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Page 13
This aunt, who is of very ancient nobility, is particularly noted for the
fervor of her hereditary opinions, and for her strict devotion. Those are
both claims to consideration which I admit fully, so far as I am
concerned. Every solid principle and every sincere sentiment command in
these days a peculiar respect. Unfortunately Madame de Pontbrian seems to
be one of those intensely devout persons who are but very indifferent
Christians. She is one of those who, reducing to a few minor observances,
of which they are ridiculously proud, all the duties of their religious or
political faith, impart to both a harsh and hateful appearance, the effect
of which is not exactly to attract proselytes. The outer forms, in all
things, are sufficient for her conscience; otherwise, no trace of charity
or kindness; above all, no trace of humility. Her genealogy, her assiduity
to church, and her annual pilgrimages to the shrine of an illustrious
exile (who would probably be glad to dispense with the sight of her
countenance), inspire in this fairy such a lofty idea of herself and such
a profound contempt for her neighbor, that they make her positively
unsociable. She remains forever absorbed in the latrian worship which she
believes due to herself. She deigns to speak but to God, and He must
indeed be a kind and merciful God if He listens to her.
Under the nominal patronage of this mystic duenna, the Little Countess
enjoys an absolute independence, which she uses to excess. After spending
the winter in Paris, where she kills off regularly two horses and a
coachman every month for the sole gratification of waltzing ten minutes
every night in half a dozen different balls, Madame de Palme feels the
necessity of seeking rest in the peace of rural life. She arrives at her
aunt's, she jumps upon a horse, and she starts at full gallop. It matters
not which way she goes, provided she keeps going. Most generally she comes
to the Chateau de Malouet, where the kind-hearted mistress of the house
manifests for her an amount of predilection which I can hardly understand.
Familiar with men, impertinent with women, the Little Countess offers a
broad mark to the most indiscreet homage of the former, and to the jealous
hostility of the latter. Indifferent to the outrages of public opinion,
she seems ready to aspire to the coarsest incense of gallantry; but what
she requires above all things is noise, movement, a whirl, worldly
pleasure carried to its most extreme and most extravagant fury; what she
requires every morning, every evening, and every night, is a break-neck
chase, which she conducts with frenzy; a reckless game, in which she may
break the bank; an uninterrupted German, which she leads until dawn. A
stoppage of a single minute, a moment of rest, of meditation and
reflection, would kill her. Never was an existence at once so busy and so
idle; never a more unceasing and more sterile activity.
Thus she goes through life hurriedly and without a halt, graceful,
careless, busy, and ignorant as the horse she rides. When she reaches the
fatal goal, that woman will fall from the nothingness of her agitation
into the nothingness of eternal rest, without the shadow of a serious
idea, the faintest notion of duty, the lightest cloud of a thought worthy
a human being, having ever grazed, even in a dream, the narrow brain that
is sheltered behind her pure, smiling, and stupid brow. It might be said
that death, at whatever age it may overtake her, will find the Little
Countess just as she left the cradle, if it were possible to suppose that
she has preserved its innocence as well as she has retained its profound
puerility. Has that madcap a soul? The word nothingness has escaped me. It
is indeed difficult for me to conceive what might survive that body when
it has once lost the vain fever and the frivolous breath that seem alone
to animate it.
I know too well the miserable ways of the world, to take to the letter the
accusations of immorality of which Madame de Palme is here the object on
the part of the witches, as also on the part of some of her rivals who are
silly enough to envy her social success. It is not in that respect, as you
may understand, that I treat her with so much severity. Men, when they
show themselves unmerciful for certain errors, are too apt to forget that
they have all, more or less, spent part of their lives seeking to bring
them about for their own benefit. But there is in the feminine type which
I have just sketched something more shocking than immorality itself,
which, however, it is rather difficult to separate from it. And so,
notwithstanding my desire of not making myself conspicuous in anything, I
have been unable to take upon myself to join the throng of admirers whom
Madame de Palme drags after her triumphal car. I know not whether
"Le tyran dans sa cour remarqua mon absence:"
I am sometimes tempted to believe it, from the glances of astonishment and
scorn with which I am overwhelmed when we meet; but it is more simple to
attribute these hostile symptoms to the natural antipathy that separates
two creatures as dissimilar as we are. I look at her at times, myself,
with the gaping surprise which must be excited in the mind of any thinking
being by the monstrosity of such a psychological phenomenon. In that way
we are even. I ought rather to say we were even, for we are really no
longer so, since a rather cruel little adventure that happened to me last
night, and which constitutes in my account-current with Madame de Palme a
considerable advance, which she will find it difficult to make up. I have
told you that Madame de Malouet, through I know not what refinement of
Christian charity, manifested a genuine predilection for the Little
Countess. I was talking with the marquise last evening in a corner of the
drawing-room. I took the liberty of telling her that this predilection,
coming from a woman like her, was a bad example; that I had never very
well understood, for my part, that passage of the Holy Scriptures in which
the return of a single sinner is celebrated above the constant merit of a
thousand just, and that this had always appeared to me very discouraging
for the just.
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