Afford the Winter-Garden and Mabille!
“Oh, I unite” — runs on the confidence,
Poor fellow, that was read in open Court,
— ”Amusement with discretion: never fear
My escapades cost more than market-price!
No durably-attached Miranda-dupe,
Sucked dry of substance by two clinging lips,
Promising marriage, and performing it!
Trust me, I know the world, and know myself,
And know where duty takes me — in good time!”
Thus fortified and realistic, then,
At all points thus against illusion armed,
He wisely did New Year inaugurate
By playing truant to the favoured five:
And sat installed at “The Varieties,” —
Playhouse appropriately named, — to note
(Prying amid the turf that’s flowery there)
What primrose, firstling of the year, might push
The snows aside to deck his button-hole —
Unnoticed by that outline sad, severe,
(Though fifty good long years removed from youth)
That tower and tower, — our image, bear in mind!
No sooner was he seated than, behold,
Out burst a polyanthus! He was ‘ware
Of a young woman niched in neighbourhood;
And ere one moment flitted, fast was he
Found captive to the beauty evermore,
For life, for death, for heaven, for hell, her own.
Philosophy, bewail thy fate! Adieu,
Youth realistic and illusion-proof!
Monsieur Léonce Miranda, — hero late
Who “understood the worth of womankind,”
“Who found therein — provisionally — sport,” —
Felt, in the flitting of a moment, fool
Was he, and folly all that seemed so wise,
And the best proof of wisdom’s birth would be
That he made all endeavour, body, soul,
By any means, at any sacrifice
Of labour, wealth, repute, and ( — well, the time
For choosing between heaven on earth, and heaven
In heaven, was not at hand immediately — )
Made all endeavour, without loss incurred
Of one least minute, to obtain her love.
“Sport transitive?” “Variety required?”
“In loving were a lifetime thrown away?”
How singularly may young men mistake!
The fault must be repaired with energy.
Monsieur Léonce Miranda ate her up
With eye-devouring; when the unconscious fair
Passed from the close-packed hall, he pressed behind;
She mounted vehicle, he did the same,
Coach stopped, and cab fast followed, at one door —
Good house in unexceptionable street.
Out stepped the lady, — never think, alone!
A mother was not wanting to the maid,
Or, may be, wife, or widow, might one say?
Out stepped and properly down flung himself
Monsieur Léonce Miranda at her feet —
And never left them after, so to speak,
For twenty years, till his last hour of life,
When he released them, as precipitate.
Love proffered and accepted then and there!
Such potency in word and look has truth.
Truth I say, truth I mean: this love was true,
And the rest happened by due consequence.
By which we are to learn that there exists
A falsish false, for truth’s inside the same,
And truth that’s only half true, falsish truth.
The better for both parties! folk may taunt
That half your rock-built wall is rubble-heap:
Answer them, half their flowery turf is stones!
Our friend had hitherto been decking coat
If not with stones, with weeds that stones befit,
With dandelions — ”primrose-buds,” smirked he;
This proved a polyanthus on his breast,
Prize-lawful or prize-lawless, flower the same.
So with his other instance of mistake:
Was Christianity the Ravissante?
And what a flower of flowers he chanced on now!
To primrose, polyanthus I prefer
As illustration, from the fancy-fact
That out of simple came the composite
By culture: that the florist bedded thick
His primrose-root in ruddle, bullock’s blood,
Ochre and devils’-dung, for aught I know,
Until the pale and pure grew fiery-fine,
Ruby and topaz, rightly named anew.
This lady was no product of the plain;
Social manure had raised a rarity.
Clara de Millefleurs (note the happy name)
Blazed in the full-blown glory of her Spring.
Peerlessly perfect, form and face: for both —
“Imagine what, at seventeen, may have proved
Miss Pages, the actress: Pages herself, my dear!”
Noble she was, the name denotes: and rich?
“The apartment in this Coliseum Street,
Furnished, my dear, with such an elegance,
Testifies wealth, my dear, sufficiently!
What quality, what style and title, eh?
Well now, waive nonsense, you and I are boys
No longer: somewhere must a screw be slack!
Don’t fancy, Duchesses descend at door
From carriage-step to stranger prostrate stretched,
And bid him take heart, and deliver mind,
March in and make himself at ease forthwith, —
However broad his chest and black his beard,
And comely his belongings, — all through love
Protested in a world of ways save one
Hinting at marriage!” — marriage which yet means
Only the obvious method, easiest help
To satisfaction of love’s first demand,
That love endure eternally: “my dear,
Somewhere or other must a screw be slack!”
Truth is the proper policy: from truth —
Whate’er the force wherewith you fling your speech, —
Be sure that speech will lift you, by rebound,
Somewhere above the lowness of a lie!
Monsieur Léonce Miranda heard too true
A tale — perhaps I may subjoin, too trite!
As the meek martyr takes her statued stand
Above our pity, claims our worship just
Because of what she puts in evidence,
Signal of suffering, badge of torture borne
In days gone by, shame then but glory now,
Barb, in the breast, turned aureole for the front!
So, half timidity, composure half,
Clara de Millefleurs told her martyrdom.
Of poor though noble parentage, deprived
Too early of a father’s guardianship,
What wonder if the prodigality
Of nature in the girl, whose mental gifts
Matched her external dowry, form and face —
If these suggested a too prompt resource
To the resourceless mother? “Try the Stage
And so escape starvation! Prejudice
Defames Mimetic Art: be yours to prove
That gold and dross may meet and never mix,
Purity plunge in pitch yet soil no plume!”
All was prepared in London — (you conceive
The natural shrinking from publicity
In Paris, where the name excites remark)
London was ready for the grand début ;
When some perverse ill fortune, incident
To art mimetic, some malicious thrust
Of Jealousy who sidles ‘twixt the scenes
O
r pops up sudden from the prompter’s hole, —
Somehow the brilliant bubble burst in suds.
Want followed: in a foreign land, the pair!
O hurry over the catastrophe —
Mother too sorely tempted, daughter tried
Scarcely so much as circumvented, say!
Caged unsuspecting artless innocence!
Monsieur Léonce Miranda tell the rest! —
The rather that he told it in a style
To puzzle Court Guide students, much more me.
“Brief, she became the favourite of Lord N.,
An aged but illustrious Duke, thereby
Breaking the heart of his competitor
The Prince of O. Behold her palaced straight
In splendour, clothed in diamonds” (phrase how fit!),
“Giving tone to the City by the Thames!
Lord N., the aged but illustrious Duke,
Was even on the point of wedding her,
Giving his name to her” (why not to us?)
“But that her better angel interposed.
She fled from such a fate to Paris back,
A fortnight since: conceive Lord N.’s despair!
Duke as he is, there’s no invading France.
He must restrict pursuit to postal plague
Of writing letters daily, duly read
As darlingly she hands them to myself,
The privileged supplanter, who therewith
Light a cigar and see abundant blue” —
(Either of heaven or else Havanna-smoke.)
“Think! she, who helped herself to diamonds late,
In passion of disinterestedness
Now — will accept no tribute of my love
Beyond a paltry ring, three Louis’-worth!
Little she knows I have the rummaging
Of old Papa’s shop in the Place Vendôme!”
So wrote entrancedly to confidant
Monsieur Léonce Miranda. Surely now,
If Heaven, that sees all, understands no less,
It finds temptation pardonable here,
It mitigates the promised punishment,
It recognizes that to tarry just
An April hour amid such dainty turf
Means no rebellion against task imposed
Of journey to the distant wall one day?
Monsieur Léonce Miranda puts the case!
Love, he is purposed to renounce, abjure;
But meanwhile, is the case a common one?
Is it the vulgar sin, none hates as he?
Which question, put directly to “his dear”
(His brother — I will tell you in a trice)
Was doubtless meant, by due meandering,
To reach, to fall not unobserved before
The auditory cavern ‘neath the cope
Of Her, the placable, the Ravissante.
But here’s the drawback, that the image smiles,
Smiles on, smiles ever, says to supplicant
“Ay, ay, ay” — like some kindly weathercock
Which, stuck fast at Set Fair, Favonian Breeze,
Still warrants you from rain, though Auster’s lead
Bring down the sky above your cloakless mirth.
Had he proposed this question to, nor “dear”
Nor Ravissante, but prompt to the Police,
The Commissary of his Quarter, now —
There had been shaggy eyebrows elevate
With twinkling apprehension in each orb
Beneath, and when the sudden shut of mouth
Relaxed, — lip pressing lip, lest out should plump
The pride of knowledge in too frank a flow, —
Then, fact on fact forthcoming, dose were dealt
Of truth remedial in sufficiency
To save a chicken threatened with the pip,
Head-staggers and a tumble from its perch.
Alack, it was the lady’s self that made
The revelation, after certain days
— Nor so unwisely! As the haschisch-man
Prepares a novice to receive his drug,
Adroitly hides the soil with sudden spread
Of carpet ere he seats his customer:
Then shows him how to smoke himself about
With Paradise; and only when, at puff
Of pipe, the Houri dances round the brain
Of dreamer, does he judge no need is now
For circumspection and punctiliousness;
He may resume the serviceable scrap
That made the votary unaware of muck.
Just thus the lady, when her brewage — love —
Was well a-fume about the novice-brain,
Saw she might boldly pluck from underneath
Her lover the preliminary lie.
Clara de Millefleurs, of the noble race,
Was Lucie Steiner, child to Dominique
And Magdalen Commercy; born at Sierck,
About the bottom of the Social Couch.
The father having come and gone again,
The mother and the daughter found their way
To Paris, and professed mode-merchandize,
Were milliners, we English roughlier say;
And soon a fellow-lodger in the house,
Monsieur Ulysse Muhlhausen, young and smart,
Tailor by trade, perceived his housemate’s youth,
Smartness, and beauty over and above.
Courtship was brief, and marriage followed quick,
And quicklier — impecuniosity.
The young pair quitted Paris to reside
At London: which repaid the compliment
But scurvily, since not a whit the more
Trade prospered by the Thames than by the Seine.
Failing all other, as a last resource,
“He would have trafficked in his wife,” — she said.
If for that cause they quarrelled, ‘t was, I fear,
Rather from reclamation of her rights
To wifely independence, than as wronged
Otherwise by the course of life proposed:
Since, on escape to Paris back again
From horror and the husband, — ill-exchanged
For safe maternal home recovered thus, —
I find her domiciled and dominant
In that apartment, Coliseum Street,
Where all the splendid magic met and mazed
Monsieur Léonce Miranda’s venturous eye.
Only, the same was furnished at the cost
Of someone notable in days long since,
Carlino Centofanti: he it was
Found entertaining unawares — if not
An angel, yet a youth in search of one.
Why this revealment after reticence?
Wherefore, beginning “Millefleurs,” end at all
Steiner, Muhlhausen, and the ugly rest?
Because the unsocial purse-comptrolling wight,
Carlino Centofanti, — made aware
By misadventure that his bounty, crumbs
From table, comforted a visitant, —
Took churlish leave, and left, too, debts to pay.
Loaded with debts, the lady needs must bring
Her soul to bear assistance from a friend
Beside that paltry ring, three Louis’-worth;
And therefore might the little circumstance
That Monsieur Léonce had the rummaging
Of old Papa’s shop in the Place Vendôme
Pass, perhaps, not so unobservably.
Frail shadow of a woman in the flesh,
These very eyes of mine saw yesterday,
Would I re-tell this story of your woes,
Would I have heart to do you detriment
By pinning all this shame and sorrow plain
To that poor chignon , — staying with me still,
Though form and face have well-nigh faded now, —
But that men read it, rough in brutal print,
&nb
sp; As two years since some functionary’s voice
Rattled all this — and more by very much —
Into the ear of vulgar Court and crowd?
Whence, by reverberation, rumblings grew
To what had proved a week-long roar in France,
Had not the dreadful cannonry drowned all.
Was, now, the answer of your advocate
More than just this? “The shame fell long ago,
The sorrow keeps increasing: God forbid
We judge man by the faults of youth in age!”
Permit me the expression of a hope
Your youth proceeded like your avenue,
Stepping by bush, and tree, and taller tree,
Until, columnar, at the house they end.
So might your creeping youth columnar rise
And reach, by year and year, symmetrical,
To where all shade stops short, shade’s service done.
Bushes on either side, and boughs above,
Darken, deform the path else sun would streak;
And, cornered half-way somewhere, I suspect
Stagnation and a horse-pond: hurry past!
For here’s the house, the happy half-and-half
Existence — such as stands for happiness
True and entire, howe’er the squeamish talk!
Twenty years long, you may have loved this man;
He must have loved you; that’s a pleasant life,
Whatever was your right to lead the same.
The white domestic pigeon pairs secure,
Nay, does mere duty by bestowing egg
In authorized compartment, warm and safe,
Boarding about, and gilded spire above,
Hoisted on pole, to dogs’ and cats’ despair!
But I have spied a veriest trap of twigs
On tree-top, every straw a thievery,
Where the wild dove — despite the fowler’s snare,
The sportsman’s shot, the urchin’s stone, — crooned gay,
And solely gave her heart to what she hatched,
Nor minded a malignant world below.
I throw first stone forsooth? ‘T is mere assault
Of playful sugarplum against your cheek,
Which, if it makes cheek tingle, wipes off rouge!
You , my worst woman? Ah, that touches pride,
Puts on his mettle the exhibitor
Of Night-caps, if you taunt him “This, no doubt, —
Now we have got to Female-garniture, —
Crowns your collection, Reddest of the row!”
O unimaginative ignorance
Of what dye’s depth keeps best apart from worst
In womankind! — how heaven’s own pure may seem
To blush aurorally beside such blanched
Divineness as the women-wreaths named White:
While hell, eruptive and fuliginous,
Sickens to very pallor as I point
Her place to a Red clout called woman too!
Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series Page 167
