When the three black horses of the Princess Napraxine, with their manes flying in the wind, their eyes flashing, and their nostrils breathing fire, dashed down the Champs ElysÉes to make the tour du Bois, all Paris looked after her, and multitudes who only knew her by repute took off their hats to her as they had used to do in a bygone time to the golden-haired empress.

‘Ah, if I had been in that woman’s place in ‘seventy-one,’ she thought once, ‘I would not have run away in a cab with Evans the dentist; I would have put on a white gown and all my diamonds, and gone out before them on to the terrace of the Tuileries—they would have forgotten Sedan, and would have worshipped me! I cannot forgive people who have the happiness of great opportunities for not rising to be equal to them. One can but die once, and it must be essentially delightful to die amidst a roll of drums, a blaze of sunset, a storm of welcome. The death of Desaix at Marengo is the ideal death.’

There was at the bottom of her soul, despite her languor, ennui, and pessimism, a certain heroic element; life seemed to her so poor a thing, so stupid, so illogical, that if it went out in fire it vindicated itself in a measure.

‘Sometimes, do you know,’ she said once to a sympathetic companion, ‘I think I might have been something great if I had been born in the time for it; all depends upon that. Mdlle. de Sombreuil would have lived and died like ten thousand other Frenchwomen, in the monotony of the vie de chÂteau, if she had not happened to be alive under the Terror. What possibility of any greatness is there for a woman who lives nowadays in what calls itself the great world? The very men who have any genius in it are dwarfed by it. Modern life is so trivial, yet so absorbing; it is such a bed of down and such a bed of prickles; it is such a sleeping-potion and such a whip of nettles, that we have no time to think about anything but itself. You must live “À l’abri des hommes,” if you want to be of higher stature than they are. Bismarck is a colossus, because he shuts himself up in Varzin so constantly. It is very hard even for men to resist the presence of the world; even Tennyson leaves Farringford in the primrose month to court a vulgar apotheosis in the London drawing-rooms; and for a woman who finds herself from birth upward in that milieu there is no resistance possible. We are born to dress, to drive, to dine, to dance, to set the fashion in all kinds of things,—and that is all. If we are clever, we do mischief in meddling with the hidden cards of diplomacy or statecraft, and if we are light-minded we do a different manner of mischief in making all sorts of vices look pretty and distinguished to those below us, who are always endeavouring to imitate us; but more than that we cannot do. The morphine has been injected into our veins; we cannot resist its influence; there is a kind of excitement and somnolence, both at once, in the routine of our world which none of us can resist. If we have any brains, perhaps we make resolutions to resist, but we do not keep them; the world we live in is idiotic but it is irresistible. When we wake, we see the heap of invitation cards on our table; we yawn, but we yield, and we fill up our book of engagements; the day is crowded, so is the year; and so life slips away hurried, tired, thinking itself amused. Sometimes I think I should like to live amongst the corn-fields and the larchwoods, and do good, and I dare say I shall when I am old, or, what is still worse than old, middle-aged. But you know one does not do good in that way; one always gets imposed on, and the Jew money-lender in the centre of the village would be really the person who would profit by one’s charities. It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. But when you have some intelligence, and have read something besides your breviary, and have studied the philosophy of life a little, it is much more difficult to content yourself. My friends who are putting on blisters and bandages at the hospitals, fancy they are on the way to eternal salvation, but a political economist would tell them that they were only doing a vast deal of mischief, upsetting the nicely-balanced arrangements of Nature. Myself, I think, Nature has very little to do with the world as it is in the nineteenth century in Europe. I do not think Nature, left to herself, would create either cripples or cancers, any more than she would yoke bullocks or cut terriers’ tails.’

She had accompanied her friends the Dames du Calvaire more than once to those hospitals, where patrician hands touched the leper’s sores and the idiot’s ulcers; but her delicate taste had been revolted, and her intelligence, nurtured on shrewd and satiric philosophies, had rejected the idea that any good was done by great ladies transforming themselves into sick nurses of disease. She thought it must be infinitely delightful to be able to delude yourself in that kind of way, to think that you pleased Deity by putting on a poultice and averted a social cataclysm by washing a cretin, but she did not believe in that kind of thing herself. She did not see how any one could do so who had thought about life, and the rest of it.

‘I dare say I am quite useless,’ she would reply to those who tried to convince her, ‘but then so many things are. Who has ever found out the use of butterflies, or of daisies, or of a nautilus, or of a nightingale, or of those charming rosy clouds which drift about at sunset? I do not see the utility of prolonging the horrible and miserable lives of lepers and of idiots in hospitals and asylums. Humanity is not in the least served; it is much more often profoundly noxious and disgusting. Even the people who talk about its sanctity, do not believe in what they say, or war would become an impossibility, and so would all the factories which, as Victor Hugo has said, take the soul out of man to put it into machinery.’

When she spoke in this way she was very much in earnest, and her arguments were very hard to refute; and even Melville went out of her presence with an uncomfortable, though unacknowledged, sense that his whole life had been a mistake based on a bubble which had all the hues of the rainbow, indeed, but no more than a bubble’s solidity. When the men of science, with whom she sometimes amused herself by playing the part of the great Catherine to the EncyclopÆdists, came into her presence, they fared no better than the priests, and she did not believe in them a whit the more.

‘Five hundred years hence, your ideas and your discoveries will all be refuted and ridiculed,’ she said to them, ‘as you now refute and ridicule the physiology of the Greeks and Latins; you will not find the key to the mystery of creation by torturing dogs or chaining horses on a bed of agony.’

And she listened to them, but she laughed at them. To the satirical clearness of her highly-trained intelligence the delirium of science was quite as much a malady of the mind as were the rhapsodies of religion.

‘La science est la grande nÉvrose du moment; Ça passera,’ she said once to Claude Bernard.

In Paris, Nadine Napraxine was what the world had made her; she was the ÉlÉgante of her period, a hothouse flower of fragile beauty, of absolute indolence, of hypercritical taste, of utter and entire uselessness. In her carriage or her sleigh, under her pile of silver fox skins; on a Tuesday at the FranÇais, and on a Saturday at the Grand OpÉra; on her Thursdays at her ‘cinq heures,’ when the most exclusive of crowds gathered in her drawing-rooms; in the few great assemblies and balls to which she deigned to carry her listless grace and her marvellous jewels; throughout her self-absorbed day, which began at noon and ended at dawn, she was a cocodette of the most exquisite grace and of the most incredible extravagance, such as Paris had known her to be from the second year of her marriage. Her caprices were unending, her changefulness was incalculable, her expenditure was enormous; the most exaggerated tales were told of her hauteur and of her exclusiveness, yet were not much beyond the truth; and men worshipped her, and women intrigued for her notice, just because she was so unapproachable and could be insolent. Fragile and white as the narcissus flower, which she always took as her emblem, with a voice ever sweet and low, and the most perfect manner in the world, she could be as cruel in all the cruelties of society as ever her ancestors had been with knout and steel in their frosty fastnesses. It amused her to see the timid recoil, the presumptuous shrink, the confident wither into humiliation, before the chillness of her smile, the terror of her few cold softly-spoken words.

‘I am the only scavenger that Europe has left,’ she said once. ‘All the others have been frightened by the democracy, but I frighten the democracy, or, at least, I keep it out of my drawing-rooms. It may get into the “Almanac de Gotha,” but it will not get past my suisse and up my staircase.’

Now and then she had been known to do exceedingly kind things, just as in the midst of her worldly life she would go now and then to a discourse at the Academy or to a sÉance at the Sorbonne. But they had been always done to persons quite simple and frank, who never affronted her with presumption or disgusted her with pretension. To a lie of any sort she was inexorable.

The HÔtel Napraxine was one of the most delightful houses in Europe. It stood near the entrance of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and was withdrawn from every inquisitive glance which might be cast on it from the road, within gardens large enough to contain groves of lime trees and plane trees, fountains, lawns, pavilions, and terraces of rose-coloured marbles. No disturbing echo of the traffic of Paris could reach the sensitive ear of its sovereign lady when she sank to sleep under the white satin of her shell-shaped ivory bed.

All the finest French artists living had been summoned to its adornment within.

‘All modern rooms are only like so many bonbon-boxes,’ she had said. ‘At least my bonbon-boxes shall be well-painted.’

And Meissonier, Duran, Baudry, Cabanel, Henner, Legros, had all signed some panel, some ceiling, some staircase, chimney-piece, or salon-wall in this most exquisite of houses.

‘It is really charming,’ she said to herself, when she reached it on that first grey, chill, misty morning of her arrival, and its delicious colour and warm air and flower-filled twilight welcomed her after the long dull journey across Europe. It was especially perfect to her this day because for some fifty hours at least her husband would not come thither. There was only one thing ever discordant in its perfect harmonies. When Platon Napraxine came up the staircase—with its black-and-white marbles, its pale-blue velvet carpets, its sculptures by ClÉsinger, and its wall-paintings by Baudry,—when he came up under the leaves of the bananas and the palms, and entered her own sanctuary, his broad tall form, his heavy step, his Kalmuck face were dissonant and absurd in it all, and irritated her sense of fitness, and annoyed her like a false note in the middle of a classic symphony.

‘Poor Platon!’ she thought more than once; ‘I have certainly been the most expensive whim that he has ever had; and he has never got the slightest entertainment out of me. I am very disagreeable to him; I have always been disagreeable to him. I was so at first because I could not help it, and I am so now because I like to be so. But I grant that it has never been quite fair to him. He might just as well have been all alone to amuse himself with his dancers, and comic singers, and people; I have been a white elephant to him. Certainly he has a kind of triumph in possessing the white elephant; he likes to feel I am here; when they all look after me in the Bois, or at the OpÉra, he likes to think I belong to him. As somebody said, when people admire what is ours, it is as if they admired us. I am very much to him what the bleu ciel SÈvres for which he gave ten thousand pounds must be to Lord Dudley. The SÈvres is of no earthly use to him, and he would scarcely dare to touch it, and he would certainly never eat his cutlet or have his venison served on it; but it is something that everybody envies him, that nobody else has. When Platon gives great dinners to sovereigns and all kinds of gros bonnets, and I am opposite to him, I am sure he has the sort of feeling that Lord Dudley has about that bleu ciel service. After all, that is something; though, as the service was incomplete in quantity, so I am incomplete in sentiment. And then, when I meet him driving Mdlle. Chose in the Champs ElysÉes, I seem as if I did not see him; and I never say a syllable of objection if there are a hundred paragraphs in the petits journaux about himself and any number of Mdlles. Chose. If I had ever liked him, I should be angry and make a fuss. After all, he ought to know that, if indifference be not flattery, it is peace.’

So she soothed her conscience, but not always successfully; she had occasionally a passing touch of self-reproach, when she remembered how very little she had given her husband in return for the magnificent fortune, the boundless admiration, and the perfect independence, which she owed to him. She had at the bottom of her heart, though stifled and indistinct, a more sensitive and a higher-toned honour than most women; that instinct of honour told her that she had been, at all times, unjust and ungrateful to a man whose good qualities she refused to see, and even did her best to destroy, because his relation to her irritated her taste and temper, and his ugliness and want of intelligence filled her with disdain.

‘If I had a daughter,’ she thought, in those moments of candour and compunction, ‘I think I should say to her, “Commit any sin and incur any sorrow you like rather than make a marriage without sympathy; it is the one crime which society has agreed to applaud as an act of wisdom and of virtue; but it is a crime nevertheless. One is so young, one does not know; one listens to people who urge all the advantages of it, and when one does know it is too late.” However,’ she added in her own musings, ‘I dare say, if I had daughters, when they were old enough, I should do just the same as everybody else does; I should want them to make a beau mariage, and I should tell them to do it. It is the world which makes one like that. At the fair of Novgorod I once saw a little Simbirsh peasant arrested for stealing a necklace of blue and yellow beads; she burst out sobbing, and said she would not have taken it, but all the girls of her village had all their big beads, and she had none! In the big world we do the same. We want the big beads because other people have theirs. It is paltry; but then society is paltry at its best. They say, when you have entered an opium house, you may have made all the resolutions you will against smoking, you cannot keep them, the atmosphere gains on you, you yield, and smoke, and sink, like all the rest. The world is an opium house.’

Nature had designed her for something better than the opium house. Her intellect, her courage, and her chastity were all of great and fine quality, like the burnished blade of a sword, that is at once delicate and strong. But the world had absorbed her, and left little scope to those higher and nobler instincts. She was in her habits and her tastes a mere ÉlÉgante, indolent, hard to please, hypercritical, of languid constitution, of infinite egotism. Given the impetus, this languor could alter, as by magic, into ardour, force, and energy; but the motive power could rarely be found which could rouse her, and she remained for the most part of her time a mere mondaine, of exquisite taste, of irresistible seduction, but useless, idle, contemptuous, cynical, vaguely disappointed, though all were at her feet, wanting, petulantly, like Alexander, more worlds to conquer. Sometimes in the ennui of the whole thing, and her dissatisfaction in it, she was only restrained from absolute evil by the consciousness of its vulgarity, and her own aversion to those indulgences in which most find their strongest temptation, but in which she only saw a humiliating and a grotesque affinity to the brutes.

As at four years old she had shrugged her small shoulders, with a sigh, before the bonbon boxes—‘J’en ai tant!’—so at four-and-twenty years old she was supercilious to the whole world because it had given her so much, and yet had nothing better than that to give. And incredulous that there was anywhere anything better, she lived in her calorifÈre-heated rooms, like an orchid in a hothouse, and amused herself as with a game by the desires, the pains, the reproaches, the solicitations, the jealousies, which fretted and fumed themselves in that arena of her salon, whilst she remained as tranquil, as pitiless, and as indifferent as fate.

No woman had the world more completely beneath her feet, yet she, like Othmar, was consumed by that eternal ennui which is the penalty of those who possess too much, have seen and heard too much too early, and have been from childhood the objects of adulation and of speculation;—of all those, indeed, who have mind and heart enough not to find all their interests in society, and yet have not that poetic temper which would give them a sure consolation and a safe refuge in the uncloying loveliness of nature.

Ennui is unjustly looked upon as the characteristic of the frivolous type of humanity; on the contrary, the frivolous character is perfectly content with frivolity, and never tires of it. Ennui is rather the mark of those whose taste is too fine and whose instincts are too high to let them be satisfied with the excitement of, and the victories of, society, and yet who have too little of that simplicity, or of that impersonality, which makes the artistic temperament capable of entirely withdrawing from the world and living its own life, self-sustained.

This delicate patrician had the seed in her of great rouÉs, of dauntless conspirators, of haughty territorial tyrants, of men and of women who had emptied thrones and filled them, and given law for life and death to multitudes of vassals; she could not be altogether content with the rosewater politics of modern drawing-rooms, with the harmless rivalry of toilettes and equipages, with the trivial pastimes and as trivial passions of society. She was a woman of the world to the tips of her fingers, yet she could not be altogether content with an existence of Courts, chiffons, flirtations, endless entertainments, and unlimited expenditure.

‘They find us eccentric, capricious, autocratic, us Russians,’ she said one day. ‘I dare say we are so; they forget that, not a century ago, our great-grandparents were slaying Paul and Peter in their palaces, and could knout to death whole villages of men, women, and children, at their mere freak and fancy. I think it is very creditable to us not to be a thousand times worse than we are; our blood is made up of arack and of ice; we are the rude pines of the north French-polished!’

It was three o’clock in the day; she had given orders to be undisturbed. She had slept admirably for eight hours without any morphine. She had bathed twice, on her arrival and on her awaking, in warm water, opaque with otto of rose; she had breakfasted off her usual cup of cream and rolls made of milk. She was in a dreamy, drowsy, amused state of thought; and, as she lay on her couch in the boudoir, which was placed between her library and her dressing-chamber, her thoughts drifted persistently to the meeting of the dawn.

She felt very like Fate now, as she thought how odd it was that the first person she had met in Paris had been Othmar.

‘He is very much changed for so short a time. He is not a whit more content,’ she reflected, with pleasure.

The little room was the prettiest thing in all Paris. ‘It is a casket for a pearl,’ one of her adorers had said, and it seemed really a pity that for eight months out of the year the casket should be closed, and no ray of light ever enter it. Its furniture was of ivory, like that of the adjoining library, bed-room, and bathroom, and its hangings were of silvery satin embroidered with pale roses and apple-blossoms; Baudry had painted the ceiling with the story of Ædon and Procris: the glass in the windows was milk white, and the floor was covered with white bearskins: the atmosphere was like that of a hothouse, and as odorous; there were always a perfect seclusion and silence in it; the only sound which ever came there was the splash of a fountain in the garden below; it might have been set in the heart of the island of Alcina rather than in one of the great avenues of Paris. Here, lying back on one of her low couches with the air around her tropical, vaporous, dreamy, she mused within herself as to how she would deal with Othmar, a smile in her eyes and a doubt in her mind.

‘Let him alone,’ said her conscience.

‘No,’ said her vanity, and perhaps some other emotion also.

‘He never harmed you; he only loved you, and obeyed you, and went away,’ her conscience urged on her. But her vanity replied: ‘That was the worst offence. There are commands which are most honoured by disobedience. There are wounds which ought to be cherished, not healed.’

Unless she chose that it should be otherwise, Othmar, she knew, would be a stranger to her all his life. They would meet, perhaps, in the world very often, but they would exchange commonplace courtesy, and remain as far asunder as two ships that pass each other on the same ocean course, unless she chose. Her better self said to her, ‘Let him alone; he has tried to make another life for himself; he has failed, no doubt, but he has probably found a sort of peace, a kind of affection; if it can console him, do not disturb it.’ But the habits of supremacy and of intrigue, the love of dominion, the intolerance of opposition, which were instinctive in her, and which all her many triumphs and her permitted egotism had fostered and confirmed, forbade her to resign herself to such passivity, and urged her to take up her empire over his life.

And she had a vague wish to see him there again beside her, a wish not very strong, but strong enough to move her. It was here, in this room, that he had first of all told her that he loved her, with words more daring and more imperious than any other had ventured to use in her presence; he was never like other people; he was probably no better, certainly no worse, than other men, but he was different: he pleased her imagination, he touched her sympathy; he was the only man with whom it had ever seemed to her that her life might have been lived harmoniously, with whom she might have understood something of that mystery of love in which she had never believed. To her temper it was the intrigue and intricacy of life which alone made it endurable, the unrolling of the ribbon of fate, the watching and controlling of the comedy of circumstances, which alone made it worth while to rise in the morning to the tedium of its routine.

‘Is life worth living?’ she said once, hearing of the title of a book of drawing-room philosophy. ‘Yes, I think it is, if you are the cat, if you are the spider, if you are the eagle, if you are the dog; not if you are the mouse, or the fly, or the lamb, or the hare. Life is certainly worth living, too, if you regard it as what it is, a dramatic entertainment, diversion. This is the true use of riches, that it enables you to give yourself up to watching and controlling circumstances as if men and women were marionettes; it enables you to sit in your fauteuil and look on without moving unless you wish. I think that life must be always rather tiresome to anybody over ten years old, but the only possible way to endure it is to regard it as a spectacle, as a comedy, or, as Manteuffel has said, that a general sitting in his saddle regards the battlefield he governs.’

This was what she said and felt in her cynical moods, and she was cynical now on her return to Paris; she had left her better self behind her in the snow-drifts of her own country. The woman who had spoken so tenderly of Boganof scarcely existed in her; she lived in an atmosphere of adulation, excitation, ennui, and frivolous occupations. The heroic protectress of the Siberian exile had scarcely a trait in common with her; she spent half the day in the discussion of new costumes with her tailors, and the other half surrounded by flatterers and courtiers in the pursuit of new distractions.

Analysis was so natural to her that it seemed to her in no situation or even crisis of her life would she have abandoned it. There is a well-known physiologist, now head of a famous laboratory, who, when his son died, a boy of twelve, scarcely waited for the child’s last breath to plunge his scalpel into the still warm body in hopes of some discovery of the law of life.[1] If she had had any emotions she would have done a similar thing; she would have dissected them even if they had sprung from her own life blood.