Читать книгу The Burning Glass - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

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M. De Guibert, the most sought after man in Paris, returned to his apartments after midnight. He had been to three houses since he had left the fête of M. Watelet, and he was tired with the sudden fatigue of a man who puts all his energy into everything he does.

Yet the stimulus of brilliant society, delicate adulation, and the meeting with a new personality, lingered in his blood, and he could not sleep.

Instead, he flung himself in the chair before his desk and began turning over some papers that lay ready to his hand.

He aspired to be a Corneille as well as a Turenne, and in the snatched leisure of his active life was writing dramas, poems, essays and fragments that experimented in every form of literary art.

Voltaire had praised him, and he meant to deserve that praise.

To his keen, ardent intellect, the vigour of his youth, the self-confidence inspired by his dazzling success, everything seemed possible.

He was in love with life, avid for experience, sensation, adventure, fevered with the sense of unrest, of change that was in the air, scornful of the old tyrannies, the old corruptions, the old conventions.

Yet he was no demagogue, fanatic, or reformer, but a professional soldier who had seen twelve years of active service, during which he had brilliantly distinguished himself in the Seven Years' War, and whose magnificent technical abilities had enabled him to write that masterpiece which was L'Essai sur la Tactique. This work, published secretly in Holland two years previously and smuggled into France, where it was eagerly passed from hand to hand, had at once made the young author famous among the intellectuals of the day through the preface—which dedicated to 'My Country' defied the existing constitutions of King and Church with a daring eloquence that delighted that band of men who, since Denis Diderot brought out the first volume of his Encyclopaedia in 1750, had been spreading the doctrine of free-thought, free government, and scientific materialism as opposed to superstitious credulity. M. de Guibert eagerly responded to the praise and friendship of these brilliant men and women, but he was too young to be satisfied with even this measure of success.

Animated by a sincere patriotism, he wished to serve France in some more definite sense. His most ardent desire was for foreign travel; particularly did he long to visit Prussia, whose king was so remarkable a monarch, Russia, whose empress had proved such a generous friend to Denis Diderot, and those far northern countries of which so little was known.

This charming, eager, and flattered young man was not, either, altogether disposed to follow the precepts he so ably endorsed in his writing; of a noble and military family, all his instincts were for the Court, the salon, the pomp, ease and refinement of life. He might be friends with men such as M. Turgot and the Marquis de Condorcet; he might applaud Voltaire retiring from the world in his little model village of happy peasantry, and Rousseau withdrawn into sulky retreat at Ermonenville; he might admire the crude manliness of David Hume, the impress of whose personality still remained on Parisian society, but he was not disposed to imitate any of these people.

He was the man of wit and fashion, gallantry and breeding, before he was a philosopher or a man of letters.

He wished for the usual preferment in the usual way. He was eager for worldly honours; the praise even of mean people pleased him. He enjoyed the homage of women; solitude, meditation, and peace were foreign to his temperament. He loved movement, company, excitement, the play, the opera, art, gaiety, easy love, facile friendship.

He was not yet sure which path he would take towards that glory that had beckoned him from the onset of his career, but he was convinced that he should gain his goal. Voltaire and Frederic of Prussia had both prophesied this of him. There were those who did not hesitate to say that he would be the liberator of his country in that crisis that every class felt approaching.

With all this, he was but a colonel of a Corsican regiment, and fiercely ambitious.

In his gorgeous fortunes were two vexations; his lack of money and the chain of an attachment which began to gall somewhat heavily on the mounting spirits of the man who felt capable of bringing all the world to his feet.

He was resolved not to be bound by Madame de Montsauge. At the same time, he shrank from breaking a connection to which the woman dung tenaciously, and which was strengthened by use and custom.

As he turned over the sheets of his manuscript without finding a word to write, his excited brain was obsessed by the images of two women.

One, Madame de Montsauge, familiar, gentle, placid, with her calm belief in his devotion, her quiet insistence on his attention—a woman whom he had known too long, loved too easily, understood too thoroughly a woman who had been too uniformly kind, too continuously pliable, whose infatuation for him was too dogged, too quiet, too unchanging. He knew her expressions, her ways, her habits, her clothes even, by heart—she was a symbol of staleness, almost of boredom, in a world that was so new and splendid.

The other woman was Julie Lespinasse, the acquaintance of half an hour's speech, elusive, strange, full of impulses and enthusiasms, vivid, vital—the woman who had said that her life was too full for his friendship.

M. de Guibert wondered who the man was who thus filled the heart of Julie de Lespinasse. She was the admired friend of every brilliant person in Paris, the most famous woman among the disciples of Voltaire. Her salon was the most renowned in the capital. For nearly two years she had reigned there—'the Muse of the Encyclopaedia,' with tact, wit, judgment, charm, and discretion.

M. de Guibert knew very little more about her than this. He was aware that there was a mystery over her birth, that Madame du Deffand had brought her to Paris from the obscurity of a convent in Lyons, that a jealous quarrel between the two women had turned a warm friendship into hatred, and that Julie de Lespinasse, in leaving her patroness had taken with her the entire circle of her friends, who between them had provided the small but decent pension on which she lived.

He knew also of her extraordinary friendship for M. D'Alembert, who occupied a room above her apartments and shared her daily life, a friendship that was respected and admired as showing both the warmheartedness and courage of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.

Even vulgar or envious minds had found nothing evil to say of this affection between the great man and the charming woman, and M. de Guibert knew that it was not the philosopher to whom Julie had referred as the person who filled her soul.

Whoever this person was, the young soldier rather envied him; it would be pleasant to his pride to be loved by a creature like Julie.

She made Madame de Montsauge appear more than ever colourless.

He had a very exact memory for faces, for nuances of colour and line, and he could recall Julie de Lespinasse so clearly that she seemed to stand before him in the little, quiet, candle-lit room.

Her figure was so enchantingly graceful—like a fine drawing by a great Master—a perfect combination of Nature and Art. She carried the fashions of the moment as if they had been designed for her. Never, among all the women of his acquaintance, had he seen one who could wear clothes so supremely well.

He could recall the long gleaming folds of her white satin mantle, the flounces of the apricot taffeta and blue gauze, the shining feathers of the grebe muff, her lovely unjewelled hands, her slender, high-arched feet that had not, his fastidious eye had noted, pressed the velvet shoe out of shape, the delicate ankle in the thin web of the silk stocking.

She was plain and he admired beauty. Yet her pale, tired face which had neither colour nor freshness, her passionate eyes dark beneath her hood, haunted his memory.

The glamour of the evening, the light of the yellow silk lamp had been kind to her, as she had so keenly known. He also knew this, but he wanted to see her again; he was too young himself to set much value on the graces of youth. Girls had never been among his conquests.

Well, he would go and see her. She was absorbed and he was bound. They might with safety enjoy each other's company; he had the vanity to hope that she would make an intimate friend of him, place him beside men like M. de Crillon, M. de Vaines, M. Élard, M. de Condorcet, and others of her wonderful circle.

He would be glad to go and mingle with the elect at her famous Tuesdays, and to be flattered by a woman whose praise was so eagerly sought for by others.

With a half-sigh he pushed aside his papers and rose.

Life was more interesting than books; he was not the type to be most successful with paper and ink. It was his own personality and charm that made him so remarkable. Little of this got into his poems and dramas, which were in the nature of a tour de force, written because his world was accustomed to literary expression.

He went to the window, drew the short, blue damask curtain, and looked out onto the night.

The moon was now rising above the dark housetops, the sky was gleaming with a silver-blue light, half the deserted street was in shadow, half illuminated by the moonbeams in which the raw, fluttering flames of the lamps looked pale.

Paris, shrouded and silent, lay before M. de Guibert, and as he regarded the city that was the centre of the civilised world, and which he had so easily fascinated, which had accorded him such intoxicating adoration, such eager adulation, he soon forgot the face and form of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.

The only person who for long occupied his thought was Jacques Hippolyte Antoine, Comte de Guibert, Colonel in His Majesty's Army—this strong, unconscious egotism, that was too ingenuous to be offensive, had largely contributed to his unchecked success.

He stepped out onto the balcony, leant against the light iron rail and looked with absent eyes at the sleeping city. The remembrance of his lack of means came to him with a certain sting. There again he was different from the men who had so warmly received him into their exclusive circle. He could not live in an attic like D'Alembert, nor in retirement like Rousseau; the main facts about him were his youth and his vitality, and these must be satisfied with things that only money could buy. To compete with the rank and wealth by which he was surrounded, and to which by birth and instinct he belonged, he needed a great deal more money than he could at present command. Nor would his position be greatly improved by the death of his father, who, like himself, a superb soldier, had no higher rank than that of major-general, and who had not yet secured a military appointment of any value.

Even the limited elegance of these apartments was more than could really be afforded by this man who was the idol of Paris. His debts were enormous, steadily mounting, and caused him some uneasiness. There was but one solution—the usual, banal one—a wealthy marriage.

The apostle of the freedom of Man, the champion of the new, the elevated, this man who would throw down the old gods and trample on the old conventions, was now in his secret soul contemplating the most commonplace, the meanest form of achieving ease and independence.

His philosophy, his freedom, could suggest nothing to him but this time-honoured expedient—his family must find for him some young girl with a magnificent fortune and suitable birth. There, too, his pride was the ordinary pride of his class. His wife must be fresh from a convent and well-born. Never for a second would he have contemplated marrying a Madame de Montsauge—or a Julie de Lespinasse. He faced the prospect of this marriage with some grimness; it was a bitter drop in the sweet, heady cup that was being everywhere offered to his lips.

He must be chained, he who loved his liberty above all things. He must be burdened for ever by an insipid creature—he whom the most accomplished women could only satisfy for a short time. He must risk putting himself in that ridiculous position in which he so often put other men—that of the ignored, slighted, and flouted husband. Yet the thing must be done, and done—though he shrank from facing this—immediately. He did not see the irony of the position whereby he, voicing so eloquently a new and lofty creed, was reduced by selfish wants to the necessity of a very ordinary expedient, but he chafed under the prospect of this forced surrender of his prized liberty.

Well, first, at least, he would travel. He would indulge his desire to go to Prussia, to study German tactics and to make the acquaintance of the famous Frederic, who, warrior, statesman, freethinker, and man of letters, was greatly admired by M. de Guibert.

He wished also to visit the battlefields of the Seven Years' War and study them in the light of his later experience and knowledge. He was slightly tired of the praise of women, slightly jaded by easy love affairs, a little weary of books and bookmen.

His youth and strength clamoured within him for new adventures, fresh activities; the real trend of his nature was towards action not thought; his military ambitions were now in the ascendant—Turenne, not Corneille, became his model as he stared down in the dark Paris street...He believed that he would rather have won Fontenoy than have written Zaire. After all, Maurice de Saxe was more his type than Jean D'Alembert.

'Grand Dieu!' murmured the young colonel, his thoughts ending in speech. 'But all these men are ill—there is not one of them who could shoulder a musket and a pack for half an hour's march.'

Then he smiled at this heresy and yawned. A little wind blew up freshly on his hot face. He yawned again, overcome with sudden desire for sleep. His healthy mind and body cried out for repose. He turned back into his room, where the candles were guttering to the sockets of the gleaming brass sticks, and without calling his valet, who had gone to bed in despair, flung off the heavy braided coat of his uniform, and then, still yawning, thrust all his papers, poems, love-letters, military documents, together in an untidy pile, closed the desk, oblivious of the May moon now shining into the room, the beauty of the spring night, even here, in the heart of the city, of all the friendship, coquetry and passion, honour, applause and homage, offered him in those letters he had just tossed together, some unopened, most unread, and all unanswered, forgetful of the wistful, vivid face of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and the dinging sweetness of Madame de Montsauge and only desirous of sleep.

When he had finished his hasty toilet, brushed the pomade out of his hair and flung himself in an abandon of fatigue on his bed, this petted hero of the salons looked an ordinary healthy and tired young man.

His profound slumbers were not disturbed by any dreams either of Julie de Lespinasse, Jeanne de Montsauge, or of the unknown girl who must one day be his wife.