Henry James - Henry James - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 10)

“Have them green or yellow,” said Newman.

“Malheureux!” the little marquise would cry. “Green bows would break your marriage — your children would be illegitimate!”

Madame de Cintre was calmly happy before the world, and Newman had the felicity of fancying that before him, when the world was absent, she was almost agitatedly happy. She said very tender things. “I take no pleasure in you. You never give me a chance to scold you, to correct you. I bargained for that, I expected to enjoy it. But you won’t do anything dreadful; you are dismally inoffensive. It is very stupid; there is no excitement for me; I might as well be marrying some one else.”

“I am afraid it’s the worst I can do,” Newman would say in answer to this. “Kindly overlook the deficiency.” He assured her that he, at least, would never scold her; she was perfectly satisfactory. “If you only knew,” he said, “how exactly you are what I coveted! And I am beginning to understand why I coveted it; the having it makes all the difference that I expected. Never was a man so pleased with his good fortune. You have been holding your head for a week past just as I wanted my wife to hold hers. You say just the things I want her to say. You walk about the room just as I want her to walk. You have just the taste in dress that I want her to have. In short, you come up to the mark, and, I can tell you, my mark was high.”

These observations seemed to make Madame de Cintre rather grave. At last she said, “Depend upon it, I don’t come up to the mark; your mark is too high. I am not all that you suppose; I am a much smaller affair. She is a magnificent woman, your ideal. Pray, how did she come to such perfection?”

“She was never anything else,” Newman said.

“I really believe,” Madame de Cintre went on, “that she is better than my own ideal. Do you know that is a very handsome compliment? Well, sir, I will make her my own!”

Mrs. Tristram came to see her dear Claire after Newman had announced his engagement, and she told our hero the next day that his good fortune was simply absurd. “For the ridiculous part of it is,” she said, “that you are evidently going to be as happy as if you were marrying Miss Smith or Miss Thompson. I call it a brilliant match for you, but you get brilliancy without paying any tax upon it. Those things are usually a compromise, but here you have everything, and nothing crowds anything else out. You will be brilliantly happy as well.” Newman thanked her for her pleasant, encouraging way of saying things; no woman could encourage or discourage better. Tristram’s way of saying things was different; he had been taken by his wife to call upon Madame de Cintre, and he gave an account of the expedition.

“You don’t catch me giving an opinion on your countess this time,” he said; “I put my foot in it once. That’s a d — d underhand thing to do, by the way — coming round to sound a fellow upon the woman you are going to marry. You deserve anything you get. Then of course you rush and tell her, and she takes care to make it pleasant for the poor spiteful wretch the first time he calls. I will do you the justice to say, however, that you don’t seem to have told Madame de Cintre; or if you have she’s uncommonly magnanimous. She was very nice; she was tremendously polite. She and Lizzie sat on the sofa, pressing each other’s hands and calling each other chere belle, and Madame de Cintre sent me with every third word a magnificent smile, as if to give me to understand that I too was a handsome dear. She quite made up for past neglect, I assure you; she was very pleasant and sociable. Only in an evil hour it came into her head to say that she must present us to her mother — her mother wished to know your friends. I didn’t want to know her mother, and I was on the point of telling Lizzie to go in alone and let me wait for her outside. But Lizzie, with her usual infernal ingenuity, guessed my purpose and reduced me by a glance of her eye. So they marched off arm in arm, and I followed as I could. We found the old lady in her arm-chair, twiddling her aristocratic thumbs. She looked at Lizzie from head to foot; but at that game Lizzie, to do her justice, was a match for her. My wife told her we were great friends of Mr. Newman. The marquise started a moment, and then said, ‘Oh, Mr. Newman! My daughter has made up her mind to marry a Mr. Newman.’ Then Madame de Cintre began to fondle Lizzie again, and said it was this dear lady that had planned the match and brought them together. ‘Oh, ’tis you I have to thank for my American son-in-law,’ the old lady said to Mrs. Tristram. ‘It was a very clever thought of yours. Be sure of my gratitude.’ And then she began to look at me and presently said, ‘Pray, are you engaged in some species of manufacture?’ I wanted to say that I manufactured broom-sticks for old witches to ride on, but Lizzie got in ahead of me. ‘My husband, Madame la Marquise,’ she said, ‘belongs to that unfortunate class of persons who have no profession and no business, and do very little good in the world.’ To get her poke at the old woman she didn’t care where she shoved me. ‘Dear me,’ said the marquise, ‘we all have our duties.’ ‘I am sorry mine compel me to take leave of you,’ said Lizzie. And we bundled out again. But you have a mother-in-law, in all the force of the term.”

“Oh,” said Newman, “my mother-in-law desires nothing better than to let me alone.”

Betimes, on the evening of the 27th, he went to Madame de Bellegarde’s ball. The old house in the Rue de l’Universite looked strangely brilliant. In the circle of light projected from the outer gate a detachment of the populace stood watching the carriages roll in; the court was illumined with flaring torches and the portico carpeted with crimson. When Newman arrived there were but a few people present. The marquise and her two daughters were at the top of the staircase, where the sallow old nymph in the angle peeped out from a bower of plants. Madame de Bellegarde, in purple and fine laces, looked like an old lady painted by Vandyke; Madame de Cintre was dressed in white. The old lady greeted Newman with majestic formality, and looking round her, called several of the persons who were standing near. They were elderly gentlemen, of what Valentin de Bellegarde had designated as the high-nosed category; two or three of them wore cordons and stars. They approached with measured alertness, and the marquise said that she wished to present them to Mr. Newman, who was going to marry her daughter. Then she introduced successively three dukes, three counts, and a baron. These gentlemen bowed and smiled most agreeably, and Newman indulged in a series of impartial hand-shakes, accompanied by a “Happy to make your acquaintance, sir.” He looked at Madame de Cintre, but she was not looking at him. If his personal self-consciousness had been of a nature to make him constantly refer to her, as the critic before whom, in company, he played his part, he might have found it a flattering proof of her confidence that he never caught her eyes resting upon him. It is a reflection Newman did not make, but we nevertheless risk it, that in spite of this circumstance she probably saw every movement of his little finger. Young Madame de Bellegarde was dressed in an audacious toilet of crimson crape, bestrewn with huge silver moons — thin crescent and full disks.

“You don’t say anything about my dress,” she said to Newman.

“I feel,” he answered, “as if I were looking at you through a telescope. It is very strange.”

“If it is strange it matches the occasion. But I am not a heavenly body.”

“I never saw the sky at midnight that particular shade of crimson,” said Newman.

“That is my originality; any one could have chosen blue. My sister-in-law would have chosen a lovely shade of blue, with a dozen little delicate moons. But I think crimson is much more amusing. And I give my idea, which is moonshine.”