Devereux — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (best free novels txt) 📖

one which to my eyes seemed to contain a throne: upon a nearer inspection I discovered it was a bed. Upon a large chair, by a very bad fire—it was in the month of March—sat a tall, handsome woman, excessively painted, and dressed in a manner which to my taste, accustomed to English finery, seemed singularly plain. I had sent in the morning to request permission to wait on her, so that she was prepared for my visit. She rose, offered me her cheek, kissed mine, shed several tears, and in short testified a great deal of kindness towards me. Old ladies who have flirted with our fathers always seem to claim a sort of property in the sons!

Before she resumed her seat she held me out at arm’s length.

“You have a family likeness to your brave father,” said she, with a little disappointment; “but—”

“Madame de Balzac would add,” interrupted I, filling up the sentence which I saw her bienveillance had made her break off, “Madame de Balzac would add that I am not so good-looking. It is true: the likeness is transmitted to me within rather than without; and if I have not my father’s privilege to be admired, I have at least his capacities to admire,” and I bowed.

Madame de Balzac took three large pinches of snuff. “That is very well said,” said she, gravely: “very well indeed! not at all like your father, though, who never paid a compliment in his life. Your clothes, by the by, are in exquisite taste: I had no idea that English people had arrived at such perfection in the fine arts. Your face is a little too long! You admire Racine, of course? How do you like Paris?”

All this was not said gayly or quickly: Madame de Balzac was by no means a gay or a quick person. She belonged to a peculiar school of Frenchwomen, who affected a little languor, a great deal of stiffness, an indifference to forms when forms were to be used by themselves, and an unrelaxing demand of forms when forms were to be observed to them by others. Added to this, they talked plainly upon all matters, without ever entering upon sentiment. This was the school she belonged to; but she possessed the traits of the individual as well as of the species. She was keen, ambitious, worldly, not unaffectionate nor unkind; very proud, a little of the devotee,—because it was the fashion to be so,—an enthusiastic admirer of military glory, and a most prying, searching, intriguing schemer of politics without the slightest talent for the science.

“Like Paris!” said I, answering only the last question, and that not with the most scrupulous regard to truth. “Can Madame de Balzac think of Paris, and not conceive the transport which must inspire a person entering it for the first time? But I had something more endearing than a stranger’s interest to attach me to it: I longed to express to my father’s friend my gratitude for the interest which I venture to believe she on one occasion manifested towards me.”

“Ah! you mean my caution to you against that terrible De Montreuil. Yes, I trust I was of service to you there.”

And Madame de Balzac then proceeded to favour me with the whole history of the manner in which she had obtained the letter she had sent me, accompanied by a thousand anathemas against those atroces Jesuites and a thousand eulogies on her own genius and virtues. I brought her from this subject so interesting to herself, as soon as decorum would allow me; and I then made inquiry if she knew aught of Oswald or could suggest any mode of obtaining intelligence respecting him. Madame de Balzac hated plain, blunt, blank questions, and she always travelled through a wilderness of parentheses before she answered them. But at last I did ascertain her answer, and found it utterly unsatisfactory. She had never seen nor heard anything of Oswald since he had left her charged with her commission to me. I then questioned her respecting the character of the man, and found Mr. Marie Oswald had little to plume himself upon in that respect. He seemed, however, from her account of him, to be more a rogue than a villain; and from two or three stories of his cowardice, which Madame de Balzac related, he appeared to me utterly incapable of a design so daring and systematic as that of which it pleased all persons who troubled themselves about my affairs to suspect him.

Finding at last that no further information was to be gained on this point, I turned the conversation to Montreuil. I found, from Madame de Balzac’s very abuse of him, that he enjoyed a great reputation in the country and a great favour at court. He had been early befriended by Father la Chaise, and he was now especially trusted and esteemed by the successor of that Jesuit Le Tellier,—Le Tellier, that rigid and bigoted servant of Loyola, the sovereign of the king himself, the destroyer of the Port Royal, and the mock and terror of the bedevilled and persecuted Jansenists. Besides this, I learned what has been before pretty clearly evident; namely, that Montreuil was greatly in the confidence of the Chevalier, and that he was supposed already to have rendered essential service to the Stuart cause. His reputation had increased with every year, and was as great for private sanctity as for political talent.

When this information, given in a very different spirit from that in which I retail it, was over, Madame de Balzac observed, “Doubtless you will obtain a private audience with the king?”

“Is it possible, in his present age and infirmities?”

“It ought to be, to the son of the brave Marshal Devereux.”

“I shall be happy to receive Madame’s instructions how to obtain the honour: her name would, I feel, be a greater passport to the royal presence than that of a deceased soldier; and Venus’s cestus may obtain that grace which would never be accorded to the truncheon of Mars!”

Was there ever so natural and so easy a compliment? My Venus of fifty smiled.

“You are mistaken, Count,” said she; “I have no interest at court: the Jesuits forbid that to a Jansenist, but I will speak this very day to the Bishop of Frejus; he is related to me, and will obtain so slight a boon for you with ease. He has just left his bishopric; you know how he hated it. Nothing could be pleasanter than his signing himself, in a letter to Cardinal Quirini, ‘Fleuri, Eveque de Frejus par l’indignation divine.’ The King does not like him much; but he is a good man on the whole, though jesuitical; he shall introduce you.”

I expressed my gratitude for the favour, and hinted that possibly the relations of my father’s first wife, the haughty and ancient house of La Tremouille, might save the Bishop of Frejus from the pain of exerting himself on my behalf.

“You are very much mistaken,” answered Madame de Balzac: “priests point the road to court as well as to Heaven; and warriors and nobles have as little to do with the former as they have with the latter, the unlucky Duc de Villars only excepted,—a man whose ill fortune is enough to destroy all the laurels of France. Ma foi! I believe the poor Duke might rival in luck that Italian poet who said, in a fit of despair, that if he had been bred a hatter, men would have been born without heads.”

And Madame de Balzac chuckled over this joke, till, seeing that no further news was to be gleaned from her, I made my adieu and my departure.