Alexandre Dumas - The Last Cavalier - Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon

Hortense resisted with all her might. At that time, Louis was quite a handsome young man, if barely twenty years old, with nice eyes and a kind smile—he looked rather like his sister Caroline, who had just married Murat. While he was not at all in love with Hortense, although he did not find her unattractive, he was too passive to resist the forces at play. Nor did Hortense hate Louis. But she was in love with Duroc.

Her little secret gave Claire de Sourdis confidence. She too ended up admitting something, precious little though it was to admit.

She too was in love, if we can call it love. It would be more appropriate to say that she was in thrall to an image, a mystery in the shape of a handsome young man.

He was twenty-three or twenty-four, with blond hair and dark eyes. His features seemed almost too regular for a man, and his hands were as elegant as a woman’s. He was put together so precisely, each part of him so completely in harmony with the whole, that one could readily see that the outward form of the man, however fragile in appearance, hid Herculean strength. Even before the time of Chateaubriand and Byron, who created darkly romantic heroes like René and Manfred, he bore a troubled brow whose pallor bespoke a strange destiny. For terrible legends were attached to his family name—legends known only imperfectly, but they came stained with blood. Yet nobody had ever seen him parade an air of exaggerated mourning, like so many who had lost so much during the Republic, and never had he made show of his pain at dances and salons and social gatherings. In fact, when he did appear in society, he had no need of any such affectations to try to attract attention. People just naturally looked at him. Usually, though, he eschewed the pastimes of his hunting and travel companions, who had never yet managed to drag him to one of those youthful parties which even the most rigid agree to attend sooner or later. And nobody remembered ever having seen him laugh aloud and openly the way most young people do, or even having seen him smile.

There had long been alliances between the Sainte-Hermine and the Sourdis families, and, as is customary in such noble houses, the memory of those alliances remained important. So when by chance young Sainte-Hermine had come to Paris, he had never failed, since Madame de Sourdis had come back from the colonies, to visit her, for he observed the demands of protocol, and never had his visits been other than formal.

The two young people had had occasion to meet, in society, over the past several months. Besides the polite greetings they exchanged, however, words had been spoken sparingly, especially by the young man. But their eyes had spoken eloquently. Hector apparently did not hold the same control over his eyes as he did over his words, and each time he encountered Claire, his gaze made known how lovely he found her and how perfectly she matched all his heart’s desires.

At their first meetings Claire had been moved by his expressive eyes, and since Sainte-Hermine seemed to her an accomplished gentleman in every way, she had permitted herself to look at him too less guardedly. She had also hoped that he would invite her to dance so that a whispered word or the pressure of his hand might affirm the meaning she’d read in his gaze. But, strangely for the time, Sainte-Hermine, the gentleman who took fencing lessons with Saint-Georges and who could shoot a pistol as well as Junot or Fournier, did not dance.

During the balls he attended, Sainte-Hermine would stand coldly and impassibly at some bay window or in a corner of the room. In that, he became an object of bewilderment for all the gay young women who wondered what secret vow might be depriving them of such an elegant dance partner—for he always dressed with such taste in the latest style.

Claire had wondered, too, at Sainte-Hermine’s reserve in her presence, especially since her mother seemed to admire the young man greatly. She spoke as highly about his family, decimated by the Revolution, as she did of him, and she knew that money could not be an obstacle to their union. The substantial fortunes of the two families were roughly equal.

One can understand the impression the mysterious young Sainte-Hermine might make on a young girl’s heart, especially on a young Creole girl’s heart, with the combination of his physical features and moral qualities, his elegance and strength. Claire’s image of him occupied her mind while biding its time to take over her heart.

Hortense made her hopes and desires clear to Claire: She wanted to marry Duroc, whom she loved, rather than Louis Bonaparte, whom she did not—that essentially was the secret she whispered to her friend. But it was not the same, for Claire’s storybook passion made it difficult for her to speak quite so plainly. At the same time that she described Hector’s features in great detail to her friend, she tried also to understand as best she could the shadows surrounding him.

Finally, after Claire’s mother had called twice, after she had stood up and embraced Hortense, as if the idea had just come to mind—as Madame de Sévigné observes, the most important part of a letter is in the postscript—she said: “By the way, dear Hortense, I am forgetting to ask you something.”

“What is that?”

“I understand that Madame de Permon is giving a great ball.”

“Yes. Loulou came to see my mother and me and invited us herself.”

“Are you going?”

“Yes, of course.”

“My dear Hortense,” Claire said in her most endearing voice, “I would like to ask a favor.”

“A favor?”

“Yes. Get an invitation for my mother and me. Is that possible?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Claire leaped with a joy. “Oh, thank you!” she said. “How will you go about it?”

“Well, I could ask Loulou for an invitation. But I prefer having Eugene do it. Eugene is close to Madame de Permon’s son, and Eugene will ask him for what you desire.”

“And I shall go to Madame de Permon’s ball?” cried Claire joyously.

“Yes,” Hortense answered. Then, looking her young friend in the eye, she asked, “Will he be there?”

Claire turned as red as a beet and dropped her eyes. “I think so.”

“You will point him out to me, won’t you?”

“Oh! You’ll recognize him without me doing that, my dear Hortense. Have I not told you that he can be picked out from among a thousand?”

“How sorry I am that he is not a dancer!” said Hortense.

“How do you think I feel?”

The two girls kissed each other and parted, Claire reminding Hortense not to forget the invitation.

Three days later Claire de Sourdis received her invitation by mail.

THE BALL FOR WHICH Mademoiselle Hortense de Beauharnais’s young friend had requested an invitation was the social event of the season for all of fashionable Paris. Madame de Permon would have needed a mansion four times the size of her own to welcome all those eager to attend, and she had refused to issue further invitations to more than one hundred men and more than fifty women despite their ardent requests. But, because she had been born in Corsica and linked from childhood to the Bonaparte family, she agreed immediately when Eugene Beauharnais made his request, and Mademoiselle de Sourdis and her mother both received their admission cards.

Madame de Permon, whose invitations were in such demand even though her name sounded a bit like the name of a commoner, was one of the grandest women of the times. Indeed, she was a descendant of the Comnène family, which had given six emperors to Constantinople, one to Heraclea, and ten to Trebizond. Her ancestor Constantin Comnène, fleeing the Muslims, had found refuge first in the Taygetus mountains and later on the island of Corsica. Along with three thousand of his compatriots who followed him as their chief, he settled there after buying from the Genoa senate the lands of Paomia, Salogna, and Revinda.