An artist's honor

Chapter I. • Pierre De Pierrepont

O NE of the most distinguished names of ancient French history, that of the Odon de Pierrepont family, was borne, and worthily borne, about 1875, by the Marquis Pierre-Armand, the last male descendant of his family, and at that time about thirty years of age. He was a man whose grave and attractive features, manly grace, and calm and unstudied dignity of bearing spontaneously elicited this trite formula of admiration: “He has the manner of a Prince.” Indeed it would have been difficult to imagine him seated at a desk, measuring off silk in a shop, or pursuing any occupation whatever, unless it might be that of the soldier or the diplomat, the only two occupations suitable for princes. The Marquis de Pierrepont had, however, appeared in uniform in the war of 1870, and had displayed the most brilliant courage ; then he had quietly returned to his former life of a Parisian and dilettante, some-

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what from the liking that he had for it and from his want of ambition ; somewhat, also, out of regard for an aunt of his, who was not welldisposed toward the Republic.

This aunt, the Baronne de Montauron, an Odon de Pierrepont by birth and excessively proud of her origin, was a widow ; she was childless, and did not regret the circumstance, as thereby she was enabled to dispose in her nephew’s favor of the great wealth that had been left her by her husband; in this manner she would repair the somewhat waning fortune and splendor of her house. The Pierreponts, while not exactly ruined, had, in fact, for two generations past, been declining to a condition of what might be called straitened circumstances, regard being had to the cost of living at the time. The young Marquis had realized from his father’s inheritance only fifteen to eighteen thousand francs of yearly income ; that was sufficient to yield him an independent living, but even when supplemented by the small addition which his aunt made to it in shape of Christmas presents, it did not amount to much for a man bearing the name that he did and representing a family of great noblemen. Mme. de Montauron, who possessed in her own right an income of nearly four hundred thousand francs, might doubtless have anticipated the moment

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of her death to gild afresh the scutcheon of her nephew, but if she had within her soul a passion that was stronger than pride of lineage, it was selfishness. Though wounded in her pride by the life which her nephew’s scanty resources obliged him to lead, she could not prevail upon herself to remedy this state of affairs during her life-time by making the smallest sacrifice to her own personal comforts. She was then fifty-five years old. Basing her calculation upon certain mortuary statistics taken from the lives of her ancestors, she reckoned that she had still approximately before her thirty years of life. The humiliation of seeing the last male representative of her line reduced to comparative penury for so long a space of time was extremely distressing to her, but the idea of selling her hotel in the Rue de Varennes, or her Chateau des Genets, or anything else, no matter what, in order to assist him in his straits, was still more unendurable. To conciliate these clashing sentiments and enrich her nephew without impoverishing herself, the only practicable expedient was to secure for him some rich heiress for a wife, and such was the end that Mme. de Montauron was aiming at, at the moment when this history opens.

She might have feared that her handsome nephew, as she called him, who was petted and

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made much of in polite society, particularly among the ladies, would not show any very great inclination to abandon the freedom of bachelorhood in order to subject himself to the constraints of wedded life. It is quite often a subject of remark, however, that men who, by their personal charm, are best equipped for feminine conquest, are not those who place the highest value upon it. Somewhat indifferent to successes that are gained with too great ease, they have generally neither the conceit nor the rage of gallantry of those who have to triumph over nature in order to produce an impression upon women. His appearance was responsible for many adventures being attributed to the Marquis de Pierrepont, and although his discretion forbade him to admit any of them to be true, there were probably quite a number that might have been authenticated. In reality, however, he was not a libertine ; on the contrary, there was in his character a fund of gravity and dignity that was beginning to tire of young bachelor life.

He was discussing this subject one evening with one of his friends, the painter Jacques Fabrice, to whose room he sometimes went upon leaving his club to drink a cup of tea and smoke a cigarette.

“My dear friend,” said he, in a melancholy

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voice, “do you know what is happening me? I am entering to-day upon my thirty-first year.”

“That is a glorious time of life,” said the painter, who was sketching by the light of his great lamp.

“It is a fine time, no doubt,” replied M. de Pierrepont ; “it is the time when a man’s faculties are at their best, but at the same time it is a critical, a decisive period in life, and especially in the life of an unoccupied man and a mere dilettante like myself. I am standing on the dividing line between youth and maturity; if I carry with me into maturity the passions and the habits of youth, it is impossible to blind myself to the future that is in store for me. I believe that I know what is due to honor and good taste ; I have an innate dislike for all that is false and base, — and yet, in spite of everything, if I abandon myself to chance at this critical moment, I behold before me a future that shocks all my inherent delicacy of feeling. I behold upon my horizon the amours of a man beyond his prime, an artificial youthfulness obstinately defying all the warnings and all the humiliations of approaching old age, operations of hair-dying and face-enamelling carried on behind locked doors, and a thousand other things of the same sort to which friends just as punctilious as I am have ended by pitifully resign-

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ing themselves. Well, my dear fellow, there is no use in wasting time thinking, — I see no other way to avoid this dismal future than to follow the custom of our forefathers — .”

“Ah! ah!” ejaculated Fabrice.

“Just so!” continued Pierre, “I must marry. Mon Dieu ! I know that marriage is not devoid of inconveniences, cares, dangers even, — but then it is the best course that a man can adopt who wishes to grow old and die reputably when his hair gets gray.”

The painter heaved a deep sigh and was silent.

“Pardon me,” said Pierre. “This is a painful subject for you ; I should not have forgotten it.”

“My personal experience in that direction has certainly been a very sad one,” the artist answered ; “but that matters nothing. I made a foolish marriage, — but I have nothing to regret, since my daughter is left to me.”

“Exactly,” Pierre resumed, “you have your daughter; — that is the kind of affection, of preoccupation, that serves to divert a man’s mind from his everlasting hankering after femininity and that sets well upon the period of matured life. It is a pleasant sight to behold a father who is still young accompanying his children in their blithe morning walk. — Well!

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what would you have, my friend? You will laugh at my frankness ; — but I have a kind of vague longing to possess, once in my life, the love of an honest woman. ”

The painter’s eyes had wandered from his drawing for an instant, and dwelt with a slightly wondering sympathy upon the Marquis’s handsome features.

“In a word,” said he, “you are thinking of attempting a second manner; you wish to learn if there may not chance to exist a kind of love of superior quality to what we are accustomed to call the Parisian article?”

“Precisely so.”

“Well, what is wanting to enable you to realize this honorable dream?”

“A wife,” said Pierre.

“But it seems to me that with your name, your connections, your future prospects and, if I may venture to say so, your personal advantages, you will have no difficulty in finding a wife when you want one.”

“Not when / want one, but when my aunt does.”

“Have you not told me that your aunt desired for you as early a marriage as possible?”

“As wealthy a marriage as possible,” said the Marquis, accenting his words with a tinge of bitterness. “It is my aunt’s notion that as

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marriage is nothing more than a mere lottery, we should look only to the dowry and leave all the rest to chance. That is not altogether my idea. Do not misunderstand me, however. I am not in a condition to despise a good round rent-roll, but I should desire tlie woman whom I may marry to give me some other assurances of happiness and honor — unquestionable assurances, too. You know how young girls are brought up nowadays; it is frightful. It is for that reason that my marriage, although we are both very desirous of it, my aunt and I, continues to be a problematical affair . — A propos y when are you coming to the Genets? My aunt asks in her last letter when she is to look for you.”

“After the fifteenth of August I shall be disengaged and at her command.”

“Bravo! — You have never seen my aunt, I think?”

“Never — not even in my dreams,” replied the painter.

“I believe I told you that her portrait would be — I was on the point of saying that it would be an ungrateful commission.”

“I will try and do my best.”

“Your merit will be only so much the greater ! Au revoir ! ”

And they parted.

Chapter II. Fabrice

D OES there exist in the artist’s special art, in his lonely and somewhat prison-like existence, in his unceasing search for a certain higher standard of beauty, some hidden virtue that tends to elevate his moral being? I cannot say, but it seems to me that more frequently than elsewhere there are found in the studios of the painters those gentle, serious intellects, those lofty, simple and upright hearts that constitute some of the types that make us think more highly of human nature. Without descending into inordinate particulars upon this general observation, I do not believe that there exist in all the world nobler hearts than those of some artists that I have known.

Jacques Fabrice’s origin was of the humblest. His father, a petty clerk in one of the municipal offices of Paris, had died young, but only after having lived long enough to do all that lay in his power to thwart his son’s precocious inclination toward the painter’s art. His mother took in work from a large manufactory

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of artificial flowers; gifted with more delicate instincts, she furtively encouraged the boy’s tastes. Left alone with him to care for, she soon made herself acquainted with all the forms of artistic instruction that Paris has to offer to the needy and placed her son in a position to profit by them. When about fifteen, Jacques began to contribute his share toward the expenses of the household by painting signs in his intervals of study. It is said that it was while he was decorating the front of a little tavern at Meudon that one of the first painters of the time saw him and took a warm interest in him ; not only did he receive him into his atelier, where he watched his progress with loving care, but two years subsequently he made him his companion in a trip to Italy. Fabrice’s mother experienced the delight of witnessing her son’s early successes, who was partly indebted to her for his talent and wholly indebted to her for those distinguishing qualities that often characterize men who have been reared by a widowed mother, that admixture of gentleness and strength which recall in a touching manner their double role of protector and protected.

It was not, however, until after his admirable display at the Salon of 1875 that Jacques Fabrice’s reputation burst upon the public; until

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II that time it had been confined to a narrow circle of brother artists, connoisseurs and dealers. His slow and scrupulously conscientious manner of working, his exacting taste, his horror of incompleteness, his artistic sense of honor, in a word, had for a long time retarded the brilliant and definitive development of his talent.

At the beginning of his career, moreover, he had had to contend with sorrows that almost proved too heavy for his endurance. At the age of twenty-two, deluded by his imagination, he had married the sister of one of his studio companions; she was a rather pretty little thing, with a look about her that reminded one of Greuze's pictures, and like Jacques’ mother, she was a worker on artificial flowers. He used to see her working industriously at her window, and she appeared to him the very image of contentment and all the domestic virtues. It was a pleasing dream to think of associating his poor little neighbor to his growing fortune, and so he married her. Whatever an intelligence of the highest order, a soul of the most delicate perceptions, can suffer from the contact in permanency of vulgarity of mind and baseness of heart, that he had to endure at the hands of this small pretty creature. Incapable of identifying herself with the artist’s lofty ambitions,

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she never ceased reproaching him, with the cries and lamentations of a fury, with the time that he devoted to his sketches and the slowness of his work, urging him to a hasty production that would bring money in more rapidly. She even brought unscrupulous dealers to his atelier during his absence and sold them unfinished pictures, to the great despair of the wretched artist. The only meritorious thing that she ever did was to die after seven or eight years, leaving a daughter who, fortunately, did not resemble her mother.

The young Marquis de Pierrepont, whose dilettantism interested itself equally in sporting affairs and in matters pertaining to Art, and who was an equally good judge of both, was among the first to prognosticate the great future that lay before Jacques Fabrice. They had made each other’s acquaintance during the siege of Paris. They had belonged to the same company of a marching regiment, and had been in hospital together after the battle of Chatillon. Subsequent to these relations, Pierrepont visited Fabrice at his studio; from that time forth he constituted himself the advocate of a talent that was as yet unknown or contested. In this way there had grown up between them a close intimacy, as confiding as it could be between two men

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who both were proud and reserved by nature, whatever, in one as well as in the other, might be the concealed impulse of their passions.

For several years Pierre de Pierrepont had been vainly trying to prevail upon his aunt, Mme. de Montauron, to have her portrait painted by Fabrice, guaranteeing the excellence of the likeness ; he insinuated that it would confer an honor upon her, and at the same time would be very economical, to be one of the first to recognize an artist who was destined to be very famous.

“I will wait for the great fame,” she replied. “I do not care to break the ice.”

Fabrice’s display in 1875, with his “Recreation at the Convent,” his “Washer-women on the Yvette,” and his “Portrait of Lady S., surnamed the Lady with the Necklace,” was an undoubted triumph, which at last decided Mme. de Montauron to yield to the urgency of her nephew and favor with her protection a man who no longer stood in need of it. After discussing the matter with Pierrepont, she invited the painter to come and pass a few weeks at her country place, the Genets, in the course of the summer, where she could sit to him for her portrait more conveniently and with less liability to interruption.

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As we have already seen, Jacques Fabrice was consequently to proceed toward the end of August to the Chateau des Genets, in the department of the Orne, there to meet the Marquis de Pierrepont, who was to go there immediately after the Deauville races.

Chapter III. Beatrice

T HE Baronne de Montauron, to whom, having made him acquainted with Pierrepont, we now introduce the reader, was an exceedingly bright woman, but entirely devoid of sensibility; she had found the way, however, to create for herself a reputation for goodness of heart by receiving into her family a young orphan, a remote connexion of her husband, who occupied the position of reader, sick-nurse, and also, to some extent, of chamber-maid. Beatrice de Sardonne was daughter to the Comte de Sardonne, whose racing stable was responsible for half his ruin, and speculations on the Bourse for the remainder. He had died, leaving his daughter with an income of a thousand francs ; that meant destitution or else the convent. Mme. de Montauron, increasing in years and sickly, had been thinking for some time of taking a young lady companion to alleviate the burthen of her solitude and her infirmities. She was desirous that this young lady companion should be of good appearance, so as not to reflect discredit on the house ; she was dei6

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sirous that she should have a good disposition (and it is very certain that the poor girl would need it). Finally, she wanted her to be pretty, so that her presence might serve to attract the men, whose society the Baronne particularly affected. Mile, de Sardonne appeared to fulfill these various requirements to perfection ; she was of good birth, more than ordinarily distinguished in appearance, and extremely pretty ; — she was even a little too pretty to suit the Baronne, but then there was always something that had to be overlooked. She was a rather tall person, but particularly noticeable for the dignity of her air. She possessed the rather high shoulders of the women of her family, dark blue eyes, a complexion that bordered on olive, with two dimples in the cheeks that showed themselves when she smiled, which was but seldom. Naturally her toilette was very simple and seldom varied : it was almost always a plain black silk dress, without ornaments — sometimes, since she had put off mourning, a dress of goldengreen silk that set off the contour of her splendid bust and at her every motion flashed back gleams of light like a soldier’s breast-plate. She was very reserved, only speaking to reply with brief politeness to questions addressed to her. She obeyed the frequently mortifying orders and the tyrannical caprices of the Ba-

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ronnc patiently, or at least with imperturbable equanimity : a vertical crease in her forehead between her arched eye-brows, which sometimes became more prominently marked, alone bore witness to her soul’s revolt against her almost servile situation.

This beautiful creature, so abounding in charm and mystery, had, as may be readily believed, numerous and not always very delicate admirers among the friends, young or old, of the household. Her serious correctness of manner, her cold reserve, quickly discouraged these equivocal tributes of admiration. It may be that in the ingenuousness of her soul and in the consciousness of her beauty, she at first believed that a portion of this homage was dictated by sincere feeling and honorable intentions, but with the keen, quick intuition of a woman she had very early been convinced that all those suitors by whom she was surrounded aspired to everything except her hand. This conviction, that she had seen confirmed day by day during the two years that she had been living with Mme. de Montauron, had added to the sadness of the unhappy orphan a settled feeling of bitter contempt. Even although she had not been the virtuous girl that she was, moreover, Mile, de Sardonne had a defence stronger than contempt, stronger perhaps than even honor itself, against the more or less openly avowed enterprises of which she was the object : her heart was no longer in her own possession. It is very seldom that a young girl has not selected, even from earliest childhood, in the secret chambers of her imagination, the man that she would like to marry were her choice in such a matter dependent on her own free-will. There is almost always, indeed, among her family or social acquaintance some one man who rises pre-eminently above all others and fills in every particular the ideal that a young girl may picture to herself of a husband, that is to say, of a lover, for at that happy age the two words are yet synonymous. Beatrice de Sardonne was barely twelve years old when she was struck by the exceptionally warm reception that was accorded by ’her own family and by the world in which she moved to a young neighbor of theirs in the country, whom they met at Paris in the gay winter season. It was plain to the child’s understanding that her aunts, her cousins, and even her dear mother herself were more than usually agitated whenever the young man’s name was announced. The conversation, which, in the quiet of the country, sometimes languished, even among women, suddenly became animated. It was evident that the approach of the expected

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guest aroused an agreeable effervescence in all those feminine breasts ; they posted themselves at the windows, as if they would hasten his arrival, and finally, when Pierre de Pierrepont appeared with his prince-like air, driving his highstepping horse along the road that encircled the lawn, the ladies ran to the front-door with beaming faces, while Mile. Beatrice, observing matters through the foliage, herself felt within her young heart a certain small emotion proportioned to her age.

The child’s impressions, growing with her growth, had assumed from year to year a deeper and more well considered character. To society at large the Marquis de Pierrepont stood as a type of gallant and charming manhood, but he was something more than that in Beatrice’s eyes: for her education, her tastes, even her prejudices, disposed her to set on high in her admiration, far beyond all others, this gracious gentleman, this lordly being, who seemed moulded from a finer clay than the rest and especially formed for noble occupations and elegant leisure, for love, war, the chase. In this manner Mile, de Sardonne’s feeling for Pierre de Pierrepont had little by little developed to the point of adoration, an adoration that the young girl guarded jealously within the deepest sanctuary of her heart, and of which Pierrepont

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did not for a moment suspect the existence, holding as he did for little girls of her age all the disdain of men of his.

Beatrice was about sixteen years old when her parents, seeing themselves on the brink of the gulf in which the remainder of their fortune was to be buried, abruptly retired from the world, preserving relations with only two or three intimate friends. The Marquis de Pierrepont, after several ineffectual attempts to break in on their retirement, had considered it his duty to insist no further, and had lost sight of them until the time when he learned of the final crash, and soon after that, of their death. He did not meet Beatrice again until she had domiciled herself with Mme. de Montauron in the capacity of poor relation, companion and scullion. He was far from suspecting that he had been in some measure, and probably even wholly, influential in the selection that Mile, de Sardonne had made of Mme. de Montauron’s house in preference to a convent, but he was of too generous a nature not to be touched by misfortune, even had it presented itself in less attractive shape. It was evident that he studied, by showing her his personal consideration, to alleviate the orphan’s humiliating condition ; but at the same time he seemed to shun all intimacy with her, and whether it was that

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he distrusted her or himself, habitually evinced a reserve that bordered on constraint.

Such were the mutual relations between these two persons when Pierrepont arrived at the Chateau des Genets in the summer of 1875, where he preceded by a few days his friend Fabrice.

The Genets was an old patrimonial possession of the Pierreponts, which had been sold and partially restored in the days of the revolution. After the expiration of more than half a century, the Baron de Montauron, at the urgent request of his wife, whose very humble servant he was, had bought back the land at a very high price and restored the buildings. All that remained of the old castle was a fine, square, crenelated tower that had been fantastically shut in between two piles of modern masonry, an old chapel with a belfry that imparted picturesqueness to the entrance of the main courtyard, and a wide moat that had been laid out as gardens. The general aspect, notwithstanding its irregularity, was not wanting in grandeur. Great avenues of beeches, a park, and woods through which flowed a tributary of the Orne contributed to give to this mansion what it is customary to call a seigniorial appearance.

Mme. de Montauron, who abominated solitude, was very glad to exercise a lavish hospi-

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tality at the Genets while the season lasted, but having once determined that the year 1875 was to behold the end of the tergiversation and bachelorhood of her nephew, she had materially widened the circle of her invitations and addressed herself with particular care to the construction of her list. She had admitted to it a more than usually large proportion of girls from the world of finance, French and cosmopolitan as well, counting upon the familiarity of chateau life to bring to maturity circumstances that she desired. On the other hand, she dispensed as far as was possible with young married women, especially if pretty, so that the attention of the neophyte might not be distracted by considerations of minor importance.

Pierrepont found at the Genets, therefore, to bid him welcome, half a dozen artless creatures, very agreeable to look upon, and who, notwithstanding their artlessness, seemed to have a tolerably clear idea of the situation. They behaved, at least, as if they had been in the Baronne’s secret and were in complicity with her, competing, each in her own small way, to make hers the successful candidacy. And that was natural enough. The husband that they were on the alert to conquer was not only a man of rare personal seductiveness, he was heir presumptive to a great fortune and had a b£a trice.

Marquise’s crown to dispose of. That was sufficient justification for the display of toilettes, of graces, of candor, of tomboyishness, or of affected indifference in which the young competitors strove to emulate each other.

It followed as a natural result that there was a good deal of gayety at the Genets. Those young ladies with their relatives, a few brothers and some friends and acquaintances of the neighborhood, constituted a very brilliant and lively society, which abandoned itself with zest to all the customary amusements of country life : driving and horse-back riding, fishing parties on the river in the park while waiting for the hunting season to open, lawn-tennis in the court on the lawn, and in the evening innocent games, music and dancing. Mme. de Montauron, who hated silence because it made her think of death, liked to see all this stir and bustle going on around her, but she took only a small part in it personally, being troubled by her rheumatism. From her wheeled-chair, where she queened it with a certain great-ladylike dignity of manner, sometimes in her drawing-room, sometimes beneath the trees of the park, it gave her pleasure to behold all these young people with their elegant toilets and equipages, enjoying themselves and forming a sort of small court for her, and to watch the

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phaetons and four-in-hands as they passed, bright with charming dresses and gay laughter.

To Mile, de Sardonne the spectacle afforded less pleasure. Aside from the very rare occasions when Mme. de Montauron made up her mind to drive and took her reader with her, she kept her at her side in the house for alleged reasons of propriety. Poor Beatrice, therefore, had no part in the festal and luxurious life that was going on beneath her eyes, and upon which, too, she felt that her plain, unvarying toilet would have cast a blot and would have shamed her. She herself had been brought up to lead the easy life of the upper class, and like most of the young girls of her set, she had the passionate taste and the rather narrow devotion for the elegant pleasures of out-door life. Hers was a noble spirit, rather than a superior intelligence ; she was proud, but not at all philosophical, and under the dimple of her pretty smile there often lay concealed a bitter sense of hardship. As she watched the amazons and their attendant cavaliers disappearing along the shaded avenues, her forehead remained unclouded, but her heart was lacerated.