Читать книгу The Lady and the Arsenic - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 5
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ОглавлениеMeanwhile Paris—all France—is excited by another dramatic enigma that plunges the romantics, the intellectuals into wild excitement and greatly troubles the King himself.
Again the prisoner is a man, the victim of a woman, but this time a dead woman. Her character, conduct and love affairs form, however, the pivot on which the case turns.
Two years after La Roncière had disappeared into prison, the elegant and famous Gavarni (Paul-Sulpice), celebrated for his sketches and caricatures of Parisian life published in Les Gens du Monde and Charivari, and one of the leading figures in the artistic life of the capital, received by express from Bourg, a provincial town near the frontiers of Savoy, a desperate appeal from an old friend, a colleague, Sébastien-Benoît Peytel—"Help, my friend, and quickly!"
Peytel was in prison on a charge of a triple murder; the circumstances were dramatic, the mise en scène romantic, the whole affair mysterious, exciting. Gavarni threw himself into it with fervour and ran about Paris enlisting the sympathy and the help of all Peytel's friends and acquaintances; among them were such famous men as Honoré Balzac, Alphonse de Lamartine, father of the "romantics," Emile de Girardin, Henri Berthoud and Louis Desnoyers.
This Peytel came from Macon; he had been educated for the law, but instead of practising it he tried his fortune in Paris. He achieved some success in journalism and quickly made lifelong friends of some of the best minds of the day; he was what we should term "modern," what he called contemporain, and his acrid, shrewd and effective style was chiefly employed in attacking, in the traditional manner of the young intellectual, all existing institutions. Louis-Philippe, under the symbol of "The Pear" (La Poire), was one of Peytel's favourite butts, and some of these satires were considered very successful.
Before the revolution of 1830, he had brought out several literary journals, printed on rose-coloured paper—Le Sylphe, Le Trilby, Le Lutin; after this date he purchased, with Balzac, shares in Le Voleur; he helped to edit this and wrote the theatrical reviews. A daring pamphlet against the King made him popular with the wits of the boulevards, but not only did he earn nothing by his journalistic enterprises, they ate up a considerable portion of his modest patrimony.
At the age of thirty Peytel decided to return to the law and to purchase a provincial legal practice; he chose that of one Maître Cerdon, notary public at Belley, in the valley of the Rhône near the Savoy borders. Proposed public works, a new bridge, a new road, a steamboat on the Rhône, promised some profitable work in this far-away spot, and Peytel agreed to pay M. Cerdon forty thousand francs for his practice—a high price for the place and the period. To meet these expenses, Peytel looked out for an heiress, and soon found one—a girl of twenty years of age, Félice Alcazar, who was staying at Belley with her sister, Madame Montrichard, wife of the Commandant of the gendarmerie of the district.
Félice was a white Creole from Port-d'Espagne, of a good family of Spanish extraction; she was ill-educated, spoilt, indolent, petulant and greedy to a disgusting extent. All these defects had a common origin; the girl was nearly blind, she could not get up and downstairs or cut her food without assistance. She was, however, "coquette," and had contrived to imbibe many of the romantic notions of the period; ni laide, ni jolie, this feeble creature had few attractions beyond her dowry, which was considerable.
She brought her husband property in Gibraltar, shares in an English business, an annual income of two thousand francs, one hundred and eighty francs in French government bonds, and a floating capital of eight thousand five hundred francs. They were married in May, 1838; Lamartine, Gavarni, Desnoyers and Berthoud signed the register as witnesses.
At first Peytel and his wife lived with a married sister, Madame Casimir Broussis, at Bourg, near Belley, then at Belley itself with the Montrichards. In the autumn they were in Peytel's native town of Mâcon, and by the end of October he was ready to go to Belley again to take up official residence as notary public. He travelled in a one-horse covered carriage (phaéton à soufflet) with his wife, and was followed by a baggage cart that contained a considerable sum of money as well as luggage; the horse that drew this was led by Peytel's young servant, Louis Rey, an ex-soldier of excellent character whom he had obtained from his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Montrichard.
Because of long delays at each stage this cavalcade did not reach the last stretch of the journey—that between Roussillon and Belley—until eleven o'clock at night, when a frightful storm of wind and rain was added to the darkness and the wildness of the lonely road that wound, between rocks, lakes and precipices, through a gorge known as la montée de la Darde to a bridge called the Pont d'Andert over the river Furand.
Well beyond this bridge stood the lonely cottage and forge of a blacksmith, one Termet. In the fields beyond the ravine were a few scattered farms, but no spot in a civilised country could have been more desolate, especially on this night—All Saints' Eve—of violent tempest.
Amid the howling of the wind and the lashing of the rain the son of Joseph Termet heard a knocking at their door; the youth called his father and the two gazed cautiously from the window; some ragged moonbeams revealed a closed phaéton, the horse led by a gentleman who declared that he was Maître Peytel, the new notary at Belley, that his wife had just been murdered by his servant and that he wanted help to take her into Belley.
The two Termets accompanied Peytel to the road over the Darde, and there the body of Félice was found face downwards by the roadside in wet muslins and broken hat, horribly disfigured and half-submerged in a flooded field. When this corpse had been placed in the phaéton, Peytel directed the carriage towards Belley, but, after a few yards, drew up to point out to the blacksmith another body in the middle of the road. It was that of Louis Rey, his brains beaten in with a hammer; Peytel tried to drive over the corpse and, when prevented, explained laconically that "ce brigand" had shot Madame Peyel and that he in revenge had killed him with a geologist's hammer that he carried.
When the phaéton arrived at Belley, Peytel sprang out, knocked up the principal citizens and again told his frightful story to the doctor and magistrate. The former could not help Félice—she was already cold, with two pistol balls in her head. The little town of five thousand inhabitants was soon in a state of commotion, into the midst of which wandered the horse with the baggage wagon seeking his stable. Lieutenant Wolff of the gendarmerie soon appeared on the scene and listened sceptically to the tale of the dreadful events in the gorge of the Darde.
"All very well," was his comment, "but three went out and one returns. I arrest you, monsieur."
Such was the plight of Sébastien Peytel when he wrote his appeal to Gavarni. The ex-journalist's friends were soon up in arms, and his foremost champion was Balzac, once his co-editor on Le Voleur.
The preliminary enquiries, so important in French legal cases, were wholly unfavourable to Peytel. His story of the night of November 1st was proved, upon investigation, to be false. However Madame Peytel and Louis Rey had died, it had not been in the way in which Peytel declared they had. The career of the servant was discovered to be blameless; this foundling, without relatives, was a jolly, pleasant, industrious fellow, liked by all who had known him. Peytel's money affairs were bad, he had caused his wife to make a will in his favour, he had inserted in the marriage contract a clause, which the wife's notary had overlooked, that left him the master of her capital. Worse, a paper was found in Félice's writing confessing to miserable behaviour—some unspecified misconduct—and this was proved to be the half-blind girl's tracing in ink over her husband's pencilling. Worst of all, Mme. Peytel was, at the time of her murder, a few months from motherhood, and if she had had a child nothing could have prevented it from inheriting her fortune.
The six months' married life of the Peytels had been a wretched affair—the girl had been wilful, lazy, greedy, childish, but the man had been violent, brutal; his "scenes" had often reduced his partner to panic fright; she had never liked him and had lately come to regard him with physical repulsion.
In view of these facts it might have been reasonably supposed that Peytel had destroyed his unwanted wife and child, and then the servant, in order to put the blame on this victim. So far the story was sordid enough, but all the evidence (of which there was a great deal) pointed to the guilt of Peytel and to motives of cupidity, and, perhaps, a furious exasperation against a tiresome fool who was in the way. But the "romantic" element so popular at the time soon appeared; when Peytel was first arrested he exclaimed to Lieutenant Wolff—"You do not know all my misfortunes—my wife and my servant were lovers!" He afterwards denied having said this and treated any doubt of his wife's fidelity with offended scorn.
But when Gavarni visited him in prison, Peytel threw himself into his friend's arms and whispered "a secret." Gavarni never revealed this, but allowed it to be assumed that it was what Peytel had already told Wolff. The artist dashed back to Paris, told Balzac "the secret," and the two friends returned to Bourg post-haste. On the road the novelist indulged in some innocent publicity; at the first relay, he said to the postilion: "Ah, my friend, make haste! I can earn a hundred francs a day, this gentleman fifty francs, so you see how this loss of time ruins us!" The sums rose at every stage until Balzac was a self-confessed millionaire by the time he reached Bourg.
The novelist heard Peytel's story, believed it, and took up the case with all the full glow of that creative imagination so detrimental to the discovery of the truth. He visited the scene of the crime and was greatly impressed with the lonely gloom of the montée of the Darde. Yes, the rich colours of romanticism were here! The scenery of rock, abyss, lake and winding road was "Satanic," like that of the infernal regions. What a splendid setting for a crime of passion! Here Peytel, "essentially good," fiery, sensitive, proud, had destroyed the two base creatures who had "soiled his name"—and then tried to save the miserable woman's "honour" by a noble lie. Or had the guilty lovers tried to murder and rob the husband and been killed by Peytel in self-defence?
Balzac was not quite sure, but he returned to Paris and dashed off a brochure in defence of Peytel that contained such a severe attack on Félice that her brother-in-law entered the field to protect her memory. In Balzac's imagination the murdered woman was "horrible, low, mean, disgusting," she had "stooped to the embraces of a slave" and deserved even the terrible punishment that she had received.
Meanwhile Peytel had been put on his trial for murder. He appeared fashionably dressed, his black hair "cast back in the mode," his heavy whiskers carefully trimmed, his air haughty and aloof. Under cross-examination he showed that verbal dexterity which exasperates without convincing; his attitude towards the law was extremely insolent. He was fortified, not only by the knowledge of the exertions of Gavarni and Balzac, but by an enthusiastic letter on his behalf written by Lamartine, the French Byron.
There were suggestions that Peytel had been a little "Byronic" himself—that he used a skull as a drinking vessel and so on; neither this atmosphere of romantic gloom, however, nor his "Manfred" air in the dock impressed a provincial jury; he was found guilty and sentenced to death, to the amazement and rage of his friends. Gavarni, generous and impulsive, Balzac, warmhearted and opinionated, used every effort for a reopening of the case that became more and more obscured by theatricalisms.
Peytel spent his time in writing verses, memoirs, letters, sonnets to his friends, accounts of his youth—anything as long as he scribbled something. Like the Girondins, he was ready to write on the steps of the guillotine; he belonged to that class of pseudo-intellectuals which, without talent, must be continually expressing their own nullity of heart and mind All Peytel's output was banal and coloured by the literary fashion of his time; his style so enervated his thought that nothing of interest is to be found in this outpouring written in such horrible circumstances.
But Peytel, as the date of his death drew near, did pen one poignant document; it was a letter to Gavarni. The prisoner was not allowed to write to anyone or see anyone, but he enclosed this letter in another and contrived to cast it out of his cell window. A passer-by picked it up outside the prison walls. The covering letter contained a passionate appeal to the stranger who might find the letter not to read the inner epistle—"if you do, you will violate an important secret"—but to post it at once to Gavarni in Paris.
The finder of the letter had the charity to carry out the instructions and Gavarni duly received the desperate document. This was long, half-incoherent, and in places unintelligible; it referred to Peytel in the third person and was obviously written in a state of despair. It contained no confession, but many complaints of the conduct of the trial, a hint that his pamphlet against the King might injure him now, and minute instructions for a large quantity of opium to be smuggled into his cell within the lining of the covers of a Bible.
Gavarni sent this letter, secretly and direct, to the King. Louis-Philippe was greatly disturbed—"he neither ate nor slept for forty- eight hours." He always signed a death sentence with great reluctance, and in this case his instinct was to be magnanimous towards the man who had once libelled him. But after an exhaustive personal examination of the evidence the King, who had a shrewd, well-trained mind, could find no justification for saving Peytel from the guillotine.
Louis-Philippe returned the letter to Gavarni by a faithful hand and kept the secret entrusted to him; he had himself sealed the letter from Peytel and written across the envelope: "Faithfully resealed. L. P." He also suspended the death sentence on Peytel for a few days, to give Gavarni, it was supposed, time to send the poison to the prisoner; why the artist did not do this is not clear.
Peytel was guillotined in the market-place of Bourg without confessing. Balzac thought he had been "assassinated."
None of the romantics showed any pity for the wretched girl slain so horribly in such awful circumstances, or for the cheerful, likeable youth trudging along with his charge and suddenly blotted out of existence; no, all sympathy, all interest, all efforts were concentrated on the gloomy figure of Peytel, who by his own confession had murdered Louis Rey and according to the evidence murdered also his wife and child. He was a journalist, a poet, dark, haughty, sensitive to his "honour," a Manfred, a Childe Harold, the victim of "Satanic influences." If he had been tried in Paris he would probably have been acquitted, but the jurymen of Bourg were farther removed from the influence of the capital than were the jurymen who condemned Emile de la Roncière; these provincials had probably not read Byron, Lamartine or George Sand; it is known that they considered the black-browed, insolent young notary, with his shallow arrogance and harsh features, extremely unprepossessing—and the King shared their opinion that this Parisian journalist, so much admired by so many famous men, was a brutal murderer, a cunning liar.
The early years of the reign were disturbed also by the exploits of the poet-bandit, Lacenaire, who affected to be a kind of Francois Villon. He outstripped his model, however, and began not only robbing as a "gesture" against society, but murdering for the sheer excitement of the thing—for the thrill, as we should say.
This cynic scoundrel and bad versifier became, together with his accomplice Avril, one of the heroes of the day, sighed after by the women, admired—even imitated—by some of the men. He was so very fascinating with his sardonic smile, his black locks, his haughty disdain of all conventions, his mysterious evil; there was the double attraction—evil and despair. Yet he was, the reporters declared, mean-looking, bilious, small.
The romantics, the jeune France of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, were born either under the experimental stages of the French Revolution or during the first Empire; sons and daughters of men and women who had experienced or witnessed anarchy and the extremes of violence, passionate heroism, lofty idealism and bestial excesses, the intense excitement following unheard-of military glory and success, these romantics invented for themselves all the heady emotional experience that their parents had undergone at first hand.
Classicism, the craze of the last generation, was swept aside, declared dull, stupid, bourgeois (most scathing of insults), and the romantics, inspired by Horace Walpole, Charles Maturin, Mrs. Radcliffe, Sir Walter Scott, William Beckford, Hoffmann, and their own writers, Gautier, Hugo, De Vigny, became frantically gothique or "moyen âge." By these vague terms the romantics, whose ignorance of history was deplorable, meant any period from that of the Merovingian Kings to that of Francois I. They were dépaysés in their own country and century, and used every means to endeavour to live spiritually and emotionally in these past centuries that were, they falsely believed, full of what they termed "romance." There was also "a nostalgia of Asia Minor," for the East of the Crusades, for the Spain of chivalry, for China, Persia, India—anywhere, as long as the lotus bloomed and the breezes blew soft.
The romantic ideal was a lazy life, full of costly luxuries, deliciously agitated by love affairs, voluptuously refined, relieved by the violent drama of evil, jealousy, quarrels, death, murder, suicide, adorned with poetry, music and all that was soothing to the senses, and quite untouched by sordid (practical) cares and considerations. The romantics regarded with bitter contempt touched with fury the ordinary people, the great majority of their countrymen and countrywomen who were managing the France in which they had leisure to play their antics.
Romanticism penetrated deeply into the life of the people; not only was it found in the capital among the intellectuals, the poets, painters, novelists, journalists and architects, it infected even the ranks of Philistia. The King restored (and nearly ruined) some of the royal châteaux; the royal burial place, Saint-Denis, wrecked by the revolutionaries, was reconstructed by His Majesty at a vast cost and with the lamentable result that the Gothic abbey looked like a railway station. The nobility restored their country-seats in style gothique and furnished them in the same manner. It was the hey-day of the antique dealer; medieval furniture and bric-a-brac were sold (and made) in huge quantities; it was with an antique pistol that Peytel—a noted collector—shot his wife, and with another of these ancient weapons that the duc de Praslin beat out the brains of his duchess in the last year of the reign of Louis-Philippe. At the time of the murder the duc was spending large sums on rebuilding his magnificent château of Choiseul-Praslin in the pure Gothic style.
The middle classes did what they could by putting tourelles and ogive windows, castellated roof lines and a thousand other absurdities on or into their modest country houses. The provinces copied Paris; every city had its group of romantics, its secret society, its clubs founded on something desperate, dark and evil, like Medmenham and the Hellfire Clubs.
There were "cigarette" and "cigar" clubs (oddly enough, smoking was considered romantic), there were other clubs, the Black Pin, the Eagles of Napoleon, for example, that existed to subvert society, connected with the illuminati, the Rosicrucians and Freemasonry; these clubs, eccentric fag-ends of the revolutionary societies, gave the police a great deal of trouble. One of them, "The Bared Arms," was mentioned in the La Roncière case, and another was supposed to be behind the mysterious murder of the Duc de Berri, heir to the throne, on the steps of the Opera House.
A great feature of these clubs was the periodic orgies; an example of these collective debaucheries—something very difficult to do well—is given in Balzac's Peau de chagrin.
The music of Liszt and Chopin inflamed the romantics; in Les Préludes Liszt translates Lamartine into music and gives us the quintessence of romanticism; Berlioz added his erotic genius to the ferment and in several pieces, notably Les Francs Juges, gave a furious romantic's impression of the fascination, the gloom, the wizardry, the masked terrors of the Middle Ages.
The male costumes of jeune France were copied as near as possible from those seen on the boards during a representation of a Victor Hugo drama. Discarding the austere clothes of the Republicans and the fantastic uniforms of the Empire, the romantics tried to dress like the Frankish Kings, like the courtiers of the Valois, like pages of the Renaissance. It was said that the boulevards looked like a flower garden owing to the coloured felt hats of the gallants; these were slouched at all angles—à la Vandyck, à la Velasquez, à la Rubens—and surmounted long, flowing locks, fierce moustachios, and, often, as much beard as could be produced. The clothes were of fine cloth, silk, velvet, satin, and in brilliant colours—sky-blue and apple-green were favourite hues. There were less cheerful ones—grey, "the colour of ruins," "the colour of despair," "the colour of a thunderstorm." Cloaks were extremely fashionable and no romantic showed a scrap of linen; it was essential that the "frac" should be turned back with huge revers, showing a puffed-up waistcoat and a black cravat wound up to the ears; this cravat had to be black—a black "of shadows," "of hell," of "eternal damnation." The waistcoat was very important; Gautier set the fashion of red for this garment, but young men sat up half the night discussing what shade of red they should wear—"flame of Hell," gooseberry, pomegranate, cherry, purple, ox-blood, fires of love?
To wear this trying toilet with success one had to be tall, slender, elegant, white-faced, hollow-eyed, with black hair and brows. When a royal Prince, the duc de Nemours, fell a victim to the craze and grew his hair and beard long, he was regarded as a failure because he was so "disgustingly blond." No, one must look like Satan, like Manfred, like a damned soul, while the least touch of plumpness, especially about the waist-line, made the whole thing ridiculous.
In order to conform in some degree with the usual mode of their day, the romantics wore trousers, tight and gaily-coloured, and sometimes top-hats. Some of them dressed in complete black with cropped hair and side-whiskers; these usually wore corsets to give sharpness to the sombre silhouette. Every kind of braid, fur, tassels, galon, soutaches, feather and jewel was worn by these young men—anything to be different from the Philistine, the bourgeois.
Petrus Borel, the painter, wore pantaloons coloured vert d'eau and gloves coloured sang royaliste—"the entire history of France paraded the streets." Some wore their hair parted in the centre and hanging straight down like a portrait by Giotto, others had their locks tossed back "in wild and savage beauty"—anything as long as one was "flamboyant."
"We should have liked," wrote Gautier, "to have negro timbalists to precede us in the streets, a hundred clarions to follow us."
These young men had their own language; they wrote to one another in old French, they called one another Loys, Jehan, Don Antonio, Karl, Antonio, they referred to one another's complexions as "plus basané que les Maures d'Afrique," to one another's beards as "fauve et rutilante." Those who had money aimed at having a "castle" with pages, musicians, champing steeds, ghosts and skeletons; those who had no money wrote about these things.
Costume balls were the rage; the archives of Paris were ransacked (and much damaged) by enthusiasts looking for ideas for gothique costumes; one romantic, trying to waltz in plate armour, fell down in a fit. Alexandre Dumas wore real "museum pieces" looted during the revolution of 1830—"une palingénésie habillée des archives nationales." Names that seemed prosaic or bourgeois were changed into romantic forms. Théophile Dondey becomes Philottée O'Neddy—Auguste Maquet Augustus MacKeat—Elie Garimon Elias Ongimar—one must find a baroque pseudonym, one must "gothiciser."
The only words of praise to be obtained from a romantic were "c'est gothique," "c'est gothique flamboyant," "c'est cathédrale," "c'est satanique," "c'est asphyxiant."
Ressembler à Manfred! Oh la joie enivrante!
Avoir la bouche amère et le front soucieux,
Ignorer à jamais l'espérance riante,
Et se sentir maudit! Et blasphémer les cieux!
The women were shut out of many of these romantic pleasures but were none the less avid of them; while the men had their clubs, their orgies, their papers, journals and promenades, the women sat at home with their albums and pianofortes and scribbled and sketched and tinkled and languished. Clothes were the great solace. The women, like the men, turned their backs on classicism and tried to dress like Valois Princesses or Queens of Spain; huge gigot sleeves were worn, jewels on the forehead, veils, scarves, bracelets, belts fashioned like Gothic castles, gates and windows. A modish girl tried to get a "book of hours" and a prie-Dieu, and, if possible, a secret love intrigue—a note dropped by a dark-eyed stranger into her hand while the duenna (governess) was not looking, a lute struck beneath her window, a roll of verse cast into her carriage, a single flower offered in silence as she hurried to mass—and she was happy.
The wealthy have the fancy-dress balls; what joy to be Marie de Bourgogne, Isabeau de Bavière, Marguerite de Valois, Agnès Sorel—but above all, what joy to be Mary, Queen of Scots! This heroine is the female ideal; the lofty, captive, wronged Queen, so refined, so sad, with a secret passion disturbing her tender heart—above all, so persecuted, so unhappy—with a dozen cavaliers ready to risk their lives for her rescue.
The female romantics also dream of the château, the castle—oh, to be a châtelaine! To sit on a terrace and dream of a knight returning from the East! To move through Gothic galleries in brocades and silks, with a lute, a prayer-book, a love-sick page! To muse over the orange groves of Smyrna, over the courts of the Valois, over jousts where, crowned with roses, one gives the prize to the victor—anything to escape from the deadly tedium of reality and the commonplace!
The children were dressed as pages with feathered caps and velvet jackets; the pianofortes on which their mothers and sisters played the melodies of Chopin and Liszt had fronts shaped like the windows of a Gothic cathedral; many a gloomy old country-house where the women of the eighteenth century had groaned in boredom was discovered to be "delicious," "ravishing," if it had but tourelles, hooded chimney-pieces or any such fashionable anachronisms; any discomfort was enjoyed as long as one obtained the atmosphere of that vague dreamland, le moyen age.
Into a society thus prepared to receive them with enthusiasm came the powerful allies of romanticism—George Sand and the Valse.
When Amantine Aurore, Baronne Dudevant, ran away from a dull husband and tiresome children to live in Paris With a young student, when this emancipated lady began to paint, to write novels, to acquire fame and famous lovers, to wear male attire, to earn large sums of money, to become the idol of the intellectual world of Paris, a shudder of mingled horror and delight ran through French womanhood. The elderly, the orthodox, the happily situated woman regarded with alarm and horror this adulterous wife, this shameless wanton with her cigars and trousers, her skill with sword and pistol, but the large majority of the young, the lonely, the dissatisfied, the frustrated women admired Madame Dudevant either openly or secretly, and many imitated her as far as they dared.
Another aspect of womanhood became blended with the meek, languishing châtelaine, the lionne, dashing, bold, passionate, able to manage an Arabian charger, to handle a sword, to pick and choose her lovers regardless of conventions or the laws.
The Byronic scoundrel, the brigand, the pirate, the murderer, the "Satanic" villain had long been popular among the male romantics; now the women, hitherto held back by fear, lack of a leader and tradition, hastened to indulge in moral anarchy, though with some timidity.
Madame Dudevant, writing under a male name, George Sand, packed the whole philosophy of her generation into the glittering, seductive and sensual romances that rapidly found their way into every boudoir, every kitchen, every schoolroom in the land. George Sand had great talents, an enticing style, a strong gift of narrative, a vivid manner of presenting her theories that was acceptable alike to the ignorant and to the fastidious. Her novels could act like an enchantment on Jenny at the wash-tub and the young duchesse in her pseudo-Gothic apartments, on the lazy, stupid schoolgirl and on the refined, intelligent woman of middle age. Under the guise of the most voluptuous colours, the most exciting situations, George Sand preached woman's right to love; carrying much farther the doctrines of her master, J.-J. Rousseau, and embellishing these with her own gifts and colouring them with her own temperament, George Sand taught that there was no such thing as illicit love—a sincere passion was above all laws and justified itself; this sincere love might be renewed many times without blame, it brought with it purity, redemption from sin, and had a high spiritual value; it justified adultery, suicide, any contravention of the law—it was the only thing that made life worth while.
Marriage was ridiculous, dull, degrading, a man-made institution, little better than slavery; only in complete sex freedom did a woman find dignity, happiness, repose. This theory, eagerly accepted by other writers (perhaps simultaneously thought of by them), culminated in the apotheosis of the courtesan who regained her virginity by the purifying fires of a pure love—Marion de l'Orme, Angelo and La Dame aux Camélias served to make this point of view popular. The influence of George Sand made a heroine of the unfaithful wife, the harlot, the déclassés woman, the rebel, deceived a hundred times, still seeking for the true love that should not only restore her chastity but set her on the side of the angels.
Mary Magdalene was the patron saint of the romantics—the saying "because she has loved much" was taken to mean that the penitent beauty won merit by experimenting frequently in physical love. With rare devices of literary talent these theories, combined with a general lawlessness, and insistence on the general aspect of love and what the orthodox considered blasphemy, were expounded in Indiana, Valentine, Léone Léoni', Jacques, Simon Mauprat, La Dernière, Aldini, Les Mâitre, Mosaïstes, Pauline, Un Hiver à Majorque, Lucrezia Floriani and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.
Other romances spread the same philosophy with fierce, but no more impressive fervour; Eugène Sue, Frédéric Soulié, with their hideous pictures of the most degraded people, the most repellent vices, Balzac and Hugo with their exaltation of the immoral woman, De Vigny, De Musset with their enervating and luxurious themes of misunderstood love and genius, and humanity's right to commit suicide, all of them with their common conception of "wickedness" as grand, splendid, intellectual, goodness as pale, mean, bourgeois, with their elevation of emotion over reason, their discovery of heroism in unrestrained passion, and their preoccupation with sex, sadism and hedonism, set the fashion of thought and conduct for at least the younger generation and permeated the whole of society with the taint of blood and patchouli, the reek of the slaughter-house or the thieves' kitchen and the sickly odours of the courtesan's boudoir.
God was used by these writers, but only as a stage effect; dumb and blind, the Deity sat apart like a sphinx in a desert, but when dramatic ends were served he might be either evoked or defied or prayed to by one of the frantic company of jeune France.
Lélia was the handbook of the female romantics; few could resist the intoxicating pages in which the luscious sentences of George Sand depicted a world without restraints, without laws, in which a refined sensuality, an erotic sensibility was lightly cloaked by pretences of intellectualism and philosophy.
This novel and its fellows—all the output of the romantics—were loose, contradictory and incoherent in their basic ideas, which were, as far as they could be co-ordinated, entirely unworkable, false and confused.
In the masterpieces of Stendhal (Henri Beyle), Le Rouge et Le Noir (note the careless cynicism of the title), La Chartreuse de Parme and L'Amour, there is a complete reversal of all moral values. Julien forces himself to seduce Madame de Renal, it is his duty; Angélique is indignant that Fabian should be in peril for killing a man (an actor), his inferior in birth.
A miasma of the most refined and fastidious evil hangs over all these books; it is a decadence of the heart and the mind not only of morals and manners that Stendhal paints; it is worse than vice, it is virtue and heroism upside down.
"What is evil?" ask the romantics contemptuously. "Good and evil alike come from God."
Numbers of the inferior authors copied these fashionable writers, every newspaper had its feuilleton; novels were brought out in cheap weekly parts, were sold at low prices, crowded the shelves of the circulating libraries—romances, verses, memoirs were everywhere; the conductors of the new omnibuses read them as their heavy vehicles trundled over the cobbles of Paris, the errand boys were absorbed in "the blood and mud" of Eugène Sue's Mystères de Paris, the elegant lady in her briska or brougham had her copy of Lélia or Léone Léoni in her muff. We have seen how Marie de Morell obtained these novels, innocent from a convent school as she was, and how Peytel, the friend of Balzac, in irons in the condemned cell, scribbled in the style of Eugène Sue or Victor Hugo.
To this moral bouleversement was added the delicious excitement of the valse; in the year of Queen Victoria's coronation, Johann Strauss the elder gave seventy-eight concerts in London, and his melodious dance tunes were soon the rage of Paris; this sensuous music, this whirling measure with men and women clasped in one another's arms while they kept time to a pleasing rhythm, suited the romantics—it took a high place in that world where the Gothic castle, the Court of Francois, le roi chevalier, the slums of Paris, the criminal's cell, the harlot's garret and the boudoir of the châtelaine jostled the verses of Byron and Lamartine, the novels of Schiller and George Sand in the phantasmagoria of a nightmare.
The theatre showed the romantic point of view in the most alluring colours; the austere and noble characters of Racine and Corneille were cast aside, the witty, elegant comedies of Molière were ignored, people and scenes never before considered worthy of the dignity of drama were displayed in the Parisian playhouses amid a fervour of enthusiasm; plays showing a state of moral anarchy were nightly applauded by crowded audiences.
The dramas exalted "the grandeur of evil," "the sublimity of passion," ("With me," declared one villain-hero, "you are sublime—with an ordinary bourgeois you would be nothing but an honest woman.") Scoundrels were made fascinating—"bronzes cast by Satan." Every conceivable vice or wrong-doing was romanticised; every criminal had something great about him, nothing was despised save the law-abiding, the well-behaved, the bourgeois. The rebels against society were shown as noble and attractive compared to the dull hypocrites who formed this society; the mother, the matron, the married woman, the tradesman, the whole fabric of law and order were nightly held up to derision on the boards of the Parisian theatre, while the Parisians applauded the triumph of the femme déclassée, the criminal and the brigand.
Marion de l'Orme cries:
"Mon Didier! Près de toi, rien de moi nest resté
Et ton amour m'a fait une virginité!"
And every woman in the theatre applauded, sighed, and envied such a voluptuous return to a long lost chastity—who would not, under such conditions, have a succession of lovers?
The theatres that catered for the audiences who could not pay quite so much for their seats provided plays that dealt with the darker side of romanticism, the Gothic romance of ghosts and terror combined with the lurid horrors made popular by Soulié and Sue.
Plays in which every extravagance and every abomination were displayed had a succès fou in these cheaper theatres—La Nonne Sanglante, Le Chiffonnier de Paris, Les Nuits de la Seine, Dix ans de la vie d'une femme, La Tour de Nesle were some of the best known of these melodramas. So, while the mistress was listening to the ravings of Antony or Angelo acclaiming the genius of evil, the maid was agape before "the bleeding nun," "the rag-picker of Paris," or some scene of sordid crime set in Newgate or a morgue.
When they compared their entertainments over the morning's toilet, they would both devour the last instalment of Le Juif errant or some such feuilleton.
The Chatterton of Alfred de Vigny was held responsible for the annual rise in suicides, nearly doubled between 1830 and 1840, and many young, ardent, gifted souls certainly destroyed themselves because the romantics taught that the ability to commit suicide was the great distinction between man and beast, and because they thought that this self-destruction was a fine gesture of contempt towards a dull bourgeois world.
Such victims of romanticism were usually male; the women clung more tenaciously to life; they were not less corrupted.
George Sand received packets of letters from despairing husbands and fathers who accused her of ruining their homes. Contented wives and mothers dipped into the pages of Lélia or some of its successors and straightway found their husbands plain and coarse, their children tedious, their lives paltry; finding reality intolerable, these women tried to create in their actions and surroundings the atmosphere of the enchanting fictions that had turned their heads.
The unmarried women of the upper classes were in a better position to indulge romanticism. Idle, luxurious, often talented and well-trained in "accomplishments," often charming and pretty, they were able to produce a certain illusion of romance; it was easy for them to assume a melancholy air, to play valses, to sing verses, to recite poetry, to attend balls and theatres in "fancy" costume or in white muslin with flowers in their tresses, to exchange romantic confidences with a female friend—above all, it was easy to read, read, read, and to write, write, write letters, verses, essais, songs, pensées, réflexions. Carefully they cultivated l'air romantique, the pale face, the black hair and eyes (if possible), the enigmatic, brooding manner, the graceful languor, the half-suppressed passion, the nostalgia for the past, for the East, the scorn for their own times and for everything practical.
To obtain the sylph-like figure made "the rage" by Madame Taglioni, these ladies starved and forced themselves into iron corsets; food was despised, the romantic played with an egg, with a salad, with a little fruit, she drank quantities of China tea, of soda water, and ate mufflings (muffins); if the result was a face blanched with anaemia or shadowed with the pains of indigestion, so much the better. Some girls drank vinegar and sucked lead pencils to give themselves a pallid complexion; it was considered "interesting" to have consumption of the lungs, to die young. In a habit amazone, with her hair flying and a whip in her gauntleted hand, the romantic would gallop solitary through the Bois, but never quite beyond the range of admiring glances of spectators.
These women indulged in musings over death as well as passion; not only was their air melancholy, dark, not only did they put bistre round their eyes and belladonna into their eyes to obtain this "beyond-the-tomb" fixity of gaze, but they adorned their salons with pictures of vampires, witches, Sabbaths, phantoms, skeletons and flights of bats, favoured white gowns with black roses, boughs of cypress instead of fans, and named their drawing-rooms salle de la mélancolie or "The Spectre's Antechamber."
It is not to be supposed that in the country of Voltaire, Molière and Rabelais the romantics went unnoticed by the satirists; a whole literature, a series of albums, of drawings were devoted to this subject; some of the leading romantics themselves almost satirised the movement, but this was too powerful even for sarcasm or ridicule to check—it went its headlong course until Madame Bovary did for romanticism what Don Quixote did for chivalry.
Gustave Flaubert did not kill romanticism; what is implied in this term is common to human nature in all ages and countries, but he put it out of fashion for a time at least, and by coldly dissecting the romantic woman put femininity out of love with this particular role—though constantly recurring specimens of the romantic woman prove that the type is immortal.
Never before was it encouraged and exalted as in the period that we are considering; this enthusiasm for feminine romanticism Was owing partly to ignorance of much that is now common knowledge. The phenomena of hysteria, magnetism, mesmerism, trance, ecstasy were imperfectly understood; the science of psychology was in its infancy; women who then could pass for femmes fatales or "eternal enigmas" would now be docketed as mental cases. Least of all was pathological lying or the creation of a fantasy-life by a person dissatisfied with reality credited, or even considered seriously—as we have seen in the Marie de Morell case. Some few doctors understood at least something of this large subject, but they were not listened to and often dared not say what they thought. Yet it was to this dangerous state of "make-believe" that many romantic women were reduced.
From reading novelettes to writing novelettes, and then to living novelettes, the steps were easy. The romantic deliberately created out of herself a character that approached that of her favourite heroine, and sometimes, like Frankenstein, found that she had created a monster who ran away, not into realms of fantasy, but into the sordid tragedies of everyday.
The great difficulty that faced the romantics—it was greater in the case of the ladies—was this inevitable conflict with reality. After all, pretend as one would, one was living in the nineteenth century and not in the Middle Ages, in France, not in fairyland. George Sand was one in a million; where was the average woman, even if well-born, well-to-do, young and pleasing, to find the means of leading the free life of Madame Dudevant that was the result of great gifts, a powerful character, a capacity for earning money?
All very well to dream of freedom in love, of a hundred errors effaced by the one pure passion, but even the errors had to have a partner and where were the men coming from? These Satanic heroes, passionate, refined and sardonic, or deliciously damned and cursed, were rare; when they did appear they usually lacked money; often they lacked the means to support even a castle in Spain. And a Frenchwoman, however romantic, had strong inherited ideas of security, comfort, the convenable; she did not want a starving poet though he might look like Byron, or a grocer's assistant though he might resemble Satan. The family tradition was still powerful—papa and mamma had to be considered; she was dependent on them for everything; her relations guarded her dot carefully, it was to be parted with only to a man of good position and prospects—such a one was, too often, not a romantic, or, if he were infected with the fashionable malaise, did not look in the least like a George Sand hero or the portraits of Alfred de Musset.
Even in the wildest throes of romanticism most of the women retained some glimmerings of the national shrewdness and common sense and tried to make the most of both worlds. The usual expedient was to marry the "best" parti procurable, and afterwards to indulge oneself as far as possible in romantic caprices—these, if circumstances were favourable, might include a lover; but as a rule the romantic was careful not to outrage too violently that dull society which she despised but which she also feared and which accorded her—as long as she behaved herself—security, comfort, and often luxury.
Many women achieved this double life with the ease of natural duplicity and that elegant feminine dexterity for which hypocrisy is too coarse a word. But some bold, passionate creatures found it extremely difficult to subscribe to a social order they loathed; few, however, had the courage to cast aside all restraints and to follow the example of George Sand. Despite romanticism the feminine code was extremely strict and the well-brought-up young woman hesitated a long time before she took the step that would cut her off from the help and protection of her family, the countenance of her class and all the advantages to be gained from a pose of respectability in a world that was still, on the whole, respectable—at least in appearance.
Marriage, for instance, might be odious, degrading, but for the ordinary woman what was the alternative? Spinsterhood (one was vieille fille at twenty-five years of age), boredom—a life barren of dignity, importance and excitement. Save for the very few, a "career" was not to be thought of; the market for feminine talents and activities was extremely small; a lady had no training for anything but a post as governess; the arts were out of the question unless one was very gifted; actresses were not recruited from the ranks of gentlewomen; nor was it easy to become a famous courtesan; lack of gifts, opportunities and courage prevented most well-born women from taking up this career that was so seductively romantic. But how to set about being a Marion de l'Orme or a Ninon de Lenclos?
Driven back to the conventions the young romantic sullenly acquiesced in her destiny and tried to do the best with the material at her command—her dreams, her books, her scribblings, her albums, her chance secret opportunities for adventure, for rebellion, for realisation of her own potentialities.
Thrown thus on herself, infected with the moral anarchy of the endless romances she read, the sensitive, imaginative young woman began to invent the exciting life she was denied, to lie, to combine real details with an intricate pattern of falsehood, to intrigue to gain her ends; she became skilful in provoking the passions of those about her, in creating "sensations," in making mischief, in assuming poses, even often an adept in the most subtle duplicity and that subtle combination of truth and falsehood more dangerous than lies.
The amount of pain, distress, trouble and confusion, even of wrong and suffering, caused by this type of romantic liar was often vast and far-reaching in its effects; not even the shrewdest, best-trained legal brains of the day could cope with the fearful complications created by the perverse egotism of the hysteric female desperately anxious to be the centre of some powerful drama.
A mysterious murder took place at the dawn of the romantic movement that illustrates the terrible power of this type of hysterical woman to confuse justice and to inflame the public imagination to fury. The murdered body of a M. Fualdès, a middle-aged magistrate of the town of Rodez, was found in the river that flows through his native town. The police decided that the crime had been committed in the hovel of a certain couple named Bancal who lived in one of the worst quarters of the town and were of the most degraded description; perpetrated by this couple and a wretch named Collard who lived with them at the instigation of two well-known citizens related to the murdered man—Joseph Jousion and Bernard-Charles Bastide-Grammont.
The police theory was that the two principals had hired the others to abduct and murder Fualdès and afterwards to carry his body through the town and cast it into the river. The motive could not be clearly guessed at—Bastide-Grammont owed Fualdès money, and Fualdès had been carrying a large sum on the night of his murder; there were also suspicions of political motives, private vendettas and the vengeance of one of the secret societies with which France was then riddled. Fualdès had been one of the jurymen who tried Charlotte de Corday, and even this was brought up as a possible explanation of the murder.
The accused had, on their side, good alibis and a reasonable defence, lack of motives, previous good characters, the unlikelihood that men of education and position would commit such a crude, barbarous and stupid crime, and so on.
The affair was then, and has since remained, a mystery, one of the most exasperating of causes célèbres; the interest of it, for a student of romanticism, lies in the intervention in the case of Clarisse Manson.
This lady, née Enjalran, was the daughter of a magistrate of Rodez, neither pretty nor graceful, but pleasing and vivacious; she had been born and bred in the country and was in everything a little provincial; she found the provinces, however, intolerably dull, was an insatiable novel-reader and early stated her creed—"I am a romantic." She revolted against the idea of an ordinary marriage with an ordinary man, but was induced to give her hand to M. Antoine Manson, whom she found, however, extremely commonplace.
To liven up the marriage she indulged in make-believe; the husband was forbidden the house and forced to woo her as if he were a secret lover. He sang Spanish songs under her balcony, sent her pearl-grey doves with notes under their wings, baskets of fruit with cashmere shawls, voiles d'Angleterre and verses, and kept rendez-vous in a pavilion in the garden that Clarisse pretended to think was extremely dangerous. She wrote the whole story in a series of egotistical, foolish letters to a schoolgirl friend at Rodez; those epistles were composed in the high-flown language of the persistent fiction-reader who had no experience of life.
Clarisse soon wearied of her romantic pretences—do what she would, Antoine Manson was bourgeois, she could not turn him into a Byron, a Schiller, a troubadour or even a Spanish cavalier. M. Manson also tired of being kept out of his own house, entering his wife's room by the window, sending her verses and presents, every day getting up with the dawn to sing aubades beneath her balcony, and of listening to silly chatter about Aleppo and Corinne.
The couple separated; Clarisse kept the only child, a boy of whom she was foolishly fond, and returned to the dull house of her dull parents. Idle, discontented, consumed with daydreams, always brooding over some novel, and imagining herself the heroine, Clarisse Manson wearied of the fetters of a tedious existence; she was a nonentity with neither beauty nor gifts, in a small provincial town (Rodez is near Toulouse and the Spanish frontier, a long way from Paris), a woman whom no one noticed, into whose dreary life came neither drama nor romance nor excitement of any kind.
With the Fualdès affair came Clarisse's great chance, and she took it; shortly after the arrest of the accused man she went to the prefecture and signed a deposition to the effect that she had been in the Bancal hovel during the murder and that she could identify Bastide-Grammont and Jousion as the murderers. She had been wandering down this slum of an ugly reputation in the dark of a March evening when she heard a noise that frightened her and she fled into a doorway; a hag pulled her in and thrust her into a cupboard, telling her to be silent; when she was let out she saw both Bastide-Grammont and Jousion; the former had wished to kill her, the latter had saved her life but had forced her to swear secrecy; half-dead with terror she was led through the room where the corpse of Fualdès was extended on the table, taken to a distant part of the town and left; she had been wearing a dark dress and veil.
The prosecution declared that Clarisse Manson "was an angel sent by God to bring hideous criminals to justice," and Clarisse was one of the first witnesses to be called. With her opening words, however, she took her story back—she had never been in the Bancals' hut; after making this declaration she fainted.
Upon recovery she showed great terror at the sight of the prisoners in the dock, made some incoherent statements about "knives, blood" and so on, and fell into convulsions. The impression she made was that she was terrified of the vengeance of the prisoners if they were acquitted, or of that of relatives if they were condemned—and that she was afraid to speak.
She was promised legal protection; a file of soldiers was placed between her and the prisoners, and she was entreated, even by the advocate for the defence, to speak the truth. Having thus attracted a lively attention, Clarisse Manson proceeded to disturb and confuse, not only Rodez but the whole of France, with what can only be described as a novelette in the form of a jig-saw puzzle.
Her evidence, spread over weeks, was incoherent, contradictory, incredible, baffling to a maddening degree; the interest of the case shifted from the men on trial for their lives to Clarisse Manson who, without looks, talents or fortune, contrived to occupy a position of dazzling publicity. In the course of her evidence, which was always given with much drama and emotion and interrupted by fainting fits and convulsions, Clarisse Manson swore to the following different stories:
She had never been to the Bancals' house—she knew a woman who had been, but could not reveal her name.
She had been to the Bancals' house, she had hidden in a closet, a cupboard, under a bed, behind a door; she had heard nothing, she had heard Fualdès being killed. She had seen the murderers and recognised them, she had seen some men she could not recognise. She had worn a black veil, a dark dress; she had been attired as a man. She had the jacket and waistcoat—the pantaloons had been destroyed because they were blood-stained; this blood had come from the corpse that she had brushed against in leaving the Bancals, it had come from her own nose, which had bled, as she had fallen against a shutter.
To these contradictory statements Clarisse Manson added others to account for her being in such an ill-reputed place at such an hour. She was there to meet a secret lover, she was there to meet her husband with whom she was on the point of being reconciled, she was there to surprise her husband with the charming Rose Perrin, with whom he had, she suspected, an intrigue, she was there because she had seen someone she knew in the street and out of curiosity had followed him into this ill-famed dwelling—finally, she would veer right round and declare: "I was not there at all, at the foot of the scaffold I would maintain that."
She continually cast looks of indignation at the prisoners and addressed them in terms of reproach and horror; she was so much affected by the sight of weapons that the officer of gens d'armes standing near her had to take off his sword; she declared that she was in great fear of her own life and an armed guard accompanied her when she went abroad in Rodez. She frequently alluded to "a secret" that no torture should tear from her, and often held up the business of the court by long swoons or trances during which she muttered incoherencies like a seeress.
Some of her dramatic exclamations, notably: "All the murderers are not in the dock!" spread alarm and confusion, not only throughout Rodez, but throughout France.
All the accused showed great firmness and patience in denying all her stories and none of them was trapped by her insinuations into any admission of guilt.
Finally, there being some realists among the magistrates, Clarisse Manson was arrested on a charge of perjury and sent to Paris. She then assumed a melancholy air of resignation, still talked of her "secret," wept, laughed, and began, true to type, to write her memoirs. She was very well treated, allowed to have her child, whom she pampered, and to receive visitors; her likeness appeared in all the papers and she occupied more of the public attention than any question of the moment, however important. By no other means than the public utterance of fantastic lies this commonplace woman achieved more notoriety than is usually accorded to great heroines or great criminals.
The journalists analysed her character and described her person with the greatest care, her "honour" and her "virtue" were discussed as if these vague abstractions had great importance. Only a few had the shrewdness to describe Madame Manson's appearances in the witness-box as "véritables scènes de mélodrame" and to comment "lorsque la passion paraît la justice s'en va." Only a few laughed at her fantastic "romans" of that famous and fatal night, among which was one about an Englishwoman, Miss Gipson [sic], who, wearing remarkable green plumes, had been secreted in the cupboard of the thieves' kitchen that the Bancals owned.
Five of the prisoners were condemned to death for the murder of M. Fualdès; their guilt is still a matter of dispute. Their condemnation was in part owing to the intervention of Madame Manson, for, though she was accused of perjury, she contrived to create an atmosphere of mystery that was most prejudicial to the accused men and woman.
In a series of letters to the Prefect of Aveyron, written from prison, Madame Manson denied absolutely having ever been in the Bancals' hut, giving an alibi for the night of the murder. She declared that a certain M. Clémendot had seen her at the theatre, tried to force his attention on her, and in doing so had roused the anger of her brother. Fearful of a duel between the two men and of separation from her child ("mon Edouard, mon seul bien"), exhausted by lack of food and sleep, she had made the false declaration in a state of mental confusion.
She soon offered a variation of this tale. M. Clémendot was her lover, he had been false to her with Rose Perrin, and it was to surprise the lovers that she had gone to the maison Bancal. Her final word, however, was that she did not even know where this house was situated.
How often, when some bright, sensitive creature has destroyed himself, has the coroner remarked: "He lived in a world of fantasy." Tragic indeed are such cases where the impact of reality is too hard for the dreamer to endure, and he ends a life of promise by suicide; but even more tragic are the cases where the dweller in realms of fantasy tries to superimpose a romantic invention on reality and to live in a self-created world of those imaginings that are, when translated into speech and action, plain falsehoods. Better for such a one to destroy himself than to involve others in all the terrible consequences of an attempt to turn daydreams into actualities and to translate into action the eccentric and egotistical fancies that bewilder the neurotic, the romantic, the hysterical.
All the mise en scène of romanticism—as the early nineteenth century understood the word—seems ridiculous and pitiful. We smile at these damned, cursed souls, at these "Satanic" characters, at all the melodramatic properties of the romantics, but if we consider the too frequent cases, of which Marie de Morell and Clarisse Manson are typical examples, where the atmosphere of the novelette is shadowed by prison bars and the knife of the guillotine, where the inventions, poses and half-unconscious actions of some irresponsible, emotional woman bring misery, disgrace and ruin and perhaps death to innocent people, where the lurid incidents of melodrama blend with the grimmest realities of life and death, then we may be inclined to think that indeed there is something Satanic about romanticism, which may be described as the father of all lies.
Even in the first half of the nineteenth century of France not everyone was a romantic; the law existed and so did a large number of people ready to enforce the law; petty, sordid passions, cupidity, spite, envy, snobbery animated many ordinary folk who were without romanticism. The orthodox, the law-abiding were still powerful, especially in the provinces; thousands of women read romances and went no farther than sighing over them in secret; the true romantic was faced with a world where he could work endless mischief, but which sooner or later would defeat him.
The morbid rebel, the social anarchist, even in this period, came sooner or later into conflict with forces that eclipsed or destroyed them; the romantic who could not keep his fantasies under control found himself confronted with a tragedy in which, too often, others were involved disastrously.
Not so much harm has been done by the realist who, understanding his world, and knowing what he wants, has unscrupulously striven for his ends, as by the romantic who, inhabitant of a novelette-melodrama-created world, has endeavoured to subordinate reality to his own fantasy.
While Clarisse Manson was distracting France with her lies and postures, a little girl was growing up who was to outshine her in her own sphere, and who, romantic of the romantics, was to combine in her short career all the ingredients of romanticism—"the secret of the cradle," "the secret of the tomb," an entangled intrigue that included a handsome Spaniard, stolen diamonds, the honour of a great lady, a frustrated love affair, an unhappy marriage, a Gothic castle, swoons, convulsions, a murder, ghosts, a cause célèbre, prisons, "the shadow of the scaffold," an abundance of period fripperies.
This little girl was Marie Cappelle, afterwards Madame Lafarge, whose slender figure, hair like swathes of crape, huge eyes with bistre shadows, hollow cough, all with l'air romantique, half-infernal, half-angelic, a whole generation found almost unbearably fascinating.
Her own character, her circumstances, the period in which she lived combined to make this woman symbolic of the whole French romantic movement and illustrative of an important facet of human nature.
Far more gifted, intelligent and remarkable than either Marie de Morell or Clarisse Manson, Marie Cappelle's melodrama was more lurid and "sensational" than either the affair of the anonymous letters or Mme. Manson's part in the Fualdès murder.
By her friends and partisans (of whom she had a vast number, and who comprised some of the finest minds in France) she was termed "l'ange de l'arsénic," an unconscious parody of Lamartine's description of Charlotte de Corday as "the angel of assassination"—and she herself described the dangerous delights of the George Sand romances as "diamonds in a rose."
This biography has been named The Lady and the Arsenic, because each of these two plays an important part in the tale.
The bibliography at the end of the volume contains the principal authorities on which this study of a famous romantic has been based.
Joseph Shearing. Paris, May, 1936.
