Генри Джеймс
The American
“My father is coming to fetch me,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.
She had hardly spoken when, through the door behind her, which opens on one of the great white stone staircases of the Louvre, M. Nioche made his appearance. He came in with his usual even, patient shuffle, and he made a low salute to the two gentlemen who were standing before his daughter’s easel. Newman shook his hands with muscular friendliness, and Valentin returned his greeting with extreme deference. While the old man stood waiting for Noémie to make a parcel of her implements, he let his mild, oblique gaze hover toward Bellegarde, who was watching Mademoiselle Noémie put on her bonnet and mantle. Valentin was at no pains to disguise his scrutiny. He looked at a pretty girl as he would have listened to a piece of music. Attention, in each case, was simple good manners. M. Nioche at last took his daughter’s paint-box in one hand and the bedaubed canvas, after giving it a solemn, puzzled stare, in the other, and led the way to the door. Mademoiselle Noémie made the young men the salute of a duchess, and followed her father.
“Well,” said Newman, “what do you think of her?”
“She is very remarkable. Diable, diable, diable!” repeated M. de Bellegarde, reflectively; “she is very remarkable.”
“I am afraid she is a sad little adventuress,” said Newman.
“Not a little one—a great one. She has the material.” And Valentin began to walk away slowly, looking vaguely at the pictures on the walls, with a thoughtful illumination in his eye. Nothing could have appealed to his imagination more than the possible adventures of a young lady endowed with the “material” of Mademoiselle Nioche. “She is very interesting,” he went on. “She is a beautiful type.”
“A beautiful type? What the deuce do you mean?” asked Newman.
“I mean from the artistic point of view. She is an artist,—outside of her painting, which obviously is execrable.”
“But she is not beautiful. I don’t even think her very pretty.”
“She is quite pretty enough for her purposes, and it is a face and figure on which everything tells. If she were prettier she would be less intelligent, and her intelligence is half of her charm.”
“In what way,” asked Newman, who was much amused at his companion’s immediate philosophisation of Mademoiselle Nioche, “does her intelligence strike you as so remarkable?”
“She has taken the measure of life, and she has determined to be something—to succeed at any cost. Her painting, of course, is a mere trick to gain time. She is waiting for her chance; she wishes to launch herself, and to do it well. She knows her Paris. She is one of fifty thousand, so far as the mere ambition goes; but I am very sure that in the way of resolution and capacity she is a rarity. And in one gift—perfect heartlessness—I will warrant she is unsurpassed. She has not as much heart as will go on the point of a needle. That is an immense virtue. Yes, she is one of the celebrities of the future.”
“Heaven help us!” said Newman, “how far the artistic point of view may take a man! But in this case I must request that you don’t let it take you too far. You have learned a wonderful deal about Mademoiselle Noémie in a quarter of an hour. Let that suffice; don’t follow up your researches.”
“My dear fellow,” cried Bellegarde with warmth, “I hope I have too good manners to intrude.”
“You are not intruding. The girl is nothing to me. In fact, I rather dislike her. But I like her poor old father, and for his sake I beg you to abstain from any attempt to verify your theories.”
“For the sake of that seedy old gentleman who came to fetch her?” demanded Valentin, stopping short. And on Newman’s assenting, “Ah no, ah no,” he went on with a smile. “You are quite wrong, my dear fellow; you needn’t mind him.”
“I verily believe that you are accusing the poor gentleman of being capable of rejoicing in his daughter’s dishonor.”
“Voyons!” said Valentin; “who is he? what is he?”
“He is what he looks like: as poor as a rat, but very high-toned.”
“Exactly. I noticed him perfectly; be sure I do him justice. He has had losses, des malheurs, as we say. He is very low-spirited, and his daughter is too much for him. He is the pink of respectability, and he has sixty years of honesty on his back. All this I perfectly appreciate. But I know my fellow-men and my fellow-Parisians, and I will make a bargain with you.” Newman gave ear to his bargain and he went on. “He would rather his daughter were a good girl than a bad one, but if the worst comes to the worst, the old man will not do what Virginius did. Success justifies everything. If Mademoiselle Noémie makes a figure, her papa will feel—well, we will call it relieved. And she will make a figure. The old gentleman’s future is assured.”
“I don’t know what Virginius did, but M. Nioche will shoot Miss Noémie,” said Newman. “After that, I suppose his future will be assured in some snug prison.”
“I am not a cynic; I am simply an observer,” Valentin rejoined. “Mademoiselle Noémie interests me; she is extremely remarkable. If there is a good reason, in honor or decency, for dismissing her from my thoughts forever, I am perfectly willing to do it. Your estimate of the papa’s sensibilities is a good reason until it is invalidated. I promise you not to look at the young girl again until you tell me that you have changed your mind about the papa. When he has given distinct proof of being a philosopher, you will raise your interdict. Do you agree to that?”
“Do you mean to bribe him?”
“Oh, you admit, then, that he is bribable? No, he would ask too much, and it would not be exactly fair. I mean simply to wait. You will continue, I suppose, to see this interesting couple, and you will give me the news yourself.”
“Well,” said Newman, “if the old man turns out a humbug, you may do what you please. I wash my hands of the matter. For the girl herself, you may be at rest. I don’t know what harm she may do to me, but I certainly can’t hurt her. It seems to me,” said Newman, “that you are very well matched. You are both hard cases, and M. Nioche and I, I believe, are the only virtuous men to be found in Paris.”
Soon after this M. de Bellegarde, in punishment for his levity, received a stern poke in the back from a pointed instrument. Turning quickly round he found the weapon to be a parasol wielded by a lady in green gauze bonnet. Valentin’s English cousins had been drifting about unpiloted, and evidently deemed that they had a grievance. Newman left him to their mercies, but with a boundless faith in his power to plead his cause.
CHAPTER XII
Three days after his introduction to the family of Madame de Cintré, Newman, coming in toward evening, found upon his table the card of the Marquis de Bellegarde. On the following day he received a note informing him that the Marquise de Bellegarde would be grateful for the honor of his company at dinner.
He went, of course, though he had to break another engagement to do it. He was ushered into the room in which Madame de Bellegarde had received him before, and here he found his venerable hostess, surrounded by her entire family. The room was lighted only by the crackling fire, which illuminated the very small pink slippers of a lady who, seated in a low chair, was stretching out her toes before it. This lady was the younger Madame de Bellegarde. Madame de Cintré was seated at the other end of the room, holding a little girl against her knee, the child of her brother Urbain, to whom she was apparently relating a wonderful story. Valentin was sitting on a puff, close to his sister-in-law, into whose ear he was certainly distilling the finest nonsense. The marquis was stationed before the fire, with his head erect and his hands behind him, in an attitude of formal expectancy.
Old Madame de Bellegarde stood up to give Newman her greeting, and there was that in the way she did so which seemed to measure narrowly the extent of her condescension. “We are all alone, you see, we have asked no one else,” she said austerely.
“I am very glad you didn’t; this is much more sociable,” said Newman. “Good evening, sir,” and he offered his hand to the marquis.
M. de Bellegarde was affable, but in spite of his dignity he was restless. He began to pace up and down the room, he looked out of the long windows, he took up books and laid them down again. Young Madame de Bellegarde gave Newman her hand without moving and without looking at him.
“You may think that is coldness,” exclaimed Valentin; “but it is not, it is warmth. It shows she is treating you as an intimate. Now she detests me, and yet she is always looking at me.”
“No wonder I detest you if I am always looking at you!” cried the lady. “If Mr. Newman does not like my way of shaking hands, I will do it again.”
But this charming privilege was lost upon our hero, who was already making his way across the room to Madame de Cintré. She looked at him as she shook hands, but she went on with the story she was telling her little niece. She had only two or three phrases to add, but they were apparently of great moment. She deepened her voice, smiling as she did so, and the little girl gazed at her with round eyes.
“But in the end the young prince married the beautiful Florabella,” said Madame de Cintré, “and carried her off to live with him in the Land of the Pink Sky. There she was so happy that she forgot all her troubles, and went out to drive every day of her life in an ivory coach drawn by five hundred white mice. Poor Florabella,” she exclaimed to Newman, “had suffered terribly.”
“She had had nothing to eat for six months,” said little Blanche.
“Yes, but when the six months were over, she had a plum-cake as big as that ottoman,” said Madame de Cintré. “That quite set her up again.”
“What a checkered career!” said Newman. “Are you very fond of children?” He was certain that she was, but he wished to make her say it.
“I like to talk with them,” she answered; “we can talk with them so much more seriously than with grown persons. That is great nonsense that I have been telling Blanche, but it is a great deal more serious than most of what we say in society.”
“I wish you would talk to me, then, as if I were Blanche’s age,” said Newman, laughing. “Were you happy at your ball the other night?”
“Ecstatically!”
“Now you are talking the nonsense that we talk in society,” said Newman. “I don’t believe that.”
“It was my own fault if I was not happy. The ball was very pretty, and everyone very amiable.”
“It was on your conscience,” said Newman, “that you had annoyed your mother and your brother.”
Madame de Cintré looked at him a moment without answering. “That is true,” she replied at last. “I had undertaken more than I could carry out. I have very little courage; I am not a heroine.” She said this with a certain soft emphasis; but then, changing her tone, “I could never have gone through the sufferings of the beautiful Florabella,” she added, not even for her prospective rewards.
Dinner was announced, and Newman betook himself to the side of the old Madame de Bellegarde. The dining-room, at the end of a cold corridor, was vast and sombre; the dinner was simple and delicately excellent. Newman wondered whether Madame de Cintré had had something to do with ordering the repast and greatly hoped she had. Once seated at table, with the various members of the ancient house of Bellegarde around him, he asked himself the meaning of his position. Was the old lady responding to his advances? Did the fact that he was a solitary guest augment his credit or diminish it? Were they ashamed to show him to other people, or did they wish to give him a sign of sudden adoption into their last reserve of favor? Newman was on his guard; he was watchful and conjectural; and yet at the same time he was vaguely indifferent. Whether they gave him a long rope or a short one he was there now, and Madame de Cintré was opposite to him. She had a tall candlestick on each side of her; she would sit there for the next hour, and that was enough. The dinner was extremely solemn and measured; he wondered whether this was always the state of things in “old families.” Madame de Bellegarde held her head very high, and fixed her eyes, which looked peculiarly sharp in her little, finely-wrinkled white face, very intently upon the table-service. The marquis appeared to have decided that the fine arts offered a safe subject of conversation, as not leading to startling personal revelations. Every now and then, having learned from Newman that he had been through the museums of Europe, he uttered some polished aphorism upon the flesh-tints of Rubens and the good taste of Sansovino. His manners seemed to indicate a fine, nervous dread that something disagreeable might happen if the atmosphere were not purified by allusions of a thoroughly superior cast. “What under the sun is the man afraid of?” Newman asked himself. “Does he think I am going to offer to swap jack-knives with him?” It was useless to shut his eyes to the fact that the marquis was profoundly disagreeable to him. He had never been a man of strong personal aversions; his nerves had not been at the mercy of the mystical qualities of his neighbors. But here was a man towards whom he was irresistibly in opposition; a man of forms and phrases and postures; a man full of possible impertinences and treacheries. M. de Bellegarde made him feel as if he were standing bare-footed on a marble floor; and yet, to gain his desire, Newman felt perfectly able to stand. He wondered what Madame de Cintré thought of his being accepted, if accepted it was. There was no judging from her face, which expressed simply the desire to be gracious in a manner which should require as little explicit recognition as possible. Young Madame de Bellegarde had always the same manners; she was always preoccupied, distracted, listening to everything and hearing nothing, looking at her dress, her rings, her finger-nails, seeming rather bored, and yet puzzling you to decide what was her ideal of social diversion. Newman was enlightened on this point later. Even Valentin did not quite seem master of his wits; his vivacity was fitful and forced, yet Newman observed that in the lapses of his talk he appeared excited. His eyes had an intenser spark than usual. The effect of all this was that Newman, for the first time in his life, was not himself; that he measured his movements, and counted his words, and resolved that if the occasion demanded that he should appear to have swallowed a ramrod, he would meet the emergency.
After dinner M. de Bellegarde proposed to his guest that they should go into the smoking-room, and he led the way toward a small, somewhat musty apartment, the walls of which were ornamented with old hangings of stamped leather and trophies of rusty arms. Newman refused a cigar, but he established himself upon one of the divans, while the marquis puffed his own weed before the fire-place, and Valentin sat looking through the light fumes of a cigarette from one to the other.
“I can’t keep quiet any longer,” said Valentin, at last. “I must tell you the news and congratulate you. My brother seems unable to come to the point; he revolves around his announcement like the priest around the altar. You are accepted as a candidate for the hand of our sister.”
“Valentin, be a little proper!” murmured the marquis, with a look of the most delicate irritation contracting the bridge of his high nose.
“There has been a family council,” the young man continued; “my mother and Urbain have put their heads together, and even my testimony has not been altogether excluded. My mother and the marquis sat at a table covered with green cloth; my sister-in-law and I were on a bench against the wall. It was like a committee at the Corps Législatif. We were called up, one after the other, to testify. We spoke of you very handsomely. Madame de Bellegarde said that if she had not been told who you were, she would have taken you for a duke—an American duke, the Duke of California. I said that I could warrant you grateful for the smallest favors—modest, humble, unassuming. I was sure that you would know your own place, always, and never give us occasion to remind you of certain differences. After all, you couldn’t help it if you were not a duke. There were none in your country; but if there had been, it was certain that, smart and active as you are, you would have got the pick of the titles. At this point I was ordered to sit down, but I think I made an impression in your favor.”
M. de Bellegarde looked at his brother with dangerous coldness, and gave a smile as thin as the edge of a knife. Then he removed a spark of cigar-ash from the sleeve of his coat; he fixed his eyes for a while on the cornice of the room, and at last he inserted one of his white hands into the breast of his waistcoat. “I must apologize to you for the deplorable levity of my brother,” he said, “and I must notify you that this is probably not the last time that his want of tact will cause you serious embarrassment.”
“No, I confess I have no tact,” said Valentin. “Is your embarrassment really painful, Newman? The marquis will put you right again; his own touch is deliciously delicate.”
“Valentin, I am sorry to say,” the marquis continued, “has never possessed the tone, the manner, that belongs to a young man in his position. It has been a great affliction to his mother, who is very fond of the old traditions. But you must remember that he speaks for no one but himself.”
“Oh, I don’t mind him, sir,” said Newman, good-humoredly. “I know what he amounts to.”
“In the good old times,” said Valentin, “marquises and counts used to have their appointed fools and jesters, to crack jokes for them. Nowadays we see a great strapping democrat keeping a count about him to play the fool. It’s a good situation, but I certainly am very degenerate.”
M. de Bellegarde fixed his eyes for some time on the floor. “My mother informed me,” he said presently, “of the announcement that you made to her the other evening.”
“That I desired to marry your sister?” said Newman.
“That you wished to arrange a marriage,” said the marquis, slowly, “with my sister, the Comtesse de Cintré. The proposal was serious, and required, on my mother’s part, a great deal of reflection. She naturally took me into her counsels, and I gave my most zealous attention to the subject. There was a great deal to be considered; more than you appear to imagine. We have viewed the question on all its faces, we have weighed one thing against another. Our conclusion has been that we favor your suit. My mother has desired me to inform you of our decision. She will have the honor of saying a few words to you on the subject herself. Meanwhile, by us, the heads of the family, you are accepted.”
Newman got up and came nearer to the marquis. “You will do nothing to hinder me, and all you can to help me, eh?”
“I will recommend my sister to accept you.”
Newman passed his hand over his face, and pressed it for a moment upon his eyes. This promise had a great sound, and yet the pleasure he took in it was embittered by his having to stand there so and receive his passport from M. de Bellegarde. The idea of having this gentleman mixed up with his wooing and wedding was more and more disagreeable to him. But Newman had resolved to go through the mill, as he imagined it, and he would not cry out at the first turn of the wheel. He was silent a while, and then he said, with a certain dryness which Valentin told him afterwards had a very grand air, “I am much obliged to you.”
“I take note of the promise,” said Valentin, “I register the vow.”
M. de Bellegarde began to gaze at the cornice again; he apparently had something more to say. “I must do my mother the justice,” he resumed, “I must do myself the justice, to say that our decision was not easy. Such an arrangement was not what we had expected. The idea that my sister should marry a gentleman—ah—in business was something of a novelty.”
“So I told you, you know,” said Valentin raising his finger at Newman.
“The novelty has not quite worn away, I confess,” the marquis went on; “perhaps it never will, entirely. But possibly that is not altogether to be regretted,” and he gave his thin smile again. “It may be that the time has come when we should make some concession to novelty. There had been no novelties in our house for a great many years. I made the observation to my mother, and she did me the honor to admit that it was worthy of attention.”
“My dear brother,” interrupted Valentin, “is not your memory just here leading you the least bit astray? Our mother is, I may say, distinguished for her small respect of abstract reasoning. Are you very sure that she replied to your striking proposition in the gracious manner you describe? You know how terribly incisive she is sometimes. Didn’t she, rather, do you the honor to say, ‘A fiddlestick for your phrases! There are better reasons than that?’”
“Other reasons were discussed,” said the marquis, without looking at Valentin, but with an audible tremor in his voice; “some of them possibly were better. We are conservative, Mr. Newman, but we are not also bigots. We judged the matter liberally. We have no doubt that everything will be comfortable.”
Newman had stood listening to these remarks with his arms folded and his eyes fastened upon M. de Bellegarde, “Comfortable?” he said, with a sort of grim flatness of intonation. “Why shouldn’t we be comfortable? If you are not, it will be your own fault; I have everything to make me so.”
“My brother means that with the lapse of time you may get used to the change”—and Valentin paused, to light another cigarette.
“What change?” asked Newman in the same tone.
“Urbain,” said Valentin, very gravely, “I am afraid that Mr. Newman does not quite realize the change. We ought to insist upon that.”
“My brother goes too far,” said M. de Bellegarde. “It is his fatal want of tact again. It is my mother’s wish, and mine, that no such allusions should be made. Pray never make them yourself. We prefer to assume that the person accepted as the possible husband of my sister is one of ourselves, and that he should have no explanations to make. With a little discretion on both sides, everything, I think, will be easy. That is exactly what I wished to say—that we quite understand what we have undertaken, and that you may depend upon our adhering to our resolution.”
Valentin shook his hands in the air and then buried his face in them. “I have less tact than I might have, no doubt; but oh, my brother, if you knew what you yourself were saying!” And he went off into a long laugh.
M. de Bellegarde’s face flushed a little, but he held his head higher, as if to repudiate this concession to vulgar perturbability. “I am sure you understand me,” he said to Newman.
“Oh no, I don’t understand you at all,” said Newman. “But you needn’t mind that. I don’t care. In fact, I think I had better not understand you. I might not like it. That wouldn’t suit me at all, you know. I want to marry your sister, that’s all; to do it as quickly as possible, and to find fault with nothing. I don’t care how I do it. I am not marrying you, you know, sir. I have got my leave, and that is all I want.”
“You had better receive the last word from my mother,” said the marquis.
“Very good; I will go and get it,” said Newman; and he prepared to return to the drawing-room.
M. de Bellegarde made a motion for him to pass first, and when Newman had gone out he shut himself into the room with Valentin. Newman had been a trifle bewildered by the audacious irony of the younger brother, and he had not needed its aid to point the moral of M. de Bellegarde’s transcendent patronage. He had wit enough to appreciate the force of that civility which consists in calling your attention to the impertinences it spares you. But he had felt warmly the delicate sympathy with himself that underlay Valentin’s fraternal irreverence, and he was most unwilling that his friend should pay a tax upon it. He paused a moment in the corridor, after he had gone a few steps, expecting to hear the resonance of M. de Bellegarde’s displeasure; but he detected only a perfect stillness. The stillness itself seemed a trifle portentous; he reflected however that he had no right to stand listening, and he made his way back to the salon. In his absence several persons had come in. They were scattered about the room in groups, two or three of them having passed into a small boudoir, next to the drawing-room, which had now been lighted and opened. Old Madame de Bellegarde was in her place by the fire, talking to a very old gentleman in a wig and a profuse white neck cloth of the fashion of 1820. Madame de Cintré was bending a listening head to the historic confidences of an old lady who was presumably the wife of the old gentleman in the neckcloth, an old lady in a red satin dress and an ermine cape, who wore across her forehead a band with a topaz set in it. Young Madame de Bellegarde, when Newman came in, left some people among whom she was sitting, and took the place that she had occupied before dinner. Then she gave a little push to the puff that stood near her, and by a glance at Newman seemed to indicate that she had placed it in position for him. He went and took possession of it; the marquis’s wife amused and puzzled him.
“I know your secret,” she said, in her bad but charming English; “you need make no mystery of it. You wish to marry my sister-in-law. C’est un beau choix. A man like you ought to marry a tall, thin woman. You must know that I have spoken in your favor; you owe me a famous taper!”
“You have spoken to Madame de Cintré?” said Newman.
“Oh no, not that. You may think it strange, but my sister-in-law and I are not so intimate as that. No; I spoke to my husband and my mother-in-law; I said I was sure we could do what we chose with you.”
“I am much obliged to you,” said Newman, laughing; “but you can’t.”
“I know that very well; I didn’t believe a word of it. But I wanted you to come into the house; I thought we should be friends.”
“I am very sure of it,” said Newman.
“Don’t be too sure. If you like Madame de Cintré so much, perhaps you will not like me. We are as different as blue and pink. But you and I have something in common. I have come into this family by marriage; you want to come into it in the same way.”
“Oh no, I don’t!” interrupted Newman. “I only want to take Madame de Cintré out of it.”
“Well, to cast your nets you have to go into the water. Our positions are alike; we shall be able to compare notes. What do you think of my husband? It’s a strange question, isn’t it? But I shall ask you some stranger ones yet.”
“Perhaps a stranger one will be easier to answer,” said Newman. “You might try me.”
“Oh, you get off very well; the old Comte de la Rochefidèle, yonder, couldn’t do it better. I told them that if we only gave you a chance you would be a perfect talon rouge. I know something about men. Besides, you and I belong to the same camp. I am a ferocious democrat. By birth I am vieille roche; a good little bit of the history of France is the history of my family. Oh, you never heard of us, of course! Ce que c’est que la gloire! We are much better than the Bellegardes, at any rate. But I don’t care a pin for my pedigree; I want to belong to my time. I’m a revolutionist, a radical, a child of the age! I am sure I go beyond you. I like clever people, wherever they come from, and I take my amusement wherever I find it. I don’t pout at the Empire; here all the world pouts at the Empire. Of course I have to mind what I say; but I expect to take my revenge with you.” Madame de Bellegarde discoursed for some time longer in this sympathetic strain, with an eager abundance which seemed to indicate that her opportunities for revealing her esoteric philosophy were indeed rare. She hoped that Newman would never be afraid of her, however he might be with the others, for, really, she went very far indeed. “Strong people”—le gens forts—were in her opinion equal, all the world over. Newman listened to her with an attention at once beguiled and irritated. He wondered what the deuce she, too, was driving at, with her hope that he would not be afraid of her and her protestations of equality. In so far as he could understand her, she was wrong; a silly, rattling woman was certainly not the equal of a sensible man, preoccupied with an ambitious passion. Madame de Bellegarde stopped suddenly, and looked at him sharply, shaking her fan. “I see you don’t believe me,” she said, “you are too much on your guard. You will not form an alliance, offensive or defensive? You are very wrong; I could help you.”
Newman answered that he was very grateful and that he would certainly ask for help; she should see. “But first of all,” he said, “I must help myself.” And he went to join Madame de Cintré.
“I have been telling Madame de la Rochefidèle that you are an American,” she said, as he came up. “It interests her greatly. Her father went over with the French troops to help you in your battles in the last century, and she has always, in consequence, wanted greatly to see an American. But she has never succeeded till to-night. You are the first—to her knowledge—that she has ever looked at.”
Madame de la Rochefidèle had an aged, cadaverous face, with a falling of the lower jaw which prevented her from bringing her lips together, and reduced her conversations to a series of impressive but inarticulate gutturals. She raised an antique eyeglass, elaborately mounted in chased silver, and looked at Newman from head to foot. Then she said something to which he listened deferentially, but which he completely failed to understand.
“Madame de la Rochefidèle says that she is convinced that she must have seen Americans without knowing it,” Madame de Cintré explained. Newman thought it probable she had seen a great many things without knowing it; and the old lady, again addressing herself to utterance, declared—as interpreted by Madame de Cintré—that she wished she had known it.
