks and brow with a tint like that on the damask rose-leaves that had fallen into the water, and floated there like delicate shells.

"Mon Dieu, Monsieur Léon! how you frightened me!"

And like a startled fawn, or a young bird glancing round at a rustle amidst the leaves, Favette sprang up, half shy, half smiling, all her treasures gathered from the woods—of flowers, of mosses, of berries, of feathery grasses, of long ivy-sprays—falling from her lap on to the turf in unheeded disorder.

"I frightened you, Favette? Surely not. Are you sorry to see me, then?"

"Sorry? Oh no, Monsieur Léon!" and Favette glanced through her thick curled lashes, slyly yet archly, and began to braid again her plait of rushes.

"Come, tell me, then, what and whom were you dreaming of, ma mie, as you looked down into the water? Tell me, Favette. You have no secrets from your playmate, your friend, your brother?"

Favette shook her head, smiling, and plaited her rushes all wrong, the blush on her cheeks as bright as that on the cups of the rose-leaves that the wind shook down in a fresh shower into the brook.

"Come, tell me, mignonne. Was it—of me?"

"Of you? Well, perhaps—yes!"

It was first love that whispered in Favette's pretty voice those three little words; it was first love that answered in his, as he threw himself down on the violet-tufted turf at her feet, as Boufflers at Aline's.

"Ah, Favette, so should it be! for every hope, every dream, every thought of mine, is centred in and colored by you."

"Yet you can leave me to-day," pouted Favette, with a sigh and a moue mutine, and gathering tears in her large gazelle eyes.

"Leave you? Would to Heaven I were not forced! But against a king's will what power has a subject? None are too great, none are too lowly, to be touched by that iron hand if they provoke its grasp. Vincennes yawns for those who dare to think, For-l'Evêque for those who dare to jest. Monsieur de Voltaire was sent to the Bastille for merely defending a truth and his own honor against De Rohan-Chabot. Who am I, that I should look for better grace?"

Favette struck him, with her plaited rushes, a reproachful little blow.

"Monsieur Vincennes—Monsieur Voltaire—who are they? I know nothing of those stupid people!"

He smiled, and fondly stroked her hair:

"Little darling! The one is a prison that manacles the deadly crimes of Free Speech and Free Thought; the other, a man who has suffered for both, but loves both still, and will, sooner or later, help to give both to the world——"

"Ah, you think of your studies, of your ambitions, of your great heroes! You think nothing of me, save to call me a little darling. You are cruel, Monsieur Léon!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

THE SECOND MORNING.

"Savez-vous que Favart va écrire une nouvelle comédie—La Chercheuse d'Esprit?"

"Vraiment? Il doit bien écrire cela, car il s'occupe toujours à le chercher, et n'arrive jamais à le trouver!"

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

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

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

Lords of the chamber obeyed her wishes, ministers signed lettres de cachet at her instance; "ces messieurs," la Queue de la Régence, had their rendezvous at her suppers; she had a country villa that eclipsed Trianon; she had fêtes that outshone the fêtes at Versailles; she had a "droit de chasse" in one of the royal districts; she had the first place on the easels of Coypel, Lancret, Pater, Vanloo, La Tour; the first place in the butterfly odes of Crébillon le Gai, Claude Dorat; Voisenon.

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

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

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

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

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

Oui l'Amour papillonne, sans entraves, à son gré; Chargé longtemps de fers, de soie même, il mourrait!—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Madame, is there not my father?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

MIDNIGHT.

The Français was crowded. Thargélie Dumarsais, great in Electre, Chimène, Inès, as in "Ninette à la Cour," "Les Moissonneurs," or "Annette et Lubin," was playing in "Phèdre." Louis Quinze was present, with all the powdered marquises, the titled wits, the glittering gentlemen of the Court of Versailles; but no presence stayed the shout of adoration with which the parterre welcomed the idol of the hour, and Louis le Bien-aimé (des femmes!) himself added his royal quota to the ovation, and threw at her feet a diamond, superb as any in his regalia. It was whispered that the Most Christian King was growing envious of his favorite's favor with la Dumarsais, and would, ere long, supersede him.

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

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

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

"We are late, but that is always a more pardonable fault than to be too early," said the Marquis, as they were ushered across the vestibule, through several salons, into the supper-room, hung with rich tapestries of "Les Nymphes au Bain," "Diane Chasseresse," and "Apollon et Daphné;" with gilded consoles, and rosewood buffets, enamelled with medallion groups, and crowded with Sèvres and porcelaine de Saxe, while Venetian mirrors at each end of the salle reflected the table, with its wines, and fruits, and flowers, its gold dishes and Bohemian glass. The air was heavily perfumed, and vibrating with laughter. The guests were Richelieu, Bièvre, Saxe, D'Etissac, Montcrif, and lovely Marie Camargo, the queen of the coulisses who introduced the "short skirts" of the ballet, and upheld her innovation so stanchly amidst the outcries of scandalized Jansenists and journalists. But even Marie Camargo herself paled—and would have paled even had she been, what she was not, in the first flush of her youth—before the superb beauty, the languid voluptuousness, the sensuous grace, the southern eyes, the full lips, like the open leaves of a damask rose, melting yet mocking, of the most beautiful and most notorious woman of a day in which beauty and notoriety were rife, the woman with the diamond of Louis Quinze sparkling in the light upon her bosom, whom Versailles and Paris hailed as Thargélie Dumarsais.

The air, scented with amber, rang with the gay echoes of a stanza of Dorat's, chanted by Marie Camargo; the "Cupids and Bacchantes," painted in the panels of Sèvres, seemed to laugh in sympathy with the revel over which they presided; the light flashed on the King's diamond, to which Richelieu pointed, with a wicked whisper; for the Marshal was getting tired of his own reign, and his master might pay his court when he would. Thargélie Dumarsais, more beautiful still at her petit souper than at her petit lever, with her hair crowned with roses, true flowers of Venus that might have crowned Aspasia, looked up laughingly as her lacqueys ushered in le Marquis de la Thorillière and le Chevalier de Tallemont.

"M. le Marquis," cried the actress, "you are late! It is an impertinence forbidden at my court. I shall sup in future with barred doors, like M. d'Orléans; then all you late-comers——"

Through the scented air, through the echoing laughter, stopping her own words, broke a startled bitter cry:

"Mon Dieu, c'est Favette!"

Thargélie Dumarsais shrank back in her rose velvet fauteuil as though the blow of a dagger had struck her; the color fled from her lips, and underneath the delicate rouge on her cheeks; her hand trembled as it grasped the King's aigrette.

"Favette—Favette! Who calls me that?"

It was a forgotten name, the name of a bygone life that fell on her ear with a strange familiar chime, breaking in on the wit, the license, the laughter of her midnight supper, as the subdued and mournful sound of vesper bells might fall upon the wild refrains and noisy drinking-songs of bacchanalian melody.

A surprised silence fell upon the group, the laughter hushed, the voices stopped; it was a strange interruption for a midnight supper. Thargélie Dumarsais involuntarily rose, her lips white, her eyes fixed, her hand clasped convulsively on the King's diamond. A vague, speechless terror held mastery over her, an awe she could not shake off had fastened upon her, as though the dead had risen from their graves, and come thither to rebuke her for the past forgotten, the innocence lost. The roses in her hair, the flowers of revel, touched a cheek blanched as though she beheld some unearthly thing, and the hand that lay on the royal jewel shook and trembled.

"Favette? Favette?" she echoed again. "It is so many years since I heard that name!"

Her guests sat silent still, comprehending nothing of this single name which had such power to move and startle her. Richelieu alone, leaning back in his chair, leisurely picked out one of his brandy-cherries, and waited as a man waits for the next scene at a theatre:

"Is it an unexpected tragedy, or an arranged comedy, ma chère? Ought one to cry or to laugh? Give me the mot d'ordre!"

His words broke the spell, and called Thargélie Dumarsais back to the world about her. Actress by profession and by nature, she rallied with a laugh, putting out her jewelled hand with a languid glance from her long almond-shaped eyes.

"A friend of early years, my dear Duc, that is all. Ah, Monsieur de Tallemont what a strange rencontre! When did you come to Paris? I scarcely knew you at the first moment; you have so long been an exile, one may pardonably be startled by your apparition, and take you for a ghost! I suppose you never dreamed of meeting Favette Fontanie under my nom de théâtre? Ah! how we change, do we not, Léon? Time is so short, we have no time to stand still! Marie, ma chère, give Monsieur le Chevalier a seat beside you—he cannot be happier placed!"

Léon de Tallemont heard not a word that she spoke; he stood like a man stunned and paralyzed by a sudden and violent blow, his head bowed, a mortal pallor changing his face to the hues of death, the features that were a moment before bright, laughing, and careless, now set in mute and rigid anguish.

"Favette! Favette!" he murmured, hoarsely, in the vague dreamy agony with which a man calls wildly and futilely on the beloved dead to come back to him from the silence and horror of the grave.

"Peste!" laughed Richelieu. "This cast-off lover seems a strange fellow! Does he not know that absent people have never the presumption to dream of keeping their places, but learn to give them graciously up!—shall I teach him the lesson? If he have his sixteen quarterings, a prick of my sword will soon punish his impudence!"

The jeer fell unheeded on Léon de Tallemont's ear; had he heard it, the flippant sneer would have had no power to sting him then. Regardless of the men around the supper-table, he grasped Thargélie Dumarsais's hands in his:

"This is how we meet!"

She shrank away from his glance, terrified, she scarce knew why, at the mute anguish upon his face.

Perhaps for a moment she realized how utterly she had abused the love and wrecked the life of this man; perhaps with his voice came back to her thronging thoughts of guileless days, memories ringing through the haze of years, as distant chimes ring over the water from lands we have quitted, reaching us when we have floated far away out to sea—memories of an innocent and untroubled life, when she had watched the woodland flowers open to the morning sun, and listened to the song of the brooks murmuring over the violet roots, and heard the sweet evening song of the birds rise to heaven under the deep vine shadows of Lorraine.

One moment she was silent, her eyes falling, troubled and guilty, beneath his gaze; then she looked up, laughing gayly, and flashing on him her languid lustrous glance.

"You look like a somnambulist, mon ami! Did nobody ever tell you, then, how Mme. de la Vrillière carried me off from Lorraine, and brought me in her train to Paris, till, when Favette Fontanie was tired of being petted like the spaniel, the monkey, and the parrot, she broke away from Madame la Marquise, and made, after a little probation at the Foire St. Laurent, her appearance at the Français as Thargélie Dumarsais? Allons donc! have I lost my beauty, that you look at me thus? You should be reminding me of the proverb, 'On revient toujours à ses premiers amours!' Surely, Thargélie Dumarsais will be as attractive to teach such a lesson as that little peasant girl, Favette, used to be? Bah, Léon! Can I not love you as well again in Paris as I once loved you at Grande Charmille? And—who knows?—perhaps I will!"

She leaned towards him; her breath fanning his cheek, her scented hair brushing his lips, her lustrous eyes meeting his with eloquent meaning, her lips parted with the resistless witchery of that melting and seductive sourire d'amour to which they were so admirably trained. He gazed down on her, breathless, silence-stricken—gazed down on the sorceress beauty to which the innocent loveliness of his Lorraine flower had changed. Was this woman, with the rouge upon her cheeks, the crimson roses in her hair, the mocking light in her eyes, the wicked laugh on her lips, the diamond glittering like a serpent's eye in her bosom—was she the guileless child he had left weeping, on the broken steps of the fountain, tears as pure as the dew in the violet-bells, with the summer sunlight streaming round her, and no shade on her young brow darker than the fleeting shadow flung from above by the vine-leaves? A cry broke once more from his lips:

"Would to God I had died before to-night!"

Then he lifted his head, with a smile upon his face—a smile that touched and vaguely terrified all those who saw it—the smile of a breaking heart.

"I thank you for your proffered embraces, but I am faithful. I love but one, and I have lost her; Favette is dead! I know nothing of Thargélie Dumarsais, the Courtesan."

He bowed low to her and left her—never to see her face again.

A silence fell on those he had quitted, even upon Richelieu; perhaps even he realized that all beauty, faith, and joy were stricken from this man's life; and—reality of feeling was an exile so universally banished from the gay salons of the Dix-huitième Siècle, that its intrusion awed them as by the unwonted presence of some ghostly visitant.

Thargélie Dumarsais sat silent—her thoughts had flown away once more from her brilliant supper-chamber to the fountain at Grande Charmille: she was seeing the dragon-flies flutter among the elm-boughs, and the water ripple over the wild thyme; she was feeling the old priest's good-night kiss upon her brow, and her own hymn rise and mingle with the chant of the vesper choir; she was hearing the song of the forest-birds echo in the Lorraine woods, and a fond voice whisper to her, "Fear not, Favette!—we shall meet as we part!"

Richelieu took up his Dresden saucer of cherries once more with a burst of laughter.

"Voilà un drôle!—this fellow takes things seriously. What fools there are in this world! It will be a charming little story for Versailles. Dieu! how Louis will laugh when I tell it him! I fear though, ma chérie, that the 'friend of your childhood' will make you lose your reputation by his impolite epithets!"

"When one has nothing, one can lose nothing—eh, ma chère?" laughed Marie Camargo. "Monsieur le Duc, she does not hear us——"

"No, l'infidèle!" cried Richelieu. "Mademoiselle! I see plainly you love this rude lover of bygone days better than you do us!—is it not the truth?"

"Chut! nobody asks for truths in a polite age!" laughed Thargélie Dumarsais, shaking off unwelcome memories once for all, and looking down at the King's diamond gleaming in the light—the diamond that prophesied to her the triumph of the King's love.

"Naturally," added La Camargo. "My friend, I shall die with envy of your glorious jewel. Dieu! comme il brille!"