The Complete Works of Henry James

by Henry James

  “Are you very religious?” asked Newman, in a tone which gave the inquiry a grotesque effect.

  M. de Bellegarde evidently appreciated the comical element in the question, but he looked at Newman a moment with extreme soberness. “I am a very good Catholic. I respect the Church. I adore the blessed Virgin. I fear the Devil.”

  “Well, then,” said Newman, “you are very well fixed. You have got pleasure in the present and religion in the future; what do you complain of?”

  “It’s a part of one’s pleasure to complain. There is something in your own circumstances that irritates me. You are the first man I have ever envied. It’s singular, but so it is. I have known many men who, besides any factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains into the bargain; but somehow they have never disturbed my good-humor. But you have got something that I should have liked to have. It is not money, it is not even brains—though no doubt yours are excellent. It is not your six feet of height, though I should have rather liked to be a couple of inches taller. It’s a sort of air you have of being thoroughly at home in the world. When I was a boy, my father told me that it was by such an air as that that people recognized a Bellegarde. He called my attention to it. He didn’t advise me to cultivate it; he said that as we grew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had come to me, because I think I have always had the feeling. My place in life was made for me, and it seemed easy to occupy it. But you who, as I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the other day, have manufactured wash-tubs—you strike me, somehow, as a man who stands at his ease, who looks at things from a height. I fancy you going about the world like a man traveling on a railroad in which he owns a large amount of stock. You make me feel as if I had missed something. What is it?”

  “It is the proud consciousness of honest toil—of having manufactured a few wash-tubs,” said Newman, at once jocose and serious.

  “Oh no; I have seen men who had done even more, men who had made not only wash-tubs, but soap—strong-smelling yellow soap, in great bars; and they never made me the least uncomfortable.”

  “Then it’s the privilege of being an American citizen,” said Newman. “That sets a man up.”

  “Possibly,” rejoined M. de Bellegarde. “But I am forced to say that I have seen a great many American citizens who didn’t seem at all set up or in the least like large stock-holders. I never envied them. I rather think the thing is an accomplishment of your own.”

  “Oh, come,” said Newman, “you will make me proud!”

  “No, I shall not. You have nothing to do with pride, or with humility—that is a part of this easy manner of yours. People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.”

  “I don’t know what I have to lose,” said Newman, “but I certainly have something to gain.”

  “What is it?” asked his visitor.

  Newman hesitated a while. “I will tell you when I know you better.”

  “I hope that will be soon! Then, if I can help you to gain it, I shall be happy.”

  “Perhaps you may,” said Newman.

  “Don’t forget, then, that I am your servant,” M. de Bellegarde answered; and shortly afterwards he took his departure.

  During the next three weeks Newman saw Bellegarde several times, and without formally swearing an eternal friendship the two men established a sort of comradeship. To Newman, Bellegarde was the ideal Frenchman, the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was concerned with these mystical influences. Gallant, expansive, amusing, more pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when they were well pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the distinctively social virtues and a votary of all agreeable sensations; a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionally alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat superannuated image of HONOR; he was irresistibly entertaining and enlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it, as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human ingredients, mentally to have foreshadowed it. Bellegarde did not in the least cause him to modify his needful premise that all Frenchmen are of a frothy and imponderable substance; he simply reminded him that light materials may be beaten up into a most agreeable compound. No two companions could be more different, but their differences made a capital basis for a friendship of which the distinctive characteristic was that it was extremely amusing to each.

  Valentin de Bellegarde lived in the basement of an old house in the Rue d’Anjou St. Honore, and his small apartments lay between the court of the house and an old garden which spread itself behind it—one of those large, sunless humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Paris from back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations they find their space. When Newman returned Bellegarde’s visit, he hinted that HIS lodging was at least as much a laughing matter as his own. But its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero’s gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky, contracted, and crowded with curious bric-a-brac. Bellegarde, penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts. Here and there was one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in which the upholsterer’s art, in France, is so prolific; a curtain recess with a sheet of looking-glass in which, among the shadows, you could see nothing; a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows, you could not sit; a fireplace draped, flounced, and frilled to the complete exclusion of fire. The young man’s possessions were in picturesque disorder, and his apartment was pervaded by the odor of cigars, mingled with perfumes more inscrutable. Newman thought it a damp, gloomy place to live in, and was puzzled by the obstructive and fragmentary character of the furniture.

  Bellegarde, according to the custom of his country talked very generously about himself, and unveiled the mysteries of his private history with an unsparing hand. Inevitably, he had a vast deal to say about women, and he used frequently to indulge in sentimental and ironical apostrophes to these authors of his joys and woes. “Oh, the women, the women, and the things they have made me do!” he would exclaim with a lustrous eye. “C’est egal, of all the follies and stupidities I have committed for them I would not have missed one!” On this subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to expatiate largely upon it had always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even inconsistent with a fully developed human character. But Bellegarde’s confidences greatly amused him, and rarely displeased him, for the generous young Frenchman was not a cynic. “I really think,” he had once said, “that I am not more depraved than most of my contemporaries. They are tolerably depraved, my contemporaries!” He said wonderfully pretty things about his female friends, and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that on the whole there was more good in them than harm. “But you are not to take that as advice,” he added. “As an authority I am very untrustworthy. I’m prejudiced in their favor; I’m an IDEALIST!” Newman listened to him with his impartial smile, and was glad, for his own sake, that he had fine feelings; but he mentally repudiated the idea of a Frenchman having discovered any merit in the amiable sex which he himself did not suspect. M. de Bellegarde, however, did not confine his conversation to the autobiographical channel; he questioned our hero largely as to the events of his own life, and Newman told him some better stories than any that Bellegarde carried in his budget. He narrated his career, in fact, from the beginning, through all its variations, and whenever his companion’s credulity, or his habits of gentility, appeared to protest, it amused him to heighten the color of the episode. Newman had sat with Western humorists in knots, round cast-iron stoves, and seen
“tall” stories grow taller without toppling over, and his own imagination had learned the trick of piling up consistent wonders. Bellegarde’s regular attitude at last became that of laughing self-defense; to maintain his reputation as an all-knowing Frenchman, he doubted of everything, wholesale. The result of this was that Newman found it impossible to convince him of certain time-honored verities.

  “But the details don’t matter,” said M. de Bellegarde. “You have evidently had some surprising adventures; you have seen some strange sides of life, you have revolved to and fro over a whole continent as I walked up and down the Boulevard. You are a man of the world with a vengeance! You have spent some deadly dull hours, and you have done some extremely disagreeable things: you have shoveled sand, as a boy, for supper, and you have eaten roast dog in a gold-diggers’ camp. You have stood casting up figures for ten hours at a time, and you have sat through Methodist sermons for the sake of looking at a pretty girl in another pew. All that is rather stiff, as we say. But at any rate you have done something and you are something; you have used your will and you have made your fortune. You have not stupified yourself with debauchery and you have not mortgaged your fortune to social conveniences. You take things easily, and you have fewer prejudices even than I, who pretend to have none, but who in reality have three or four. Happy man, you are strong and you are free. But what the deuce,” demanded the young man in conclusion, “do you propose to do with such advantages? Really to use them you need a better world than this. There is nothing worth your while here.”

  “Oh, I think there is something,” said Newman.

  “What is it?”

  “Well,” murmured Newman, “I will tell you some other time!”

  In this way our hero delayed from day to day broaching a subject which he had very much at heart. Meanwhile, however, he was growing practically familiar with it; in other words, he had called again, three times, on Madame de Cintre. On only two of these occasions had he found her at home, and on each of them she had other visitors. Her visitors were numerous and extremely loquacious, and they exacted much of their hostess’s attention. She found time, however, to bestow a little of it on Newman, in an occasional vague smile, the very vagueness of which pleased him, allowing him as it did to fill it out mentally, both at the time and afterwards, with such meanings as most pleased him. He sat by without speaking, looking at the entrances and exits, the greetings and chatterings, of Madame de Cintre’s visitors. He felt as if he were at the play, and as if his own speaking would be an interruption; sometimes he wished he had a book, to follow the dialogue; he half expected to see a woman in a white cap and pink ribbons come and offer him one for two francs. Some of the ladies looked at him very hard—or very soft, as you please; others seemed profoundly unconscious of his presence. The men looked only at Madame de Cintre. This was inevitable; for whether one called her beautiful or not she entirely occupied and filled one’s vision, just as an agreeable sound fills one’s ear. Newman had but twenty distinct words with her, but he carried away an impression to which solemn promises could not have given a higher value. She was part of the play that he was seeing acted, quite as much as her companions; but how she filled the stage and how much better she did it! Whether she rose or seated herself; whether she went with her departing friends to the door and lifted up the heavy curtain as they passed out, and stood an instant looking after them and giving them the last nod; or whether she leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed and her eyes resting, listening and smiling; she gave Newman the feeling that he should like to have her always before him, moving slowly to and fro along the whole scale of expressive hospitality. If it might be TO him, it would be well; if it might be FOR him, it would be still better! She was so tall and yet so light, so active and yet so still, so elegant and yet so simple, so frank and yet so mysterious! It was the mystery—it was what she was off the stage, as it were—that interested Newman most of all. He could not have told you what warrant he had for talking about mysteries; if it had been his habit to express himself in poetic figures he might have said that in observing Madame de Cintre he seemed to see the vague circle which sometimes accompanies the partly-filled disk of the moon. It was not that she was reserved; on the contrary, she was as frank as flowing water. But he was sure she had qualities which she herself did not suspect.

  He had abstained for several reasons from saying some of these things to Bellegarde. One reason was that before proceeding to any act he was always circumspect, conjectural, contemplative; he had little eagerness, as became a man who felt that whenever he really began to move he walked with long steps. And then, it simply pleased him not to speak—it occupied him, it excited him. But one day Bellegarde had been dining with him, at a restaurant, and they had sat long over their dinner. On rising from it, Bellegarde proposed that, to help them through the rest of the evening, they should go and see Madame Dandelard. Madame Dandelard was a little Italian lady who had married a Frenchman who proved to be a rake and a brute and the torment of her life. Her husband had spent all her money, and then, lacking the means of obtaining more expensive pleasures, had taken, in his duller hours, to beating her. She had a blue spot somewhere, which she showed to several persons, including Bellegarde. She had obtained a separation from her husband, collected the scraps of her fortune (they were very meagre) and come to live in Paris, where she was staying at a hotel garni. She was always looking for an apartment, and visiting, inquiringly, those of other people. She was very pretty, very childlike, and she made very extraordinary remarks. Bellegarde had made her acquaintance, and the source of his interest in her was, according to his own declaration, a curiosity as to what would become of her. “She is poor, she is pretty, and she is silly,” he said, “it seems to me she can go only one way. It’s a pity, but it can’t be helped. I will give her six months. She has nothing to fear from me, but I am watching the process. I am curious to see just how things will go. Yes, I know what you are going to say: this horrible Paris hardens one’s heart. But it quickens one’s wits, and it ends by teaching one a refinement of observation! To see this little woman’s little drama play itself out, now, is, for me, an intellectual pleasure.”

  “If she is going to throw herself away,” Newman had said, “you ought to stop her.”

  “Stop her? How stop her?”

  “Talk to her; give her some good advice.”

  Bellegarde laughed. “Heaven deliver us both! Imagine the situation! Go and advise her yourself.”

  It was after this that Newman had gone with Bellegarde to see Madame Dandelard. When they came away, Bellegarde reproached his companion. “Where was your famous advice?” he asked. “I didn’t hear a word of it.”

  “Oh, I give it up,” said Newman, simply.

  “Then you are as bad as I!” said Bellegarde.

  “No, because I don’t take an ‘intellectual pleasure’ in her prospective adventures. I don’t in the least want to see her going down hill. I had rather look the other way. But why,” he asked, in a moment, “don’t you get your sister to go and see her?”

  Bellegarde stared. “Go and see Madame Dandelard—my sister?”

  “She might talk to her to very good purpose.”

  Bellegarde shook his head with sudden gravity. “My sister can’t see that sort of person. Madame Dandelard is nothing at all; they would never meet.”

  “I should think,” said Newman, “that your sister might see whom she pleased.” And he privately resolved that after he knew her a little better he would ask Madame de Cintre to go and talk to the foolish little Italian lady.

  After his dinner with Bellegarde, on the occasion I have mentioned, he demurred to his companion’s proposal that they should go again and listen to Madame Dandelard describe her sorrows and her bruises.

  “I have something better in mind,” he said; “come home with me and finish the evening before my fire.”

  Bellegarde always welcomed the prospect of a long stretch of conversation, and before long the two
men sat watching the great blaze which scattered its scintillations over the high adornments of Newman’s ball-room.

  CHAPTER VIII

  “Tell me something about your sister,” Newman began abruptly.

  Bellegarde turned and gave him a quick look. “Now that I think of it, you have never yet asked me a question about her.”

  “I know that very well.”

  “If it is because you don’t trust me, you are very right,” said Bellegarde. “I can’t talk of her rationally. I admire her too much.”

  “Talk of her as you can,” rejoined Newman. “Let yourself go.”

  “Well, we are very good friends; we are such a brother and sister as have not been seen since Orestes and Electra. You have seen her; you know what she is: tall, thin, light, imposing, and gentle, half a grande dame and half an angel; a mixture of pride and humility, of the eagle and the dove. She looks like a statue which had failed as stone, resigned itself to its grave defects, and come to life as flesh and blood, to wear white capes and long trains. All I can say is that she really possesses every merit that her face, her glance, her smile, the tone of her voice, lead you to expect; it is saying a great deal. As a general thing, when a woman seems very charming, I should say ‘Beware!’ But in proportion as Claire seems charming you may fold your arms and let yourself float with the current; you are safe. She is so good! I have never seen a woman half so perfect or so complete. She has everything; that is all I can say about her. There!” Bellegarde concluded; “I told you I should rhapsodize.”