Collected Stories by Henry James
Longmore’s growing irritation made it more and more difficult for him to see any other merit than this in the Baron de Mauves. And yet, disinterestedly, it would have been hard to give a name to the portentous vices which such an estimate implied, and there were times when our hero was almost persuaded against his finer judgement that he was really the most considerate of husbands, and that his wife liked melancholy for melancholy’s sake. His manners were perfect, his urbanity was unbounded, and he seemed never to address her but, sentimentally speaking, hat in hand. His tone to Longmore (as the latter was perfectly aware) was that of a man of the world to a man not quite of the world; but what it lacked in deference it made up in easy friendliness. ‘I can’t thank you enough for having overcome my wife’s shyness,’ he more than once declared. ‘If we left her to do as she pleased, she would bury herself alive. Come often, and bring some one else. She’ll have nothing to do with my friends, but perhaps she’ll accept yours.’
The Baron made these speeches with a remorseless placidity very amazing to our hero, who had an innocent belief that a man’s head may point out to him the shortcomings of his heart and make him ashamed of them. He could not fancy him capable both of neglecting his wife and taking an almost humourous view of her suffering. Longmore had, at any rate, an exasperating sense that the Baron thought rather less of his wife than more, for that very same fine difference of nature which so deeply stirred his own sympathies. He was rarely present during Longmore’s visits, and made a daily journey to Paris, where he had ‘business’, as he once mentioned, – not in the least with a tone of apology. When he appeared, it was late in the evening, and with an imperturbable air of being on the best of terms with every one and everything, which was peculiarly annoying if you happened to have a tacit quarrel with him. If he was a good fellow, he was surely a good fellow spoiled. Something he had, however, which Longmore vaguely envied – a kind of superb positiveness – a manner rounded and polished by the traditions of centuries – an amenity exercised for his own sake and not his neighbours’ – which seemed the result of something better than a good conscience – of a vigorous and unscrupulous temperament. The Baron was plainly not a moral man, and poor Longmore, who was, would have been glad to learn the secret of his luxurious serenity. What was it that enabled him, without being a monster with visibly cloven feet, exhaling brimstone, to misprise so cruelly a lovely wife, and to walk about the world with a smile under his moustache? It was the essential grossness of his imagination, which had nevertheless helped him to turn so many neat compliments. He could be very polite, and he could doubtless be supremely impertinent; but he was as unable to draw a moral inference of the finer strain, as a schoolboy who has been playing truant for a week to solve a problem in algebra. It was ten to one he didn’t know his wife was unhappy; he and his brilliant sister had doubtless agreed to consider their companion a Puritanical little person, of meagre aspirations and slender accomplishments, contented with looking at Paris from the terrace, and, as an especial treat, having a countryman very much like herself to supply her with homely transatlantic gossip. M. de Mauves was tired of his companion: he relished a higher flavour in female society. She was too modest, too simple, too delicate; she had too few arts, too little coquetry, too much charity. M. de Mauves, some day, lighting a cigar, had probably decided she was stupid. It was the same sort of taste, Longmore moralised, as the taste for Gérôme in painting, and for M. Gustave Flaubert in literature. The Baron was a pagan and his wife was a Christian, and between them, accordingly, was a gulf. He was by race and instinct a grand seigneur. Longmore had often heard of this distinguished social type, and was properly grateful for an opportunity to examine it closely. It had certainly a picturesque boldness of outline, but it was fed from spiritual sources so remote from those of which he felt the living gush in his own soul, that he found himself gazing at it, in irreconcilable antipathy, across a dim historic mist. ‘I’m a modern bourgeois,’ he said, ‘and not perhaps so good a judge of how far a pretty woman’s tongue may go at supper without prejudice to her reputation. But I’ve not met one of the sweetest of women without recognising her and discovering that a certain sort of character offers better entertainment than Thérésa’s songs, sung by a dissipated duchess. Wit for wit, I think mine carries me further.’ It was easy indeed to perceive that, as became a grand seigneur, M. de Mauves had a stock of rigid notions. He would not especially have desired, perhaps, that his wife should compete in amateur operettas with the duchesses in question, chiefly of recent origin; but he held that a gentleman may take his amusement where he finds it, that he is quite at liberty not to find it at home; and that the wife of a De Mauves who should hang her head and have red eyes, and allow herself to make any other response to officious condolence than that her husband’s amusements were his own affair, would have forfeited every claim to having her finger-tips bowed over and kissed. And yet in spite of these sound principles, Longmore fancied that the Baron was more irritated than gratified by his wife’s irreproachable reserve. Did it dimly occur to him that it was self-control and not self-effacement? She was a model to all the inferior matrons of his line, past and to come, and an occasional ‘scene’ from her at a convenient moment would have something reassuring, – would attest her stupidity a trifle more forcibly than her inscrutable tranquillity.
Longmore would have given much to know the principle of her submissiveness, and he tried more than once, but with rather awkward timidity, to sound the mystery. She seemed to him to have been long resisting the force of cruel evidence, and, though she had succumbed to it at last, to have denied herself the right to complain, because if faith was gone her heroic generosity remained. He believed even that she was capable of reproaching herself with having expected too much, and of trying to persuade herself out of her bitterness by saying that her hopes had been illusions and that this was simply – life. ‘I hate tragedy,’ she once said to him; ‘I have a really pusillanimous dread of moral suffering. I believe that – without base concessions – there is always some way of escaping from it. I had almost rather never smile all my life than have a single violent explosion of grief.’ She lived evidently in nervous apprehension of being fatally convinced, – of seeing to the end of her deception. Longmore, when he thought of this, felt an immense longing to offer her something of which she could be as sure as of the sun in heaven.
IV
HIS friend Webster lost no time in accusing him of the basest infidelity, and asking him what he found at Saint-Germain to prefer to Van Eyck and Memling, Rubens and Rembrandt. A day or two after the receipt of Webster’s letter, he took a walk with Madame de Mauves in the forest. They sat down on a fallen log, and she began to arrange into a bouquet the anemones and violets she had gathered. ‘I have a letter,’ he said at last, ‘from a friend whom I some time ago promised to join at Brussels. The time has come, – it has passed. It finds me terribly unwilling to leave Saint-Germain.’
She looked up with the candid interest which she always displayed in his affairs, but with no disposition, apparently, to make a personal application of his words. ‘Saint-Germain is pleasant enough,’ she said; ‘but are you doing yourself justice? Won’t you regret in future days that instead of travelling and seeing cities and monuments and museums and improving your mind, you sat here – for instance – on a log, pulling my flowers to pieces?’
‘What I shall regret in future days,’ he answered after some hesitation, ‘is that I should have sat here and not spoken the truth on the matter. I am fond of museums and monuments and of improving my mind, and I’m particularly fond of my friend Webster. But I can’t bring myself to leave Saint-Germain without asking you a question. You must forgive me if it’s unfortunate, and be assured that curiosity was never more respectful. Are you really as unhappy as I imagine you to be?’
She had evidently not expected his question, and she greeted it with a startled blush. ‘If I strike you as unhappy,’ she said, ‘I have been a poorer friend to you than I wis
‘I, perhaps, have been a better friend of yours than you have supposed. I’ve admired your reserve, your courage, your studied gaiety. But I have felt the existence of something beneath them that was more you – more you as I wished to know you – than they were; something that I have believed to be a constant sorrow.’
She listened with great gravity, but without an air of offence, and he felt that while he had been timorously calculating the last consequences of friendship, she had placidly accepted them. ‘You surprise me,’ she said slowly, and her blush still lingered. ‘But to refuse to answer you would confirm an impression which is evidently already too strong. An unhappiness that one can sit comfortably talking about, is an unhappiness with distinct limitations. If I were examined before a board of commissioners for investigating the felicity of mankind, I’m sure I should be pronounced a very fortunate woman.’
There was something delightfully gentle to him in her tone, and its softness seemed to deepen as she continued: ‘But let me add, with all gratitude for your sympathy, that it’s my own affair altogether. It needn’t disturb you, Mr Longmore, for I have often found myself in your company a very contented person.’
‘You’re a wonderful woman,’ he said, ‘and I admire you as I never have admired any one. You’re wiser than anything I, for one, can say to you; and what I ask of you is not to let me advise or console you, but simply thank you for letting me know you.’ He had intended no such outburst as this, but his voice rang loud, and he felt a kind of unfamiliar joy as he uttered it.
She shook her head with some impatience. ‘Let us be friends, – as I supposed we were going to be, – without protestations and fine words. To have you making bows to my wisdom, – that would be real wretchedness. I can dispense with your admiration better than the Flemish painters can, – better than Van Eyck and Rubens, in spite of all their worshippers. Go join your friend, – see everything, enjoy everything, learn everything, and write me an excellent letter, brimming over with your impressions. I’m extremely fond of the Dutch painters,’ she added with a slight faltering of the voice, which Longmore had noticed once before, and which he had interpreted as the sudden weariness of a spirit self-condemned to play a part.
‘I don’t believe you care about the Dutch painters at all,’ he said with an unhesitating laugh. ‘But I shall certainly write you a letter.’
She rose and turned homeward, thoughtfully rearranging her flowers as she walked. Little was said; Longmore was asking himself, with a tremor in the unspoken words, whether all this meant simply that he was in love. He looked at the rooks wheeling against the golden-hued sky, between the tree-tops, but not at his companion, whose personal presence seemed lost in the felicity she had created. Madame de Mauves was silent and grave, because she was painfully disappointed. A sentimental friendship she had not desired; her scheme had been to pass with Longmore as a placid creature with a good deal of leisure, which she was disposed to devote to profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely, and felt that there was something in him to which, when she made up her girlish mind, that a needy French baron was the ripest fruit of time, she had done very scanty justice. They went through the little gate in the garden wall and approached the house. On the terrace Madame Clairin was entertaining a friend, – a little elderly gentleman with a white moustache, and an order in his button-hole. Madame de Mauves chose to pass round the house into the court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore with a commanding nod, lifted her eye-glass and stared at them as they went by. Longmore heard the little old gentleman uttering some old-fashioned epigram about ‘la vieille galanterie Française’, and then, by a sudden impulse, he looked at Madame de Mauves and wondered what she was doing in such a world. She stopped before the house, without asking him to come in. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘you’ll consider my advice, and waste no more time at Saint-Germain.’
For an instant there rose to his lips some faded compliment about his time not being wasted, but it expired before the simple sincerity of her look. She stood there as gently serious as the angel of disinterestedness, and Longmore felt as if he should insult her by treating her words as a bait for flattery. ‘I shall start in a day or two,’ he answered, ‘but I won’t promise you not to come back.’
‘I hope not,’ she said simply. ‘I expect to be here a long time.’
‘I shall come and say good-by,’ he rejoined; on which she nodded with a smile, and went in.
He turned away, and walked slowly homeward by the terrace. It seemed to him that to leave her thus, for a gain on which she herself insisted, was to know her better and admire her more. But he was in a vague ferment of feeling which her evasion of his question half an hour before had done more to deepen than to allay. Suddenly, on the terrace, he encountered M. de Mauves, who was leaning against the parapet finishing a cigar. The Baron, who, he fancied, had an air of peculiar affability, offered him his fair, plump hand. Longmore stopped; he felt a sudden angry desire to cry out to him that he had the loveliest wife in the world; that he ought to be ashamed of himself not to know it; and that for all his shrewdness he had never looked into the depths of her eyes. The Baron, we know, considered that he had; but there was something in Euphemia’s eyes now that was not there five years before. They talked for a while about various things, and M. de Mauves gave a humourous account of his visit to America. His tone was not soothing to Longmore’s excited sensibilities. He seemed to consider the country a gigantic joke, and his urbanity only went so far as to admit that it was not a bad one. Longmore was not, by habit, an aggressive apologist for our institutions; but the Baron’s narrative confirmed his worst impressions of French superficiality. He had understood nothing, he had felt nothing, he had learned nothing; and our hero, glancing askance at his aristocratic profile, declared that if the chief merit of a long pedigree was to leave one so vaingloriously stupid, he thanked his stars that the Longmores had emerged from obscurity in the present century, in the person of an enterprising lumber merchant. M. de Mauves dwelt of course on that prime oddity of ours, – the liberty allowed to young girls; and related the history of his researches into the ‘opportunities’ it presented to French noblemen, – researches in which, during a fortnight’s stay, he seemed to have spent many agreeable hours. ‘I am bound to admit,’ he said, ‘that in every case I was disarmed by the extreme candour of the young lady, and that they took care of themselves to better purpose than I have seen some mammas in France take care of them.’ Longmore greeted this handsome concession with the grimmest of smiles, and damned his impertinent patronage.
Mentioning at last that he was about to leave Saint-Germain, he was surprised, without exactly being flattered, by the Baron’s quickened attention. ‘I’m very sorry,’ the latter cried. ‘I hoped we had you for the summer.’ Longmore murmured something civil, and wondered why M. de Mauves should care whether he stayed or went. ‘You were a diversion to Madame de Mauves,’ the Baron added. ‘I assure you I mentally blessed your visits.’
‘They were a great pleasure to me,’ Longmore said gravely. ‘Some day I expect to come back.’
‘Pray do,’ and the Baron laid his hand urgently on his arm. ‘You see I have confidence in you!’ Longmore was silent for a moment, and the Baron puffed his cigar reflectively and watched the smoke. ‘Madame de Mauves,’ he said at last, ‘is a rather singular person.’
Longmore shifted his position, and wondered whether he was going to ‘explain’ Madame de Mauves.
‘Being as you are her fellow-countryman,’ the Baron went on, ‘I don’t mind speaking frankly. She’s just a little morbid, – the most charming woman in the world, as you see, but a little fanciful, – a little exaltée. Now you see she has taken this extraordinary fancy for solitude. I can’t get her to go anywhere, – to see any one. When my friends present themselves she’s polite, but she’s freezing. She doesn’t do herself justice, and I expect every day to hear two or three of them say to me, “Your wife’s jol