Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон - The Parisians — Complete

“Do young ladies generally find him so seductive?” asked Graham, with a forced smile.

“Probably enough. He has the reputation of being very clever and very wicked, and that is a sort of character which has the serpent’s fascination for the daughters of Eve.”

“Is the reputation merited?”

“As to the cleverness, I am not a fair judge. I dislike that sort of writing which is neither manlike nor womanlike, and in which young Rameau excels. He has the knack of finding very exaggerated phrases by which to express commonplace thoughts. He writes verses about love in words so stormy that you might fancy that Jove was descending upon Semele; but when you examine his words, as a sober pathologist like myself is disposed to do, your fear for the peace of households vanishes,—they are Fox et proeterea nihil; no man really in love would use them. He writes prose about the wrongs of humanity. You feel for humanity; you say, ‘Grant the wrongs, now for the remedy,’—and you find nothing but balderdash. Still I am bound to say that both in verse and prose Gustave Rameau is in unison with a corrupt taste of the day, and therefore he is coming into vogue. So much as to his writings; as to his wickedness, you have only to look at him to feel sure that he is not a hundredth part so wicked as he wishes to seem. In a word, then, M. Gustave Rameau is a type of that somewhat numerous class among the youth of Paris, which I call ‘the lost Tribe of Absinthe.’ There is a set of men who begin to live full gallop while they are still boys. As a general rule, they are originally of the sickly frames which can scarcely even trot, much less gallop without the spur of stimulants, and no stimulant so fascinates their peculiar nervous system as absinthe. The number of patients in this set who at the age of thirty are more worn out than septuagenarians increases so rapidly as to make one dread to think what will be the next race of Frenchmen. To the predilection for absinthe young Rameau and the writers of his set add the imitation of Heine, after, indeed, the manner of caricaturists, who effect a likeness striking in proportion as it is ugly. It is not easy to imitate the pathos and the wit of Heine; but it is easy to imitate his defiance of the Deity, his mockery of right and wrong, his relentless war on that heroic standard of thought and action which the writers who exalt their nation intuitively preserve. Rameau cannot be a Heine, but he can be to Heine what a misshapen snarling dwarf is to a mangled blaspheming Titan. Yet he interests the women in general, and he evidently interests the fair Signorina in especial.”

Just as Bacourt finished that last sentence, Isaura lifted the head which had hitherto bent in an earnest listening attitude that seemed to justify the Doctor’s remarks, and looked round. Her eyes met Graham’s with the fearless candour which made half the charm of their bright yet soft intelligence; but she dropped them suddenly with a half-start and a change of colour, for the expression of Graham’s face was unlike that which she had hitherto seen on it,—it was hard, stern, and somewhat disdainful. A minute or so afterwards she rose, and in passing across the room towards the group round the host, paused at a table covered with books and prints near to which Graham was standing alone. The Doctor had departed in company with the German Count.

Isaura took up one of the prints.

“Ah!” she exclaimed, “Sorrento, my Sorrento. Have you ever visited Sorrento, Mr. Vane?”

Her question and her movement were evidently in conciliation. Was the conciliation prompted by coquetry, or by a sentiment more innocent and artless?

Graham doubted, and replied coldly, as he bent over the print,—

“I once stayed there a few days, but my recollection of it is not sufficiently lively to enable me to recognize its features in this design.”

“That is the house, at least so they say, of Tasso’s father; of course you visited that?”

“Yes, it was a hotel in my time; I lodged there.”

“And I too. There I first read ‘The Gerusalemine.’” The last words were said in Italian, with a low measured tone, inwardly and dreamily.

A somewhat sharp and incisive voice speaking in French here struck in and prevented Graham’s rejoinder: “Quel joli dessin! What is it, Mademoiselle?”

Graham recoiled; the speaker was Gustave Rameau, who had, unobserved, first watched Isaura, then rejoined her side.

“A view of Sorrento, Monsieur, but it does not do justice to the place. I was pointing out the house which belonged to Tasso’s father.”

“Tasso! Hein! and which is the fair Eleonora’s?”

“Monsieur,” answered Isaura, rather startled at that question, from a professed homme de lettres, “Eleonora did not live at Sorrento.”

“Tant pis pour Sorrente,” said the homme de lettres, carelessly. “No one would care for Tasso if it were not for Eleonora.”

“I should rather have thought,” said Graham, “that no one would have cared for Eleonora if it were not for Tasso.”

Rameau glanced at the Englishman superciliously. “Pardon, Monsieur, in every age a love-story keeps its interest; but who cares nowadays for le clinquant du Tasse?”

“Le clinquant du Tasse!” exclaimed Isaura, indignantly.

“The expression is Boileau’s, Mademoiselle, in ridicule of the ‘Sot de qualite,’ who prefers—

“‘Le clinquant du Tasse a tout l’or de Virgile.’

“But for my part I have as little faith in the last as the first.”

“I do not know Latin, and have therefore not read Virgil,” said Isaura.

“Possibly,” remarked Graham, “Monsieur does not know Italian, and has therefore not read Tasso.”

“If that be meant in sarcasm,” retorted Rameau, “I construe it as a compliment. A Frenchman who is contented to study the masterpieces of modern literature need learn no language and read no authors but his own.”

Isaura laughed her pleasant silvery laugh. “I should admire the frankness of that boast, Monsieur, if in our talk just now you had not spoken as contemptuously of what we are accustomed to consider French masterpieces as you have done of Virgil and Tasso.”

“Ah, Mademoiselle! it is not my fault if you have had teachers of taste so rococo as to bid you find masterpieces in the tiresome stilted tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Poetry of a court, not of a people, one simple novel, one simple stanza that probes the hidden recesses of the human heart, reveals the sores of this wretched social state, denounces the evils of superstition, kingcraft, and priestcraft, is worth a library of the rubbish which pedagogues call ‘the classics.’ We agree, at least, in one thing, Mademoiselle; we both do homage to the genius of your friend Madame de Grantmesnil.”

“Your friend, Signorina!” cried Graham, incredulously; “is Madame de Grantmesnil your friend?”

“The dearest I have in the world.”

Graham’s face darkened; he turned away in silence, and in another minute vanished from the room, persuading himself that he felt not one pang of jealousy in leaving Gustave Rameau by the side of Isaura. “Her dearest friend Madame de Grantmesnil!” he muttered.

A word now on Isaura’s chief correspondent. Madame de Grantmesnil was a woman of noble birth and ample fortune. She had separated from her husband in the second year after marriage. She was a singularly eloquent writer, surpassed among contemporaries of her sex in popularity and renown only by Georges Sand.

At least as fearless as that great novelist in the frank exposition of her views, she had commenced her career in letters by a work of astonishing power and pathos, directed against the institution of marriage as regulated in Roman Catholic communities. I do not know that it said more on this delicate subject than the English Milton has said; but then Milton did not write for a Roman Catholic community, nor adopt a style likely to captivate the working classes. Madame de Grantmesnil’s first book was deemed an attack on the religion of the country, and captivated those among the working classes who had already abjured that religion. This work was followed up by others more or less in defiance of “received opinions,”—some with political, some with social revolutionary aim and tendency, but always with a singular purity of style. Search all her books, and however you might revolt from her doctrine, you could not find a hazardous expression. The novels of English young ladies are naughty in comparison. Of late years, whatever might be hard or audacious in her political or social doctrines softened itself into charm amid the golden haze of romance. Her writings had grown more and more purely artistic,—poetizing what is good and beautiful in the realities of life rather than creating a false ideal out of what is vicious and deformed. Such a woman, separated young from her husband, could not enunciate such opinions and lead a life so independent and uncontrolled as Madame de Grantmesnil had done, without scandal, without calumny. Nothing, however, in her actual life had ever been so proved against her as to lower the high position she occupied in right of birth, fortune, renown. Wherever she went she was fetee, as in England foreign princes, and in America foreign authors, are fetes. Those who knew her well concurred in praise of her lofty, generous, lovable qualities. Madame de Grantmesnil had known Mr. Selby; and when, at his death, Isaura, in the innocent age between childhood and youth, had been left the most sorrowful and most lonely creature on the face of the earth, this famous woman, worshipped by the rich for her intellect, adored by the poor for her beneficence, came to the orphan’s friendless side, breathing love once more into her pining heart, and waking for the first time the desires of genius, the aspirations of art, in the dim self-consciousness of a soul between sleep and waking.