In and out of Three Normandy Inns Part 17

All three ladies laughed gayly at this absurdity; the subject of Madame de Sevigne's remarrying had come to be a venerable joke now. It had been talked of at court and in society for nearly forty years; but such was the conquering power of her charms that these two friends, her listeners, saw nothing really extravagant in her son-in-law's fear; she was one of those rare women who, even at sixty, continue to suggest the altar rather than the grave. Madame de Kerman was the first to recover her breath after the laughter.

"Dear friend, you might a.s.sure him that after a youth and the golden meridian of your years pa.s.sed in smiling indifference to the sighs of a Prince de Conti, of a Turenne, of a Fouquet, of a Bussy de Rabutin, at sixty it is scarcely likely that--"

"Ah, dear lady at sixty, when one has the complexion and the curls, to say nothing of the eyes of our dear enchantress, a woman is as dangerous as at thirty!" The d.u.c.h.esse's flattery was charmingly put, with just enough vivacity of tone to save it from the charge of insipidity. Madame de Sevigne bowed her curls to her waist.

"Ah, dear d.u.c.h.esse, it isn't age," she retorted, quickly, "that could make me commit follies. It is the fact that that son-in-law of mine actually surrounds me with spies--he keeps me in perpetual surveillance. Such a state of captivity is capable of making me forget everything; I am beginning to develop a positive rage for follies. You know that has been my chief fault--always; discretion has been left out of my composition. But I say now, as I have always said, that if I could manage to live two hundred years, I should become the most delightful person in the world!"

She herself was the first to lead in the laughter that followed her outburst; and then the d.u.c.h.esse broke in:

"You talk of defects, dear friend; but reflect what a life yours has been. So surrounded and courted, and yet you were always so guarded; so free, and yet so wise! So gay, and yet so chaste!"

"If you rubbed out all those flattering colors, dear d.u.c.h.esse, and wrote only, 'She wors.h.i.+pped her children, and preferred friends to lovers,' the portrait would be far nearer to the truth. It is easy to be chaste if one has only known one pa.s.sion in one's life, and that the maternal one!"

Again a change pa.s.sed over Madame de Sevigne's mobile face; the bantering tone was lost in a note of deep feeling. This gift of sensibility had always been accounted as one of Madame de Sevigne's chief charms; and now, at sixty, she was as completely the victim of her moods as in her earlier youth.

"Where is your daughter, and how is she?" sympathetically queried the d.u.c.h.esse.

"Oh, she is still at Grignan, as usual; she is well, thank G.o.d. But, dear d.u.c.h.esse, after all these years of separation I suffer still, cruelly." The tears sprang to Madame de Sevigne's eyes, as she added, with pa.s.sion and a force one would scarcely have expected in one whose manners were so finished, "the truth is, dear friends, I cannot live without her. I do not find I have made the least progress in that career. But, even now, believe me, these tears are sweeter than all else in life--more enrapturing than the most transporting joy!"

Madame de Kerman smiled tenderly into the rapturous mother's face; but the d.u.c.h.esse moved, as if a little restless and uneasy under this shower of maternal feeling. For thirty years her friends had had to listen to Madame de Sevigne's rhapsodies over the perfections of her incomparable daughter. Although sensibility was not the emotional fas.h.i.+on of the day, maternity, in the person of Madame de Sevigne, had been apotheosized into the queen of the pa.s.sions, if only because of its rarity; still, even this lady's most intimate friends sometimes wearied of banqueting off the feast of Madame de Grignan's virtues.

"Have you heard from Madame de La Fayette recently?" asked the d.u.c.h.esse, allowing just time enough to elapse, before putting the question, for Madame de Sevigne's emotion to subside into composure.

The d.u.c.h.esse was too exquisitely bred to allow her impatience to take the form of even the appearance of haste.

"Oh, yes," was Madame de Sevigne's quiet reply; the turn in the conversation had been instantly understood, in spite of the delicacy of the d.u.c.h.esse's methods. "Oh, yes--I have had a line--only a line. You know how she detests writing, above all things. Her letters are all the same--two lines to say that she has no time in which to say it!"

"Did she not once write you a pretty little series of epigrams about not writing?"

"Oh, yes--some time ago, when I was with my daughter. I've quoted them so often, they have become famous. 'You are in Provence, my beauty; your hours are free, and your mind still more so. Your love for corresponding with everyone still endures within you, it appears; as for me, the desire to write to any human being has long since pa.s.sed away-forever; and if I had a lover who insisted on a letter every morning, I should certainly break with him!'"

"What a curious compound she is! And how well her soubriquet becomes her!"

"Yes, it is perfect--'_Le Brouillard_'--the fog. It is indeed a fog that has always enveloped her, and what charming horizons are disclosed once it is lifted!"

"And her sensibilities--of what an exquisite quality; and what a rare, precious type, indeed, is the whole of her nature! Do you remember how alarmed she would become when listening to music?"

"And yet, with all this sensibility and delicacy of organization there was another side to her nature." Madame de Kerman paused a moment before she went on; she was not quite sure how far she dared go in her criticism; Madame de La Fayette was such an intimate friend of Madame de Sevigne's.

"You mean," that lady broke out, with unhesitating candor, "that she is also a very selfish person. You know that is my daughter's theory of her--she is always telling me how Madame de La Fayette is making use of me; that while her sensitiveness is such that she cannot sustain the tragedy of a farewell visit--if I am going to Les Rochers or to Provence, when I go to pay my last visit I must pretend it is only an ordinary running-in; yet her delicacy does not prevent her from making very indelicate proposals, to suit her own convenience. You remember what one of her commands was, don't you?"

"No," answered the d.u.c.h.esse, for both herself and her companion. "Pray tell us."

Madame de Sevigne went on to narrate that once, when at Les Rochers, Madame de La Fayette was quite certain that she, Madame de Sevigne, was losing her mind, for no one could live in the provinces and remain sane, poring over stupid books and sitting over fires.

"She was certain I should sicken and die, besides losing the tone of my mind," laughed Madame de Sevigne, as she called up the picture of her dissolution and rapid disintegration; "and therefore it was necessary at once that I should come up to Paris. This latter command was delivered in the tone of a judge of the Supreme Court. The penalty of my disobedience was to be her ceasing to love me. I was to come up to Paris directly--on the minute; I was to live with you, dear d.u.c.h.esse; I was not to buy any horses until spring; and, best of all, I was to find on my arrival a purse of a thousand crowns which would be lent me without interest! What a proposition, _mon Dieu_, what a proposition!

To have no house of my own, to be dependent, to have no carriage, and to be in debt a thousand crowns!"

As Madame de Sevigne lifted her hands the laces of her sleeves were fairly trembling with the force of her indignation. There were certain things that always put her in a pa.s.sion, and Madame de La Fayette's peculiarities she had found at times unendurable. Her listeners had followed her narration with the utmost intensity and absorption. When she stopped, their eyes met in a look of a.s.senting comment.

"It was perfectly characteristic, all of it! She judged you, doubtless, by herself. She always seems to me, even now, to keep one eye on her comfort and the other on her purse!"

"Ah, dear d.u.c.h.esse, how keen you are!" laughingly acquiesced Madame de Sevigne, as with a shrug she accepted the verdict--her indignation melting with the shrug. "And how right! No woman ever drives better bargains, without moving a finger. From her invalid's chair she can conduct a dozen lawsuits. She spends half her existence in courting death; she caresses her maladies; she positively hugs them; but she can always be miraculously resuscitated at the word money!"

"Yes," added with a certain relish Madame de Kerman. "And this is the same woman who must be forever running away from Paris because she can no longer endure the exertion of talking, or of replying, or of listening; because she is wearied to extinction, as she herself admits, of saying good-morning and good-evening. She must hide herself in some pastoral retreat, where simply, as she says, 'to exist is enough;'

where she can remain, as it were, miraculously suspended between heaven and earth!"

A ripple of amused laughter went round the little group; there was nothing these ladies enjoyed so keenly as a delicate dish of gossip, seasoned with wit, and stuffed with epigrams. This talk was exactly to their taste. The silence and seclusion of their surroundings were an added stimulus to confidence and to a freer interchange of opinions about their world. Paris and Versailles seemed so very far away; it would appear safe to say almost anything about one's dearest friends.

There was nothing to remind them of the restraints of levees, or the penalty indiscretion must pay for folly breathed in that whispering gallery--the _ruelle_. It was indeed a delightful hour; altogether an ideal situation.

The fire had burned so low only a few embers were alive now, and the candles were beginning to flicker and droop in the sconces. But the three ladies refused to find the little room either cold or dark; their talk was not half done yet, and their m.u.f.fs would keep them warm. The shadow of the deepening gloom they found delightfully provocative of confidences.

After a short pause, while Madame de Kerman busied herself with the tongs and the f.a.gots, trying to reinvigorate the dying flames, the d.u.c.h.esse asked, in a somewhat more intimate tone than she had used yet:

"And the duke--do you really think she loved the Duke de La Rochefoucauld?"

"She reformed him, dear d.u.c.h.esse; at least she always proclaims his reform as the justification of her love."

"You--you esteemed him yourself very highly, did you not?"

"Oh, I loved him tenderly; how could one help it? He was the best as well as the most brilliant of men! I never knew a tenderer heart; domestic joys and sorrows affected him in a way to render him incomparable. I have seen him weep over the death of his mother, who only died eight years before him, you know, with a depth of sincerity that made me adore him."

"He must in truth have been a very sincere person."

"Sincere!" cried Madame de Sevigne, her eyes flaming. "Had you but seen his deathbed! His bearing was sublime! Believe me, dear friend, it was not in vain that M. de La Rochefoucauld had written philosophic reflections all his life; he had already antic.i.p.ated his last moments in such a way that there was nothing either new or strange in death when it came to him."

"Madame de La Fayette truly mourned him--don't you think so? You were with her a great deal, were you not, after his death?"

"I never left her. It was the most pitiable sight to see her in her loneliness and her misery. You see, their common ill-health and their sedentary habits, had made them so necessary to each other! It was, as it were, two souls in a single body. Nothing could exceed the confidence and charm of their friends.h.i.+p; it was incomparable. To Madame de La Fayette his loss came as her death-blow; life seems at an end for her; for where, indeed, can she find another such friend, or such intercourse, such sweetness and charm--such confidence and consideration?"

There was a moment's silence after Madame de Sevigne's eloquent outburst. The eyes of the three friends were lost for a moment in the twinkling flames. The d.u.c.h.esse and Madame de Kerman exchanged meaning glances.

"Since the duke's death her thoughts are more and more turned toward religion. I hear she has been fortunate in her choice of directors, has she not? Du Guet is said to be an ideal confessor for the auth.o.r.ess of 'La Princesse de Cleves.'" There was just a suspicion of malice in the d.u.c.h.esse's tones.

"Oh, he was born to take her in hand. He knew just when to speak with authority, and when to make use of the arts of persuasion. He wrote to her once, you remember: 'You, who have pa.s.sed your life in dreaming--cease to dream! You, who have taken such pride unto yourself for being so true in all things, were very far, indeed, from the truth--you were only half true--falsely true. Your G.o.dless wisdom was in reality purely a matter of good taste!'"

"What audacity! Bossuet himself could not have put the truth more nakedly." The d.u.c.h.esse was one of those to whom truths were novelties, and unpleasant ones.

"Bossuet, if I remember rightly, was with the Duke de La Rochefoucauld at the last, was he not?"

"Yes," responded Madame de Sevigne; "he was with him; he administered the supreme unction. The duke was in a beautiful state of grace. M, Vinet, you remember, said of him that he died with 'perfect decorum.'"

"Speaking of dying reminds me"--cried suddenly Madame de Sevigne--"how are the duke's hangings getting on?"

"They begin, the duke writes me, to hang again to-morrow," answered the d.u.c.h.esse, with a certain air of disdain, the first appearance of this weapon of the great now coming to the _grande dame's_ aid. Her husband, the Duke de Chaulnes' trouble with his revolutionary citizens at Rennes was a subject that never failed to arouse a feeling of angry contempt in her. It was too preposterous, the idea of those insolent creatures rising against him, their rightful duke and master!

The d.u.c.h.esse's feeling in the matter was fully shared by her friends.

In all the court there was but one opinion in the matter--hanging was really far too good for the wretched creatures.