1662-1678 2026
This is an AI modernization of The Princess of Cleves, with The Princess of Montpensier into contemporary English. The original is available from Wikisource (the Lepetit 1820 text). Also available as an epub.
The Princess of Cleves was published in Paris in March 1678 with no author's name on it. Everyone soon knew it was by Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette (1634–1693), a countess who lived in Paris, apart from her husband, at the centre of a circle of writers that included the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maxims, and her old friend Madame de Sévigné. She never acknowledged the book. Women of her rank did not publish novels under their own names.
She set it a hundred and twenty years in the past, at the court of King Henri II in 1558 and 1559. Almost every name in it is real: the King and his mistress Diane de Poitiers, Queen Catherine de' Medici, the young Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, married to the heir to the throne and called the Queen Dauphine, the Guise brothers, the Constable de Montmorency, and the Duke of Nemours, the handsomest man at court. Only the heroine and her family are invented. The first pages are crowded with this cast, and the novel stops several times so that a character can tell a story about the court's past. These stories are not digressions. Each one is about love, ambition and deceit, and each teaches the heroine something about the world she has married into.
The story is simple. Mademoiselle de Chartres, sixteen and raised by her mother to believe that a woman's only happiness is virtue, marries the Prince of Cleves, who adores her, without loving him. Then she meets the Duke of Nemours. Almost nothing happens outwardly; nearly everything happens inside her, and Lafayette names each feeling as precisely as a doctor naming symptoms. That is why the book is often called the first modern psychological novel. When it came out, the Mercure galant, a Paris magazine, asked its readers to write in and judge one thing the princess does, and the argument has never quite stopped.
The book also contains The Princess of Montpensier, a much shorter novel Lafayette published anonymously in 1662, set during the Wars of Religion of the 1560s. It tells the same kind of story with a different ending, and reads as a first attempt at the later book.
This edition translates both from Lafayette's French, with Thomas Sergeant Perry's 1891 English version consulted for sense only. Her long, balanced sentences are broken into shorter ones, and nothing is added: she rarely describes a face, a room or a dress, and neither does this translation.
The Princess of Cleves
However warmly this story has been received by those who have heard it read, the author could not bring himself to reveal his name. He was afraid that his name might lessen the success of his book. He knows from experience that people sometimes condemn a work because they have a poor opinion of its author, and he knows too that an author's reputation often lends a work its value. So he stays in the obscurity where he is, to leave the judgments freer and fairer; and he will show himself all the same, if this story pleases the public as much as I hope it will.
Magnificence and gallantry never shone in France so brilliantly as in the last years of the reign of Henri II. The King was a ladies' man, handsome, and in love. His passion for Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, had begun more than twenty years earlier, yet it was no less violent for that, and the proofs he gave of it were no less dazzling.
He excelled at every kind of physical exercise and made it one of his chief occupations. Every day there was hunting or tennis, ballets, riding at the ring, or some such amusement. The colors and the monogram of Madame de Valentinois were everywhere, and she herself appeared in all the finery that her granddaughter, Mademoiselle de la Marck, who was then of an age to marry, might have worn.
The Queen's presence made hers respectable. The Queen, Catherine de' Medici, was beautiful, though no longer in her first youth; she loved grandeur, magnificence, and pleasure. The King had married her while he was still Duke of Orléans and had an elder brother ahead of him, the Dauphin who died at Tournon, a prince whose birth and great qualities marked him out to be a worthy successor to his father, King François I.
The Queen's ambitious nature made reigning very sweet to her. She seemed to bear the King's attachment to the Duchess of Valentinois without pain, and she showed no jealousy of it; but she was so practiced at hiding her feelings that it was hard to tell what they were, and policy obliged her to keep the Duchess close to her, so as to keep the King close as well. The King enjoyed the company of women, even of those he was not in love with. Every day he went to the Queen's apartments at the hour of the circle, her evening reception, where the handsomest men and most beautiful women of the court were always to be found.
No court ever had so many beautiful women and so many admirably handsome men, and nature seemed to have taken pleasure in bestowing her finest gifts on the greatest princesses and the greatest princes. Madame Elisabeth of France, who was later Queen of Spain, was beginning to show a surprising intelligence and that incomparable beauty which was to prove so fatal to her. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, who had just married the Dauphin and whom the court called the Queen Dauphine, was perfect in mind and in person. She had been raised at the French court and had acquired all its polish, and she was born with such a gift for every fine thing that, young as she was, she loved and understood such things better than anyone. The Queen, her mother-in-law, and Madame Marguerite, the King's sister, also loved poetry, plays, and music. The taste that King François I had had for poetry and letters still reigned in France; and since his son, the present King, loved physical exercise, every kind of pleasure was to be found at court. But what made this court beautiful and majestic was the endless number of princes and great lords of extraordinary merit. The men I am about to name were, each in his own way, the ornament and the wonder of their age.
The King of Navarre commanded everyone's respect, both by the greatness of his rank and by the greatness that showed in his person. He excelled in war, and the Duke of Guise roused such rivalry in him that more than once he had left his post as general to go and fight beside the Duke, like a common soldier, in the most dangerous places. It is true, too, that the Duke had shown such admirable courage, and won such successes, that no great captain could look at him without envy. His courage was matched by every other great quality: a vast and profound mind, a noble and lofty soul, and an equal talent for war and for affairs of state. The Cardinal of Lorraine, his brother, had been born with boundless ambition, a quick mind, and admirable eloquence, and he had acquired deep learning, which he used to make himself a man of consequence by defending the Catholic religion, then beginning to come under attack. The Chevalier de Guise, who was later called the Grand Prior, was a prince loved by everyone: handsome, witty, skillful, and famous throughout Europe for his courage. The Prince of Condé, though nature had given him a small and unfavored body, had a great and proud soul, and a wit that made him attractive even to the most beautiful women. The Duke of Nevers, whose life had been glorious in war and in the great offices he had held, was the delight of the court, though he was getting on in years. He had three sons, all of them remarkably handsome. The second, known as the Prince of Cleves, was worthy to uphold the honor of his name; he was brave and generous, and he had a prudence rarely found in the young. The Vidame de Chartres, who bore the old title of vidame that had come down in his family, came of that ancient house of Vendôme whose name even the princes of the blood, the royal family's own branches and next in line to the throne, had not disdained to bear. He was as distinguished in love as in war: handsome, fine-looking, brave, bold, and generous, and all these good qualities in him were lively and brilliant. In short, he alone was worthy to be compared with the Duke of Nemours, if anyone could have been compared with him. But Monsieur de Nemours was a masterpiece of nature. The least admirable thing about him was that he was the handsomest and best-built man in the world. What set him above everyone else was an incomparable courage, and a charm in his mind, his face, and everything he did that has never been seen in anyone but him. He had a gaiety that pleased men and women alike, an extraordinary skill in every exercise, a way of dressing that everyone copied and no one could imitate, and, in short, an air about his whole person that made it impossible to look at anyone else wherever he appeared. There was no lady at court whose pride would not have been flattered to see him devoted to her. Few of those he had devoted himself to could boast of having resisted him, and even several to whom he had shown no sign of passion had not been able to keep from feeling one for him. He had so much gentleness and so natural a bent for love affairs that he could not refuse some attentions to the women who tried to please him; so he was courting several women at once, and it was hard to guess which one he truly loved. He often went to the Queen Dauphine's. Her beauty, her sweetness, the trouble she took to please everyone, and the particular regard she showed him had often led people to believe that he dared to raise his eyes to her. The Guises, whose niece she was, had greatly increased their influence and standing through her marriage; their ambition made them aspire to equal the princes of the blood and to share the power of the Constable de Montmorency. The King left most of the business of government in the Constable's hands, and treated the Duke of Guise and the Marshal de Saint-André as his favorites. But whether favor or business brought men close to him, they could keep their place only by submitting to the Duchess of Valentinois; and though she no longer had youth or beauty, she ruled him so absolutely that she may be said to have been mistress of his person and of the state.
The King had always loved the Constable, and as soon as he came to the throne he had recalled him from the exile to which King François I had sent him. The court was divided between the Guises and the Constable, who had the backing of the princes of the blood. Both sides had always tried to win over the Duchess of Valentinois. The Duke of Aumale, the Duke of Guise's brother, had married one of her daughters; the Constable wanted the same alliance. He was not content with having married his eldest son to Madame Diane, the King's own daughter by a lady of Piedmont who had become a nun as soon as the child was born. That marriage had met many obstacles, because of the promises this eldest son, Monsieur de Montmorency, had made to Mademoiselle de Piennes, one of the Queen's maids of honor; and though the King had overcome them with great patience and kindness, the Constable still did not feel secure unless he could win Madame de Valentinois and detach her from the Guises, whose greatness was beginning to make her uneasy. She had put off the Dauphin's marriage to the Queen of Scots as long as she could. She could not bear the beauty and the able, precocious mind of that young queen, or the rise the marriage gave the Guises. She especially hated the Cardinal of Lorraine; he had spoken to her bitterly and even with contempt, and she saw that he was forming ties with the Queen. So the Constable found her willing to join him and to seal their alliance by marrying her granddaughter, Mademoiselle de la Marck, to Monsieur d'Anville, his second son, who later succeeded to his office under Charles IX. The Constable did not expect to find Monsieur d'Anville as unwilling to marry as Monsieur de Montmorency had been; but though the reasons were hidden from him, the difficulties were hardly smaller. Monsieur d'Anville was desperately in love with the Queen Dauphine, and little hope as he had in that passion, he could not bring himself to make a commitment that would divide his attentions. The Marshal de Saint-André was the only man at court who had taken no side. He was one of the favorites, and his favor was his own: the King had loved him since the days when he was Dauphin, and later made him a Marshal of France at an age when men do not usually hope for even the smallest honors. His favor gave him a brilliance that he sustained by his merit and his personal charm, by the refinement of his table and his furnishings, and by the greatest magnificence ever seen in a private man. The King's generosity paid for all this; he was lavish to the point of extravagance with those he loved. He did not have every great quality, but he had several, above all a love and understanding of war, and so he had been fortunate in it. Apart from the battle of Saint-Quentin, his reign had been an unbroken series of victories. He had won the battle of Renty in person; Piedmont had been conquered; the English had been driven out of France; and the Emperor Charles V had seen his good fortune come to an end before the city of Metz, which he had besieged in vain with all the forces of the Empire and of Spain. Nevertheless, since the disaster of Saint-Quentin had dimmed our hopes of further conquest, and since fortune had seemed ever since to divide itself between the two kings, both of them had gradually come round to thinking of peace.
The Dowager Duchess of Lorraine had begun to make proposals for it at the time of the Dauphin's marriage, and ever since there had always been some secret negotiation under way. At last Cercamp, in Artois, was chosen as the place where the parties would meet. The Cardinal of Lorraine, the Constable de Montmorency, and the Marshal de Saint-André went for the King; the Duke of Alba and the Prince of Orange for Philip II; and the Duke and Duchess of Lorraine were the mediators. The chief terms were the marriage of Madame Elisabeth of France to Don Carlos, the Infante of Spain, and that of Madame Marguerite, the King's sister, to the Duke of Savoy.
Meanwhile the King stayed on the frontier, and there he received the news of the death of Mary Tudor, Queen of England. He sent the Count of Randan to Queen Elizabeth to congratulate her on coming to the throne, and she received him gladly: her claim was so shaky that it was to her advantage to be recognized by the King. The Count found her well informed about the interests of the French court and the merits of the people in it; but above all he found her so full of the Duke of Nemours's reputation, and she spoke to him of the Duke so often and so eagerly, that when Monsieur de Randan came back and reported on his journey, he told the King there was nothing Monsieur de Nemours might not hope for from that queen, and that he had no doubt she would be willing to marry him. The King spoke to Monsieur de Nemours about it that very evening. He had Monsieur de Randan tell him every conversation he had had with Elizabeth, and advised him to try for this great fortune. Monsieur de Nemours thought at first that the King was not speaking seriously; but when he saw that he was, he said:
"At least, Sire, if I embark on a wild venture on Your Majesty's advice and in your service, I beg you to keep it secret until success justifies me in the eyes of the public, and to be so good as not to make me look vain enough to imagine that a queen who has never seen me would want to marry me for love."
The King promised to speak of the plan to no one but the Constable; indeed, he thought secrecy necessary to its success. Monsieur de Randan advised Monsieur de Nemours to go to England on the simple pretext of traveling, but he could not bring himself to do it. Instead he sent Lignerolles, a clever young man who was his favorite, to sound out the Queen's feelings and try to open some connection with her. While he waited to hear how that journey turned out, he went to see the Duke of Savoy, who was then in Brussels with the King of Spain. Queen Mary's death put great obstacles in the way of peace. The conference broke up at the end of November, and the King returned to Paris.
Then a beauty appeared at court who drew every eye, and we must believe she was a perfect beauty, since she roused admiration in a place so used to seeing beautiful women. She was of the same family as the Vidame de Chartres, and one of the greatest heiresses in France. Her father had died young and left her in the care of his wife, Madame de Chartres, whose wealth, virtue, and merit were extraordinary. After losing her husband, she had spent several years away from court. During that time she had devoted herself to her daughter's upbringing; but she did not work only to cultivate her mind and her beauty. She also set out to give her virtue, and to make virtue attractive to her. Most mothers imagine that never speaking of love affairs in front of young girls is enough to keep them away from such things. Madame de Chartres held the opposite opinion. She often described love to her daughter. She showed her what was pleasant in it, the more easily to persuade her of what she taught her was dangerous in it. She told her how little sincerity men have, how they deceive and how they betray, and what domestic misery such entanglements bring a woman; and on the other side she showed her the peace that comes with the life of a virtuous woman, and how much brilliance and dignity virtue gives to a woman who has beauty and birth. But she also showed her how hard it was to keep that virtue, except by an extreme distrust of oneself and by holding fast to the one thing that can make a woman happy, which is to love her husband and to be loved by him.
This heiress was then one of the greatest matches in France, and though she was extremely young, several marriages had already been proposed for her. Madame de Chartres, who was extremely proud, found almost nothing good enough for her daughter. When the girl was in her sixteenth year, she decided to bring her to court. On her arrival the Vidame went out to meet her. He was struck by Mademoiselle de Chartres's great beauty, and with good reason. The fairness of her skin and her golden hair gave her a radiance that has never been seen in anyone but her; all her features were regular, and her face and her whole person were full of grace and charm.
The day after she arrived, she went to have some jewels matched at the house of an Italian who dealt in them all over the world. He had come from Florence with the Queen and had grown so rich in his trade that his house looked more like a great lord's than a merchant's. While she was there, the Prince of Cleves came in. He was so struck by her beauty that he could not hide it, and Mademoiselle de Chartres could not help blushing when she saw how astonished he was. She recovered herself all the same, and paid him no more attention than courtesy required toward a man of the rank he appeared to be. Monsieur de Cleves looked at her with admiration, unable to think who this beautiful person could be whom he did not know. He could tell from her bearing, and from all her attendants, that she must be of very high rank. Her youth made him think she was unmarried; but since he saw no mother with her, and heard the Italian, who did not know her either, call her "madame," he did not know what to think, and he kept looking at her in astonishment. He noticed that his gaze embarrassed her, unlike most young girls, who always enjoy seeing the effect of their beauty; it even seemed to him that he was the reason she was in a hurry to leave, and in fact she left quite soon. Monsieur de Cleves consoled himself for losing sight of her with the hope of finding out who she was; but he was very surprised to learn that no one knew her. He was so moved by her beauty, and by the modesty he had noticed in everything she did, that one may say he conceived from that moment an extraordinary passion and esteem for her. That evening he went to see Madame Marguerite, the King's sister. She was held in high regard because of her influence over her brother the King, and that influence was so great that in making peace the King agreed to give back Piedmont so that she could marry the Duke of Savoy. Though she had wanted to marry all her life, she had never been willing to marry anyone but a sovereign; for that reason she had refused the King of Navarre when he was Duke of Vendôme, and had always wished for the Duke of Savoy, for whom she had kept a fondness ever since she saw him at Nice, at the meeting of King François I and Pope Paul III. Because she had great intelligence and a fine judgment of beautiful things, she drew all the people of taste and breeding to her, and at certain hours the whole court was to be found in her apartments. Monsieur de Cleves came as usual. He was so full of the intelligence and beauty of Mademoiselle de Chartres that he could talk of nothing else. He told everyone what had happened to him, and never tired of praising this person he had seen and did not know. Madame Marguerite told him there was no one like the person he described, and that if there were, everyone would know her. Madame de Dampierre, her lady of honor and a friend of Madame de Chartres, overheard this conversation, went up to Madame Marguerite, and told her quietly that it must surely have been Mademoiselle de Chartres whom Monsieur de Cleves had seen. Madame Marguerite turned back to him and said that if he would come again the next day, she would show him the beauty who had made such an impression on him. Mademoiselle de Chartres did indeed appear the next day. The Queen and the Queen Dauphine received her with every imaginable mark of favor, and everyone admired her so much that she heard nothing but praise around her. She received it with such noble modesty that she seemed not to hear it, or at least not to be moved by it. Then she went to Madame Marguerite's. After praising her beauty, Madame Marguerite told her how astonished Monsieur de Cleves had been. He came in a moment later.
"Come," she said to him, "see whether I haven't kept my word, and whether, in showing you Mademoiselle de Chartres, I'm not showing you the beauty you were looking for. At least thank me for having told her how much you admired her already."
Monsieur de Cleves was overjoyed to see that the person he had found so charming was of a rank to match her beauty. He went up to her and begged her to remember that he had been the first to admire her, and that without even knowing her he had felt for her all the respect and esteem that were her due.
He and the Chevalier de Guise, who were friends, left Madame Marguerite's together. At first they praised Mademoiselle de Chartres freely; then they felt they were praising her too much, and both stopped saying what they thought of her. But in the days that followed they could not avoid talking about her wherever they met. This new beauty was long the subject of every conversation. The Queen praised her highly and treated her with extraordinary consideration; the Queen Dauphine made her one of her favorites and begged Madame de Chartres to bring her often; the King's daughters sent for her to join in all their amusements. In short, the whole court loved and admired her, except Madame de Valentinois. Not that this beauty gave her any uneasiness; long experience had taught her that she had nothing to fear where the King was concerned. But she hated the Vidame de Chartres so much, having wanted to bind him to herself by marrying him to one of her daughters only to see him attach himself to the Queen instead, that she could not look kindly on a girl who bore his name and to whom he showed great affection.
The Prince of Cleves fell passionately in love with Mademoiselle de Chartres and longed to marry her; but he was afraid that Madame de Chartres's pride would be wounded at giving her daughter to a man who was not the eldest son of his house. Yet that house was so great, and the Count of Eu, its eldest son, had just married a lady so close to the royal family, that his fears came from the timidity love brings rather than from any real reason. He had a great many rivals. The one who seemed most formidable to him was the Chevalier de Guise, because of his birth, his merit, and the brilliance that royal favor lent his house. The Chevalier had fallen in love with Mademoiselle de Chartres the first day he saw her; he had noticed Monsieur de Cleves's passion, just as Monsieur de Cleves had noticed his. Though they were friends, the coolness that comes of wanting the same thing had kept them from speaking openly to each other, and their friendship had cooled without either of them having the courage to have it out. Having been the first to see Mademoiselle de Chartres seemed to Monsieur de Cleves a happy omen, and seemed to give him some advantage over his rivals; but he foresaw great obstacles from his father, the Duke of Nevers. The Duke had close ties with the Duchess of Valentinois; she was the Vidame's enemy, and that alone was enough to keep the Duke of Nevers from ever consenting to his son's thinking of the Vidame's niece.
Madame de Chartres, who had taken such pains to instil virtue in her daughter, did not relax that care in a place where it was so necessary and where there were so many dangerous examples. Ambition and love affairs were the soul of this court, and occupied men and women alike. There were so many interests and so many different cabals, and the ladies played so large a part in them, that love was always mixed with politics and politics with love. No one was calm or indifferent. Everyone was thinking of rising, of pleasing, of helping or of harming; no one knew boredom or idleness, and everyone was always busy with pleasures or intrigues. The ladies had their particular loyalties: to the Queen, to the Queen Dauphine, to the Queen of Navarre, to Madame Marguerite, the King's sister, or to the Duchess of Valentinois. Personal liking, a sense of what was proper, or a likeness of temperament decided these loyalties. Those who were past their first youth and professed a stricter virtue attached themselves to the Queen. The younger ones, who were looking for gaiety and romance, paid court to the Queen Dauphine. The Queen of Navarre had her favorites too: she was young, and she had influence over her husband the King, who was allied with the Constable and had great credit through him. Madame Marguerite still had some beauty, and drew several ladies to her. The Duchess of Valentinois could have any woman she deigned to look at; but few women pleased her, and except for a few who were her intimates and confidantes, and whose temper resembled her own, she received ladies only on the days when she chose to hold a court like the Queen's.
All these cabals were rivals and envied one another. The ladies who made them up were also jealous of each other, over favor or over suitors; and the interests of rank and advancement were often bound up with those other interests, which mattered less but were felt no less keenly. So there was a kind of agitation without disorder at this court, which made it very pleasant, but also very dangerous for a young woman. Madame de Chartres saw the danger and thought of nothing but how to protect her daughter from it. She asked her, not as her mother but as her friend, to confide in her everything men said to court her, and she promised to help her find her way in matters where a young person is so often at a loss.
The Chevalier de Guise made his feelings and his intentions toward Mademoiselle de Chartres so plain that everyone knew of them. Yet he saw nothing but impossibility in what he wanted. He knew very well that he was no fit match for Mademoiselle de Chartres, with so little fortune to support his rank; and he knew too that his brothers would not want him to marry, for fear of the decline that the marriages of younger sons usually bring on great houses. The Cardinal of Lorraine soon showed him that he was not mistaken. He condemned the Chevalier's attachment to Mademoiselle de Chartres with extraordinary heat, but he did not tell him the real reasons. The Cardinal hated the Vidame, a hatred that was secret then and broke out later. He would rather have seen his brother make any other alliance than one with the Vidame, and he declared so publicly how far he was from consenting that Madame de Chartres was deeply offended. She took great pains to show that the Cardinal of Lorraine had nothing to fear and that she had no thought of this marriage. The Vidame did the same, and he resented the Cardinal of Lorraine's conduct even more than Madame de Chartres did, because he understood its cause better.
The Prince of Cleves had shown his love just as publicly as the Chevalier de Guise. His father, the Duke of Nevers, learned of the attachment with displeasure. Still, he thought he had only to speak to his son to make him change his conduct, and he was greatly surprised to find him firmly set on marrying Mademoiselle de Chartres. He condemned the plan and lost his temper, and he hid his anger so poorly that the cause of it soon spread through the court and reached Madame de Chartres. She had never doubted that Monsieur de Nevers would see a marriage with her daughter as a fine thing for his son, so she was astonished to find that the houses of Cleves and Guise both dreaded the alliance instead of wishing for it. Her resentment made her think of finding her daughter a match that would raise her above the people who believed themselves above her. After weighing everything, she settled on the son of the Duke of Montpensier, who was called the Prince Dauphin, a title of his own family's that had nothing to do with the King's heir. He was unmarried at the time, and there was no greater match at court. Madame de Chartres was very clever; she had the help of the Vidame, who was highly regarded; and her daughter really was an important match. So she worked with such skill and such success that Monsieur de Montpensier seemed to want the marriage, and it looked as though nothing could stand in its way.
The Vidame knew that Monsieur d'Anville, the Constable's son, was in love with the Queen Dauphine, Mary Stuart. Even so, he thought it worth using the power she had over him to get him to speak for Mademoiselle de Chartres to the King, and to the Prince of Montpensier, who was his close friend. He spoke to the Queen Dauphine about it, and she gladly took up a cause that meant raising someone she was very fond of. She told the Vidame so. She assured him that although she knew perfectly well it would annoy her uncle, the Cardinal of Lorraine, she would happily set that aside, because she had reason to complain of him: every day he took the Queen's side against her own.
People in love are always glad of a pretext for speaking to those who love them. As soon as the Vidame had left her, the Queen Dauphine told Chastelart to go to Monsieur d'Anville and ask him, on her behalf, to be at the Queen's that evening. Chastelart was Monsieur d'Anville's favorite and knew of his love for her, and he took the errand with great delight and great respect. He came of a good family in the Dauphiné, but his merit and his intelligence set him above his birth. All the great lords at court received him and treated him well, and the favor of the house of Montmorency had attached him especially to Monsieur d'Anville. He was handsome and skilled at every kind of sport. He sang pleasantly and wrote verse, and he had a romantic, passionate turn of mind that Monsieur d'Anville liked so much that he made him the confidant of his love for the Queen Dauphine. That confidence brought him close to her, and it was from seeing her so often that he began the unhappy passion that took away his reason and in the end cost him his life.
Monsieur d'Anville did not fail to be at the Queen's that evening. He was delighted that the Queen Dauphine had chosen him to work for something she wanted, and he promised to carry out her orders exactly. But Madame de Valentinois had been warned of the plan, and she had worked against it so carefully, and had so thoroughly turned the King against it in advance, that when Monsieur d'Anville spoke to him about it, the King let him see that he did not approve. He even ordered him to tell the Prince of Montpensier so. You can imagine what Madame de Chartres felt at the collapse of something she had wanted so much, and whose failure gave her enemies such an advantage and did her daughter so much harm.
The Queen Dauphine told Mademoiselle de Chartres, very warmly, how sorry she was not to have been of any use to her.
"You see," she said, "how little power I have. The Queen and the Duchess of Valentinois hate me so much that between them, or through the people who depend on them, they are bound to thwart everything I want. And yet," she added, "I have never thought of anything but pleasing them. They only hate me because of my mother, the Queen of Scotland, who once made them anxious and jealous. The King was in love with her before he fell in love with Madame de Valentinois. In the first years of his marriage, when he still had no children, he seemed almost determined to have the marriage annulled and marry my mother, even though he already loved the Duchess. Madame de Valentinois was afraid of a woman he had loved before, whose beauty and wit might lessen her own hold on him, so she joined forces with the Constable, who did not want the King to marry a sister of the Guises either. Together they won the late King over to their view. He hated the Duchess of Valentinois with a deadly hatred, but he loved the Queen, so he worked with them to stop his son from leaving her. Then, to put an end to any thought of his marrying my mother, they married her to the King of Scotland, whose first wife had been Madame Madeleine, the King's sister. They chose him because he was the quickest to come to terms, and they broke the promises that had been made to the King of England, who wanted her desperately. That broken promise very nearly caused a rupture between the two kings. Henry VIII could not get over not having married my mother. Whatever other French princess they proposed to him, he always said she would never replace the one they had taken from him. And it is true that my mother was a perfect beauty. It is a remarkable thing that, as the widow of a Duke of Longueville, she was sought in marriage by three kings. Her bad luck gave her to the least of them and put her in a kingdom where she finds nothing but trouble. People say I look like her. I am afraid I shall be like her in her unhappy fate as well, and however much happiness seems to be in store for me, I cannot believe I shall ever enjoy it."
Mademoiselle de Chartres told the Queen Dauphine that these sad forebodings had so little ground that she would not keep them long, and that she should not doubt for a moment that her happiness would live up to its promise.
No one dared think of Mademoiselle de Chartres any longer. Some were afraid of displeasing the King; others thought they could not succeed with a girl who had hoped for a prince of the blood, one of the royal family's own branches. Monsieur de Cleves was held back by neither consideration. His father, the Duke of Nevers, died just then, which left him completely free to follow his heart. As soon as the time that propriety demanded for mourning had passed, he thought of nothing but how to marry Mademoiselle de Chartres. He felt lucky to be proposing at a moment when what had happened had driven off the other suitors, and when he was almost certain not to be refused. The only thing that clouded his joy was the fear that she did not care for him. He would have preferred the happiness of pleasing her to the certainty of marrying her without being loved.
The Chevalier de Guise had made him somewhat jealous. But since that jealousy came from the Chevalier's merits rather than from anything Mademoiselle de Chartres had done, he set himself only to find out whether he was lucky enough to have her approve of his feelings for her. He saw her only at the queens' apartments or at large gatherings, where a private conversation was hard to manage. He found a way all the same. He spoke to her of his intentions and his love with all the respect imaginable. He urged her to let him know what she felt for him, and he told her that his feelings for her were such that he would be unhappy forever if she married him only out of duty to her mother's wishes.
Mademoiselle de Chartres had a very noble and generous heart, and she was truly touched with gratitude at the way the Prince of Cleves had behaved. That gratitude gave her answers and her words a certain gentleness, which was enough to give hope to a man as desperately in love as he was. So he let himself believe he had some part of what he wished for.
She told her mother about the conversation. Madame de Chartres said that Monsieur de Cleves had so much greatness and so many good qualities, and showed such good sense for his age, that if her daughter felt drawn to marry him, she would gladly consent. Mademoiselle de Chartres answered that she saw the same good qualities in him, and that she would marry him with less reluctance than any other man; but that she felt no particular attraction to him.
The very next day the prince had a formal proposal made to Madame de Chartres. She accepted it. In giving her daughter the Prince of Cleves, she had no fear of giving her a husband she could not love. The marriage contract was settled, the King was told, and soon everyone knew of the match.
Monsieur de Cleves was happy, but not entirely content. It pained him to see that Mademoiselle de Chartres's feelings went no further than esteem and gratitude. Nor could he tell himself that she was hiding warmer ones, since their engagement allowed her to show them without offending her great modesty. Hardly a day passed without his complaining of it to her.
"Is it possible," he would say, "that I could marry you and not be happy? And yet it is true that I am not. All you have for me is a kind of goodness, and it cannot satisfy me. You feel no impatience, no anxiety, no sorrow. My love moves you no more than an attachment would that was founded only on your fortune and not on your own charms."
"It is unfair of you to complain," she answered. "I don't know what more you could want from me than what I do, and it seems to me that propriety doesn't allow me to do more."
"It is true," he replied, "that you give me certain signs I would be content with if there were something behind them. But instead of propriety holding you back, it is propriety alone that makes you do what you do. I touch neither your heart nor your feelings, and my presence gives you neither pleasure nor agitation."
"You cannot doubt," she went on, "that I am glad to see you. And I blush so often when I see you that you cannot doubt either that the sight of you agitates me."
"I am not deceived by your blushes," he answered. "They come from modesty, not from any stirring of your heart, and I take from them only what I ought to take."
Mademoiselle de Chartres did not know what to say. These distinctions were beyond her experience. Monsieur de Cleves saw only too clearly how far she was from feeling what could satisfy him, since it seemed to him that she did not even understand what such feelings were.
The Chevalier de Guise came back from a journey a few days before the wedding. He had seen so many insurmountable obstacles to his hope of marrying Mademoiselle de Chartres that he had never been able to believe he would succeed. All the same, he was deeply hurt to see her become another man's wife. That grief did not put out his love, and he remained just as much in love as before. Mademoiselle de Chartres had not been unaware of his feelings for her. On his return he let her know that she was the cause of the deep sadness that showed on his face. He had so much merit and so much charm that it was hard to make him unhappy without feeling some pity for him. And indeed she could not help pitying him. But that pity led her to no other feeling, and she told her mother how much the Chevalier's devotion distressed her.
Madame de Chartres admired her daughter's sincerity, and she was right to admire it, for no one has ever had a sincerity so complete or so natural. But she was just as struck that her daughter's heart had not been touched, all the more because she could see that the Prince of Cleves had not touched it any more than the others had. That was why she took great pains to bind her to her husband, and to make her understand what she owed him: he had loved her before he knew her, and he had shown his love by choosing her over every other match at a time when no one else dared think of her.
The marriage went ahead. The ceremony was held at the Louvre, and in the evening the King and the two queens came with the whole court to supper at Madame de Chartres's house, where they were received with wonderful splendor. The Chevalier de Guise did not dare single himself out by staying away from the ceremony, but he was so little master of his sadness there that anyone could see it.
Monsieur de Cleves did not find that Mademoiselle de Chartres had changed her feelings when she changed her name. Being her husband gave him greater privileges, but it did not give him a different place in his wife's heart. And so, although he was her husband, he went on being her suitor, because there was always something left for him to wish for beyond possessing her. She lived with him in perfect harmony, yet he was not entirely happy. He kept for her a violent, restless passion that disturbed his joy. Jealousy had no part in that disturbance. Never was a husband further from feeling jealousy, and never was a wife further from causing it. She was, all the same, exposed in the very middle of the court. Every day she went to the queens' apartments and to Madame Marguerite's, the King's sister. All the young men given to love affairs saw her at her own house and at the house of her brother-in-law, the new Duke of Nevers, which was open to everyone. But she had an air that inspired such respect and seemed so far from any thought of love affairs that the Marshal de Saint-André, bold as he was and backed by the King's favor, was moved by her beauty without daring to show it except by attentions and courtesies. Several others were in the same position. And Madame de Chartres added to her daughter's good sense such strict observance of every propriety that she made her seem entirely out of reach.
While the Duchess of Lorraine was working for the peace, she had also worked for the marriage of her son, the Duke of Lorraine. It had been arranged with Madame Claude of France, the King's second daughter, and the wedding was set for February.
Meanwhile the Duke of Nemours had stayed in Brussels, wholly taken up with his plans for England. He was constantly sending couriers there or receiving them. His hopes grew every day, and at last Lignerolles, the young favorite he had sent ahead, wrote that it was time for him to come in person and finish what had been so well begun. He received the news with all the joy of an ambitious young man who sees himself carried toward a throne by his reputation alone. Little by little his mind had grown used to the greatness of this fortune. At first he had dismissed it as something beyond his reach, but now the difficulties had faded from his imagination, and he no longer saw any obstacles.
He sent word to Paris in haste to have a magnificent retinue made ready, so that he could appear in England with a splendor fit for the purpose that was taking him there. He himself hurried back to court to attend the marriage of the Duke of Lorraine.
He arrived the day before the betrothal. That same evening he went to report to the King on how his plan stood and to receive his orders and advice about what remained to be done. Then he went to pay his respects to the queens. Madame de Cleves was not there, so she did not see him and did not even know he had arrived. She had heard everyone speak of him as the handsomest and most charming man at court. The Queen Dauphine in particular had described him to her in such terms, and talked of him so often, that she had made her curious and even impatient to see him.
Madame de Cleves spent the whole day of the betrothal at home dressing for the ball and the royal banquet to be held that evening at the Louvre. When she arrived, everyone admired her beauty and her dress. The ball began. While she was dancing with the Duke of Guise, there was a stir near the door of the hall, as if someone were coming in and people were making way for him. Madame de Cleves finished her dance, and while she was looking around for someone she meant to choose as her next partner, the King called out to her to take the man who had just arrived. She turned and saw a man who, she thought at once, could only be Monsieur de Nemours, stepping over some chairs to reach the dancing. He was made in such a way that it was hard not to be astonished on seeing him for the first time, especially that evening, when the care he had taken over his dress added still more to the brilliance of his looks. But it was just as hard to see Madame de Cleves for the first time without being amazed.
Monsieur de Nemours was so struck by her beauty that when he came near her and she curtsied to him, he could not help showing his admiration. When they began to dance, a murmur of praise rose through the hall. The King and the queens remembered that the two had never met, and thought it rather remarkable to see them dancing together without knowing each other. When they had finished, they called them over before they had a chance to speak to anyone else, and asked them whether they did not want very much to know who the other was, and whether they had any idea.
"As for me, Madame," said Monsieur de Nemours, "I have no doubt at all. But since Madame de Cleves has not the same reasons for guessing who I am that I have for recognizing her, I wish Your Majesty would be kind enough to tell her my name."
"I believe," said the Queen Dauphine, "that she knows it as well as you know hers."
"I assure you, Madame," said Madame de Cleves, who seemed a little embarrassed, "that I am not as good at guessing as you think."
"You guess very well," replied the Queen Dauphine. "And there is even something flattering to Monsieur de Nemours in your refusing to admit that you recognize him without ever having seen him."
The Queen interrupted them so that the ball could go on, and Monsieur de Nemours took the Queen Dauphine as his partner. She was a perfect beauty, and had seemed so to Monsieur de Nemours before he went to Flanders. But all that evening he could admire no one but Madame de Cleves.
The Chevalier de Guise, who still adored her, was close beside her, and what had just happened gave him real pain. He took it as an omen that fate meant Monsieur de Nemours to fall in love with Madame de Cleves. Whether some agitation had really shown in her face, or whether jealousy made the Chevalier see more than was there, he believed she had been moved at the sight of Nemours. He could not stop himself from telling her that Monsieur de Nemours was very lucky to begin his acquaintance with her through an incident with something so romantic and so out of the ordinary about it.
Madame de Cleves came home with her mind so full of everything that had happened at the ball that, late as it was, she went to her mother's room to tell her about it. She praised Monsieur de Nemours with a certain air that gave Madame de Chartres the same idea the Chevalier de Guise had had.
The next day the wedding took place. There Madame de Cleves saw the Duke of Nemours carry himself with such admirable dignity and grace that she was even more struck by him than before.
In the days that followed she saw him at the Queen Dauphine's. She saw him play tennis with the King and ride at the ring, and she heard him talk. But she always saw him far outshine everyone else and take command of the conversation wherever he was, by the charm of his person and the grace of his wit, so that in a short time he made a deep impression on her heart.
It is also true that Monsieur de Nemours felt a violent attraction to her, which gave him the gentleness and gaiety that the first wish to please inspires, and so he was even more charming than usual. As a result, since they saw each other often, and each saw in the other the most perfect person at court, it was hard for them not to delight in each other beyond measure.
The Duchess of Valentinois was part of every entertainment, and the King showed her the same eagerness and attentiveness as in the early days of his passion. Madame de Cleves was at the age when one believes a woman cannot be loved once she is past twenty-five, and she watched with utter amazement the King's attachment to this duchess, who was a grandmother and had just married off her granddaughter. She often talked of it to Madame de Chartres.
"Is it possible, Madame," she would say, "that the King has been in love with her for so long? How could he become attached to a woman so much older than himself, who had been his father's mistress, and who is still the mistress of many others, from what I've heard?"
"It is true," her mother answered, "that it was neither Madame de Valentinois's merit nor her faithfulness that gave rise to the King's passion or has kept it alive. That is exactly why he cannot be excused. If this woman had joined youth and beauty to her birth, if she had had the merit of never having loved anyone before, if she had loved the King with perfect faithfulness, for himself alone and not for greatness or fortune, and if she had used her power only for honorable things or for things that pleased the King himself, then we would have to admit that it would be hard not to praise him for his great devotion to her. If I were not afraid," Madame de Chartres continued, "that you would say of me what people say of all women my age, that they love telling the stories of their own day, I would tell you how the King's passion for this duchess began, along with a good many things about the late King's court that have a great deal in common with what is still going on today."
"Far from accusing you of repeating old stories," replied Madame de Cleves, "I complain, Madame, that you haven't taught me about the present ones, and that you haven't told me about the different interests and alliances at court. I know so little of them that only a few days ago I thought the Constable was on very good terms with the Queen."
"You had an opinion very far from the truth," answered Madame de Chartres. "The Queen hates the Constable, and if she ever has any power, he will feel it only too well. She knows that he has told the King more than once that of all his children, only the illegitimate ones look like him."
"I would never have suspected that hatred," Madame de Cleves broke in, "after seeing how carefully the Queen wrote to the Constable while he was a prisoner, how glad she was when he came back, and how she always calls him 'my old friend,' just as the King does."
"If you judge by appearances in this place," replied Madame de Chartres, "you will often be deceived. What appears is almost never the truth.
"But to come back to Madame de Valentinois: you know that her name is Diane de Poitiers. Her house is very illustrious. It descends from the old Dukes of Aquitaine, and her grandmother was a natural daughter of Louis XI; in short, her birth could hardly be grander. Her father, Saint-Vallier, was caught up in the affair of the Constable de Bourbon, which you have heard of. He was condemned to be beheaded and led out to the scaffold. His daughter, whose beauty was admirable and who had already caught the late King's eye, won her father's life, by what means I do not know. His pardon was brought to him as he stood waiting for the executioner's blow; but fear had taken such hold of him that he had lost his senses, and he died a few days later. His daughter appeared at court as the King's mistress. The Italian campaign and the King's captivity interrupted that passion. When he came back from Spain, and his mother, the Regent, went to meet him at Bayonne, she brought all her maids of honor with her, and among them was Mademoiselle de Pisseleu, who has since become the Duchess of Étampes. The King fell in love with her. She was below Madame de Valentinois in birth, in intelligence, and in beauty, and the only advantage she had over her was that she was much younger. I have heard her say many times that she was born on the day Diane de Poitiers was married. It was hatred that made her say so, not the truth; for I am much mistaken if the Duchess of Valentinois did not marry Monsieur de Brezé, Grand Seneschal of Normandy, at the very time the King fell in love with Madame d'Étampes.
"There has never been so great a hatred as the hatred between those two women. The Duchess of Valentinois could not forgive Madame d'Étampes for taking from her the title of the King's mistress; Madame d'Étampes was violently jealous of Madame de Valentinois, because the King still kept up his relations with her. He was not strictly faithful to his mistresses. There was always one who held the title and the honors, but the ladies they called the little band shared him among them by turns. The loss of his son the Dauphin, who died at Tournon and was believed to have been poisoned, caused him deep grief. He did not feel the same tenderness or the same liking for his second son, who reigns today; he did not find him bold enough or lively enough. One day he complained of it to Madame de Valentinois, and she told him she would make him fall in love with her, to make him livelier and more agreeable. She succeeded, as you can see. That passion has lasted more than twenty years now, and neither time nor obstacles have changed it.
"The late King opposed it at first. Whether he still loved Madame de Valentinois enough to be jealous, or whether he was pushed by the Duchess of Étampes, who was in despair at seeing the Dauphin attached to her enemy, it is certain that he watched this passion with an anger and an irritation that showed every day. His son feared neither his anger nor his hatred, and nothing could make him lessen his attachment or hide it; the King had to get used to putting up with it. This defiance of his wishes estranged him still further from his son and bound him more closely to the Duke of Orléans, his third son. He was a handsome, well-made prince, full of fire and ambition, with a headstrong youthfulness that needed reining in, but he would also have grown into a prince of real stature if age had matured his mind.
"The Dauphin's rank as the elder, and the Duke of Orléans's favor with the King, created a kind of rivalry between them that ran all the way to hatred. It had begun in their childhood and had never ended. When the Emperor Charles V passed through France, he showed an outright preference for the Duke of Orléans over the Dauphin, who felt it so keenly that while the Emperor was at Chantilly he tried to make the Constable arrest him without waiting for the King's orders. The Constable refused. The King later blamed him for not having followed his son's advice, and when he banished him from court, that reason had a great deal to do with it.
"The split between the two brothers gave the Duchess of Étampes the idea of leaning on the Duke of Orléans to support her with the King against Madame de Valentinois. She succeeded. The Duke, without being in love with her, took up her interests almost as fully as the Dauphin had taken up those of Madame de Valentinois. So the court split into two cabals, of the kind you can imagine; but these intrigues did not stop at quarrels between women.
"The Emperor, who had kept a fondness for the Duke of Orléans, had offered several times to hand over the Duchy of Milan to him. In the proposals that were made later for peace, he held out the hope of giving him the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands and of marrying him to his daughter. The Dauphin wanted neither the peace nor the marriage. He used the Constable, whom he has always loved, to make the King see how important it was not to leave his successor a brother as powerful as a Duke of Orléans would be with the Emperor's alliance and the seventeen provinces. The Constable fell in with the Dauphin's views all the more readily because in doing so he was opposing those of Madame d'Étampes, who was his declared enemy and who longed to see the Duke of Orléans raised to greatness.
"The Dauphin was then in command of the King's army in Champagne, and he had reduced the Emperor's army to such straits that it would have perished entirely if the Duchess of Étampes had not acted. She was afraid that too great a success would make us refuse the peace and the Emperor's alliance for the Duke of Orléans, so she secretly warned the enemy to seize Épernay and Château-Thierry, which were full of provisions. They did so, and saved their whole army by it.
"The Duchess did not enjoy the success of her treachery for long. Soon afterward the Duke of Orléans died at Faremoutiers, of a kind of contagious illness. He loved one of the most beautiful women at court, and she loved him. I will not name her to you, because she has lived so virtuously ever since, and has hidden the passion she had for the Duke with such care, that she has earned the right to keep her reputation. As chance would have it, she received the news of her husband's death on the same day she learned of the Duke of Orléans's; so she had that pretext to cover her real grief, and was spared the trouble of pretending.
"The King did not long outlive his son; he died two years later. He advised the Dauphin to make use of the Cardinal de Tournon and the Admiral d'Annebault, and said nothing of the Constable, who was then banished to Chantilly. Nevertheless the first thing the new King did was to recall him and put the government of affairs in his hands.
"Madame d'Étampes was driven away, and was treated as badly as she could expect to be by an enemy who was now all-powerful. The Duchess of Valentinois then took her full revenge, on the Duchess and on everyone who had ever displeased her. Her power over the King's mind proved even more absolute than it had seemed while he was Dauphin. In the twelve years that he has reigned, she has been absolute mistress of everything. Offices and affairs of state are hers to give; she has had the Cardinal de Tournon, the Chancellor Olivier, and Villeroy driven out. Those who have tried to open the King's eyes about her conduct have been ruined in the attempt. The Count of Taix, the Grand Master of the Artillery, who did not like her, could not help talking about her love affairs, and above all about her affair with the Count of Brissac, of which the King had already been very jealous. Nevertheless she managed things so well that the Count of Taix was disgraced and stripped of his office; and, what is almost beyond belief, she had it given to the Count of Brissac, and has since had him made a Marshal of France. Still, the King's jealousy grew to such a pitch that he could not bear to have the Marshal remain at court. But jealousy, which is bitter and violent in everyone else, is mild and moderate in him, because of the extreme respect he has for his mistress; so he dared not send his rival away except on the pretext of giving him the government of Piedmont. He has spent several years there. He came back last winter on the pretext of asking for troops and other things needed for the army he commands. The wish to see Madame de Valentinois again, and the fear of being forgotten by her, perhaps had a great deal to do with that journey. The King received him very coldly. The Guises, who do not like him but dare not show it because of Madame de Valentinois, used the Vidame, who is his declared enemy, to keep him from getting any of the things he had come to ask for. It was not hard to do him harm: the King hated him, and his presence made the King uneasy. So he was forced to go back with nothing to show for his journey, except perhaps that he had rekindled in Madame de Valentinois's heart feelings that absence was beginning to put out. The King has had plenty of other grounds for jealousy; but either he has not known of them, or he has not dared to complain."
"I don't know, my child," Madame de Chartres added, "whether you won't feel I have told you more than you wanted to know."
"I have no such complaint to make, Madame," replied Madame de Cleves. "If I weren't afraid of tiring you, I would ask you about a number of other things I know nothing about."
Monsieur de Nemours's passion for Madame de Cleves was so violent from the first that it robbed him of all taste for, and even all memory of, the women he had loved and had kept up relations with during his absence. He did not even take the trouble to look for pretexts to break with them; he could not find the patience to listen to their complaints or answer their reproaches. The Queen Dauphine, for whom he had had quite passionate feelings, could not hold her place in his heart against Madame de Cleves. Even his eagerness for the English journey began to slacken, and he no longer pushed so hard for the preparations his departure required. He went often to the Queen Dauphine's, because Madame de Cleves went there often, and he was not sorry to let people go on believing what they had imagined about his feelings for that queen. He valued Madame de Cleves so highly that he resolved to give her no sign of his passion rather than risk making it known to the public. He did not even speak of it to the Vidame de Chartres, who was his closest friend and from whom he hid nothing. He behaved so wisely and watched himself with such care that no one suspected him of being in love with Madame de Cleves except the Chevalier de Guise. She would hardly have noticed it herself, if her own feelings for him had not made her pay a particular attention to everything he did, an attention that left her no room for doubt.
She did not feel the same readiness to tell her mother what she thought of Monsieur de Nemours's feelings that she had felt in speaking of her other suitors. She had no settled plan to hide it from her; she simply said nothing about it. But Madame de Chartres saw it only too well, and she saw that her daughter was drawn to him as well. That knowledge caused her real grief. She saw clearly the danger the young woman was in, loved by a man like Monsieur de Nemours, and drawn to him herself. Something that happened a few days later confirmed her suspicions of that attraction entirely.
The Marshal de Saint-André, who looked for every occasion to display his magnificence, begged the King to do him the honor of coming to supper there with the Queen and the Queen Dauphine, on the pretext of showing him his house, which had only just been finished. The Marshal was also glad to put before Madame de Cleves's eyes the dazzling show of an expense that ran to extravagance.
A few days before the day chosen for the supper, the Dauphin, whose health was rather poor, had been taken ill and had seen no one. The Queen Dauphine, his wife, had spent the whole day at his side. Toward evening, as he was feeling better, he had all the people of rank who were waiting in his antechamber shown in. The Queen Dauphine went back to her own rooms, where she found Madame de Cleves and a few other ladies she was closest to.
As it was already rather late and she was not dressed, she did not go to the Queen's. She sent word that she was not receiving, and had her jewels brought so that she could choose some for the Marshal de Saint-André's ball and give some to Madame de Cleves, as she had promised. While they were busy with this, the Prince of Condé arrived; his rank gave him entry everywhere. The Queen Dauphine said that he must have come from the Dauphin's apartments, and asked him what was going on there.
"They are arguing with Monsieur de Nemours, Madame," he answered, "and he defends his side with such heat that it must be his own cause. I think he must have some lady who makes him anxious when she goes to a ball, he finds it so painful for a man in love to see the woman he loves there."
"What," said the Queen Dauphine, "Monsieur de Nemours doesn't want the woman he loves to go to balls! I could well believe that husbands might wish their wives wouldn't go; but as for suitors, I never imagined they could be of that opinion."
"Monsieur de Nemours holds," replied the Prince of Condé, "that a ball is the most unbearable thing there is for men in love, whether they are loved in return or not. He says that if they are loved, they have the vexation of being loved less for several days; that there is no woman whose concern with her dress does not keep her from thinking of the man who loves her; that women are wholly taken up with it; that they adorn themselves for everyone, as much as for the one they love; that when they are at a ball they want to please everyone who looks at them; and that when they are pleased with their own beauty, they feel a joy in which the man who loves them plays only a small part. He says too that when a man is not loved, he suffers even more from seeing the woman he loves at a gathering: the more the public admires her, the unhappier he is not to be loved by her, and he is always afraid her beauty will inspire some love that is luckier than his own. In short, he finds there is no suffering like seeing the woman he loves at a ball, unless it is knowing she is there and not being there himself."
Madame de Cleves pretended not to hear what the Prince of Condé was saying, but she listened closely. She could easily see how large a part she had in the opinion Monsieur de Nemours was defending, and above all in what he said about the vexation of not being at a ball where the woman he loved was; for he was not to be at the Marshal de Saint-André's, since the King was sending him to meet the Duke of Ferrara.
The Queen Dauphine laughed with the Prince of Condé and did not approve of Monsieur de Nemours's opinion.
"There is only one occasion, Madame," the Prince of Condé told her, "when Monsieur de Nemours will consent to the woman he loves going to a ball, and that is when he is the one giving it. He says that last year, when he gave one for Your Majesty, he felt the lady he loved was doing him a favor by coming, even though she only seemed to be following you there; that it is always a kindness to a man in love to go and share in a pleasure he provides; and that it is also a pleasant thing for him to have the woman he loves see him master of a place where the whole court is gathered, and watch him play the host there well."
"Monsieur de Nemours was right," said the Queen Dauphine, smiling, "to approve of the woman he loved going to his ball. In those days he gave that title to so many women that if they hadn't come, there would have been hardly anyone there."
As soon as the Prince of Condé had begun to tell of Monsieur de Nemours's feelings about balls, Madame de Cleves had felt a strong wish not to go to the Marshal de Saint-André's. She readily accepted the idea that a woman should not go to the house of a man who was in love with her, and she was glad that propriety gave her a reason to do something that was a favor to Monsieur de Nemours. All the same she took away the jewels the Queen Dauphine had given her; but that evening, when she showed them to her mother, she told her she did not mean to wear them. The Marshal de Saint-André, she said, took such pains to show that he was attached to her that she had no doubt he would also want people to believe she had some part in the entertainment he was to give the King, and that under the pretext of doing the honors of his house he would pay her attentions that might put her in an awkward position.
Madame de Chartres argued for a while against her daughter's opinion, which she found odd; but seeing that she held to it, she gave way. She told her that in that case she would have to pretend to be ill, so as to have an excuse for not going, because the reasons that kept her away would not be approved of, and they must not even be suspected. Madame de Cleves willingly agreed to spend a few days at home, rather than go to a place where Monsieur de Nemours would not be; and he left without the pleasure of knowing that she would not be there.
He came back the day after the ball and learned that she had not been there. But since he did not know that the conversation at the Dauphin's had been repeated in front of her, it never occurred to him that he might have been lucky enough to be the reason she stayed away.
The next day, while he was at the Queen's, talking with the Queen Dauphine, Madame de Chartres and Madame de Cleves came in and went up to her. Madame de Cleves was a little carelessly dressed, like someone who had been unwell; but her face did not match her clothes.
"You look so beautiful," the Queen Dauphine said to her, "that I cannot believe you have been ill. I think that when the Prince of Condé told you Monsieur de Nemours's opinion about balls, he persuaded you that going to the Marshal de Saint-André's would be doing him a favor, and that is what kept you from coming."
Madame de Cleves blushed, both because the Queen Dauphine had guessed so exactly, and because she was saying what she had guessed in front of Monsieur de Nemours.
Madame de Chartres saw at that moment why her daughter had not wanted to go to the ball; and to keep Monsieur de Nemours from seeing it as clearly as she did, she spoke up with every appearance of telling the truth.
"I assure you, Madame," she said to the Queen Dauphine, "that Your Majesty does my daughter more honor than she deserves. She really was ill; but I believe that if I hadn't prevented her, she would still have followed you and shown herself, changed as she was, for the pleasure of seeing all the extraordinary things at last night's entertainment."
The Queen Dauphine believed what Madame de Chartres said. Monsieur de Nemours was very sorry to find it plausible; and yet Madame de Cleves's blush made him suspect that what the Queen Dauphine had said was not altogether far from the truth. Madame de Cleves had at first been vexed that Monsieur de Nemours had reason to believe it was he who had kept her from the Marshal de Saint-André's; but then she felt a kind of regret that her mother had talked him out of the idea so completely.
Although the assembly at Cercamp had broken up, the peace negotiations had gone on all along, and matters were so arranged that at the end of February the parties met again at Cateau-Cambrésis. The same envoys went back; and the Marshal de Saint-André's absence rid Monsieur de Nemours of a rival who was dangerous to him less for any progress he could make with Madame de Cleves than for the close watch he kept on everyone who came near her.
Madame de Chartres had not wanted to let her daughter see that she knew her feelings for Monsieur de Nemours, for fear of making her distrust what she meant to say. One day she began to talk about him. She spoke well of him, and mixed in a good deal of poisoned praise: of his wisdom in being incapable of falling in love, and of the way he made the company of women a pleasure and not a serious attachment.
"Not that he hasn't been suspected," she added, "of a great passion for the Queen Dauphine. I even see that he goes there very often, and I advise you to avoid speaking to him as much as you can, and above all in private, because, with the Queen Dauphine treating you as she does, people would soon say that you are their confidante, and you know how disagreeable that reputation is. If this talk goes on, I think you should go a little less often to the Queen Dauphine's, so as not to find yourself mixed up in love affairs."
Madame de Cleves had never heard of Monsieur de Nemours and the Queen Dauphine. She was so surprised by what her mother said, and so sure she now saw how mistaken she had been in everything she had thought about his feelings, that her face changed. Madame de Chartres noticed it. People came in at that moment; Madame de Cleves went home and shut herself up in her room.
No words can express the grief she felt at learning, from what her mother had just said, how much she cared for Monsieur de Nemours; she had not yet dared admit it to herself. She saw then that the feelings she had for him were the ones Monsieur de Cleves had so often begged her for, and she saw how shameful it was to have them for someone other than a husband who deserved them. She felt hurt and embarrassed by the fear that Monsieur de Nemours meant to use her as a cover for the Queen Dauphine, and that thought decided her to tell Madame de Chartres what she had not yet told her.
The next morning she went to her mother's room to carry out her resolution; but she found that Madame de Chartres had a slight fever, so she did not want to speak to her. The illness seemed so small a thing, though, that Madame de Cleves still went to the Queen Dauphine's that afternoon. She was in her private room with two or three of the ladies she trusted most.
"We were talking about Monsieur de Nemours," the Queen Dauphine said when she saw her, "and marveling at how changed he is since he came back from Brussels. Before he went he had an endless number of women he was courting, and it was even a fault in him, since he paid court equally to the ones who had merit and the ones who hadn't. Since he came back he pays no attention to either kind. There has never been such a change. I even find there is a change in his temper, and that he is less cheerful than usual."
Madame de Cleves said nothing, and she thought with shame that she would have taken everything that was being said about his change for signs of his passion, if she had not been undeceived. She felt some bitterness toward the Queen Dauphine at seeing her hunt for reasons and marvel at something whose truth she apparently knew better than anyone. She could not help letting something of it show; and as the other ladies moved away, she went up to her and said in a low voice:
"Was that speech meant for me too, Madame? Would you hide from me that you are the one who has made Monsieur de Nemours change his conduct?"
"You are unjust," the Queen Dauphine told her. "You know I keep nothing from you. It is true that before he went to Brussels, Monsieur de Nemours did, I think, mean to let me understand that he did not dislike me; but since he came back, it hasn't even seemed to me that he remembers what he did. And I confess I am curious to know what has changed him. It will be hard for me not to find out," she added. "The Vidame de Chartres, who is his close friend, is in love with a lady over whom I have some power, and through her I will find out what has caused the change."
The Queen Dauphine spoke in a way that convinced Madame de Cleves, and in spite of herself she felt calmer and more at ease than she had been before.
When she went back to her mother's, she learned that her mother was much worse than when she had left her. Her fever had doubled, and in the days that followed it rose so much that it was plainly going to be a serious illness. Madame de Cleves was in extreme distress and never left her mother's room. Monsieur de Cleves spent almost every day there too, both out of concern for Madame de Chartres and to keep his wife from giving way to sadness, but also for the pleasure of seeing her: his passion had not lessened at all.
Monsieur de Nemours, who had always been a great friend of his, had not stopped showing it since his return from Brussels. During Madame de Chartres's illness he found the means to see Madame de Cleves several times, by pretending to look for her husband or to come and fetch him for a walk. He even looked for him at hours when he knew very well he would not be there, and on the pretext of waiting for him he stayed in Madame de Chartres's antechamber, where there were always several people of rank. Madame de Cleves often came through; and grieved as she was, she seemed no less beautiful to Monsieur de Nemours. He let her see how much her sorrow touched him, and he spoke to her of it with such a gentle and submissive air that he easily persuaded her that it was not the Queen Dauphine he was in love with.
The sight of him could not fail to disturb her, and yet she took pleasure in seeing him; but when she no longer saw him, and reflected that the charm she found in seeing him was the beginning of passion, she came close to believing she hated him, because of the grief that thought gave her.
Madame de Chartres grew so much worse that people began to despair of her life. She heard what the doctors told her about her danger with a courage worthy of her virtue and her piety. When they had gone, she sent everyone away and called for Madame de Cleves.
"We must part, my child," she said to her, holding out her hand. "The danger I am leaving you in, and your need of me, make the grief of leaving you worse. You have feelings for Monsieur de Nemours. I am not asking you to confess it to me; I am no longer in a position to use your sincerity to guide you. I saw that attraction long ago; but I did not want to speak to you of it at first, for fear of making you see it yourself. You know it only too well now. You are on the edge of a precipice, and it will take great effort, and great violence to your own feelings, to hold yourself back. Think of what you owe your husband; think of what you owe yourself; and remember that you are about to lose the reputation you have won for yourself, and that I have wanted so much for you. Have strength and courage, my child. Withdraw from the court; make your husband take you away; do not be afraid of choices that are too harsh and too difficult. However dreadful they seem at first, they will be sweeter in the end than the misery of a love affair. If any reasons other than virtue and your duty could move you to do what I wish, I would tell you that if anything could trouble the happiness I hope for in leaving this world, it would be to see you fall like other women. But if that misfortune must come to you, I welcome death gladly, so that I will not have to witness it."
Madame de Cleves wept over her mother's hand, which she held pressed between her own; and Madame de Chartres, feeling moved herself, said:
"Goodbye, my child. Let us end a conversation that moves us both too deeply; and remember, if you can, everything I have just told you."
As she finished these words she turned away and told her daughter to call her women, and she would neither listen nor say anything more. Madame de Cleves left her mother's room in the state one can imagine, and Madame de Chartres thought of nothing but preparing herself for death. She lived two days longer, and in that time she would not see her daughter again, though her daughter was the only thing she still felt bound to.
Madame de Cleves's grief was extreme. Her husband never left her side, and as soon as Madame de Chartres had died he took her to the country, to get her away from a place that only sharpened her sorrow. No one has ever seen such grief. Tenderness and gratitude had the largest part in it, but her need of her mother to defend her against Monsieur de Nemours had a great deal to do with it too. She felt how unhappy it was to be left to herself at a time when she had so little command of her feelings, and when she would so much have wished for someone who could pity her and give her strength. The way Monsieur de Cleves treated her made her more determined than ever never to fail in any of her duties to him. She showed him more friendship and more tenderness than she ever had before; she did not want him to leave her, and it seemed to her that if she held fast to him, he would defend her against Monsieur de Nemours.
Monsieur de Nemours came to see Monsieur de Cleves in the country. He did what he could to pay a visit to Madame de Cleves as well, but she would not receive him. Knowing very well that she could not help finding him attractive, she had made a firm resolution to keep herself from seeing him, and to avoid every chance of it that she could.
Monsieur de Cleves went to Paris to pay his respects at court, and promised his wife to return the next day; but he did not come back until the day after.
"I waited for you all day yesterday," Madame de Cleves said to him when he arrived, "and I must reproach you for not coming as you promised me. You know that if I could feel a new grief in the state I am in, it would be the death of Madame de Tournon, which I learned of this morning. I would have been touched by it even if I had not known her; it is always pitiful when a woman as young and beautiful as she was dies in two days. But besides that, she was one of the people in the world I liked best, and she seemed to have as much virtue as merit."
"I was very sorry not to come back yesterday," replied Monsieur de Cleves, "but an unhappy man needed me so badly to console him that I could not possibly leave him. As for Madame de Tournon, I do not advise you to grieve for her, if you mourn her as a woman full of virtue and worthy of your esteem."
"You astonish me," said Madame de Cleves. "I have heard you say several times that there was no woman at court you esteemed more."
"It is true," he answered, "but women are beyond understanding; and when I look at all of them, I find myself so happy to have you that I cannot admire my good fortune enough."
"You think more of me than I am worth," replied Madame de Cleves with a sigh, "and it is not yet time to find me worthy of you. Tell me, I beg you, what has undeceived you about Madame de Tournon."
"I have been undeceived for a long time," he replied, "and I have long known that she loved the Count of Sancerre, and gave him hopes of marrying him."
"I cannot believe," Madame de Cleves broke in, "that Madame de Tournon, after the extraordinary aversion to marriage she has shown since she was widowed, and after declaring publicly that she would never marry again, gave Sancerre hopes."
"If she had given them only to him," replied Monsieur de Cleves, "there would be nothing to wonder at. But what is surprising is that she was giving them to Estouteville at the same time; and I am going to tell you the whole story.
"You know how close Sancerre and I are. All the same, when he fell in love with Madame de Tournon, about two years ago, he hid it from me with great care, just as he hid it from everyone else, and I was very far from suspecting it. Madame de Tournon still seemed inconsolable over her husband's death, and she lived in strict seclusion. Sancerre's sister was almost the only person she saw, and it was at his sister's house that he had fallen in love with her.
"One evening there was to be a play at the Louvre. Everyone was waiting only for the King and Madame de Valentinois before it could begin, when word came that she had been taken ill and that the King would not be coming. It was easy to guess that the Duchess's illness was really some quarrel with the King. We knew how jealous he had been of the Marshal de Brissac while the Marshal was at court; but he had gone back to Piedmont a few days before, and we could not imagine what this new falling-out was about.
"I was talking it over with Sancerre when Monsieur d'Anville came into the room and told me quietly that the King was in a state of grief and anger that was pitiful to see. A few days earlier, he said, the King and Madame de Valentinois had made up a quarrel they had had over the Marshal de Brissac, and the King had given her a ring and asked her to wear it. While she was dressing for the play, he had noticed that she was not wearing it, and asked her why. She had seemed shocked to find it missing, and asked her women about it. They, by bad luck, or because no one had told them what to say, answered that they had not seen it for four or five days.
"'That is exactly when the Marshal de Brissac left,' Monsieur d'Anville went on. 'The King has no doubt that she gave him the ring when she said goodbye. The thought has woken all his old jealousy, which had never quite died down, and for once in his life he lost his temper and heaped reproaches on her. He has just gone back to his rooms in great distress. But I cannot tell whether he is more upset at the idea that Madame de Valentinois gave the ring away, or afraid that he has offended her by his anger.'
"As soon as Monsieur d'Anville had finished telling me this news, I went back to Sancerre and passed it on. I told it to him as a secret that had just been confided to me, and I made him promise not to repeat it.
"The next morning I went rather early to call on my sister-in-law, and found Madame de Tournon sitting at her bedside. Madame de Tournon did not like Madame de Valentinois, and she knew that my sister-in-law had no reason to be fond of her either. Sancerre had gone to see her straight from the play. He had told her about the King's quarrel with the Duchess, and Madame de Tournon had come to tell my sister-in-law, without knowing, or without stopping to think, that it was I who had told it to the man who loved her.
"As soon as I came up to my sister-in-law, she told Madame de Tournon that I could be trusted with what she had just heard. Then, without waiting for Madame de Tournon's permission, she repeated to me, word for word, everything I had said to Sancerre the evening before. You can imagine how astonished I was. I looked at Madame de Tournon, and she seemed embarrassed. Her embarrassment made me suspicious. I had told the story to no one but Sancerre. He had left me after the play without saying why. I remembered hearing him praise Madame de Tournon to the skies. All these things opened my eyes, and I had no trouble working out that he was having a love affair with her and had gone to see her after he left me. I was so stung to find that he had kept this from me that I said several things which made Madame de Tournon realize how careless she had been. I saw her to her carriage, and as I took my leave I assured her that I envied the good fortune of whoever had told her about the King's quarrel with Madame de Valentinois.
"I went straight off to find Sancerre. I reproached him and told him I knew of his passion for Madame de Tournon, without saying how I had found out, and he was forced to admit it. Then I told him how I had learned it, and he told me the details of their affair. He said that although he was only a younger son and could never have hoped for so good a match, she was nevertheless determined to marry him. I could not have been more surprised. I told Sancerre to hurry the marriage on, and warned him that he had everything to fear from a woman clever enough to keep up, in the eyes of the world, a part so far from the truth. He answered that her grief had been real, but that her feelings for him had overcome it, and she could not let so great a change show all at once. He gave me several other reasons to excuse her, which showed me how deeply in love he was. He promised to make her agree to my knowing about his passion, since it was she herself, after all, who had let me discover it. And he did bring her to agree, though not without great difficulty, and after that I was deep in their confidence.
"I have never seen a woman behave more honorably or more charmingly toward the man who loved her. Even so, I was always put off by the way she went on pretending to be in mourning. Sancerre was so much in love, and so happy with the way she treated him, that he hardly dared press her to settle the marriage, for fear she would think he wanted it for her fortune rather than out of true passion. He did speak to her about it, though, and she seemed determined to marry him. She even began to leave her seclusion and to go back into society. She came to my sister-in-law's at hours when part of the court was there. Sancerre came only rarely, but those who were there every evening, and saw her often, found her very charming.
"Not long after she had begun to give up her solitude, Sancerre thought he saw some cooling in her passion for him. He spoke to me about it several times, and I paid little attention to his complaints. But in the end, when he told me that instead of settling their marriage she seemed to be putting it off, I began to think he had good reason to be anxious. I told him that if Madame de Tournon's passion had begun to fade after two years, that was nothing to be surprised at. And even if it had not faded, but was simply not strong enough to make her marry him, he still ought not to complain. In the eyes of the world, the marriage would do her great harm, not only because he was not a good enough match for her, but because of the damage it would do to her reputation. So all he could ask was that she should not deceive him or give him false hopes. I told him too that if she could not bring herself to marry him, or if she confessed that she loved someone else, he must not fly into a rage or complain. He should go on feeling esteem and gratitude toward her.
"'I am giving you the advice I would take myself,' I told him. 'Sincerity moves me so deeply that I believe if the woman I loved, or even my wife, confessed to me that she was attracted to someone else, I would be grieved by it but not embittered. I would stop being her suitor or her husband, and become instead the one who advised her and pitied her.'"
These words made Madame de Cleves blush. She saw in them a certain likeness to her own situation, which startled her, and left her in an agitation she took a long time to recover from.
"Sancerre spoke to Madame de Tournon," Monsieur de Cleves went on, "and told her everything I had advised him to say. But she reassured him so carefully, and seemed so offended by his suspicions, that she drove them out of his mind entirely. All the same, she put the marriage off until after a journey he was about to make, which was to be a fairly long one. But she behaved so well until he left, and seemed so grieved at his going, that I believed as firmly as he did that she truly loved him. He left about three months ago. While he was away I saw little of Madame de Tournon. You have taken up all my thoughts, and I knew only that he was due back soon.
"The day before yesterday, when I reached Paris, I learned that she was dead. I sent to his house to ask whether there had been any news of him, and was told that he had arrived the evening before, which was the very day of Madame de Tournon's death. I went to see him at once, fully expecting the state I would find him in. But his grief went far beyond anything I had imagined.
"I have never seen sorrow so deep or so tender. The moment he saw me he embraced me, in floods of tears. 'I shall never see her again,' he said, 'I shall never see her again. She is dead! I was not worthy of her, but I shall follow her soon.'
"After that he fell silent. Then, every now and then, he would say again, 'She is dead, and I shall never see her again,' and fall back into weeping and cries, and then stay still like a man who had lost his reason. He told me that he had not had many letters from her while he was away, but that this had not surprised him, because he knew her and knew how reluctant she was to risk putting anything in writing. He had never doubted that he would marry her on his return. He thought her the most lovable and the most faithful woman who had ever lived. He believed she loved him tenderly. And he was losing her at the very moment when he thought he was about to bind himself to her forever. All these thoughts plunged him into a violent grief that overwhelmed him completely, and I confess that I could not help being moved by it.
"Even so, I had to leave him to go to the King, and I promised I would come back soon. I did come back, and I have never been so surprised in my life as when I found him completely changed from the man I had left. He was on his feet in his room, his face full of fury, walking up and down and stopping short as if he were beside himself. 'Come in, come in,' he said, 'come and see the most desperate man in the world. I am a thousand times more unhappy than I was an hour ago, and what I have just learned about Madame de Tournon is worse than her death.'
"I thought grief had unhinged him completely. I could not imagine that anything could be worse than the death of a woman one loves and who loves one in return. I told him that as long as his grief had kept within bounds I had approved of it and shared it, but that I would pity him no longer if he gave way to despair and lost his reason.
"'I would be only too happy to have lost my reason, and my life with it,' he cried. 'Madame de Tournon was unfaithful to me! I learn of her faithlessness and her betrayal the day after I learned of her death, at a time when my heart is full of the keenest grief and the tenderest love that anyone has ever felt, at a time when I hold her in my heart as the most perfect being who ever lived, and the most perfect toward me. And now I find that I have been deceived, and that she does not deserve my tears. Yet I grieve for her death just as much as if she had been faithful to me, and I feel her faithlessness as if she were not dead. If I had learned that she had changed before she died, jealousy, anger and rage would have filled me, and would have hardened me in some way against the grief of losing her. But as it is, I can neither be consoled for her nor hate her.'
"You can imagine how surprised I was by what Sancerre told me. I asked him how he had found out. He told me that a moment after I had left his room, Estouteville had come to see him. Estouteville is a close friend of his, but he knew nothing of Sancerre's love for Madame de Tournon. As soon as he sat down he had begun to weep. He said that he begged Sancerre's pardon for having hidden from him what he was about to tell him, that he begged him to pity him, that he had come to open his heart, and that Sancerre saw before him the man in all the world most grief-stricken by Madame de Tournon's death.
"'That name,' Sancerre told me, 'took me so much by surprise that, although my first impulse was to tell him that I grieved for her more than he did, I could not find the strength to speak. He went on. He told me he had been in love with her for six months. He had always meant to tell me, but she had forbidden it, expressly and with so much authority that he had not dared disobey her. She had come to care for him almost as soon as he began to love her. They had hidden their passion from everyone, and he had never once called on her openly. He had had the joy of consoling her for her husband's death, and he was about to marry her when she died. But this marriage, which was a marriage of love, was to have looked like a matter of duty and obedience. She had persuaded her father to order her to marry him, so that there should not seem to be too great a change in her conduct, after she had shown herself so set against marrying again.
"'As long as Estouteville was speaking,' Sancerre told me, 'I believed him, because his story was all too plausible, and because the time when he said he had begun to love Madame de Tournon was exactly the time when she had seemed to me to change. But a moment later I thought him a liar, or at least a man imagining things. I was ready to tell him so. Then I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I questioned him, I let him see my doubts. In the end I went to such lengths to make sure of my own misfortune that he asked me whether I knew Madame de Tournon's handwriting, and laid four of her letters and her portrait on my bed. My brother came in just then. Estouteville's face was so wet with tears that he had to leave so as not to be seen. He said he would come back this evening for what he had left with me. And I sent my brother away, on the excuse that I was not well, because I could not wait to see those letters, hoping to find something in them that would let me disbelieve what Estouteville had just told me. But alas, what did I not find in them! What tenderness! What vows! What promises to marry him! What letters! She never wrote me anything like them.
"'And so,' he went on, 'I am suffering both the grief of death and the grief of faithlessness at once. The two are often compared, but no one has ever felt them both at the same time. I confess, to my shame, that I feel her loss even more than her betrayal. I cannot find her guilty enough to accept her death. If she were alive, I would have the satisfaction of reproaching her, and of taking my revenge by making her see how unjust she had been. But I shall never see her again,' he kept saying, 'I shall never see her again. That is the worst of all evils. I would give my life to bring her back to life. What a wish! If she came back, she would live for Estouteville.
"'How happy I was yesterday,' he cried, 'how happy I was! I was the most grief-stricken man in the world, but my grief was reasonable, and there was a kind of sweetness in thinking that I would never be consoled. Today all my feelings are unjust. I am paying to a passion she only pretended to feel for me the same tribute of grief I thought I owed to a true one. I can neither hate her memory nor love it. I can neither be consoled nor mourn.
"'At least,' he said, turning suddenly to me, 'I beg you, see to it that I never meet Estouteville. His very name horrifies me. I know perfectly well that I have no right to complain of him. It is my own fault for hiding from him that I loved Madame de Tournon. If he had known, perhaps he would never have become attached to her, and she would not have been unfaithful to me. He came to me to confide his grief, and I pity him. And well I may,' he cried. 'He loved Madame de Tournon, she loved him, and he will never see her again. And yet I know that I cannot help hating him. Once more, I beg you, make sure I never see him.'
"Then Sancerre began to weep again, to mourn Madame de Tournon, to speak to her as if she were there, and to say the tenderest things in the world to her. Then he went back to hatred, to complaints, to reproaches and curses against her. Seeing him in so violent a state, I knew I would need help to calm him. I sent for his brother, whom I had just left at the King's, and went to speak to him in the antechamber before he came in, to tell him the state Sancerre was in. We gave orders that he was not to see Estouteville, and we spent part of the night trying to bring him back to reason. This morning I found him even more grief-stricken than before. His brother has stayed with him, and I have come back to you."
"No one could be more surprised than I am," said Madame de Cleves. "I thought Madame de Tournon incapable of love or of deceit."
"Cunning and pretense could go no further than she took them," replied Monsieur de Cleves. "Notice that when Sancerre thought her feelings for him had changed, they really had: she was beginning to love Estouteville. She told Estouteville that he was the one consoling her for her husband's death, and that he was the reason she was giving up her long seclusion. To Sancerre, meanwhile, it looked as though she was doing it because the two of us had agreed she should stop making such a show of grief. She told Estouteville that hiding their understanding, and seeming to marry him only because her father ordered it, was a sign of how careful she was of her reputation. In fact it was a way to abandon Sancerre without his having any grounds to complain.
"I must go back and see that unhappy man," Monsieur de Cleves went on, "and I think you ought to come back to Paris too. It is time you saw people again and received that endless stream of visits, which you could not avoid in any case."
Madame de Cleves agreed to go back, and returned the next day. She felt much calmer about Monsieur de Nemours than she had been. Everything her mother had told her on her deathbed, and her grief at her mother's death, had held her feelings in suspense, so that she believed they had been wiped out entirely.
On the very evening of her arrival, the Queen Dauphine came to see her. After telling her how much she had shared her sorrow, she said that, to take her mind off such sad thoughts, she wanted to tell her everything that had happened at court while she was away, and she went on to tell her a number of private matters.
"But what I most want to tell you," she added, "is that Monsieur de Nemours is certainly passionately in love. And not only are his closest friends not in his confidence, they cannot even guess who the woman is. Yet this love is strong enough to make him neglect, or rather give up, his hopes of a crown."
The Queen Dauphine then told her everything that had happened about the English project.
"I heard what I have just told you from Monsieur d'Anville," she went on, "and he told me this morning that last night the King sent for Monsieur de Nemours because of some letters from Lignerolles. Lignerolles is asking to come home. He writes to the King that he can no longer go on making excuses to the Queen of England for Monsieur de Nemours's delays. She is beginning to take offense, and although she has not given any definite promise, she has said enough to make the journey worth the risk. The King read the letter to Monsieur de Nemours, and Monsieur de Nemours, instead of speaking seriously, as he did at the start, did nothing but laugh, joke and make fun of Lignerolles's hopes.
"'All Europe would condemn my folly,' he said, 'if I risked going to England as the Queen's would-be husband without being sure of success. And it seems to me,' he added, 'that I would be choosing a bad moment to make the journey just now, when the King of Spain is pressing so hard to marry her himself. He might not be a very dangerous rival in a love affair, but where a marriage is concerned, I do not think Your Majesty would advise me to compete with him.'
"'On this occasion I would,' replied the King. 'But you will have nothing to compete with him for. I know he has other ideas. And even if he did not, Queen Mary fared too badly under the Spanish yoke for us to think her sister wants to take it up again, or that she will let herself be dazzled by the splendor of so many crowns joined together.'
"'If she is not dazzled by them,' Monsieur de Nemours answered, 'it seems likely that she will want to find her happiness in love. Some years ago she loved Lord Courtenay. He was loved by Queen Mary too, who would have married him with the consent of all England, if she had not realized that her sister Elizabeth's youth and beauty meant more to him than the hope of reigning. Your Majesty knows that her violent jealousy drove her to throw both of them into prison, then to send Lord Courtenay into exile, and in the end decided her to marry the King of Spain. I believe that Elizabeth, who is now on the throne, will soon call Lord Courtenay back, and that she will choose a man she has loved, who is very attractive, and who has suffered so much for her, rather than another man she has never seen.'
"'I would agree with you,' replied the King, 'if Courtenay were still alive. But I learned a few days ago that he has died in Padua, where he had been banished. I can see,' he added as he left Monsieur de Nemours, 'that we shall have to arrange your marriage the way we would arrange the Dauphin's, and send ambassadors to marry the Queen of England for you.'
"Monsieur d'Anville and the Vidame, who were with the King at the time, along with Monsieur de Nemours, are convinced that it is this same passion that is turning him away from so great a prospect. The Vidame, who sees more of him than anyone, told Madame de Martigues that he is so changed that he no longer recognizes him. What surprises the Vidame even more is that he cannot see him carrying on any affair, or slipping away at any odd hours. So he believes that Monsieur de Nemours has no understanding at all with the woman he loves. And what makes Monsieur de Nemours so unlike himself is to see him in love with a woman who does not return his love."
What poison for Madame de Cleves, every word the Queen Dauphine said! How could she fail to recognize herself as the woman whose name nobody knew? And how could she fail to be filled with gratitude and tenderness, learning from a source she had no reason to doubt that this man, who had already touched her heart, was hiding his passion from everyone, and giving up his hopes of a crown for love of her? No words can describe what she felt, or the agitation that rose in her heart. If the Queen Dauphine had looked at her closely, she would easily have seen that what she had just said did not leave her indifferent. But since she had no suspicion of the truth, she went on talking without noticing anything.
"Monsieur d'Anville," she added, "who, as I told you, gave me all these details, thinks I know more about it than he does. He has so high an opinion of my charms that he is convinced I am the only person who could work such great changes in Monsieur de Nemours."
These last words of the Queen Dauphine's stirred a different kind of agitation in Madame de Cleves from the one she had felt a few moments before.
"I could easily agree with Monsieur d'Anville," she answered. "It seems very likely, Madame, that it would take no less than a princess like you to make a man scorn the Queen of England."
"I would admit it to you if I knew it," replied the Queen Dauphine, "and I would know it if it were true. A passion like that never escapes the woman who causes it: she is always the first to notice. Monsieur de Nemours has never shown me anything but the slightest attentions. And yet there is so great a difference between the way he used to behave with me and the way he behaves now that I can promise you I am not the reason he cares nothing for the crown of England.
"I am forgetting myself with you," she added, "and forgetting that I must go and see Madame Elisabeth. You know that the peace is almost concluded. But what you do not know is that the King of Spain refused to agree to a single article unless he could marry her himself, instead of his son, Don Carlos. The King found it very hard to bring himself to it, but in the end he consented, and a little while ago he went to tell Madame Elisabeth the news. I think she will be inconsolable. Being married to a man of the King of Spain's age and temper is not a thing anyone could like, least of all she, who has all the gaiety of early youth as well as beauty, and who expected to marry a young prince she was already drawn to without ever having seen him. I do not know whether the King will find her as obedient as he would wish. He has asked me to see her, because he knows she is fond of me and thinks I may have some influence over her. After that I shall pay a very different kind of visit: I am going to congratulate the King's sister, Madame Marguerite. Everything has been settled for her marriage to the Duke of Savoy, and he will be here before long. No one of her age was ever so completely happy to be married. The court is going to be finer and more crowded than it has ever been, and in spite of your grief you must come and help us show the foreigners that our beauties are nothing ordinary."
With these words the Queen Dauphine left Madame de Cleves, and the next day the marriage of Madame Elisabeth was known to everyone. In the days that followed, the King and the two queens came to see Madame de Cleves. Monsieur de Nemours had waited for her return with extreme impatience, and he wanted badly to speak to her without witnesses. So he waited to call on her until the hour when everyone else would be leaving and no one was likely to come back. His plan worked, and he arrived just as the last visitors were going out.
She was resting on her bed. The weather was warm, and the sight of Monsieur de Nemours deepened the flush the heat had already given her, and it took nothing from her beauty. He sat down facing her, with the fear and the shyness that only a true passion gives. For some time he could not speak. Madame de Cleves was no less at a loss, so that they kept silent for quite a while. At last Monsieur de Nemours spoke, and offered his sympathy for her loss. Madame de Cleves was glad to keep the conversation on that subject. She talked for some time about her mother's death, and in the end she said that even when time had softened the violence of her grief, it would leave so strong a mark on her that her whole temper would be changed by it.
"Great sorrows and violent passions make great changes in the mind," Monsieur de Nemours replied. "As for me, I have not recognized myself since I came back from Flanders. Many people have noticed the change, and the Queen Dauphine herself was speaking to me of it again only yesterday."
"It is true that she has noticed it," said Madame de Cleves, "and I believe I have heard her say something about it."
"I am not sorry, Madame, that she has seen it," Monsieur de Nemours went on. "But I wish she were not the only one to see it. There are women to whom a man dare not give any sign of his passion except through things that have nothing to do with them. Since he does not dare let them see that he loves them, he would at least like them to see that he wants to be loved by no one else. He would like them to know that there is no beauty, of whatever rank, that he does not look at with indifference, and no crown he would buy at the price of never seeing them again. Women usually judge a man's passion," he continued, "by the trouble he takes to please them and to seek them out. But that is not hard, if they are the least bit attractive. What is hard is not to give in to the pleasure of following them. It is to avoid them, for fear of letting the public, and almost the women themselves, see what he feels for them. And what proves a true attachment even better is to become the complete opposite of what one was, and to have no more ambition and no more pleasure, after having spent one's whole life taken up with both."
Madame de Cleves understood without difficulty how much of this was meant for her. It seemed to her that she ought to answer and not let it pass. It seemed to her too that she ought not to understand it, or show that she took it as meant for her. She felt she had to speak, and she felt she must say nothing. What Monsieur de Nemours said pleased her and offended her almost equally. She saw in it the confirmation of everything the Queen Dauphine had made her think. She found in it something courteous and respectful, but also something bold and far too easy to understand. Her feelings for him threw her into an agitation she could not control. The most veiled words of a man one likes stir more agitation than the open declarations of a man one does not. So she said nothing, and Monsieur de Nemours would have noticed her silence, and perhaps drawn no bad omen from it, if the arrival of Monsieur de Cleves had not ended the conversation and his visit.
Her husband had come to tell her the latest news of Sancerre, but she had no great curiosity about the rest of that story. She was so full of what had just happened that she could barely hide how far away her mind was. When she was free to think, she saw plainly that she had been mistaken when she believed she felt nothing but indifference for Monsieur de Nemours. What he had said had made all the impression he could have wished, and had entirely convinced her of his passion. His actions agreed too well with his words to leave her any doubt. She no longer flattered herself with the hope of not loving him. She thought only of never giving him any sign of it. That was a difficult undertaking, and she already knew what it cost. She knew that the only way to succeed was to avoid his presence, and since her mourning gave her a reason to live more quietly than usual, she used that excuse to stop going anywhere he might see her. She was in a deep sadness. Her mother's death seemed to be the cause of it, and no one looked for any other.
Monsieur de Nemours was in despair at hardly ever seeing her anymore. Since he knew he would not find her at any gathering or at any of the entertainments the whole court attended, he could not bring himself to appear at them. He pretended a great passion for hunting, and arranged hunting parties on the very days when there were receptions at the queens' apartments. A slight illness served him for a long time as an excuse to stay at home and avoid every place where he knew very well that Madame de Cleves would not be.
Monsieur de Cleves fell ill at about the same time. Madame de Cleves never left his room during his illness. But when he was better and began to see company, Monsieur de Nemours among others, who on the excuse of still being weak spent the greater part of every day there, she found that she could no longer stay in the room. All the same, she did not have the strength to leave it the first few times he came. It had been too long since she had seen him for her to resolve not to see him. Monsieur de Nemours found a way to make her understand, through talk that seemed only general, but which she understood because it echoed what he had said to her at her own house, that he went hunting in order to be alone with his thoughts, and that he did not go to the gatherings because she was not there.
At last she carried out the resolution she had made, to leave her husband's room whenever Monsieur de Nemours was there. It cost her an extreme effort. He saw clearly that she was avoiding him, and he was deeply hurt by it.
Monsieur de Cleves did not notice his wife's conduct at first, but in the end he saw that she did not want to be in his room when there was company. He spoke to her about it. She answered that she did not think propriety allowed her to spend every evening with the youngest people at court. She begged him to let her live a more retired life than she had been used to. Her mother's virtue and presence, she said, had made many things acceptable that a woman of her age could not keep up on her own.
Monsieur de Cleves, who was naturally very gentle and indulgent with his wife, was not so on this occasion. He told her that he absolutely did not want her to change her way of life. She was on the point of telling him that it was being said at court that Monsieur de Nemours was in love with her, but she did not have the strength to say his name. She felt ashamed, too, of wanting to use a false reason, and of hiding the truth from a man who thought so well of her.
A few days later, the King was at the Queen's apartments at the hour of the circle, and the talk turned to horoscopes and predictions. Opinions were divided about how much belief they deserved. The Queen put a great deal of faith in them. She maintained that after so many things had been predicted and then seen to happen, no one could doubt that there was some certainty in this science. Others held that among that endless number of predictions, the few that turned out true showed plainly that it was nothing but chance.
"I was once very curious about the future," said the King. "But I was told so many false and unlikely things that I came away convinced that nothing true can be known about it. Some years ago an astrologer of great reputation came here. Everyone went to see him. I went like the others, but without telling him who I was, and I took Monsieur de Guise and Descars with me and made them go in ahead of me. The astrologer spoke to me first all the same, as if he had judged me the master of the others. Perhaps he knew me. Yet he told me something that would not have suited me if he had. He predicted that I would be killed in a duel. Then he told Monsieur de Guise that he would be killed from behind, and Descars that he would have his skull broken by a kick from a horse. Monsieur de Guise was almost offended by his prediction, as if he had been accused of being the kind of man who runs away. Descars was hardly pleased to learn that he was to end by so unlucky an accident. In short, we all came out very displeased with the astrologer. I do not know what will happen to Monsieur de Guise and Descars, but there is very little likelihood that I will be killed in a duel. The King of Spain and I have just made peace, and even if we had not, I doubt we would fight each other, or that I would challenge him, as the King my father challenged the Emperor Charles V."
After the misfortune the King said had been predicted for him, those who had defended astrology abandoned its cause and agreed that it deserved no belief at all.
"For my part," said Monsieur de Nemours aloud, "I am the man in the world who ought to believe in it least." Then, turning to Madame de Cleves, who was beside him, he said quietly: "I was told that I would be made happy by the kindness of the woman for whom I would feel the most violent and the most respectful passion in the world. You may judge, Madame, whether I ought to believe in predictions."
The Queen Dauphine, who gathered from what Monsieur de Nemours had said aloud that what he was saying quietly was some false prediction that had been made to him, asked him what he was telling Madame de Cleves. If he had had less presence of mind, the question would have caught him out. But he answered without hesitating: "I was telling her, Madame, that it was predicted I would rise to a fortune so high that I would not even dare to aspire to it."
"If that is the only prediction they have made you," the Queen Dauphine replied with a smile, thinking of the English affair, "I do not advise you to run down astrology. You might find reasons to defend it."
Madame de Cleves understood very well what the Queen Dauphine meant. But she also understood that the fortune Monsieur de Nemours had in mind was not to be King of England.
Since it was now some time since her mother's death, she had to begin appearing in society again and attending at court as she used to. She saw Monsieur de Nemours at the Queen Dauphine's. She saw him at Monsieur de Cleves's, where he often came with other men of rank his own age, so as not to be noticed. But she never saw him now without an agitation that he easily perceived.
However hard she tried to avoid his eyes and to speak to him less than to anyone else, certain things escaped her on first impulse which made him judge that he was not indifferent to her. A less perceptive man might not have noticed them. But he had been loved so many times already that it was hard for him not to know when he was loved. He saw clearly that the Chevalier de Guise was his rival, and the Chevalier knew that Monsieur de Nemours was his. He was the only man at court who had worked out this truth; his own interest had made him more clear-sighted than the others. Knowing what each other felt gave the two men a bitterness that showed in everything, though it never broke out in an open quarrel. But they were opposed in all things. They were always on different sides in riding at the ring, in fighting at the barrier, and in every entertainment the King took part in, and their rivalry was so great that it could not be hidden.
The English affair often came back into Madame de Cleves's mind. It seemed to her that Monsieur de Nemours would not hold out against the King's advice and the urging of Lignerolles. She saw with pain that Lignerolles had still not returned, and she waited for him impatiently. If she had followed her own impulses, she would have inquired carefully how the matter stood. But the same feeling that made her curious obliged her to hide her curiosity, and she asked only about Queen Elizabeth's beauty, her intelligence, and her character. One of Elizabeth's portraits was brought to the King's apartments, and she found it more beautiful than she wanted to find it. She could not help saying that it flattered her.
"I don't think so," replied the Queen Dauphine, who was present. "That queen has the reputation of being beautiful and of having a mind far above the ordinary, and I know very well that she has been held up to me as an example all my life. She must be attractive, if she is like her mother, Anne Boleyn. No woman ever had so much charm and so much grace, in her person and in her temper. I have heard that there was something lively and unusual about her face, and that she looked nothing like the other English beauties."
"It seems to me," said Madame de Cleves, "that people say she was born in France."
"Those who believed that were mistaken," the Queen Dauphine answered, "and I will tell you her story in a few words.
"She came of a good English family. Henry VIII had been in love with her sister and with her mother, and it has even been suspected that she was his daughter. She came here with the sister of Henry VII, who married King Louis XII. That princess, who was young and fond of love affairs, found it very hard to leave the court of France after her husband's death. But Anne Boleyn, whose tastes were the same as her mistress's, could not bring herself to leave it at all. The late King was in love with her, and she stayed on as a maid of honor to Queen Claude. When that queen died, Madame Marguerite, the late King's sister, Duchess of Alençon and afterward Queen of Navarre, whose stories you have read, took her into her household, and it was from her that Anne Boleyn picked up the first tinge of the new religion. She then went back to England and charmed everyone there. She had the manners of France, which please every nation. She sang well, and she danced admirably. She was made a maid of honor to Queen Catherine of Aragon, and King Henry VIII fell madly in love with her.
"Cardinal Wolsey, his favorite and his first minister, had hoped to be made pope, and he was angry with the Emperor for not supporting him in that ambition. He resolved to take his revenge by binding the King his master to France. He put it into Henry VIII's head that his marriage to the Emperor's aunt was invalid, and proposed that he marry the Duchess of Alençon, whose husband had just died. Anne Boleyn, who had ambition, saw this divorce as a road that might lead her to the throne. She began to give the King of England a taste for the religion of Luther, and she persuaded the late King to support Henry's divorce at Rome, in the hope of a marriage with Madame d'Alençon. Cardinal Wolsey had himself sent to France on other pretexts, to arrange the matter. But his master could not bring himself to let the proposal even be made, and he sent him an order at Calais not to speak of that marriage at all.
"When he came back from France, Cardinal Wolsey was received with honors like those paid to the King himself. No favorite has ever carried pride and vanity to such a height. He arranged a meeting between the two kings, which took place at Boulogne. François I offered his hand to Henry VIII, who did not want to take it. Each in turn entertained the other with extraordinary magnificence, and they gave each other suits of clothes like the ones they had had made for themselves. I remember hearing that the ones the late King sent to the King of England were of crimson satin, trimmed in a pattern of triangles with pearls and diamonds, and the gown of white velvet embroidered with gold. After a few days at Boulogne they went on to Calais. Anne Boleyn was lodged with Henry VIII, with a queen's household, and François I gave her the same presents and paid her the same honors as if she had been queen already. At last, after a passion of nine years, Henry married her without waiting for the dissolution of his first marriage, which he had been asking of Rome for a long time. The Pope hurried to pronounce his sentence against him, and Henry was so enraged by it that he declared himself head of the Church and dragged all of England into the unhappy change in which you see it today.
"Anne Boleyn did not enjoy her greatness for long. Just when she thought it was made secure by the death of Catherine of Aragon, she was watching with the whole court one day as her brother, the Viscount Rochford, rode at the ring, and the King was struck by such a jealousy that he left the spectacle abruptly, went off to London, and left orders to arrest the Queen, the Viscount Rochford, and several others whom he believed to be her lovers or her confidants. Though that jealousy seemed to be born in that moment, it had for some time been fed by the Viscountess Rochford. She could not bear her husband's close friendship with the Queen, and she made the King see it as a criminal attachment. And so the King, who was in love with Jane Seymour besides, thought of nothing but getting rid of Anne Boleyn. In less than three weeks he had the Queen and her brother tried, had their heads cut off, and married Jane Seymour. He had several wives after that, whom he put away or put to death, and among them Catherine Howard, whose confidante the Viscountess Rochford had been, and who was beheaded along with her. So she was punished for the crimes she had invented against Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII died having grown prodigiously fat."
All the ladies who had been present for the Queen Dauphine's story thanked her for teaching them so much about the court of England. Madame de Cleves was among them, and she could not help asking her several more questions about Queen Elizabeth.
The Queen Dauphine was having miniature portraits painted of all the beautiful women at court, to send to the Queen her mother. On the day the portrait of Madame de Cleves was being finished, she came to spend the afternoon at her house. Monsieur de Nemours did not fail to be there. He let no chance of seeing Madame de Cleves slip by, though he never let it show that he was looking for one. She was so beautiful that day that he would have fallen in love with her if he had not been in love already. Yet he did not dare keep his eyes fixed on her while she was being painted, and he was afraid of showing too plainly the pleasure he took in looking at her.
The Queen Dauphine asked Monsieur de Cleves for a small portrait he had of his wife, so as to see it beside the one that was being finished. Everyone gave an opinion of the two, and Madame de Cleves told the painter to correct something in the hair of the one that had just been brought in. To obey her, the painter took the portrait out of its case, and when he had worked on it he set it back on the table.
Monsieur de Nemours had long wanted to have a portrait of Madame de Cleves. When he saw the one that belonged to Monsieur de Cleves, he could not resist the urge to steal it from a husband he believed she loved tenderly, and he thought that among so many people in the same room, he would be no more suspected than anyone else.
The Queen Dauphine was sitting on the bed and speaking quietly to Madame de Cleves, who stood before her. Through one of the bed curtains, which was only half drawn, Madame de Cleves caught sight of Monsieur de Nemours with his back against the table at the foot of the bed, and she saw that without turning his head he was deftly taking something from that table. She had no trouble guessing that it was her portrait, and she was so agitated by it that the Queen Dauphine noticed she was not listening, and asked her aloud what she was looking at. At those words Monsieur de Nemours turned around. He met the eyes of Madame de Cleves, which were still fixed on him, and he thought it not impossible that she had seen what he had just done.
Madame de Cleves was in no small difficulty. Reason said she should ask for her portrait back. But to ask for it in public was to tell everyone what Monsieur de Nemours felt for her, and to ask for it in private was almost to invite him to speak of his passion. In the end she judged it better to let him keep it, and she was glad to grant him a favor that she could do him without his even knowing she was doing it. Monsieur de Nemours noticed her awkwardness and almost guessed its cause. He came up to her and said quietly: "If you saw what I dared to do, be kind enough, Madame, to let me believe that you know nothing of it. I dare not ask you for more." And with those words he withdrew, without waiting for her answer.
The Queen Dauphine went out for a walk, followed by all her ladies, and Monsieur de Nemours went home and shut himself in, unable to bear in public his joy at having a portrait of Madame de Cleves. He felt all the sweetest things that passion can make a man feel. He loved the most attractive woman at court. He was making her love him in spite of herself, and he saw in everything she did that agitation and awkwardness that love causes in the innocence of first youth.
That evening the portrait was searched for with great care. Since the case it should have been in was found, no one suspected that it had been stolen, and everyone believed it had fallen somewhere by chance. Monsieur de Cleves was distressed at the loss. After another fruitless search, he said to his wife, though in a way that showed he did not mean it, that she must surely have some hidden suitor to whom she had given the portrait, or who had stolen it, since anyone but a man in love would not have been content with the painting without its case.
Those words, though said in jest, made a sharp impression on the mind of Madame de Cleves. They gave her remorse. She reflected on the violence of the feeling that was drawing her toward Monsieur de Nemours. She found that she was no longer in command of her words or her face. She thought that Lignerolles had come back, that she no longer feared the English affair, that she no longer had any suspicions about the Queen Dauphine, and that, in short, there was nothing left to protect her, and no safety for her except in going away. But since going away was not in her power, she found herself in a desperate position, on the point of falling into what seemed to her the greatest of all misfortunes, which was to let Monsieur de Nemours see what she felt for him. She remembered everything Madame de Chartres had said to her on her deathbed, and her advice to take any course whatever, however difficult it might be, rather than get involved in a love affair. What Monsieur de Cleves had said about sincerity, when he was speaking of Madame de Tournon, came back into her mind. It seemed to her that she ought to confess to him what she felt for Monsieur de Nemours. That thought occupied her for a long time. Then she was shocked at having had it. She saw madness in it, and fell back into the awkward position of not knowing what course to take.
The peace was signed. Madame Elisabeth, after great reluctance, had resolved to obey the King her father. The Duke of Alba had been named to come and marry her in the name of the Catholic King, Philip II of Spain, and he was expected soon. The Duke of Savoy was expected as well. He was coming to marry Madame Marguerite, the King's sister, and the two weddings were to be held at the same time. The King thought of nothing but making these weddings famous through entertainments in which he could show off the skill and the magnificence of his court. The grandest ballets and plays that could be staged were proposed, but the King found such entertainments too private, and he wanted something more brilliant. He resolved to hold a tournament, open to foreigners, which the people could watch. All the princes and young lords took up the King's plan with joy, above all the Duke of Ferrara, Monsieur de Guise, and Monsieur de Nemours, who surpassed everyone else in exercises of that kind. The King chose them to be the four champions of the tournament with him.
It was proclaimed throughout the kingdom that in the city of Paris, on the fifteenth of June, the lists would be opened by His Most Christian Majesty the King and by the princes Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, François of Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and Jacques of Savoy, Duke of Nemours, to be held against all comers. The first combat would be on horseback in the lists, in double armor, four courses with the lance and one for the ladies. The second would be with swords, one against one or two against two, as the marshals of the field chose. The third would be on foot, three strokes of the pike and six of the sword. The champions would supply lances, swords, and pikes, and the comers would choose among them. Anyone who struck his opponent's horse in a charge would be put out of the ranks. There would be four marshals of the field to give the orders, and those comers who had broken the most lances and performed best would receive a prize, its value left to the judges. Every comer, French or foreign, would be required to come and touch one of the shields hung on the stand at the end of the lists, or several of them, as he chose. There he would find a herald to receive him and enroll him according to his rank and the shields he had touched. The comers would be required to have a gentleman bring their shield with their coat of arms, to hang on the stand three days before the tournament began. Otherwise they would not be admitted without the champions' leave.
A great field for the tournament was laid out near the Bastille. It ran from the palace of the Tournelles across the rue Saint-Antoine to the royal stables. On both sides stood stands and tiers of seats with covered boxes, which formed a kind of gallery, made a very fine sight, and could hold an endless number of people. All the princes and lords now thought of nothing but ordering what they needed to appear with brilliance, and of working into their monograms or their mottoes some touch of love that referred to the women they loved.
A few days before the Duke of Alba arrived, the King played a game of tennis with Monsieur de Nemours, the Chevalier de Guise, and the Vidame de Chartres. The Queen and the Queen Dauphine went to watch them play, followed by all the ladies, Madame de Cleves among them. When the game was over and everyone was leaving the tennis court, Chastelart came up to the Queen Dauphine and told her that chance had just put into his hands a love letter that had fallen from Monsieur de Nemours's pocket. The Queen Dauphine, who was always curious about anything that concerned Nemours, told Chastelart to give it to her. She took it and followed the Queen, Catherine de' Medici, her mother-in-law, who was going with the King to watch the work on the lists for the tournament.
After they had been there a while, the King had some horses brought out that he had recently acquired. They were not yet broken in, but he wanted to ride them, and he had them given to everyone who had come with him. The King and Monsieur de Nemours found themselves on the two most spirited horses, and the two animals tried to go at each other. Monsieur de Nemours, afraid of hurting the King, pulled back sharply and drove his horse against a pillar of the riding ground so violently that the shock made him reel. People ran to him, and everyone thought he was badly hurt. Madame de Cleves thought him more badly hurt than anyone did. Her concern for him gave her a fear and an agitation that she did not think to hide. She went up to him with the Queen and the Queen Dauphine, and her face was so changed that a man with less at stake than the Chevalier de Guise would have noticed it. He noticed it easily, and he paid far more attention to the state Madame de Cleves was in than to the state of Monsieur de Nemours. The blow Nemours had taken left him so dazed that for some time he stayed with his head bowed over the men who were holding him up. When he raised it, the first person he saw was Madame de Cleves. He read in her face the pity she felt for him, and he looked at her in a way that let her judge how deeply it touched him. Then he thanked the Queen and the Queen Dauphine for the kindness they had shown him and apologized for the state they had seen him in. The King ordered him to go and rest.
Once Madame de Cleves had recovered from her fright, she soon began to reflect on the signs of it she had given. The Chevalier de Guise did not leave her long in the hope that no one had noticed. He gave her his hand to lead her out of the lists.
"I am more to be pitied than Monsieur de Nemours, Madame," he said to her. "Forgive me if I step outside the deep respect I have always had for you, and if I let you see the sharp pain I feel at what I have just witnessed. This is the first time I have ever been bold enough to speak to you, and it will also be the last. Death, or at least a lifelong absence, will take me away from a place where I can no longer live, since I have just lost the sad consolation of believing that every man who dares to look at you is as unhappy as I am."
Madame de Cleves answered only a few disjointed words, as though she had not understood what the Chevalier de Guise's words meant. At another time she would have been offended that he had spoken to her of his feelings for her; but at that moment she felt nothing except grief that he had seen her feelings for Monsieur de Nemours. The Chevalier de Guise was so convinced of them, and so pierced with sorrow, that from that day on he resolved never again to think of being loved by Madame de Cleves. But to give up an enterprise that had seemed to him so difficult and so full of honor, he needed another one great enough to fill his mind. He set his heart on capturing Rhodes from the Turks, an idea he had already toyed with; and when death took him from the world in the flower of his youth, just when he had won the reputation of one of the greatest princes of his age, the only regret he showed at leaving life was that he had not been able to carry out so fine a plan, whose success he believed certain because of all the care he had taken over it.
When she left the lists, Madame de Cleves went to the Queen's apartments, her mind full of what had happened. Monsieur de Nemours came in shortly afterward, magnificently dressed and looking like a man who felt nothing of the accident that had befallen him. He even seemed more cheerful than usual, and his joy at what he believed he had seen gave him an air that made him more attractive still. Everyone was surprised when he came in, and there was no one who did not ask how he was, except Madame de Cleves, who stayed by the fireplace and pretended not to see him. The King came out of a side room where he had been, and seeing Nemours among the others, called him over to talk about his accident. Monsieur de Nemours passed close to Madame de Cleves and said to her very quietly:
"I received marks of your pity today, Madame; but they are not the ones I most deserve."
Madame de Cleves had suspected that he had noticed the feeling she had shown for him, and his words proved that she had not been mistaken. It was a great grief to her to find that she was no longer able to hide her feelings, and to have let the Chevalier de Guise see them. It grieved her greatly, too, that Monsieur de Nemours knew them; but this last grief was not so complete, and it was mixed with a kind of sweetness.
The Queen Dauphine, who was extremely impatient to know what was in the letter Chastelart had given her, came over to Madame de Cleves.
"Go and read this letter," she said. "It is addressed to Monsieur de Nemours, and by all appearances it comes from the woman he loves, the one he has given up all the others for. If you can't read it now, keep it; come to my bedchamber tonight when I retire, give it back to me, and tell me whether you recognize the handwriting."
With these words the Queen Dauphine left Madame de Cleves, who was so stunned and so shaken that for some time she could not move from where she stood. The impatience and agitation she felt would not let her stay in the Queen's apartments. She went home, though it was not the hour at which she usually withdrew. She held the letter in a trembling hand. Her thoughts were so confused that none of them was clear, and she found herself in a kind of unbearable grief that she did not recognize and had never felt before. As soon as she was in her own room she opened the letter, and this is what she found:
"I have loved you too much to let you believe that the change you see in me comes from any fickleness of mine. I want you to know that your infidelity is the cause of it. You are surprised that I speak to you of your infidelity. You hid it from me with such skill, and I took such care to hide from you that I knew of it, that you have reason to be shocked that it is known to me. I am surprised myself that I managed to let nothing of it show. No grief has ever been like mine. I believed that you felt a violent passion for me; I no longer hid from you the passion I felt for you; and at the very time I was letting you see it whole, I learned that you were deceiving me, that you loved another woman, and that by every appearance you were sacrificing me to this new love. I learned it on the day of the riding at the ring; that is why I did not go. I pretended to be ill to hide the disorder of my mind; but I truly became ill, and my body could not bear so violent an agitation.
"When I began to feel better, I went on pretending to be very unwell, so as to have an excuse not to see you and not to write to you. I wanted time to decide how I ought to deal with you. Twenty times I made and unmade the same resolutions; but in the end I found you unworthy to see my grief, and I resolved not to let you see it at all. I wanted to wound your pride by showing you that my passion was fading away of its own accord. I thought that in this way I would lessen the value of the sacrifice you were making of it; I did not want you to have the pleasure of showing how much I loved you in order to seem more lovable for it. I resolved to write you lukewarm, listless letters, so as to put it into the mind of the woman you were giving them to that I had stopped loving you. I did not want her to have the pleasure of learning that I knew she had triumphed over me, nor to add to her triumph by my despair and my reproaches. I thought I would not punish you enough by breaking with you, and that I would give you only a slight pain if I stopped loving you when you no longer loved me. I decided that you had to love me in order to feel the misery of not being loved, which I was feeling so cruelly myself. I believed that if anything could rekindle the feelings you had once had for me, it was to let you see that mine had changed; but to let you see it while pretending to hide it from you, as if I had not had the strength to admit it.
"I settled on this resolution. But how hard it was to take! And when I saw you again, how impossible it seemed to carry out! A hundred times I was ready to burst out in reproaches and tears. The state my health was still in helped me to disguise my agitation and my grief from you. Afterward I was sustained by the pleasure of deceiving you as you were deceiving me. And yet it cost me such violence to tell you and to write to you that I loved you, that you saw sooner than I had intended that my feelings had changed. You were hurt; you complained of it. I tried to reassure you, but in such a forced way that you were only more convinced that I no longer loved you. In the end I did everything I had meant to do. The strangeness of your heart brought you back to me as you saw me drawing away from you. I have tasted all the pleasure that revenge can give. It has seemed to me that you loved me better than you ever had, and I have let you see that I no longer loved you. I have had reason to believe that you had entirely abandoned the woman for whom you left me. I have also had reasons to be sure that you never spoke to her of me. But your return and your discretion cannot make up for your fickleness. Your heart has been divided between me and another woman. You deceived me, and that is enough to take away the pleasure of being loved by you as I thought I deserved to be, and to leave me in the resolution I have taken never to see you again, which so surprises you."
Madame de Cleves read this letter, and read it again several times, without all the same knowing what she had read. She saw only that Monsieur de Nemours did not love her as she had thought, and that he loved other women, whom he deceived as he deceived her. What a sight, and what a discovery, for a woman of her temper, who felt a violent passion, who had just given signs of it to a man she judged unworthy of it, and to another man whom she was treating badly for his sake! No grief was ever so sharp and so keen. It seemed to her that what gave this grief its bitterness was what had happened that day, and that if Monsieur de Nemours had not had reason to believe she loved him, she would not have cared whether he loved another. But she was deceiving herself; and this pain she found so unbearable was jealousy, with all the horrors that can go with it. She saw from the letter that Monsieur de Nemours had been carrying on a love affair for a long time. She found that the woman who had written it had intelligence and worth; she seemed to her worthy of being loved; she found in her more courage than she found in herself, and she envied the strength the woman had had to hide her feelings from Monsieur de Nemours. She saw from the end of the letter that this woman believed herself loved; and she thought that the discretion Nemours had shown her, which had touched her so deeply, was perhaps only the effect of his passion for this other woman, whom he was afraid of displeasing. In short, she thought everything that could add to her grief and her despair.
How she searched her own heart! What reflections she made on the advice her mother had given her! How she repented of not having insisted on withdrawing from society, in spite of Monsieur de Cleves, or of not having followed the thought she had had of confessing to him her feelings for Monsieur de Nemours! She found that she would have done better to reveal them to a husband whose goodness she knew, and who would have had every interest in hiding them, than to let them be seen by a man who was unworthy of them, who deceived her, who was perhaps sacrificing her, and who wanted to be loved by her only out of pride and vanity. In the end she found that every misfortune that could befall her, and every extreme she might be driven to, was less than having let Monsieur de Nemours see that she loved him, and knowing that he loved another. All that consoled her was to think that at least, after this discovery, she had nothing more to fear from herself, and that she would be entirely cured of her feelings for him.
She hardly gave a thought to the Queen Dauphine's order to attend her when she retired. She went to bed and pretended to be unwell, so that when Monsieur de Cleves came back from the King's, he was told she was asleep. But she was very far from the calm that leads to sleep. She spent the night doing nothing but grieving and rereading the letter she held in her hands.
Madame de Cleves was not the only person whose peace of mind this letter had destroyed. The Vidame de Chartres, who had lost it, and not Monsieur de Nemours, was in extreme anxiety over it. He had spent the whole evening at the Duke of Guise's, who had given a great supper for his brother-in-law the Duke of Ferrara and for all the young people of the court. By chance, over supper, the talk turned to well-written letters. The Vidame de Chartres said he had one on him that was finer than any letter ever written. They pressed him to show it; he refused. Monsieur de Nemours maintained that he had no such letter and was talking out of vanity. The Vidame answered that Nemours was pushing his discretion to the limit; that he would not show the letter all the same, but he would read a few passages from it, which would make them judge that few men received letters like it. At the same moment he went to take out the letter and could not find it. He searched for it in vain; they teased him about it; but he looked so anxious that they stopped talking of it. He withdrew earlier than the others and went home in a hurry to see whether he had left the missing letter there. While he was still searching, one of the Queen's chief valets came to find him, to say that the Viscountess d'Uzès had thought it necessary to warn him at once: it was being said in the Queen's apartments that a love letter had fallen from his pocket while he was at the tennis court; that a great part of what was in it had been repeated; that the Queen had shown great curiosity to see it; that she had sent to ask one of her gentlemen in waiting for it; but that he had answered that he had left it in Chastelart's hands.
The valet told the Vidame de Chartres a great many other things besides, which completed his alarm. He went out that very moment to the house of a gentleman who was a close friend of Chastelart's. He had him roused, although it was an extraordinary hour, and sent him to ask for the letter, without saying who was asking for it or who had lost it. Chastelart, whose mind was already made up that the letter belonged to Monsieur de Nemours and that Nemours was in love with the Queen Dauphine, had no doubt that it was Nemours who was sending to ask for it back. He answered with malicious pleasure that he had put the letter into the hands of the Queen Dauphine. The gentleman brought this answer back to the Vidame de Chartres. It increased the anxiety he already felt and added new anxieties to it. After being long undecided about what to do, he concluded that only Monsieur de Nemours could help him out of the awkward position he was in.
He went to Nemours's house and entered his bedroom as day was just beginning to break. Nemours was sleeping peacefully; what he had seen of Madame de Cleves the day before had left him nothing but pleasant thoughts. He was very surprised to be woken by the Vidame de Chartres, and asked him whether it was to avenge what he had said at supper that he came to disturb his rest. The Vidame's face made it plain that the business that brought him was nothing but serious.
"I have come to confide to you the most important affair of my life," he said. "I know very well that you owe me no gratitude for it, since it comes at a time when I need your help; but I know too that I would have lost your esteem if I had told you all I am about to tell you without necessity forcing me to it. I dropped the letter I spoke of last night. It matters extremely to me that no one should know it is addressed to me. It was seen by a great many people who were at the tennis court, where it fell yesterday. You were there too, and I beg you as a favor to be willing to say that it was you who lost it."
"You must believe I have no lady of my own," Monsieur de Nemours answered with a smile, "to make me such a proposal, and to imagine there is no one I could fall out with by letting it be believed that I receive letters like that."
"I beg you," said the Vidame, "listen to me seriously. If there is a woman you love, as I have no doubt there is, though I don't know who she is, it will be easy for you to clear yourself, and I will give you sure means of doing it. And even if you did not clear yourself with her, it can cost you no more than a quarrel of a few moments. But I, through this affair, dishonor a woman who has loved me passionately and who is one of the most estimable women in the world; and on the other side I draw down on myself an implacable hatred that will cost me my fortune, and perhaps something more."
"I can't follow everything you say," replied Monsieur de Nemours, "but you give me a glimpse that the rumors about the interest a great princess took in you are not entirely false."
"They are not," replied the Vidame de Chartres, "and would to God they were! I would not be in the awkward position I am in. But I must tell you everything that has happened, to show you everything I have to fear.
"Ever since I came to court, the Queen has always treated me with great distinction and kindness, and I had reason to believe she thought well of me. Still, there was nothing particular in it, and I had never thought of having any feelings for her but respect. I was even deeply in love with Madame de Thémines. Anyone who sees her can easily judge that a man may love her very much when she loves him; and she loved me. Nearly two years ago, when the court was at Fontainebleau, I found myself two or three times in conversation with the Queen at hours when very few people were about. It seemed to me that my mind pleased her and that she took up everything I said. One day among others we began to talk about trust. I said there was no one I trusted completely; that in my view one always regretted trusting anyone; and that I knew a great many things I had never spoken of. The Queen told me she esteemed me the more for it; that she had found no one in France who could keep a secret, and that this was what had troubled her most, because it had taken from her the pleasure of giving her trust; that it was a necessary thing in life to have someone one could talk to, above all for people of her rank. In the days that followed she returned to the same conversation several times; she even told me some rather private things that were going on. In the end it seemed to me that she wished to be sure of my discretion, and that she wanted to confide her secrets to me. The thought attached me to her; I was touched by the distinction, and I paid my court to her far more assiduously than I had been used to.
"One evening when the King and all the ladies had gone riding in the forest, where she had not wanted to go because she was feeling a little unwell, I stayed with her. She went down to the edge of the pond and let go of her equerries' hands so as to walk more freely. After a few turns she came up to me and ordered me to follow her. 'I want to speak to you,' she said, 'and you will see, by what I am going to say, that I am your friend.' She stopped at these words, and looking at me steadily, went on: 'You are in love; and because you perhaps trust no one, you believe your love is not known. But it is known, and even by the people concerned. You are being watched; the places where you see the woman you love are known; there is a plan to surprise you there. I do not know who she is; I am not asking you; I only want to protect you from the misfortunes you may fall into.' Consider, I beg you, what a trap the Queen was setting for me, and how hard it was not to fall into it. She wanted to know whether I was in love; and by not asking me with whom, and by letting me see nothing but an intention to do me a kindness, she took away any thought that she was speaking out of curiosity or by design.
"And yet, against every appearance, I worked out the truth. I was in love with Madame de Thémines; but although she loved me, I was not fortunate enough to have private places to see her, nor to fear being surprised there; so I saw clearly that she could not be the woman the Queen meant. I knew, too, that I was carrying on an affair with another woman, less beautiful and less strict than Madame de Thémines, and that it was not impossible that the place where I saw her had been discovered; but since I cared little for her, it was easy for me to put myself out of reach of every danger by simply ceasing to see her. So I decided to admit nothing to the Queen, and to assure her, on the contrary, that I had long ago given up the wish to be loved by women whose love I could hope for, because I found nearly all of them unworthy of holding a gentleman, and that only something far above them could engage me. 'You are not answering me sincerely,' the Queen replied. 'I know the opposite of what you tell me. The way I am speaking to you ought to oblige you to hide nothing from me. I want you to be one of my friends,' she went on; 'but in giving you that place I do not want to be ignorant of your attachments. See whether you are willing to buy it at the price of telling me them. I give you two days to think it over; but after that, consider well what you will say to me, and remember that if I ever find afterward that you have deceived me, I will not forgive you as long as I live.'
"The Queen left me after saying these words, without waiting for my answer. You can believe that my mind was full of what she had just said. The two days she had given me to think it over did not seem too long for me to make up my mind. I saw that she wanted to know whether I was in love, and that she did not wish me to be. I saw the consequences of the course I was about to take. My vanity was not a little flattered by a private understanding with the Queen, and a queen whose person is still extremely attractive. On the other side, I loved Madame de Thémines; and although I was being unfaithful to her, in a way, with that other woman I have told you about, I could not bring myself to break with her. I saw too the danger I was exposing myself to by deceiving the Queen, and how hard it was to deceive her. Nevertheless I could not bring myself to refuse what fortune was offering me, and I took my chance on everything my bad conduct might bring down on me. I broke with the woman whose affair with me could be discovered, and I hoped to hide the one I had with Madame de Thémines.
"At the end of the two days the Queen had given me, as I came into the room where all the ladies were gathered for the circle, she said to me out loud, with a grave air that surprised me: 'Have you thought about that business I charged you with, and do you know the truth of it?' 'Yes, Madame,' I answered, 'and it is as I told Your Majesty.' 'Come this evening, at the hour when I write my letters,' she replied, 'and I will finish giving you my orders.' I made a deep bow without answering, and did not fail to be there at the hour she had named. I found her in the gallery, where her secretary was, and one or two of her women. As soon as she saw me she came to me and led me to the other end of the gallery. 'Well,' she said, 'is it after thinking it over carefully that you have nothing to tell me? And does the way I treat you not deserve that you should speak to me sincerely?' 'It is because I am speaking to you sincerely, Madame,' I answered, 'that I have nothing to tell you; and I swear to Your Majesty, with all the respect I owe her, that I have no attachment to any woman at court.' 'I am willing to believe it,' the Queen replied, 'because I wish it; and I wish it because I want you to be entirely devoted to me, and because it would be impossible for me to be content with your friendship if you were in love. One cannot trust people who are in love; one cannot be sure of their discretion. They are too distracted and too divided; the woman they love is their first concern, and that does not fit the way I want you to be attached to me. Remember, then, that it is on the word you give me that you have no engagement that I choose you to receive all my trust. Remember that I want yours entire; that I want you to have no friend, man or woman, but those who are agreeable to me, and to give up every care but that of pleasing me. I will not make you lose the care of your fortune; I will manage it more attentively than you would yourself; and whatever I do for you, I will think myself too well rewarded if I find you toward me what I hope. I choose you to confide all my sorrows to, and to help me soften them. You may judge that they are not slight. I seem to bear the King's attachment to the Duchess of Valentinois without much pain; but it is unbearable to me. She governs the King; she deceives him; she despises me; all my people are hers. The Queen my daughter-in-law, proud of her beauty and of her uncles' power, pays me no duty. The Constable de Montmorency is master of the King and of the kingdom; he hates me, and he has given me proofs of his hatred that I cannot forget. The Marshal de Saint-André is a brash young favorite who treats me no better than the rest. The full account of my misfortunes would move you to pity. Until now I have not dared to trust anyone; I trust you. See that I do not regret it, and be my only consolation.' The Queen's eyes reddened as she finished these words. I nearly threw myself at her feet, so truly was I touched by the kindness she showed me. From that day on she gave me her entire confidence; she no longer did anything without speaking to me of it; and I have kept up a connection with her that lasts to this day.
"And yet, however full and however taken up I was with this new tie to the Queen, I was still bound to Madame de Thémines by a natural attraction I could not master. It seemed to me that she was ceasing to love me. If I had been wise, I would have used the change I saw in her to help cure myself; instead, my love for her doubled, and I managed things so badly that the Queen got some knowledge of the attachment. Jealousy comes naturally to people of her nation, and perhaps the Queen has warmer feelings for me than she herself realizes. In any case, the rumor that I was in love caused her such anxiety and such sorrow that a hundred times I thought I had lost her favor for good. In the end I reassured her, by attentions, by submission, and by false oaths. But I could not have deceived her for long if Madame de Thémines's change had not detached me from her in spite of myself. She made me see that she no longer loved me, and I was so convinced of it that I was forced to stop tormenting her and to leave her in peace.
"Some time afterward she wrote me the letter I have lost. From it I learned that she had found out about my dealings with that other woman I told you of, and that this was the cause of her change. Since nothing divided me any longer, the Queen was fairly satisfied with me. But my feelings for her are not of a kind to make me incapable of any other attachment, and no one falls in love by choice; and so I fell in love with Madame de Martigues, to whom I had already been much drawn while she was still Mademoiselle de Villemontais, one of the Queen Dauphine's maids of honor. I have reason to believe she does not dislike me: the discretion I show her, without her knowing all the reasons for it, pleases her. The Queen has no suspicion on that score, but she has another that is hardly less troublesome. Since Madame de Martigues is always with the Queen Dauphine, I go there far more often than I used to, and the Queen has got it into her head that it is the Queen Dauphine I am in love with. The Queen Dauphine's rank, which is equal to her own, and the youth and beauty in which she surpasses her, give her a jealousy that amounts to fury, and a hatred of her daughter-in-law that she can no longer hide. The Cardinal of Lorraine, who has long seemed to me to be aiming at the Queen's good graces, and who sees very well that I hold a place he would like to fill, has stepped into the quarrels the two of them have had, on the pretext of reconciling the Queen Dauphine with her. I have no doubt he has worked out the real cause of the Queen's bitterness, and I believe he does me every kind of bad turn, without letting her see that he means to.
"That is how things stand as I speak to you. Judge what effect that letter can have, the letter I lost, and which my ill luck made me put in my pocket to return to Madame de Thémines. If the Queen sees it, she will know that I deceived her, and that almost at the very time I was deceiving her for Madame de Thémines, I was deceiving Madame de Thémines for someone else. Judge what idea that can give her of me, and whether she can ever trust my word again. And if she does not see the letter, what am I to tell her? She knows it was put into the Queen Dauphine's hands. She will believe that Chastelart recognized the Queen Dauphine's handwriting and that the letter is hers; she will imagine that the woman the letter is so jealous of may be herself. In short, there is nothing she has not reason to think, and nothing I need not fear from her thoughts. Add to this that I am deeply in love with Madame de Martigues, and that the Queen Dauphine will certainly show her the letter, which she will take to have been written recently. So I shall be on bad terms at once with the person in the world I love most and with the person in the world I have most to fear. Consider, after all that, whether I am not right to beg you to say the letter is yours, and to ask you, as a favor, to go and get it back from the Queen Dauphine."
"I can see," said Monsieur de Nemours, "that no one could be in a worse position than you are, and it must be admitted that you deserve it. I have been accused of not being a faithful suitor, and of carrying on several love affairs at once; but you outdo me so far that I would not even have dared to imagine the things you have attempted. Could you expect to keep Madame de Thémines while binding yourself to the Queen? And did you hope to bind yourself to the Queen and be able to deceive her? She is an Italian and a queen, and therefore full of suspicion, jealousy, and pride. When your good luck, rather than your good conduct, got you out of the ties you were in, you took on new ones, and you imagined that in the middle of the court you could love Madame de Martigues without the Queen noticing. You could not have taken too much care to spare her the shame of having made the first advances. She has a violent passion for you. Your discretion keeps you from telling me so, and mine keeps me from asking; but the fact is that she loves you, she is suspicious, and the truth is against you."
"Is it for you to heap reproaches on me?" the Vidame broke in. "Shouldn't your own experience make you indulgent toward my faults? Still, I'm willing to admit I'm in the wrong; but think, I beg you, of getting me out of the abyss I'm in. It seems to me you would have to see the Queen Dauphine as soon as she is awake and ask her for the letter back, as something you had lost."
"I have already told you," Monsieur de Nemours replied, "that what you propose is a little extraordinary, and that my own private interest may make me find difficulties in it. But besides that, if the letter was seen to fall out of your pocket, it seems to me hard to persuade anyone that it fell out of mine."
"I thought I had told you," the Vidame answered, "that the Queen Dauphine has been told it fell out of yours."
"What," Monsieur de Nemours broke in sharply, seeing in that instant the harm this mistake could do him with Madame de Cleves, "the Queen Dauphine has been told that it was I who dropped the letter!"
"Yes," the Vidame went on, "she has been told so. And what caused the mistake is this: there were several gentlemen of the two Queens' households in one of the rooms at the tennis court where our clothes were, and your servants and mine had gone to fetch them. At that moment the letter fell; the gentlemen picked it up and read it aloud. Some thought it was yours, others mine. Chastelart, who took it, and whom I have just sent to ask for it, has said that he gave it to the Queen Dauphine as a letter belonging to you; and those who spoke of it to the Queen unfortunately said it was mine. So you can easily do what I ask, and get me out of the position I am in."
Monsieur de Nemours had always been very fond of the Vidame de Chartres, and what the Vidame was to Madame de Cleves made him dearer still. Nevertheless, he could not bring himself to take the risk of her hearing the letter spoken of as something that concerned him. He fell into a deep reverie, and the Vidame, guessing more or less what it was about, said:
"I can well believe you are afraid of a quarrel with the woman you love. You would even give me reason to think it is the Queen Dauphine, if the little jealousy I see in you toward Monsieur d'Anville did not put the idea out of my head. But however that may be, it is only fair that you should not sacrifice your peace of mind to mine, and I am willing to give you the means of showing the woman you love that this letter was written to me and not to you. Here is a note from Madame d'Amboise, who is a friend of Madame de Thémines and the one she confided in about all her feelings for me. In this note she asks me to return her friend's letter, the one I lost. My name is on the note, and what is inside proves beyond any doubt that the letter being asked for is the same one that was found. I put this note in your hands, and I consent to your showing it to the woman you love, to clear yourself. I beg you not to lose a moment, and to go to the Queen Dauphine this very morning."
Monsieur de Nemours gave the Vidame de Chartres his promise, and took Madame d'Amboise's note. Nevertheless, his plan was not to see the Queen Dauphine; he found he had something more pressing to do. He had no doubt that she had already spoken of the letter to Madame de Cleves, and he could not bear that a woman he loved so desperately should have reason to believe he had an attachment to someone else.
He went to her house at the hour he thought she might be awake, and sent in word that he would not ask for the honor of seeing her at so unusual an hour if a matter of consequence did not oblige him to. Madame de Cleves was still in bed, her mind sore and agitated by the sad thoughts she had had during the night. She was extremely surprised when she was told that Monsieur de Nemours was asking for her. The bitterness she was in made her answer without hesitation that she was ill and could not speak to him.
Nemours was not wounded by the refusal. A show of coldness, at a time when she might be jealous, was not a bad omen. He went to Monsieur de Cleves's apartment and told him that he had just come from his wife's; that he was very sorry not to be able to speak with her, because he had to talk to her about a matter of importance to the Vidame de Chartres. In a few words he gave Monsieur de Cleves to understand how much was at stake, and Monsieur de Cleves took him at once into his wife's room. If she had not been in the dark, she would have had trouble hiding her agitation and her shock at seeing Monsieur de Nemours come in, brought by her husband. Monsieur de Cleves told her that it was about a letter, in which her help was needed for the Vidame's interests; that she would see with Monsieur de Nemours what had to be done; and that as for himself, he was going to the King, who had just sent for him.
Monsieur de Nemours was left alone with Madame de Cleves, as he could have wished.
"I have come to ask you, Madame," he said, "whether the Queen Dauphine has said anything to you about a letter that Chastelart put into her hands yesterday."
"She said something to me about it," Madame de Cleves replied, "but I don't see what that letter has to do with my uncle's interests, and I can assure you that he is not named in it."
"It is true, Madame," Monsieur de Nemours answered, "he is not named in it. All the same, it was written to him, and it matters very much to him that you get it back from the Queen Dauphine."
"I find it hard to understand," Madame de Cleves went on, "why it should matter to him that the letter be seen, and why it has to be asked for in his name."
"If you will take the time to hear me, Madame," said Monsieur de Nemours, "I will soon show you the truth, and you will learn things so important to the Vidame that I would not have confided them even to the Prince of Cleves, if I had not needed his help to have the honor of seeing you."
"I think that anything you took the trouble to tell me would be useless," Madame de Cleves answered, rather drily, "and you had better go to the Queen Dauphine and tell her, without looking for roundabout ways, what interest you have in that letter, since in any case she has been told it comes from you."
The bitterness Monsieur de Nemours saw in Madame de Cleves gave him the keenest pleasure he had ever felt, and it balanced his impatience to clear himself.
"I do not know, Madame," he went on, "what the Queen Dauphine may have been told; but I have no interest in that letter, and it was written to the Vidame."
"I believe it," Madame de Cleves replied, "but the Queen Dauphine has been told the opposite, and it will not seem likely to her that the Vidame's letters fall out of your pockets. So unless you have some reason I don't know of for hiding the truth from the Queen Dauphine, I advise you to confess it to her."
"I have nothing to confess to her," he answered. "The letter was not written to me, and if there is anyone I wish to convince of that, it is not the Queen Dauphine. But, Madame, since the Vidame's whole fortune is at stake in this, allow me to tell you things that are even worthy of your curiosity."
By her silence Madame de Cleves showed that she was ready to listen, and Monsieur de Nemours told her, as briefly as he could, everything he had just learned from the Vidame. Though these were things that might well have shocked her and held her attention, Madame de Cleves heard them with such coldness that she seemed either not to believe they were true or to be indifferent to them. Her mind stayed in that state until Monsieur de Nemours spoke of Madame d'Amboise's note, which was addressed to the Vidame de Chartres and was the proof of everything he had just said. Since Madame de Cleves knew that this woman was a friend of Madame de Thémines, she found some likelihood of truth in what Monsieur de Nemours was telling her, and it made her think that perhaps the letter had not been written to him after all. That thought drew her all at once, and in spite of herself, out of the coldness she had kept until then. Nemours, after reading her the note that cleared him, handed it to her to read, and told her she might recognize the handwriting. She could not help taking it, looking at the outside to see whether it was addressed to the Vidame de Chartres, and reading the whole of it to judge whether the letter being asked for was the same one she had in her hands. Monsieur de Nemours said everything else he thought likely to persuade her; and since a pleasant truth is easily believed, he convinced Madame de Cleves that he had no part in the letter.
She then began to talk over with him the awkward and dangerous position the Vidame was in, to blame him for his bad conduct, and to look for ways of helping him. She was shocked at the Queen's behavior; she admitted to Monsieur de Nemours that she had the letter; in short, as soon as she believed him innocent, she entered with an open and untroubled mind into the very matters she had at first seemed not to deign to hear. They agreed that the letter must not be given back to the Queen Dauphine, for fear she would show it to Madame de Martigues, who knew Madame de Thémines's handwriting and who, from the interest she took in the Vidame, would easily have guessed it was written to him. They also decided that the Queen Dauphine should not be told everything that concerned the Queen, her mother-in-law. Madame de Cleves, under the pretext of her uncle's affairs, took pleasure in keeping all the secrets Monsieur de Nemours confided to her.
Nemours would not have gone on talking of the Vidame's interests forever. The freedom he found himself in to speak with her would have given him a boldness he had not yet dared to take, if someone had not come to tell Madame de Cleves that the Queen Dauphine ordered her to come to her. Monsieur de Nemours was forced to withdraw. He went to find the Vidame, to tell him that after leaving him he had thought it more fitting to apply to Madame de Cleves, who was the Vidame's niece, than to go straight to the Queen Dauphine. He had no lack of reasons to make the Vidame approve what he had done and to make him hope for a good outcome.
Meanwhile Madame de Cleves dressed in haste to go to the Queen Dauphine. She had scarcely appeared in her room when the Queen Dauphine called her over and said to her in a low voice:
"I have been waiting for you for two hours, and I have never been so hard put to disguise the truth as I was this morning. The Queen has heard about the letter I gave you yesterday. She believes it was the Vidame de Chartres who dropped it, and you know she takes some interest in him. She has had the letter looked for; she had Chastelart asked for it; he said he had given it to me. So they came and asked me for it, on the pretext that it was a pretty letter and the Queen was curious to see it. I did not dare say you had it. I thought she would imagine I had put it in your hands because of the Vidame, your uncle, and that there was a great understanding between him and me. It has already seemed to me that she dislikes his seeing me so often. So I said the letter was in the clothes I wore yesterday, and that the people who had the key to them had gone out. Give me the letter quickly," she added, "so that I can send it to her, and so that I can read it before I send it, to see whether I recognize the handwriting."
Madame de Cleves found herself in an even more awkward position than she had expected.
"I don't know, Madame, what you will do," she replied, "because Monsieur de Cleves, whom I had given it to read, gave it back to Monsieur de Nemours, who came this morning to beg him to ask you for it. Monsieur de Cleves was imprudent enough to tell him he had it, and weak enough to give in when Monsieur de Nemours begged him to hand it over."
"You put me in the worst position I could ever be in," the Queen Dauphine retorted, "and you were wrong to give that letter to Monsieur de Nemours. Since it was I who gave it to you, you should not have given it back without my permission. What do you expect me to say to the Queen, and what will she imagine? She will believe, and with good reason, that the letter concerns me, and that there is something between the Vidame and me. No one will ever persuade her that the letter belongs to Monsieur de Nemours."
"I am very sorry," Madame de Cleves answered, "for the trouble I am causing you; I know how great it is. But it is Monsieur de Cleves's fault, and not mine."
"It is yours," the Queen Dauphine replied, "for having given him the letter. You are the only woman in the world who tells her husband everything she knows."
"I believe I am in the wrong, Madame," Madame de Cleves replied; "but think of repairing my fault, and not of examining it."
"Don't you remember, more or less, what is in the letter?" the Queen Dauphine then asked.
"Yes, Madame," she answered, "I remember it; I have read it over more than once."
"If that is so," the Queen Dauphine went on, "you must go at once and have it written out in an unknown hand. I will send it to the Queen. She will not show it to those who have seen it; and even if she did, I would always maintain that it is the one Chastelart gave me, and he would not dare say otherwise."
Madame de Cleves agreed to this expedient, all the more because she thought she would send for Monsieur de Nemours to get the letter itself back, so that it could be copied word for word and the handwriting more or less imitated; and she believed the Queen would certainly be deceived by it. As soon as she was home, she told her husband the Queen Dauphine's awkward position and asked him to send for Monsieur de Nemours. He was sent for; he came in haste. Madame de Cleves told him everything she had already told her husband, and asked him for the letter. But Monsieur de Nemours replied that he had already given it back to the Vidame de Chartres, who had been so glad to have it again, and to find himself out of the danger he had been in, that he had sent it off at once to Madame de Thémines's friend. Madame de Cleves found herself in a new difficulty, and finally, after much consultation, they resolved to write the letter from memory.
They shut themselves in to work at it. Orders were given at the door to let no one in, and all Monsieur de Nemours's servants were sent away. This air of mystery and confidence held no small charm for Nemours, and even for Madame de Cleves. Her husband's presence and the Vidame de Chartres's interests reassured her, in a way, about her scruples. She felt only the pleasure of seeing Monsieur de Nemours; she had a pure and unmixed joy in it that she had never felt before. That joy gave her a freedom and a playfulness of mind that Monsieur de Nemours had never seen in her, and which doubled his love. Since he had never yet had such pleasant moments, his high spirits rose with them; and when Madame de Cleves tried to begin remembering the letter and writing it down, Nemours, instead of helping her seriously, did nothing but interrupt her and say amusing things. Madame de Cleves fell into the same spirit of gaiety, so that they had already been shut in for a long time, and word had already come twice from the Queen Dauphine telling Madame de Cleves to hurry, before they had done half the letter.
Monsieur de Nemours was glad to prolong a time that was so pleasant to him, and forgot his friend's interests. Madame de Cleves was not bored, and forgot her uncle's interests too. In the end the letter was barely finished by four o'clock; and it was so badly done, and the handwriting they had it copied in looked so little like the one it was meant to imitate, that the Queen could only have missed the truth by taking no trouble at all to find it. And she was not deceived. However hard they tried to persuade her that the letter was addressed to Monsieur de Nemours, she remained convinced not only that it belonged to the Vidame de Chartres, but that the Queen Dauphine had a part in it and that there was some secret understanding between them. That thought so increased the hatred she had for the Queen Dauphine that she never forgave her, and persecuted her until she had driven her out of France.
As for the Vidame de Chartres, he was ruined in her eyes. Whether the Cardinal of Lorraine had already made himself master of her mind, or whether the affair of the letter, which showed her she was deceived, helped her to see through the other deceptions the Vidame had already practiced on her, it is certain that he could never sincerely make it up with her. Their tie was broken, and later she brought him down over the conspiracy of Amboise, the plot against the Guises in which he found himself compromised.
After the letter had been sent to the Queen Dauphine, Monsieur de Cleves and Monsieur de Nemours went away. Madame de Cleves was left alone, and as soon as she was no longer carried by the joy that the presence of the person one loves gives, she came to herself as if out of a dream. She looked with shock at the prodigious difference between the state she had been in the night before and the state she found herself in now. She set before her eyes the bitterness and coldness she had shown Monsieur de Nemours as long as she believed Madame de Thémines's letter was written to him, and what calm and what sweetness had followed that bitterness as soon as he had persuaded her the letter had nothing to do with him. When she thought that the day before she had reproached herself, as if for a crime, for having shown him signs of feeling that compassion alone might have produced, and that by her bitterness she had now shown him signs of jealousy, which were certain proofs of passion, she no longer recognized herself. When she thought further that Monsieur de Nemours saw very well that she knew of his love; that he also saw that, in spite of knowing it, she treated him no worse for it, even in her husband's presence; that on the contrary she had never looked on him so favorably; that she was the reason Monsieur de Cleves had sent for him, and that they had just spent an afternoon together in private, she found that she was in a secret understanding with Monsieur de Nemours, that she was deceiving the husband who least deserved in all the world to be deceived, and she was ashamed to appear so little worthy of esteem even in the eyes of the man who loved her. But what she could bear less than all the rest was the memory of the state in which she had spent the night, and the burning grief that the thought that Monsieur de Nemours loved someone else, and that she was being deceived, had caused her.
Until then she had never known the deadly anxieties of distrust and jealousy. She had thought only of keeping herself from loving Monsieur de Nemours, and she had not yet begun to fear that he might love someone else. Though the suspicions the letter had given her were wiped away, they still opened her eyes to the risk of being deceived, and left her with impressions of distrust and jealousy she had never had before. She was shocked that she had never yet considered how unlikely it was that a man like Monsieur de Nemours, who had always shown such fickleness with women, should be capable of a sincere and lasting attachment. She found it almost impossible that she could ever be content with his passion.
"But even if I could be," she said to herself, "what do I want to do with it? Do I want to allow it? Do I want to return it? Do I want to get into a love affair? Do I want to fail Monsieur de Cleves? Do I want to fail myself? And do I want, in the end, to expose myself to the cruel regrets and the deadly griefs that love brings? I am beaten and overcome by an attraction that carries me away in spite of myself. All my resolutions are useless. I thought yesterday everything I think today, and today I am doing the exact opposite of what I resolved yesterday. I must tear myself away from Monsieur de Nemours's presence; I must go to the country, however strange my journey may look; and if Monsieur de Cleves insists on preventing it, or on wanting to know the reasons, perhaps I shall do him the harm, and myself too, of telling him what they are."
She held to that resolution and spent the whole evening at home, without going to find out from the Queen Dauphine what had become of the Vidame's false letter.
When Monsieur de Cleves came home, she told him that she wanted to go to the country: she was not feeling well, and she needed fresh air. Her husband looked at her and saw a beauty that did not suggest anything seriously wrong, so at first he laughed at the idea of the trip. He reminded her that she was forgetting the princesses' weddings and the tournament, which were about to take place, and that she had none too much time to get ready to appear there as magnificently as the other women. His reasons did not change her plan. She asked him to let her go to Coulommiers while he went to Compiègne with the King. Coulommiers was a fine house a day's journey from Paris that they were having built with great care. Monsieur de Cleves agreed. She went, meaning not to come back soon, and the King left for Compiègne, where he was to stay only a few days.
Monsieur de Nemours had been deeply unhappy not to have seen Madame de Cleves since that afternoon he had spent with her so pleasantly, the one that had raised his hopes. He was so impatient to see her again that he could not rest, and so, when the King returned to Paris, he decided to visit his sister, the Duchess of Mercoeur, who was in the country quite near Coulommiers. He suggested that the Vidame come with him, and the Vidame readily agreed. Nemours made the plan in the hope of seeing Madame de Cleves, and of calling on her with the Vidame.
Madame de Mercoeur welcomed them with great joy and thought of nothing but entertaining them and giving them every pleasure the country offers. While they were out hunting the stag, Monsieur de Nemours lost his way in the forest. As he asked which road would take him back, he learned that he was close to Coulommiers. At that one word, Coulommiers, without any reflection and without knowing what he meant to do, he rode at full gallop in the direction he was shown. He came into the forest and let himself be led at random along carefully made paths, which he judged must lead toward the house. At the end of these paths he found a pavilion. The lower floor was a large salon with two smaller rooms off it; one opened onto a flower garden, separated from the forest only by a fence, and the other looked out on a wide avenue of the park. He went into the pavilion, and he would have stopped to admire its beauty, except that he saw Monsieur and Madame de Cleves coming down the avenue, followed by a large number of servants. He had not expected to find Monsieur de Cleves, whom he had left with the King, and his first impulse was to hide. He went into the room that opened onto the flower garden, meaning to leave by a door that stood open onto the forest. But then he saw that Madame de Cleves and her husband had sat down in the pavilion, that their servants were staying in the park, and that they could not reach him without passing through the room where Monsieur and Madame de Cleves were sitting. He could not deny himself the pleasure of seeing her, nor resist the curiosity of listening to her conversation with a husband who made him more jealous than any of his rivals.
He heard Monsieur de Cleves saying to his wife: "But why won't you come back to Paris? What can keep you in the country? For some time now you have had a taste for solitude that surprises me and grieves me, because it separates us. I even find you sadder than usual, and I am afraid you have some cause for sorrow."
"There is nothing troubling my mind," she answered, with an awkward air, "but the commotion of the court is so great, and there are always so many people at your house, that body and mind cannot help growing tired and looking for rest."
"Rest," he replied, "is hardly right for a person of your age. At home and at court you are not the kind of person to tire yourself out. I would sooner fear that you are glad to be away from me."
"You would do me a great injustice to think so," she said, more and more awkward, "but I beg you to leave me here. If you could stay here, I would be very glad of it, provided you stayed alone and were willing to do without that endless crowd of people who almost never leave you."
"Ah, Madame!" cried Monsieur de Cleves. "Your look and your words show me that you have reasons for wanting to be alone which I do not know, and I beg you to tell me what they are."
He pressed her for a long time to tell him, without being able to make her. And after she had defended herself in a way that only increased her husband's curiosity, she fell into a deep silence, her eyes lowered. Then all at once she spoke, and looked at him.
"Do not force me," she said, "to confess something to you that I have not the strength to confess, though I have meant to several times. Only consider that prudence does not allow a woman of my age, who is her own mistress in her conduct, to remain exposed in the middle of the court."
"What are you making me imagine, Madame?" cried Monsieur de Cleves. "I would not dare say it, for fear of offending you."
Madame de Cleves did not answer, and her silence confirmed her husband in what he had thought.
"You say nothing," he went on, "and that is telling me that I am not mistaken."
"Well then, Monsieur," she answered, throwing herself at his knees, "I am going to make you a confession that no wife has ever made to her husband. But the innocence of my conduct and of my intentions gives me the strength to make it. It is true that I have reasons to keep away from the court, and that I want to avoid the dangers that people of my age sometimes find themselves in. I have never shown the least sign of weakness, and I would not be afraid of showing any, if you left me free to withdraw from the court, or if I still had Madame de Chartres to help guide me. However dangerous the course I am taking, I take it gladly, to keep myself worthy of being yours. I ask your pardon a thousand times if I have feelings that displease you; at least I will never displease you by my actions. Consider that to do what I am doing, a woman must have more affection and more esteem for her husband than any woman has ever had. Guide me, have pity on me, and love me still, if you can."
Through this whole speech Monsieur de Cleves had sat with his head in his hands, beside himself, and it had not occurred to him to raise his wife from her knees. When she stopped speaking and he looked at her, and saw her at his knees, her face covered with tears and so admirably beautiful, he thought he would die of grief. He raised her up and embraced her.
"Have pity on me yourself, Madame," he said. "I deserve it. And forgive me if, in the first moments of a grief as violent as mine, I do not respond as I ought to conduct like yours. You seem to me more worthy of esteem and admiration than any woman who has ever lived in the world. But I also find myself the unhappiest man who ever lived. I have been in love with you from the first moment I saw you. Neither your coldness nor possessing you has been able to put that love out; it lasts still. I have never been able to make you love me, and now I see that you are afraid of loving someone else. And who is he, Madame, this fortunate man who gives you this fear? Since when has he pleased you? What has he done to please you? What road did he find to your heart? I had consoled myself in some way for never having touched your heart with the thought that it could not be touched. Yet another man does what I could not do. I feel at once the jealousy of a husband and the jealousy of a man in love. But it is impossible to feel a husband's jealousy after conduct like yours. It is too noble not to give me complete security; it even consoles me as a man who loves you. The trust and the sincerity you have shown me are beyond any price. You think well enough of me to believe that I will not abuse this confession. You are right, Madame; I will not abuse it, and I will not love you any the less. You make me unhappy by the greatest proof of faithfulness that a woman has ever given her husband. But, Madame, finish, and tell me who it is you want to avoid."
"I beg you not to ask me," she answered. "I am resolved not to tell you, and I believe prudence does not allow me to name him."
"Do not be afraid, Madame," Monsieur de Cleves went on. "I know the world too well to be unaware that respect for a husband does not stop a man from being in love with his wife. One should hate the men who are, and not complain of them. And once more, Madame, I beg you to tell me what I want to know."
"You would press me in vain," she replied. "I have the strength to keep silent about what I believe I ought not to say. The confession I made you was not made out of weakness, and it takes more courage to admit this truth than to undertake to hide it."
Monsieur de Nemours did not miss a word of this conversation, and what Madame de Cleves had just said made him hardly less jealous than her husband. He was so desperately in love with her that he believed everyone else felt the same. It was true, too, that he had several rivals; but he imagined still more, and his mind wandered in search of the man Madame de Cleves meant. He had believed many times that she did not dislike him, but he had built that judgment on things which seemed so slight to him at this moment that he could not imagine he had inspired a passion that must be very violent indeed to drive her to so extraordinary a remedy. He was so carried away that he hardly knew what he was seeing, and he could not forgive Monsieur de Cleves for not pressing his wife harder to tell him the name she was hiding.
Monsieur de Cleves was nevertheless doing everything he could to learn it, and after he had pressed her in vain, she answered: "It seems to me that you ought to be satisfied with my sincerity. Do not ask me for more, and do not give me reason to regret what I have just done. Content yourself with the assurance I give you once again: that none of my actions has betrayed my feelings, and that no one has ever said anything to me that I could have taken offense at."
"Ah, Madame," Monsieur de Cleves broke in suddenly, "I cannot believe you. I remember how confused you were the day your portrait was lost. You gave it away, Madame; you gave away that portrait which was so dear to me, and which belonged to me so rightfully. You have not been able to hide your feelings. You are in love; it is known; your virtue has protected you, so far, from the rest."
"Is it possible," she cried, "that you can think there is any pretense in a confession like mine, which no reason obliged me to make? Trust my words. I am paying a high enough price for the trust I ask of you. Believe me, I beg you: I did not give away my portrait. It is true that I saw it taken, but I did not want to show that I saw, for fear of exposing myself to being told things that no one had yet dared say to me."
"Then how has he shown you that he loves you," Monsieur de Cleves went on, "and what proofs of passion has he given you?"
"Spare me the pain," she replied, "of repeating details that make me ashamed of myself for having noticed them, and which have only too well convinced me of my weakness."
"You are right, Madame," he answered. "I am unjust. Refuse me every time I ask you such things; but do not be offended, all the same, when I ask."
At that moment several of their people, who had stayed in the avenues, came to tell Monsieur de Cleves that a gentleman had come looking for him on the King's behalf, with orders for him to be in Paris that evening. Monsieur de Cleves was obliged to leave, and he could say nothing to his wife except that he begged her to come the next day, and that he implored her to believe that, grieved as he was, he had a tenderness and an esteem for her that she ought to be satisfied with.
When he had gone and Madame de Cleves was left alone, and she looked at what she had just done, she was so appalled that she could hardly believe it was real. She felt that she had robbed herself of her husband's heart and esteem, and that she had dug herself a pit she would never climb out of. She asked herself why she had done something so dangerous, and she found that she had gone into it almost without meaning to. The strangeness of such a confession, which she could find no example of, showed her all its peril.
But when she came to think that this remedy, violent as it was, was the only one that could defend her against Monsieur de Nemours, she found that she ought not to regret it, and that she had not risked too much. She spent the whole night full of uncertainty, agitation, and fear. But at last calm returned to her mind. She even found a sweetness in having given this proof of faithfulness to a husband who deserved it so well, who had so much esteem and so much affection for her, and who had just given her fresh proofs of it by the way he had received what she confessed.
Meanwhile Monsieur de Nemours had left the place where he had heard a conversation that touched him so deeply, and had gone deep into the forest. What Madame de Cleves had said about her portrait had brought him back to life, because it told him that he was the man she did not hate. He gave himself up to that joy at first. But it did not last long, once he reflected that the very thing which had just taught him he had touched her heart ought also to convince him that he would never receive any sign of it, and that it was impossible to win over a woman who would go to so extraordinary a remedy. And yet he felt a keen pleasure at having driven her to this extremity. He took pride in having made himself loved by a woman so unlike every other woman of her sex. In short, he found himself a hundred times happy and unhappy at once. Night overtook him in the forest, and he had great trouble finding the road back to Madame de Mercoeur's. He arrived at daybreak. He was hard put to explain what had kept him; he got out of it as best he could, and returned to Paris that same day with the Vidame.
Nemours was so full of his passion, and so astonished by what he had heard, that he fell into a fairly common imprudence: talking in general terms about one's own particular feelings, and telling one's own adventures under borrowed names. On the way back he turned the conversation to love. He dwelt on the pleasure of being in love with a woman worthy of being loved; he spoke of the strange effects of that passion; and at last, unable to keep to himself the shock Madame de Cleves's action had given him, he told it to the Vidame, without naming her and without saying that he had any part in it. But he told it with so much warmth and so much admiration that the Vidame easily suspected the story concerned Nemours himself. He pressed him hard to admit it. He said that he had known for a long time that Nemours had some violent passion, and that it was unjust to distrust a man who had trusted him with the secret of his own life. Monsieur de Nemours was too much in love to admit his love. He had always hidden it from the Vidame, though the Vidame was the man at court he liked best. He answered that one of his friends had told him this story and had made him promise not to speak of it, and that he begged the Vidame to keep the secret too. The Vidame assured him that he would say nothing. Nevertheless Monsieur de Nemours regretted having told him so much.
Meanwhile Monsieur de Cleves had gone to the King, his heart pierced with a mortal grief. No husband had ever felt so violent a passion for his wife, or esteemed her so much. What he had just learned did not take away his esteem, but it gave him an esteem of a different kind from the one he had felt until then. What occupied him most was the wish to guess who had managed to please her. Monsieur de Nemours came into his mind first, as the most attractive man at court, and then the Chevalier de Guise and the Marshal de Saint-André, as two men who had once hoped to please her and who still paid her a great deal of attention. So he settled on the belief that it had to be one of the three. He reached the Louvre, and the King took him into his private room to tell him that he had chosen him to escort Madame Elisabeth to Spain: he had thought that no one would carry out this commission better, and that no one would do France so much honor there as Madame de Cleves. Monsieur de Cleves received the honor of this choice as he ought, and he even looked on it as something that would take his wife away from the court without any visible change in her conduct. Yet the time of this departure was still too far off to be a remedy for the awkward position he was in. He wrote at once to Madame de Cleves to tell her what the King had just said to him, and he added that he absolutely wanted her back in Paris. She came back as he ordered, and when they saw each other, they both found themselves in an extraordinary sadness.
Monsieur de Cleves spoke to her like the most honorable man in the world, and the one most worthy of what she had done.
"I have no anxiety about your conduct," he said. "You have more strength and more virtue than you think. It is not fear of the future that grieves me, either. The only thing that grieves me is to see you feel for another man what I could never make you feel for me."
"I do not know what to answer," she said. "I am dying of shame to speak of it with you. Spare me, I beg you, such cruel conversations. Govern my conduct; arrange it so that I see no one. That is all I ask of you. But let me say no more to you about a thing that makes me look so little worthy of you, and that I find so unworthy of myself."
"You are right, Madame," he replied. "I am abusing your gentleness and your trust. But have some compassion, too, for the state you have put me in, and consider that, whatever you have told me, you are hiding from me a name that gives me a curiosity I cannot live with. I do not ask you to satisfy it. But I cannot help telling you that I believe the man I ought to envy is the Marshal de Saint-André, the Duke of Nemours, or the Chevalier de Guise."
"I will answer nothing," she said, blushing, "and I will give you no ground, by my answers, either to weaken or to strengthen your suspicions. But if you try to clear them up by watching me, you will make me so awkward that the whole world will see it. In God's name," she went on, "let me see no one, on the pretext of some illness."
"No, Madame," he replied. "People would soon work out that it was a pretense. Besides, I will trust no one but you. That is the road my heart advises me to take, and my reason advises it too. With your nature, by leaving you your freedom I set you narrower limits than any I could lay down."
Monsieur de Cleves was not mistaken. The trust he showed his wife strengthened her all the more against Monsieur de Nemours, and made her take sterner resolutions than any constraint could have forced on her. So she went to the Louvre and to the Queen Dauphine's as usual; but she avoided Monsieur de Nemours's presence and his eyes with such care that she took away almost all the joy he had in believing she loved him. He saw nothing in her conduct that did not persuade him of the opposite. He hardly knew whether what he had heard had not been a dream, so unlikely did it seem. The one thing that assured him he was not mistaken was the extreme sadness of Madame de Cleves, whatever effort she made to hide it. Perhaps kind looks and kind words would not have increased Monsieur de Nemours's love as much as this stern conduct did.
One evening, when Monsieur and Madame de Cleves were at the Queen's, someone said there was a rumor that the King was going to name another great lord of the court to escort Madame Elisabeth to Spain. Monsieur de Cleves had his eyes on his wife when the speaker added that it might be the Chevalier de Guise or the Marshal de Saint-André. He noticed that she was not moved by either of these two names, nor by the prospect of their making the journey with her. That made him believe that neither of the two was the man whose presence she feared. To settle his suspicions, he went into the Queen's private room, where the King was. After staying there a while he came back to his wife and whispered to her that he had just learned it would be Monsieur de Nemours who was going with them to Spain.
The name of Monsieur de Nemours, and the thought of being exposed to seeing him every day on a long journey, in front of her husband, threw Madame de Cleves into an agitation she could not hide. Trying to give it other reasons, she answered: "That is a very unwelcome choice for you. He will share all the honors, and it seems to me you ought to try to have someone else chosen."
"It is not honor, Madame," Monsieur de Cleves went on, "that makes you dread Monsieur de Nemours coming with me. Your displeasure at it has another cause. Your displeasure tells me what another woman's joy would have told me. But do not be afraid. What I have just told you is not true; I invented it to make sure of something I already believed only too well."
He left after these words, not wanting to add by his presence to the extreme awkwardness he saw his wife in.
Monsieur de Nemours came in at that instant, and noticed at once the state Madame de Cleves was in. He went up to her and said in a low voice that out of respect he did not dare ask her what made her more pensive than usual. The sound of his voice brought her to herself. She looked at him without having heard what he had just said, full of her own thoughts and of the fear that her husband would see him beside her.
"In God's name," she said, "leave me in peace."
"Alas, Madame," he answered, "I leave you in peace only too well. What can you complain of? I do not dare speak to you; I do not even dare look at you; I never come near you without trembling. How have I brought on myself what you have just said to me? And why do you let me see that I have some part in the sorrow I find you in?"
Madame de Cleves was very sorry to have given Monsieur de Nemours an opening to speak more plainly than he had ever done in his life. She left him without answering and went home, her mind more agitated than it had ever been. Her husband easily saw that her awkwardness had grown. He saw that she was afraid he would speak to her about what had happened. He followed her into a small room she had gone into.
"Do not avoid me, Madame," he said. "I will say nothing to you that could displease you. I ask your pardon for the surprise I sprang on you earlier; I am punished enough for it by what I learned. Of all men, Monsieur de Nemours was the one I feared most. I see the danger you are in. Have power over yourself, for your own sake, and, if it is possible, for mine. I do not ask it of you as a husband, but as a man whose whole happiness you are, and who has a tenderer and more violent passion for you than the man your heart prefers to him."
Monsieur de Cleves was overcome as he spoke these last words, and could hardly finish them. His wife was pierced by them, and bursting into tears she embraced him with a tenderness and a grief that left him in a state little different from her own. They stayed some time without saying anything, and parted without the strength to speak.
The preparations for Madame Elisabeth's marriage were complete. The Duke of Alba arrived to marry her by proxy. He was received with all the magnificence and all the ceremony such an occasion could call for. The King sent to meet him the Prince of Condé, the Cardinals of Lorraine and of Guise, and the Dukes of Lorraine, Ferrara, Aumale, Bouillon, Guise, and Nemours. They brought several gentlemen with them and a great many pages dressed in their liveries. The King himself waited for the Duke of Alba at the first gate of the Louvre with the two hundred gentlemen of his household, the Constable at their head. When the Duke came near the King, he tried to embrace his knees; but the King prevented him, and had him walk at his side to the Queen's apartments and to Madame Elisabeth's, where the Duke of Alba presented her with a magnificent gift from his master. He then went to Madame Marguerite, the King's sister, to pay her the compliments of the Duke of Savoy and to assure her that he would arrive within a few days. Great assemblies were held at the Louvre to show the Duke of Alba, and the Prince of Orange who had come with him, the beauties of the court.
Madame de Cleves did not dare stay away from them, however much she wanted to, for fear of displeasing her husband, who commanded her absolutely to go. What decided her still more was the absence of Monsieur de Nemours. He had gone to meet the Duke of Savoy, and after the Duke arrived, he was obliged to stay almost always at his side to help him with everything that concerned the ceremonies of his wedding. So Madame de Cleves did not meet Nemours as often as she had been used to, and she found in that a kind of peace of mind.
The Vidame de Chartres had not forgotten the conversation he had had with Monsieur de Nemours. It had stayed in his mind that the story Nemours told him was his own, and he watched him so closely that he might perhaps have worked out the truth, if the arrival of the Duke of Alba and of the Duke of Savoy had not brought the court a change and a bustle of business that kept him from seeing what might have enlightened him. The wish to find out, or rather the natural tendency we all have to tell everything we know to the person we love, made him repeat to Madame de Martigues the extraordinary action of this woman who had confessed to her husband the passion she felt for another man. He assured her that Monsieur de Nemours was the man who had inspired this violent passion, and he begged her to help him watch him. Madame de Martigues was very glad to hear what the Vidame told her, and the curiosity she had always seen in the Queen Dauphine about everything that concerned Monsieur de Nemours made her all the more eager to get to the bottom of this affair.
A few days before the day chosen for the wedding, the Queen Dauphine gave a supper for the King, her father-in-law, and for the Duchess of Valentinois. Madame de Cleves, who was busy dressing, went to the Louvre later than usual. On the way she met a gentleman whom the Queen Dauphine had sent to fetch her. As she came into the room, the Queen Dauphine called out from the bed where she was lying that she had been waiting for her with the greatest impatience.
"I think, Madame," Madame de Cleves answered, "that I have no reason to thank you for that impatience. I am sure it comes from something other than a wish to see me."
"You are right," the Queen Dauphine replied. "But you ought to be grateful to me all the same, because I am going to tell you a story that I am certain you will be very glad to hear."
Madame de Cleves knelt down beside the bed, and luckily for her, the light was not on her face.
"You know," the Queen Dauphine said, "how curious we have been to guess what has caused the change in the Duke of Nemours. I think I know, and it is something that will surprise you. He is madly in love with one of the most beautiful women at court, and she loves him in return."
Madame de Cleves could not take these words to herself, since she did not believe anyone knew she loved him, and they caused her a pain that is easy to imagine.
"I see nothing in that," she answered, "which should surprise anyone, in a man of Monsieur de Nemours's age and looks."
"That is not what should astonish you either," the Queen Dauphine went on. "What should astonish you is this: the woman who loves Monsieur de Nemours has never given him the slightest sign of it, and she was so afraid of not always being able to control her passion that she confessed it to her husband, so that he would take her away from court. And it is Monsieur de Nemours himself who told the story I am telling you."
If Madame de Cleves had first felt pain at the thought that she had no part in this story, the Queen Dauphine's last words threw her into despair, because now she was certain that she had far too much. She could not answer. She stayed with her head bent over the bed while the Queen Dauphine went on talking, so taken up with what she was saying that she did not notice her confusion. When Madame de Cleves had recovered a little, she said: "That story hardly seems likely to me, Madame, and I would very much like to know who told it to you."
"It was Madame de Martigues," the Queen Dauphine replied, "who heard it from the Vidame de Chartres. You know he is in love with her. He told it to her as a secret, and he has it from the Duke of Nemours himself. It is true that the Duke of Nemours did not give him the lady's name, and did not even admit that he was the man she loved, but the Vidame de Chartres has no doubt of it."
As the Queen Dauphine finished these words, someone came up to the bed. Madame de Cleves was turned in a way that kept her from seeing who it was, but she had no doubt when the Queen Dauphine cried out, with an air of gaiety and surprise: "Here he is himself, and I am going to ask him what the truth of it is."
Madame de Cleves knew it was the Duke of Nemours, and so it was. Without turning toward him, she leaned quickly toward the Queen Dauphine and whispered that she must take great care not to speak to him of this story. He had confided it to the Vidame de Chartres, and it was the kind of thing that could make them quarrel. The Queen Dauphine answered, laughing, that she was too cautious, and turned to Monsieur de Nemours. He was dressed for the evening's assembly, and he spoke with that grace which came so naturally to him.
"I think, Madame," he said, "that I may suppose, without presumption, that you were talking about me when I came in, that you meant to ask me something, and that Madame de Cleves objects."
"That is true," the Queen Dauphine replied. "But I will not oblige her the way I usually do. I want to know from you whether a story I have been told is true, and whether you are not the man who is in love with, and loved by, a woman of this court who hides her passion from him with great care, and who has confessed it to her husband."
Madame de Cleves's agitation and distress were beyond anything that can be imagined. If death had offered to release her from that state, she would have welcomed it. But Monsieur de Nemours was even more at a loss, if that is possible. Here was the Queen Dauphine, who he had reason to believe did not dislike him, saying this in front of Madame de Cleves, the person at court she trusted most, and who trusted her most in return. It threw his thoughts into such strange confusion that he could not keep control of his face. The awkward position he saw Madame de Cleves in through his own fault, and the thought of the good reason he had given her to hate him, struck him so hard that he could not answer. The Queen Dauphine, seeing how completely he was thrown, said to Madame de Cleves: "Look at him. Look at him, and judge whether this story is not his own."
Meanwhile Monsieur de Nemours recovered from his first confusion. He saw how important it was to get out of so dangerous a position, and all at once he took command of his wits and his face.
"I admit, Madame," he said, "that no one could be more surprised or more hurt than I am by the Vidame de Chartres's breach of faith, in repeating a story about one of my friends which I told him in confidence. I could take my revenge," he went on, smiling, with an air of calm that nearly took from the Queen Dauphine the suspicions she had just had, "for he has confided things to me that are of no small importance. But I do not know, Madame," he continued, "why you do me the honor of mixing me up in this story. The Vidame cannot say that it concerns me, because I told him the opposite. The part of a man in love may suit me well enough. But the part of a man who is loved, Madame, is one I do not think you can give me."
Nemours was glad to say something to the Queen Dauphine that matched what he had let her see of himself in earlier days, to turn her mind from the thoughts she might have had. She believed she understood what he meant. But without answering it, she went on teasing him about his confusion.
"I was agitated, Madame," he answered, "on my friend's account, and because of the just reproaches he could make me for having repeated something that is dearer to him than life. Still, he only half confided in me, and he did not name the woman he loves. All I know is that he is the most deeply in love, and the most to be pitied, of any man in the world."
"Do you find him so much to be pitied," the Queen Dauphine replied, "since he is loved?"
"Do you believe that he is, Madame?" he answered. "Do you believe that a woman with a real passion could reveal it to her husband? That woman surely does not know what love is. She has mistaken a faint gratitude for the devotion a man feels for her, and called it love. My friend cannot flatter himself with any hope. But unhappy as he is, he counts himself happy at least to have made her afraid of loving him, and he would not change his state for that of the happiest suitor in the world."
"Your friend has a passion that is very easily satisfied," said the Queen Dauphine, "and I am beginning to think it is not yourself you are speaking of. I am very nearly of Madame de Cleves's opinion," she went on. "She maintains that this story cannot be true."
"I do not believe it can be," said Madame de Cleves, who had not yet spoken. "And even if it were possible, how could anyone have found it out? It is not likely that a woman capable of something so extraordinary would be weak enough to tell it. Her husband, presumably, would not have told it either. Or if he did, he would be a husband very unworthy of the way he had been treated."
Monsieur de Nemours saw that Madame de Cleves's suspicions had fallen on her husband, and he was glad to confirm them. He knew that her husband was the most dangerous rival he had to destroy.
"Jealousy," he answered, "and the curiosity to learn more, perhaps, than he has been told, can lead a husband into a great many indiscretions."
Madame de Cleves was at the last limit of her strength and her courage. She could not keep up the conversation any longer, and she was about to say that she felt unwell when, luckily for her, the Duchess of Valentinois came in and told the Queen Dauphine that the King was on his way. The Queen Dauphine went into her dressing room to dress. Monsieur de Nemours came up to Madame de Cleves as she was about to follow.
"I would give my life, Madame," he said, "to speak to you for a moment. But of all the important things I would have to say to you, nothing seems to me more important than to beg you to believe this: if I said anything that the Queen Dauphine might take as meant for her, I did it for reasons that have nothing to do with her."
Madame de Cleves gave no sign of having heard him. She left him without a glance and went to follow the King, who had just come in. There was a great crowd, and she caught her foot in her gown and stumbled. She used that as her excuse to leave a place where she had not the strength to stay, and pretending that she could not stand, she went home.
Monsieur de Cleves came to the Louvre and was surprised not to find his wife there. He was told of the accident that had happened to her. He went home at once to find out how she was. He found her in bed, and he learned that her injury was nothing serious. But after he had been with her for a while, he saw that she was in a sadness so extreme that it surprised him.
"What is the matter, Madame?" he said. "It seems to me you have some other grief than the one you complain of."
"I have the sharpest grief I could ever have," she answered. "What use have you made of the extraordinary trust, or rather the mad trust, that I placed in you? Did I not deserve to have my secret kept? And even if I did not deserve it, did your own interest not demand it? Did the curiosity to learn a name that I must not tell you really drive you to confide in someone, in the hope of finding it out? Nothing but that one curiosity can have made you commit so cruel an indiscretion. And the consequences are as bad as they could possibly be. The story is known. It has just been told to me, by someone who did not know that I was the one it chiefly concerned."
"What are you saying, Madame?" he answered. "You accuse me of having told what passed between you and me, and you inform me that the thing is known. I will not defend myself against having repeated it; you could not believe that of me. You must surely have taken something said about some other woman as said about yourself."
"Ah, Monsieur," she replied, "there is no other story in the world like mine. There is no other woman capable of the same thing. Chance cannot have invented it. No one ever imagined such a thing, and the thought never entered any mind but my own. The Queen Dauphine has just told me the whole story. She had it from the Vidame de Chartres, who had it from Monsieur de Nemours."
"Monsieur de Nemours!" cried Monsieur de Cleves, with a movement that showed both fury and despair. "What! Monsieur de Nemours knows that you love him, and that I know it?"
"You always insist on choosing Monsieur de Nemours rather than anyone else," she replied. "I have told you that I will never answer you about your suspicions. I do not know whether Monsieur de Nemours knows the part I have in this story, or the part you have given him in it. But he told it to the Vidame de Chartres, and said that he had it from one of his friends, who had not named the woman. This friend of Monsieur de Nemours must be a friend of yours, and you must have trusted him in order to find out what you wanted to know."
"Is there a friend in the world to whom one would make such a confidence," Monsieur de Cleves answered, "and would anyone try to clear up his suspicions at the price of telling someone else what he would wish to hide even from himself? Think instead, Madame, of whom you have spoken to. It is more likely that this secret escaped through you than through me. You could not bear alone the awkward position you found yourself in, and you looked for the relief of complaining to some confidante, who has betrayed you."
"Do not finish crushing me," she cried, "and do not be so hard as to accuse me of a fault that you have committed. Can you suspect me of it? Since I was capable of speaking to you, am I capable of speaking to anyone else?"
The confession Madame de Cleves had made to her husband was so great a proof of her sincerity, and she denied so strongly that she had confided in anyone, that Monsieur de Cleves did not know what to think. On the other hand, he was sure he had repeated nothing. It was something no one could have guessed, and yet it was known. So it had to have come from one of the two of them. But what caused him violent pain was knowing that this secret was in someone's hands, and that in all likelihood it would soon be made public.
Madame de Cleves was thinking very nearly the same things. She found it equally impossible that her husband had spoken and that he had not. What Monsieur de Nemours had said, that curiosity could lead a husband into indiscretions, seemed to fit Monsieur de Cleves's state so exactly that she could not believe it had been said by chance. And that likelihood made her decide that Monsieur de Cleves had abused the trust she had placed in him. They were both so taken up with their own thoughts that they were a long time without speaking, and they broke the silence only to repeat the same things they had already said several times over. They were left further apart in heart and in mind, and more changed toward each other, than they had ever been.
It is easy to imagine what kind of night they passed. Monsieur de Cleves had used up all his firmness in bearing the misfortune of seeing a woman he adored in love with another man. He had no courage left. He even thought he had no duty to find any, in a matter where his pride and his honor were so deeply wounded. He no longer knew what to think of his wife. He could no longer see what conduct he ought to require of her, or how he ought to behave himself. On every side he saw nothing but cliffs and chasms. At last, after a very long agitation and uncertainty, and knowing that he would soon have to leave for Spain, he resolved to do nothing that might increase the suspicions or the knowledge of his unhappy state. He went to Madame de Cleves and told her that the question was not which of them had failed to keep the secret. The question was how to show that the story people were telling was a fable in which she had no part. It was in her power to convince Monsieur de Nemours and everyone else of that. She had only to treat him with the severity and coldness she owed to a man who showed her love. By that conduct she would easily rid him of any idea that she had feelings for him. So she need not distress herself over anything he might have thought, because if from now on she showed no weakness, all his thoughts would easily fall apart on their own. And above all, she must go to the Louvre and to the assemblies as usual.
With these words Monsieur de Cleves left his wife without waiting for her answer. She found a great deal of reason in everything he had said, and her anger against Monsieur de Nemours made her believe she would find it easy to carry out. But it seemed hard to her to be present at all the wedding ceremonies, and to appear there with a calm face and an untroubled mind. Still, she was to carry the Queen Dauphine's train, an honor for which she had been chosen over several other princesses, and there was no way to give it up without causing a great deal of talk and making people look for reasons. So she resolved to make an effort over herself. But she took the rest of the day to prepare for it, and to give way to all the feelings that were tormenting her. She shut herself up alone in her private room. Of all her sufferings, the one that pressed on her most violently was that she had reason to complain of Monsieur de Nemours, and could find no way to excuse him. She could not doubt that he had told this story to the Vidame de Chartres; he had admitted it. And from the way he had spoken, she could not doubt either that he knew the story was hers. How could so great an indiscretion be excused, and what had become of the extreme discretion which had touched her so deeply?
"He was discreet," she said to herself, "as long as he believed himself unhappy. But the thought of a happiness, even an uncertain one, put an end to his discretion. He could not imagine that he was loved without wanting it known. He said everything he could say. I did not confess that it was he I loved; he suspected it, and he let his suspicions show. If he had been certain, he would have done exactly the same. I was wrong to believe there was a man capable of hiding what flatters his pride. And yet it is for this man, whom I believed so different from the rest of men, that I find myself like other women, when I am so far from resembling them. I have lost the heart and the respect of a husband who should have been my happiness. Soon I will be looked on by everyone as a woman with a mad and violent passion. The man I have it for no longer doubts it. And it was to avoid these very misfortunes that I risked all my peace of mind, and even my life."
These sad reflections were followed by a flood of tears. But whatever grief weighed her down, she felt that she would have had the strength to bear it, if only she had been satisfied with Monsieur de Nemours.
Nemours was in no calmer state. The indiscretion he had committed in speaking to the Vidame de Chartres, and its cruel consequences, caused him a mortal grief. He could not picture, without being crushed, the awkwardness, the agitation and the distress in which he had seen Madame de Cleves. He was inconsolable at having said things about this story which, however gallant in themselves, now seemed to him coarse and ill-mannered, since they had let Madame de Cleves understand that he knew very well she was the woman with the violent passion, and that he was the man she had it for. All he could have wished for was a conversation with her. But he found that he ought to fear one rather than desire it.
"What could I say to her?" he cried. "Would I go and show her again what I have already made far too plain? Would I let her see that I know she loves me, I who have never even dared to tell her that I love her? Would I begin to speak openly of my passion, and look like a man made bold by his hopes? Can I so much as think of going near her, and would I dare put her through the ordeal of facing me? How could I excuse myself? I have no excuse. I am unworthy of a look from Madame de Cleves, and I have no hope that she will ever look at me again. By my own fault I have given her better weapons against me than any she was looking for, and might have looked for in vain. Through my indiscretion I lose the happiness and the honor of being loved by the most charming and most admirable woman in the world. But if I had lost that happiness without her suffering for it, without having given her a mortal grief, it would be some consolation to me. At this moment I feel the harm I have done her more than the harm I have done myself in her eyes."
Monsieur de Nemours went on grieving and thinking the same thoughts for a long time. The wish to speak to Madame de Cleves kept coming back to him. He thought of ways to manage it; he thought of writing to her. But in the end he decided that after the fault he had committed, and in the mood she was in, the best thing he could do was to show her a deep respect by his grief and his silence, to let her see that he did not even dare appear before her, and to wait for whatever time, chance and her feelings for him might do on his behalf. He also resolved not to reproach the Vidame de Chartres for his breach of faith, for fear of strengthening his suspicions.
The betrothal of Madame Elisabeth, which took place the next day, and the wedding, which took place the day after, so occupied the whole court that Madame de Cleves and Monsieur de Nemours easily hid their sadness and their agitation from the public. The Queen Dauphine mentioned only in passing to Madame de Cleves the conversation they had had with Monsieur de Nemours, and Monsieur de Cleves made a point of not speaking to his wife again about anything that had happened. So she found herself in a less awkward position than she had imagined.
The betrothal took place at the Louvre, and after the banquet and the ball, the whole royal household went to sleep at the Bishop's Palace, as was the custom. In the morning the Duke of Alba, who never dressed in anything but the plainest clothes, put on a coat of cloth of gold mixed with flame color, yellow and black, covered all over with jewels, and on his head he wore a closed crown. The Prince of Orange, just as magnificently dressed and with his liveried servants, and all the Spaniards followed by theirs, came to collect the Duke of Alba at the Hôtel de Villeroy, where he was lodged, and set out four abreast for the Bishop's Palace. As soon as he arrived, everyone went to the church in order of rank. The King led Madame Elisabeth, who also wore a closed crown, with her train carried by Mademoiselle de Montpensier and Mademoiselle de Longueville. The Queen walked next, but without a crown. After her came the Queen Dauphine, Madame Marguerite, the King's sister, Madame de Lorraine, and the Queen of Navarre, their trains carried by princesses. The queens and princesses all had their maids of honor magnificently dressed in the same colors they wore themselves, so that one could tell whose maids they were by the color of their clothes. They climbed onto the platform that had been built in the church, and the marriage ceremonies were performed. Then everyone went back to the Bishop's Palace to dine, and at about five o'clock they left for the Palais, the old royal palace where the Parlement sat, where the banquet was held, and where the Parlement, the sovereign courts and the city magistrates had been invited to attend. The King, the queens, the princes and princesses ate at the marble table in the great hall of the Palais, with the Duke of Alba seated beside the new Queen of Spain. Below the steps of the marble table, on the King's right, was a table for the ambassadors, the archbishops and the Knights of the Order, and on the other side a table for the gentlemen of the Parlement.
The Duke of Guise, in a robe of crimped cloth of gold, waited on the King as Grand Master of his household; the Prince of Condé served his bread, and the Duke of Nemours his wine. When the tables had been cleared, the ball began. It was interrupted by ballets and by extraordinary stage machinery, then taken up again, and at last, after midnight, the King and the whole court went back to the Louvre. Sad as Madame de Cleves was, she still appeared, in everyone's eyes and above all in Monsieur de Nemours's, incomparably beautiful. He did not dare speak to her, though the bustle of the ceremony gave him several chances. But he showed her so much sadness, and such a respectful fear of coming near her, that she no longer found him so guilty, though he had said nothing to excuse himself. He behaved the same way in the days that followed, and that behavior had the same effect on Madame de Cleves's heart.
At last the day of the tournament came. The queens took their places in the galleries and on the stands that had been set aside for them. The four champions appeared at the end of the lists, with such a quantity of horses and liveries that it was the most magnificent spectacle ever seen in France.
The King wore no colors but white and black, which he always wore for Madame de Valentinois, who was a widow. The Duke of Ferrara and all his train were in yellow and red. The Duke of Guise appeared in flesh pink and white. At first no one knew why he had chosen those colors, but then people remembered that they were the colors of a beautiful woman he had loved while she was still unmarried, and whom he loved still, though he no longer dared let her see it. Monsieur de Nemours wore yellow and black, and people looked for the reason in vain. Madame de Cleves had no trouble guessing it. She remembered having said in front of him that she liked yellow, and that she was sorry to be fair, because she could not wear it. Nemours thought he could appear in that color without indiscretion, since Madame de Cleves never wore it, and no one could suspect that it was hers.
Never was such skill shown as the four champions displayed. Though the King was the best horseman in his kingdom, no one knew to whom to give the prize. Monsieur de Nemours had a grace in everything he did that could win over people far less partial than Madame de Cleves. The moment she saw him appear at the end of the lists, she felt an extraordinary emotion, and at every one of his courses she had trouble hiding her joy when he had run it well.
Toward evening, when it was almost over and everyone was about to leave, to the misfortune of the kingdom the King wanted to break one more lance. He sent word to the Count of Montgomery, who was extremely skilled, to take the field against him. The Count begged the King to excuse him, and offered every excuse he could think of. But the King, almost angry, sent word that he absolutely insisted. The Queen sent to the King, begging him to run no more. He had done so well that he ought to be satisfied, and she implored him to come back to her side. He answered that it was for love of her that he was going to run again, and he entered the barrier. She sent the Duke of Savoy to beg him a second time to come back, but it was no use. He ran, the lances shattered, and a splinter from the Count of Montgomery's lance struck him in the eye and stayed there. The King fell from the blow. His equerries, and Monsieur de Montmorency, who was one of the marshals of the field, ran to him. They were stunned to see him so badly hurt. But the King was not alarmed. He said it was nothing much, and that he forgave the Count of Montgomery. One can imagine what agitation and grief such a fatal accident brought to a day meant for rejoicing. As soon as the King had been carried to his bed and the surgeons had examined his wound, they found it very serious. At that moment the Constable remembered the prediction that had been made to the King, that he would be killed in single combat, and he had no doubt that the prediction had come true.
The King of Spain, Philip II, who was then in Brussels, was told of the accident and sent his own physician, a man of great reputation. But he judged the King to be beyond hope.
A court so divided, and so full of opposed interests, was in no small agitation on the eve of so great an event. All the same, every movement was hidden, and people seemed concerned with nothing but their single anxiety for the King's health. The queens, the princes and the princesses hardly ever left his antechamber.
Madame de Cleves knew that she was obliged to be there, that she would see Monsieur de Nemours there, and that she could not hide from her husband the agitation the sight of him caused her. She knew too that his mere presence excused him in her eyes and destroyed all her resolutions. So she decided to pretend to be ill. The court was too busy to pay attention to her conduct, or to work out whether her illness was false or real. Her husband alone could know the truth of it, but she was not sorry for him to know it. So she stayed at home, little concerned with the great change that was coming, and full of her own thoughts, she was entirely free to give way to them. Everyone was at the King's bedside. Monsieur de Cleves came at certain hours to bring her news of him. He treated her exactly as he always had, except that when they were alone there was something a little colder and less open about him. He had not spoken to her again of anything that had happened, and she had not had the strength, and had not even thought it wise, to reopen that conversation.
Monsieur de Nemours, who had expected to find a few moments to speak to Madame de Cleves, was very surprised and very grieved not to have even the pleasure of seeing her. The King's wound proved so serious that on the seventh day the physicians gave him up. He received the certainty of his death with an extraordinary firmness, all the more admirable because he was losing his life by so unlucky an accident, and dying in the flower of his age, happy, adored by his people, and loved by a mistress whom he loved to distraction. On the eve of his death he had Madame Marguerite, his sister, married to the Duke of Savoy, without ceremony. One can imagine what state the Duchess of Valentinois was in. The Queen would not allow her to see the King, and sent to demand from her the King's seals and the crown jewels that she had in her keeping. The Duchess asked whether the King was dead. When she was told that he was not, she answered: "Then I have no master yet, and no one can oblige me to give back what his trust placed in my hands."
As soon as the King had died, at the palace of the Tournelles, the Duke of Ferrara, the Duke of Guise and the Duke of Nemours escorted the Queen Mother, the new King and the Queen his wife to the Louvre. Monsieur de Nemours led the Queen Mother. As they began to walk, she stepped back a few paces and told the Queen, her daughter-in-law, that it was for her to go first. But it was easy to see that there was more bitterness than courtesy in the compliment.
The Cardinal of Lorraine had made himself absolute master of the mind of the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici. The Vidame de Chartres no longer had any share in her good graces, and his love for Madame de Martigues and for his own freedom had even kept him from feeling the loss as keenly as it deserved to be felt. During the ten days of the King's illness the Cardinal had had time to lay his plans and to bring the Queen round to decisions that suited them. So as soon as the King was dead, the Queen ordered the Constable to stay at the Tournelles, beside the body of the late King, to carry out the customary ceremonies. That duty kept him away from everything and left him no freedom to act. He sent a courier to the King of Navarre, urging him to come at once, so that together they could oppose the great rise in power he saw coming for the Guises. The command of the armies was given to the Duke of Guise, and the treasury to the Cardinal of Lorraine. The Duchess of Valentinois was driven from court. The Cardinal de Tournon, a declared enemy of the Constable, was recalled, and so was the Chancellor Olivier, a declared enemy of the Duchess of Valentinois. In short, the court changed its face entirely. The Duke of Guise took the same rank as the princes of the blood in carrying the King's mantle at the funeral ceremonies. He and his brothers were wholly the masters, not only because of the Cardinal's hold on the Queen's mind, but because she believed she could remove them if they ever gave her cause for uneasiness, whereas she could never remove the Constable, who was backed by the princes of the blood.
When the ceremonies of mourning were over, the Constable came to the Louvre and was received by the young King with great coldness. He wanted to speak with him in private, but the King called the Guises in and told him, in front of them, that he advised him to take his rest; that the treasury and the command of the armies were already given; and that when he needed his advice, he would call him to his side. The Queen Mother received him even more coldly than the King had, and she even reproached him for having told the late King that his children did not look like him. The King of Navarre arrived and was no better received. The Prince of Condé, less patient than his brother, complained loudly, and his complaints were useless: he was sent away from court on the pretext of going to Flanders to sign the ratification of the peace. The King of Navarre was shown a forged letter from the King of Spain accusing him of designs on the Spanish strongholds; he was made to fear for his own lands; and in the end he was brought to the idea of going home to Béarn. The Queen gave him the means by putting him in charge of escorting Madame Elisabeth to Spain, and she even obliged him to set out ahead of her. And so there was no one left at court who could balance the power of the house of Guise.
It was a disappointment for Monsieur de Cleves not to be the one to escort Madame Elisabeth, but he could not complain of it, given the greatness of the man preferred to him. Yet what he regretted was less the honor he would have had from the post than the fact that it would have taken his wife away from court without his appearing to have planned it.
A few days after the King's death, it was decided to go to Reims for the coronation. As soon as the journey was spoken of, Madame de Cleves, who had stayed at home all this time pretending to be ill, asked her husband to agree that she should not follow the court, but should go to Coulommiers for the air and to look after her health. He answered that he did not wish to inquire whether it was really her health that kept her from making the journey, but that he consented to her staying behind. He had no trouble consenting to something he had already decided on himself. Whatever good opinion he had of his wife's virtue, he saw clearly that prudence did not allow him to expose her any longer to the sight of a man she loved.
Monsieur de Nemours soon learned that Madame de Cleves was not to follow the court. He could not bring himself to leave without seeing her, and on the eve of his departure he went to her house as late as propriety allowed, hoping to find her alone. Fortune favored his plan. As he came into the courtyard he met Madame de Nevers and Madame de Martigues on their way out, and they told him they had left her alone. He went up with an agitation and confusion that can only be compared to what Madame de Cleves felt when she was told that Monsieur de Nemours had come to see her. The fear that he would speak to her of his passion, the dread of answering him too kindly, the anxiety the visit might cause her husband, the pain of having to account for it to him or of hiding it all from him: everything came into her mind at once and put her in such an impossible position that she decided to avoid the one thing in the world she perhaps wanted most. She sent one of her women to Monsieur de Nemours, who was waiting in her antechamber, to tell him that she had just been taken ill and was very sorry that she could not receive the honor he wished to do her. What grief for him, not to see Madame de Cleves, and not to see her because she did not want him to. He was leaving the next day; he had nothing more to hope for from chance; he had said nothing to her since that conversation at the Queen Dauphine's, and he had reason to believe that his mistake in speaking to the Vidame had destroyed all his hopes. In short, he went away with everything that can embitter a sharp grief.
As soon as Madame de Cleves had recovered a little from the agitation the thought of his visit had given her, all the reasons that had made her refuse it disappeared. She even felt that she had made a mistake, and if she had dared, or if there had still been time, she would have had him called back.
Madame de Nevers and Madame de Martigues, on leaving her house, went to the Queen Dauphine's. Monsieur de Cleves was there. The Queen Dauphine asked them where they had come from. They said they had come from Monsieur de Cleves's house, where they had spent part of the afternoon with a great many people, and that they had left no one there but Monsieur de Nemours. These words, which they thought so harmless, were not harmless to Monsieur de Cleves, though he might well have imagined that Monsieur de Nemours could often find occasions to speak to his wife. Still, the thought that he was at her house, that he was there alone, and that he could speak to her of his love, seemed to him at that moment something so new and so unbearable that jealousy flared up in his heart more violently than it ever had before. It was impossible for him to stay at the Queen Dauphine's. He went home, not even knowing why he was going, or whether he meant to go and interrupt Monsieur de Nemours. As he came near his house he looked about for anything that might tell him whether Nemours was still there. He felt relief at seeing that he was gone, and found some comfort in thinking that he could not have stayed long. He told himself that perhaps it was not Monsieur de Nemours he ought to be jealous of; and though he had no doubt of it, he tried to doubt. But so many things would have convinced him that he did not stay long in the uncertainty he wished for. He went straight to his wife's room, and after talking with her for a while about ordinary things, he could not keep from asking her what she had done and whom she had seen. She gave him an account. When he saw that she did not name Monsieur de Nemours, he asked her, trembling, whether that was everyone she had seen, so as to give her the chance to name him, and to spare himself the pain of her hiding it from him. Since she had not seen him, she did not name him, and Monsieur de Cleves spoke again in a tone that showed his distress:
"And Monsieur de Nemours," he said. "Didn't you see him, or have you forgotten him?"
"I didn't see him, in fact," she answered. "I was feeling unwell, and I sent one of my women to make my excuses."
"So you were unwell only for him," said Monsieur de Cleves, "since you saw everyone else? Why these distinctions for Monsieur de Nemours? Why isn't he the same to you as any other man? Why must you be afraid of seeing him? Why do you let him see that you're afraid? Why do you let him know that you are using the power his passion gives you over him? Would you dare refuse to see him if you didn't know very well that he can tell your severity from rudeness? But why must you be severe with him at all? From a person like you, Madame, everything is a favor except indifference."
"Whatever suspicions you have about Monsieur de Nemours," said Madame de Cleves, "I didn't think you could reproach me for not having seen him."
"I do reproach you, Madame," he replied, "and with good reason. Why not see him, if he has said nothing to you? But, Madame, he has spoken to you. If his silence alone had told you of his passion, it would not have made so deep an impression on you. You could not tell me the whole truth; you hid the greater part of it from me; you even regretted the little you confessed, and you did not have the strength to go on. I am more unhappy than I thought, and I am the unhappiest of all men. You are my wife, I love you the way a man loves a woman he is courting, and I see you love another man. That other man is the most attractive man at court, and he sees you every day, and he knows that you love him. And I could believe," he cried, "that you would overcome your passion for him! I must have lost my reason to have thought it possible."
"I don't know," said Madame de Cleves sadly, "whether you were wrong to think well of conduct as extraordinary as mine. But I don't know whether I was wrong to believe that you would do me justice."
"Have no doubt of it, Madame," replied Monsieur de Cleves. "You were wrong. You expected things of me as impossible as the things I expected of you. How could you hope that I would keep my reason? Had you forgotten that I loved you desperately, and that I was your husband? Either one can drive a man to extremes; what can the two together not do? And to what extremes they are driving me," he went on. "I have nothing but violent and shifting feelings that I cannot master. I no longer find myself worthy of you; you no longer seem to me worthy of me. I adore you, I hate you; I offend you, I ask your pardon; I admire you, and I am ashamed of admiring you. In short, there is no calm left in me and no reason. I don't know how I have gone on living since you spoke to me at Coulommiers, and since the day you learned from the Queen Dauphine that your story was known. I cannot work out how it became known, or what passed between Monsieur de Nemours and you on the subject. You will never explain it to me, and I do not ask you to. I ask you only to remember that you have made me the unhappiest man in the world."
With these words Monsieur de Cleves left his wife's room, and he set out the next day without seeing her. But he wrote her a letter full of grief, of courtesy, and of tenderness. She answered it so touchingly, and with such assurances about her past conduct and the conduct she would keep in future, that the letter made an impression on Monsieur de Cleves and gave him some calm, for her assurances were founded on the truth and were truly what she felt. Besides, since Monsieur de Nemours was going to join the King just as he was, he had the comfort of knowing that Nemours would not be in the same place as Madame de Cleves. Every time she spoke with her husband, the passion he showed her, the honorableness of his conduct, the affection she felt for him, and what she owed him made impressions on her heart that weakened the thought of Monsieur de Nemours. But it was only for a time, and the thought soon came back more vivid and more present than before.
In the first days after Nemours left, she hardly felt his absence; then it seemed cruel to her. Since she had loved him, not a day had passed on which she had not feared or hoped to meet him, and it was a great pain to her to think that it was no longer in the power of chance to bring them together.
She went to Coulommiers, and on the way she took care to have some large paintings brought there, copies she had had made of the originals that Madame de Valentinois had commissioned for her beautiful house at Anet. All the remarkable deeds of the King's reign were in those paintings. Among them was the siege of Metz, and everyone who had distinguished himself there was painted to the life. Monsieur de Nemours was among them, and that was perhaps what had made Madame de Cleves want the paintings.
Madame de Martigues, who had not been able to leave with the court, promised to come and spend a few days at Coulommiers. The young Queen's favor, which they shared, had given them no envy or dislike of each other. They were friends, though they did not confide their feelings to one another. Madame de Cleves knew that Madame de Martigues loved the Vidame, but Madame de Martigues did not know that Madame de Cleves loved Monsieur de Nemours, or that he loved her. Being the Vidame's niece made Madame de Cleves dearer to Madame de Martigues, and Madame de Cleves loved her too, as someone who was in love as she was, and in love with the closest friend of the man she loved.
Madame de Martigues came to Coulommiers as she had promised, and found her living a very solitary life. Madame de Cleves had even looked for a way to be entirely alone, and to spend her evenings in the gardens without any of her household about her. She would go to the pavilion where Monsieur de Nemours had overheard her, and into the room that opened onto the garden. Her women and her servants stayed in the other room, or below the pavilion, and did not come to her unless she called them. Madame de Martigues had never seen Coulommiers. She was surprised by all the beauty she found there, and above all by the charm of the pavilion, and she and Madame de Cleves spent every evening in it. The freedom of being alone together at night, in the most beautiful place in the world, kept the conversation going endlessly between two young women who had violent passions in their hearts; and though they confided nothing to each other, they took great pleasure in talking. Madame de Martigues would have found it hard to leave Coulommiers if leaving it had not meant going where the Vidame was. She left for Chambord, where the court was then.
The coronation had been performed at Reims by the Cardinal of Lorraine, and the rest of the summer was to be spent at the château of Chambord, which was newly built. The young Queen showed great joy at seeing Madame de Martigues again, and after giving her several signs of it, she asked for news of Madame de Cleves and of what she was doing in the country. Monsieur de Nemours and Monsieur de Cleves were with the Queen at the time. Madame de Martigues, who had found Coulommiers wonderful, described all its beauties, and she dwelt at great length on the pavilion in the forest and on the pleasure Madame de Cleves took in walking there alone for part of the night. Monsieur de Nemours knew the place well enough to follow what Madame de Martigues was saying, and it occurred to him that it might not be impossible to see Madame de Cleves there without being seen by anyone but her. He asked Madame de Martigues a few questions to learn more. Monsieur de Cleves, who had watched him the whole time Madame de Martigues was speaking, thought he could see at that moment what was passing through his mind. The questions Nemours asked confirmed him in the thought, until he had no doubt that Nemours meant to go and see his wife. He was not mistaken in his suspicions. The plan took such hold of Monsieur de Nemours that after spending the night thinking of ways to carry it out, he asked the King's leave the very next morning to go to Paris, on some pretext he invented.
Monsieur de Cleves had no doubt of the purpose of the journey, but he resolved to find out the truth about his wife's conduct and not to remain in a cruel uncertainty. He wanted to leave at the same time as Monsieur de Nemours and to come himself, in secret, to discover how the journey would turn out. But he was afraid his departure would look strange, and that Monsieur de Nemours, once warned of it, would take other measures. So he decided to trust a gentleman in his service whose loyalty and intelligence he knew. He told him the awkward position he was in, told him how virtuous Madame de Cleves had always been until then, and ordered him to set out on Monsieur de Nemours's heels, to watch him closely, and to see whether he went to Coulommiers and whether he entered the garden at night.
The gentleman, who was very capable of such a commission, carried it out with all the exactness imaginable. He followed Monsieur de Nemours to a village a mile or so from Coulommiers, where Nemours stopped, and the gentleman easily guessed that he was waiting there for nightfall. He did not think it wise to wait there too. He went on through the village and into the forest, to the place where he judged Monsieur de Nemours would have to pass. He was right in everything he had supposed. As soon as night came he heard footsteps, and though it was dark, he easily recognized Monsieur de Nemours. He saw him walk all around the garden, as if listening for anyone inside and choosing the place where he could get in most easily. The fences were very high, and there were more behind them to keep anyone from entering, so it was quite difficult to make a way through. Monsieur de Nemours managed it all the same. Once he was in the garden, he had no trouble making out where Madame de Cleves was. He saw a great many lights in the room; all its windows were open; and slipping along the fences, he came up to it with an agitation and emotion that are easy to imagine. He placed himself behind one of the windows, which served as a door, to see what Madame de Cleves was doing. He saw that she was alone, but he saw her of such wonderful beauty that he could barely master the rapture the sight gave him. It was hot, and she had nothing on her head or her throat but her hair, loosely tied back. She was on a daybed, with a table before her on which stood several baskets full of ribbons. She was choosing some of them, and Monsieur de Nemours noticed that they were the very colors he had worn at the tournament. He saw that she was tying them in bows on a very unusual Indian cane, one he had carried for a time and had given to his sister, and which Madame de Cleves had taken from her without seeming to recognize that it had belonged to Monsieur de Nemours. When she had finished her work, with a grace and a sweetness that the feelings in her heart spread over her face, she took a candle and went over to a large table that stood opposite the painting of the siege of Metz, where the portrait of Monsieur de Nemours was. She sat down and began to look at that portrait with an attention and a dreaminess that only passion can give.
What Monsieur de Nemours felt at that moment cannot be expressed. To see, in the middle of the night, in the most beautiful place in the world, a person he adored; to see her without her knowing that he saw her; and to see her wholly taken up with things that had to do with him and with the passion she was hiding from him: this is something no other lover has ever tasted or imagined.
He was so far beside himself that he stood motionless, looking at Madame de Cleves, without a thought for how precious the moments were. When he had recovered a little, he thought he should wait to speak to her until she went out into the garden. He believed he could do it more safely there, because she would be farther from her women. But seeing that she stayed in the room, he resolved to go in. When he tried to do it, what agitation he felt, what fear of displeasing her, what dread of changing a face that held so much sweetness, and of seeing it fill with severity and anger.
He saw that there had been madness, not in coming to see Madame de Cleves without being seen, but in thinking of showing himself to her. He saw everything he had not yet considered. It seemed to him wild boldness to come and surprise, in the middle of the night, a woman to whom he had never yet spoken of his love. He thought he had no right to expect her to listen to him, and that she would be justly angry at the danger he exposed her to from the accidents that might happen. All his courage left him, and several times he was on the point of deciding to go back without showing himself. Still, driven by the desire to speak to her, and reassured by the hopes that everything he had seen gave him, he came forward a few steps; but with so much agitation that a scarf he was wearing caught on the window and made a noise. Madame de Cleves turned her head. Whether because her mind was full of him, or because he stood where the light fell well enough for her to make him out, she thought she recognized him. Without hesitating, and without turning toward where he was, she went into the room where her women were. She came in so agitated that, to hide it, she was forced to say she felt unwell; and she said it also to keep all her people busy, and to give Monsieur de Nemours time to withdraw. When she had thought it over a little, she decided she had been mistaken, and that it was an effect of her imagination to have believed she saw Monsieur de Nemours. She knew he was at Chambord; she could see no likelihood that he had attempted anything so reckless. Several times she wanted to go back into the room and look into the garden to see whether anyone was there. Perhaps she wished as much as she feared to find Monsieur de Nemours; but in the end reason and prudence won out over all her other feelings, and she decided it was better to stay in her doubt than to run the risk of settling it. It took her a long time to make up her mind to leave a place where she thought he might be so near, and it was almost daylight when she went back to the house.
Monsieur de Nemours had stayed in the garden as long as he could see a light. He had not been able to give up hope of seeing Madame de Cleves again, though he was convinced that she had recognized him and had gone out only to avoid him. But when he saw the doors being shut, he knew there was nothing more to hope for. He went back for his horse close to the spot where Monsieur de Cleves's gentleman was waiting. The gentleman followed him to the same village he had set out from that evening. Monsieur de Nemours decided to spend the whole day there, so that he could return to Coulommiers at night and see whether Madame de Cleves would again be so cruel as to flee from him, or to keep herself from being seen. Though he felt a keen joy at having found her so full of the thought of him, he was deeply distressed all the same to have seen her flee from him by so natural an impulse.
Passion has never been so tender and so violent as it was then in Monsieur de Nemours. He went off under some willows, along a little stream that ran behind the house where he was hiding. He went as far as he could, so as to be neither seen nor heard by anyone, and gave himself up to the transports of his love. His heart was so full that he was forced to let a few tears fall; but they were not the tears that grief alone draws out. They were mixed with sweetness, and with that charm which is found only in love.
He began to go back over everything Madame de Cleves had done since he had been in love with her: what honorable and modest severity she had always shown him, though she loved him.
"For she does love me," he said. "She loves me; I cannot doubt it. The greatest promises and the greatest favors are not such sure signs as the ones I have had from her. And yet I am treated with the same severity as if I were hated. I hoped that time would help me; I can expect nothing more from it. I see her always defending herself against me and against herself alike. If I were not loved, I would set about pleasing her; but I do please her, I am loved, and it is hidden from me. What can I hope for, then, and what change can I expect in my fate? What! I am to be loved by the most attractive woman in the world, and I am to have that excess of love which the first certainty of being loved gives, only to feel more sharply the pain of being ill-treated!
"Let me see that you love me, beautiful princess," he cried. "Let me see your feelings. If only I can learn them from you once in my life, I consent to your taking up forever the severity you have crushed me with. At least look at me with the same eyes I saw you look at my portrait with tonight. Can you have looked at it with such sweetness, and fled from me myself so cruelly? What are you afraid of? Why is my love so fearful to you? You love me; you hide it from me in vain; you yourself have given me signs of it without meaning to. I know my happiness; let me enjoy it, and stop making me unhappy.
"Is it possible," he went on, "that I am loved by Madame de Cleves, and that I am unhappy? How beautiful she was tonight! How could I resist the urge to throw myself at her feet? If I had done it, perhaps I would have kept her from fleeing; my respect would have reassured her. But perhaps she did not recognize me. I am grieving more than I should, and the sight of a man at so strange an hour simply frightened her."
These same thoughts occupied Monsieur de Nemours all day. He waited impatiently for night, and when it came, he took the road to Coulommiers again. Monsieur de Cleves's gentleman, who had disguised himself to be less noticeable, followed him to the place where he had followed him the evening before, and saw him go into the same garden. Nemours soon realized that Madame de Cleves had not wanted to risk his trying to see her again: every door was shut. He went around on every side to see whether he could find any light, but it was useless.
Madame de Cleves, suspecting that Monsieur de Nemours might come back, had stayed in her room. She had been afraid that she would not always have the strength to flee from him, and she had not wanted to put herself in danger of speaking to him in a way so unlike the conduct she had kept until then.
Though Monsieur de Nemours had no hope of seeing her, he could not bring himself to leave so soon a place where she was so often. He spent the whole night in the garden, and found some consolation in at least seeing the same things she saw every day. The sun was up before he thought of leaving; but at last the fear of being discovered forced him to go.
He found it impossible to leave without seeing Madame de Cleves. So he went to his sister, Madame de Mercoeur, who was then staying at the house she had near Coulommiers. She was extremely surprised by her brother's arrival. He invented a reason for his journey plausible enough to deceive her, and in the end he managed his design so skillfully that she proposed, of her own accord, that they go to see Madame de Cleves. The visit was made that very day, and Monsieur de Nemours told his sister that he would leave her at Coulommiers and ride back in haste to the King. He had planned to part from her at Coulommiers so that she would be the first to leave; in this way, he thought, he had found a sure means of speaking to Madame de Cleves.
When they arrived she was walking in a broad avenue that borders the flower garden. The sight of Monsieur de Nemours disturbed her more than a little, and it left her no doubt that it was he whom she had seen the night before. That certainty stirred some anger in her, at the boldness and imprudence she saw in what he had done. He noticed a coldness in her face that pained him deeply. The conversation was about nothing in particular, and yet he found the art of showing so much wit in it, so much courtesy, and so much admiration for Madame de Cleves, that he dispelled, in spite of her, part of the coldness she had felt at first.
Once he felt reassured on his first fear, he showed an extreme curiosity to go and see the pavilion in the forest. He spoke of it as the most delightful place in the world, and even described it in such detail that Madame de Mercoeur said he must have been there several times to know all its beauties so well.
"I do not think, though," replied Madame de Cleves, "that Monsieur de Nemours has ever been inside it. It was only finished a short while ago."
"It is not long since I was there either," replied Monsieur de Nemours, looking at her, "and I don't know whether I should be glad that you have forgotten seeing me there."
Madame de Mercoeur, who was admiring the beauty of the gardens, paid no attention to what her brother was saying. Madame de Cleves blushed, and, lowering her eyes without looking at Monsieur de Nemours, she said:
"I do not remember seeing you there, and if you have been there, it was without my knowing it."
"It is true, Madame," replied Monsieur de Nemours, "that I went there without your leave, and I spent there the sweetest and the cruelest moments of my life."
Madame de Cleves understood only too well everything he was saying, but she made no answer. She was thinking how to keep Madame de Mercoeur out of the inner room of the pavilion, because the portrait of Monsieur de Nemours was there and she did not want her to see it. She managed it so well that the time slipped by, and Madame de Mercoeur spoke of going home. But when Madame de Cleves saw that Monsieur de Nemours and his sister were not leaving together, she saw plainly what she was about to be exposed to. She found herself in the same awkward position she had been in at Paris, and she took the same course. The fear that this visit might be one more confirmation of her husband's suspicions did a great deal to decide her; and to prevent Monsieur de Nemours from being left alone with her, she told Madame de Mercoeur that she would go with her as far as the edge of the forest, and ordered her carriage to follow.
The grief Monsieur de Nemours felt at finding Madame de Cleves as unbending as ever was so violent that he turned pale on the spot. Madame de Mercoeur asked him if he was ill, but he looked at Madame de Cleves, without anyone noticing, and let her read in his eyes that his only illness was despair. All the same, he had to let them go without daring to follow, and after what he had said he could not go back with his sister. So he returned to Paris, and left it the next day.
Monsieur de Cleves's gentleman had watched him the whole time. He too went back to Paris, and when he saw that Monsieur de Nemours had set out for Chambord, he took the post road so as to arrive before him and give an account of his journey. His master was waiting for his return as for the news that would decide the misery of his whole life.
As soon as he saw him, he judged from his face and his silence that the man had nothing but painful things to tell him. For some time he sat gripped by grief, his head bowed, unable to speak. At last he motioned with his hand for him to go.
"Go," he said. "I see what you have to tell me, but I have not the strength to hear it."
"I have nothing to tell you," the gentleman answered, "on which any certain judgment can be made. It is true that Monsieur de Nemours went into the garden in the forest two nights running, and that the day after he was at Coulommiers with Madame de Mercoeur."
"That is enough," replied Monsieur de Cleves, "that is enough," and he motioned him again to withdraw. "I have no need of any fuller account."
The gentleman was forced to leave his master abandoned to his despair. There has perhaps never been a more violent one. Few men of such high courage and such a passionate heart as Monsieur de Cleves have felt, at one and the same time, the grief that a lover feels at the infidelity of the woman he loves and the shame that a husband feels at being deceived by his wife.
Monsieur de Cleves could not withstand the blow. That same night a fever took hold of him, with such severe symptoms that from that moment his illness looked very dangerous. Word was sent to Madame de Cleves, and she came in haste. When she arrived he was worse still, and she found something so cold and so frozen in his manner toward her that she was extremely surprised and distressed. It even seemed to her that he accepted the care she gave him with reluctance; but in the end she thought this was perhaps an effect of his illness.
As soon as she was at Blois, where the court then was, Monsieur de Nemours could not help feeling joy at knowing she was in the same place as he. He tried to see her, and went every day to Monsieur de Cleves's lodging on the pretext of asking after him; but it was no use. She never left her husband's room, and the state she saw him in gave her violent grief. Monsieur de Nemours was in despair that she should be so stricken. He could easily judge how much this grief revived her affection for Monsieur de Cleves, and how dangerously that affection drew her away from the passion she carried in her heart. For a while this thought gave him a deadly sorrow; but the extremity of Monsieur de Cleves's illness opened new hopes to him. He saw that Madame de Cleves might perhaps be free to follow her heart, and that he might find in the future a future of lasting happiness and pleasure. He could not bear the thought, so much agitation and rapture did it give him, and he turned his mind away from it for fear of finding himself too wretched if he came to lose his hopes.
Meanwhile the doctors had almost given Monsieur de Cleves up. On one of the last days of his illness, after a very bad night, he said toward morning that he wanted to rest. Madame de Cleves stayed alone in his room. It seemed to her that instead of resting he was very restless. She went to him and knelt down beside his bed, her face covered with tears. Monsieur de Cleves had resolved not to show her the violent bitterness he felt against her. But the care she took of him, and her grief, which sometimes seemed to him real and which at other times he took for marks of pretense and treachery, gave him feelings so contradictory and so painful that he could not keep them inside him.
"You are shedding many tears, Madame," he said, "for a death that you are causing, and that cannot give you the grief you show. I am no longer in a condition to reproach you," he went on, in a voice weakened by illness and sorrow, "but I am dying of the cruel grief you have given me. Did an act as extraordinary as the one you performed in speaking to me at Coulommiers have to come to so little? Why open my eyes to your passion for Monsieur de Nemours, if your virtue had no more strength than that to resist it? I loved you so much that I was glad to be deceived; I confess it to my shame. I have missed that false peace of mind you took from me. Why did you not leave me in the untroubled blindness that so many husbands enjoy? I might perhaps have gone my whole life without knowing that you loved Monsieur de Nemours.
"I shall die," he added, "but know that you make death welcome to me, and that after taking from me the esteem and the tenderness I had for you, you have made life a horror. What would I do with life? Spend it with a woman I have loved so much and by whom I have been so cruelly deceived? Or live apart from that same woman, and come to a public scandal and to violence so contrary to my nature and to the passion I had for you? That passion went beyond anything you saw of it, Madame. I hid the greater part of it from you, for fear of troubling you, or of losing something of your esteem by behaving in ways that did not suit a husband. In short, I deserved your heart. I say it once more: I die without regret, since I could not have it, and can no longer wish for it.
"Farewell, Madame. One day you will miss a man who loved you with a true and lawful passion. You will feel the sorrow that reasonable people find in these entanglements, and you will know the difference between being loved as I loved you and being loved by men who, in professing their love for you, are looking only for the honor of seducing you. But my death will leave you free," he added, "and you will be able to make Monsieur de Nemours happy without its costing you any crime. What does it matter," he went on, "what happens when I am gone? And must I be weak enough to look at it?"
Madame de Cleves was so far from imagining that her husband could have any suspicion of her that she listened to all these words without understanding them. The only idea she had was that he was reproaching her for her feelings for Monsieur de Nemours. At last, coming out of her blindness all at once, she cried:
"I, crimes? The very thought of them is unknown to me. The strictest virtue could inspire no other conduct than mine has been, and I have never done a single thing that I would not have wished you to witness."
"Would you have wished," replied Monsieur de Cleves, looking at her with scorn, "that I had witnessed the nights you spent with Monsieur de Nemours? Ah, Madame, is it you I am speaking of, when I speak of a woman who has spent nights with a man?"
"No, Monsieur," she replied. "No, it is not me you are speaking of. I have never spent any nights, or any moments, with Monsieur de Nemours. He has never seen me in private; I have never allowed it, never listened to him, and I would swear any oath..."
"Say no more," Monsieur de Cleves interrupted. "False oaths or a confession would perhaps give me equal pain."
Madame de Cleves could not answer; her tears and her grief took away her power of speech. At last, with an effort, she said:
"Look at me, at least. Listen to me. If only my own interest were at stake, I would bear these reproaches; but your life is at stake. Listen to me for your own sake. It is impossible that with so much truth on my side I should fail to persuade you of my innocence."
"Would to God you could persuade me of it," he cried. "But what can you tell me? Was Monsieur de Nemours not at Coulommiers with his sister? And had he not spent the two nights before that with you in the garden in the forest?"
"If that is my crime," she replied, "it is easy for me to clear myself. I do not ask you to believe me; but believe all your servants. Ask them whether I went to the garden in the forest the evening before Monsieur de Nemours came to Coulommiers, and whether I did not leave it the evening before that two hours earlier than I usually did."
She then told him how she had thought she saw someone in the garden, and she admitted that she had believed it was Monsieur de Nemours. She spoke with such assurance, and the truth is so easily believed even when it is not probable, that Monsieur de Cleves was almost convinced of her innocence.
"I do not know," he said, "whether I ought to let myself believe you. I feel so close to death that I do not want to see anything that might make me regret leaving life. You have opened my eyes too late; but it will always be a comfort to me to carry away the thought that you are worthy of the esteem I had for you. I beg you to let me have the further consolation of believing that my memory will be dear to you, and that, if it had depended on you, you would have had for me the feelings you have for another."
He wanted to go on, but a faintness took his speech away. Madame de Cleves sent for the doctors, who found him almost without life. He lingered a few days more nonetheless, and died at last with admirable steadiness.
Madame de Cleves was left in a grief so violent that she nearly lost the use of her reason. The young Queen came to see her, with great kindness, and took her to a convent without her knowing where she was being taken. Her sisters-in-law brought her back to Paris before she was yet in a condition to feel her sorrow distinctly. When she began to have the strength to face it, and saw what a husband she had lost; when she considered that she was the cause of his death, and that it was through the passion she had felt for another man that she was the cause of it, the horror she felt for herself and for Monsieur de Nemours cannot be described.
In those first days Nemours did not dare to pay her any attentions beyond what propriety required. He knew Madame de Cleves well enough to believe that anything more pressing would be unwelcome to her. But what he learned next showed him clearly that he would have to keep to the same conduct for a long time.
One of his equerries told him that Monsieur de Cleves's gentleman, who was his close friend, had said to him, in his grief at the loss of his master, that Monsieur de Nemours's journey to Coulommiers was the cause of his death. Monsieur de Nemours was extremely surprised by this account; but after thinking it over he guessed part of the truth, and he could well judge what Madame de Cleves's feelings would be at first, and how she would turn away from him, if she believed that her husband's illness had been caused by jealousy. He decided that he must not even remind her of his name so soon, and he kept to this course, painful as he found it.
He made a journey to Paris, and still could not keep himself from going to her door to ask for news of her. He was told that no one saw her, and that she had even forbidden her people to tell her who had come asking for her. Perhaps these strict orders were given with Nemours in mind, so that she would never hear him spoken of. But Monsieur de Nemours was too much in love to be able to live so completely deprived of the sight of Madame de Cleves. He resolved to find some means, however difficult, of escaping from a state that seemed to him unbearable.
Her grief went beyond the bounds of reason. Her husband dying, and dying because of her, and with such tenderness for her, never left her mind. She went over and over everything she owed him, and she blamed herself as if it were a crime that she had never felt passion for him, as if that had been something in her power. Her only consolation was to think that she mourned him as much as he deserved to be mourned, and that for the rest of her life she would do only what he would have been glad to see her do, had he lived.
She had wondered several times how he had known that Monsieur de Nemours had come to Coulommiers. She did not suspect Nemours of having told it, and it even seemed to her a matter of indifference whether he had repeated it, so fully did she believe herself cured of the passion she had felt for him, and far removed from it. All the same, she felt a sharp pain at the thought that he was the cause of her husband's death, and she remembered with distress the fear Monsieur de Cleves had shown, as he lay dying, that she would marry him. But all these griefs were lost in the grief of losing her husband, and she believed she had no other.
After several months had passed she came out of that violent grief and passed into a state of sadness and languor. Madame de Martigues made a journey to Paris and visited her faithfully for as long as she stayed there. She talked to her about the court and everything that was happening in it; and though Madame de Cleves did not seem to take any interest, Madame de Martigues went on telling her about it all the same, to distract her.
She gave her news of the Vidame, of Monsieur de Guise, and of all the others who stood out for their person or their worth.
"As for Monsieur de Nemours," she said, "I don't know whether affairs of state have taken the place of love affairs in his heart, but he is far less cheerful than he used to be. He seems to have withdrawn almost entirely from the company of women. He often makes journeys to Paris, and I believe he is there even now."
The name of Monsieur de Nemours surprised Madame de Cleves and made her blush. She changed the subject, and Madame de Martigues did not notice her agitation.
The next day, looking for occupations that suited the state she was in, she went to see a man near her house who made silk work of an unusual kind, meaning to have some of the same made for herself. After she had been shown his pieces, she saw the door of a room where she thought there might be more, and asked for it to be opened. The master replied that he did not have the key, and that the room was taken by a man who came there sometimes during the day to draw the fine houses and gardens that could be seen from its windows.
"He is the handsomest man in the world," he added. "He hardly looks like someone reduced to earning his living. Every time he comes here, I see him looking at the houses and the gardens, but I never see him work."
Madame de Cleves listened to this with close attention. What Madame de Martigues had told her, that Monsieur de Nemours was sometimes in Paris, joined in her imagination with this handsome man who came so near her house, and gave her an idea of Monsieur de Nemours, of Monsieur de Nemours bent on seeing her, that threw her into a confused agitation whose cause she did not even know. She went to the windows to see where they looked out. She found that they looked over her whole garden and the front of her apartments; and when she was back in her room, she easily picked out the very window where she had been told this man came. The thought that it was Monsieur de Nemours changed the whole state of her mind. She no longer found herself in that sad calm she had begun to taste; she felt anxious and restless. At last, unable to bear her own company, she went out to take the air in a garden beyond the outskirts of the city, where she expected to be alone. When she arrived she thought she had not been mistaken: she saw no sign that anyone was there, and she walked for a good while.
After crossing a small wood, she saw at the end of an avenue, in the most secluded corner of the garden, a kind of summer-house open on every side, and she walked toward it. As she came near it she saw a man lying on the benches, who seemed buried in deep thought, and she recognized Monsieur de Nemours. The sight stopped her short. But her servants, who were following her, made some noise, and it drew Monsieur de Nemours out of his reverie. Without looking to see who had made the noise he had heard, he rose from his place to avoid the company coming toward him, and turned into another avenue, making a bow so low that it kept him from even seeing the people he was bowing to.
If he had known whom he was avoiding, how eagerly he would have turned back! But he went on along the avenue, and Madame de Cleves watched him go out by a back gate where his carriage was waiting. What an effect that moment's sight had on her heart! What a sleeping passion it rekindled there, and with what violence! She went and sat down in the very place Monsieur de Nemours had just left, and she stayed there as if crushed. He rose up in her thoughts, more lovable than anyone in the world: a man who had loved her for so long with a passion full of respect and faithfulness, who scorned everything for her sake, who respected even her grief, who thought of seeing her without a thought of being seen, who had left the court, where he was the delight of everyone, to come and look at the walls that shut her in, and to come and dream in places where he could not hope to meet her. In short, a man worthy to be loved for his devotion alone, and for whom her own feelings were so violent that she would have loved him even if he had not loved her; and more than that, a man of high rank, and of a rank that matched her own. There was no longer any duty, any virtue, to stand against her feelings. Every obstacle had been removed, and nothing remained of their past condition but Monsieur de Nemours's passion for her and hers for him.
All these ideas were new to her. Her grief at Monsieur de Cleves's death had occupied her enough to keep her from ever looking at them. The presence of Monsieur de Nemours brought them crowding into her mind. But when it was wholly filled with them, and she remembered as well that this same man whom she now thought of as able to marry her was the one she had loved while her husband was alive, and who was the cause of his death; that even as he died, her husband had shown his fear that she would marry him; then her strict virtue was so wounded by the thought that she found hardly less crime in marrying Monsieur de Nemours than she had found in loving him during her husband's life. She gave herself up to these reflections, so contrary to her happiness, and she strengthened them further with several reasons that concerned her peace of mind and the evils she foresaw if she married him. At last, after she had stayed two hours in that place, she went home, convinced that she must flee the sight of him as something wholly opposed to her duty.
But that conviction, which was the work of her reason and her virtue, did not carry her heart with it. Her heart stayed bound to Monsieur de Nemours with a violence that put her in a state deserving of pity, and that left her no peace of mind. She passed one of the cruelest nights she had ever passed. In the morning her first impulse was to go and see whether anyone was at the window that looked into her house. She went, and she saw Monsieur de Nemours there. The sight surprised her, and she drew back so quickly that he judged he had been recognized. He had often wished to be, ever since his passion had made him find these ways of seeing Madame de Cleves; and when he had no hope of that pleasure, he went to dream in the same garden where she had found him.
Worn out at last by a state so wretched and so uncertain, he resolved to try some way of learning his fate. "What am I waiting for?" he said to himself. "I have known for a long time that she loves me. She is free; she has no duty left to set against me. Why should I settle for seeing her without being seen and without speaking to her? Can love really have taken away my reason and my boldness so completely, and made me so different from what I was in every other passion of my life? I owed some respect to Madame de Cleves's grief. But I have respected it too long, and I am giving her time to put out the feeling she has for me."
After these reflections he thought about how he might see her. He decided there was nothing left that obliged him to hide his passion from the Vidame de Chartres, her uncle. He resolved to speak to him about it, and to tell him what he intended toward his niece.
The Vidame was in Paris at the time. Everyone had come there to see to his horses and his clothes, so as to follow the King, who was to escort the Queen of Spain on her way. So Monsieur de Nemours went to the Vidame and made him a frank confession of everything he had kept hidden until then, except for Madame de Cleves's feelings, which he did not want to seem to know.
The Vidame heard everything he said with great joy. He assured him that, without knowing his feelings, he had often thought, ever since Madame de Cleves was widowed, that she was the only woman worthy of him. Monsieur de Nemours begged him to find a way for him to speak to her and to learn how she was disposed toward him.
The Vidame offered to take him to her house, but Monsieur de Nemours thought she would be offended, because she was still seeing no one. They decided that the Vidame should ask her to come to his house on some pretext, and that Monsieur de Nemours should come in by a hidden staircase so that no one would see him. It was done as they had planned. Madame de Cleves came; the Vidame went to receive her and led her into a large room at the end of his apartments; and some time later Monsieur de Nemours came in as if chance had brought him there. Madame de Cleves was extremely surprised to see him. She blushed, and tried to hide it. The Vidame talked at first of one thing and another, and then went out, pretending he had some order to give. He told Madame de Cleves that he was leaving her to do the honors of his house, and that he would be back in a moment.
No one can express what Monsieur de Nemours and Madame de Cleves felt at finding themselves alone, and able to speak to each other, for the first time. For a while they said nothing. At last Monsieur de Nemours broke the silence:
"Will you forgive Monsieur de Chartres, Madame, for giving me a chance to see you and talk with you, which you have always so cruelly denied me?"
"I ought not to forgive him," she answered, "for forgetting the state I am in, and what he is exposing my reputation to."
As she said this she made to leave, and Monsieur de Nemours held her back.
"Don't be afraid, Madame," he said. "No one knows I am here, and there is no accident to fear. Listen to me, Madame, listen to me. If not out of kindness, then at least for your own sake, to spare yourself the wild things that a passion I no longer control would certainly drive me to."
For the first time, Madame de Cleves gave way to the pull she felt toward Monsieur de Nemours, and she looked at him with eyes full of sweetness and charm.
"But what do you hope for," she said, "from the indulgence you are asking of me? You may well regret having obtained it, and I will certainly regret having granted it. You deserve a happier fate than the one you have had until now, and than any you can find in the future, unless you look for it elsewhere."
"I, Madame, look for happiness elsewhere!" he said. "Is there any happiness but being loved by you? Though I have never spoken to you, I cannot believe, Madame, that you do not know of my passion, and that you do not know it to be the truest and the most violent passion there will ever be. What trials it has been through, from things you know nothing of! And what trials you have put it through by your severity!"
"Since you want me to speak to you, and since I have made up my mind to do it," Madame de Cleves answered, sitting down, "I will do it with a sincerity you will not easily find in women. I will not tell you that I have not seen the attachment you have had for me; perhaps you would not believe me if I did. So I admit not only that I have seen it, but that I have seen it exactly as you could wish it to have appeared to me."
"And if you saw it, Madame," he broke in, "is it possible that it did not touch you? And may I dare to ask whether it made no impression on your heart?"
"You must have judged that from my conduct," she replied. "But I would like very much to know what you thought of it."
"I would have to be in a happier state to dare to tell you," he answered, "and my fate has too little to do with what I would say. All I can tell you, Madame, is that I wished with all my heart that you had not confessed to Monsieur de Cleves what you were hiding from me, and that you had hidden from him what you let me see."
"How could you have found out," she said, blushing, "that I confessed anything to Monsieur de Cleves?"
"I learned it from you yourself, Madame," he answered. "But if you are to forgive the boldness I had in listening to you, remember whether I ever took advantage of what I heard, whether my hopes grew because of it, and whether I was any bolder in speaking to you."
He began to tell her how he had overheard her conversation with Monsieur de Cleves, but she interrupted him before he had finished.
"Tell me no more," she said. "I see now how you came to be so well informed. You showed it only too plainly at the Queen Dauphine's, when she had heard the story from the people you had confided it to."
Monsieur de Nemours then told her how the thing had come about.
"Don't excuse yourself," she said. "I forgave you long ago, without your telling me any reason. But since you learned from my own lips what I had meant to hide from you all my life, I will admit that you have made me feel things I did not know before I saw you. I had so little idea of them that at first they gave me a shock, which only added to the agitation that always goes with them. I make this confession with less shame because I make it at a time when I can make it without wrongdoing, and because you have seen that my feelings have not governed my conduct."
"Do you believe, Madame," said Monsieur de Nemours, throwing himself at her knees, "that I will not die at your feet of joy and rapture?"
"I am only telling you," she answered with a smile, "what you already knew only too well."
"Ah, Madame," he replied, "what a difference there is between knowing it by an accident of chance and learning it from you yourself, and seeing that you are willing for me to know it!"
"It is true," she said, "that I am willing for you to know it, and that I find a sweetness in telling you. I am not even sure that I am not telling you more for my own sake than for yours. Because, in the end, this confession will lead to nothing, and I will follow the strict rules that my duty lays on me."
"You are not thinking, Madame," answered Monsieur de Nemours. "There is no duty binding you any more; you are free. And if I dared, I would even say that it is in your power to arrange it so that your duty will one day oblige you to keep the feelings you have for me."
"My duty," she replied, "forbids me ever to think of anyone, and of you less than of anyone in the world, for reasons you do not know."
"Perhaps I do know them, Madame," he said. "But they are not real reasons. I believe I know that Monsieur de Cleves thought me more fortunate than I was, and that he imagined you had approved of the wild things that passion made me do without your consent."
"Let us not speak of that affair," she said. "I cannot bear to think of it. It shames me, and it is too painful to me as well, because of what it led to. It is only too true that you are the cause of Monsieur de Cleves's death. The suspicions that your reckless conduct gave him cost him his life, as surely as if you had taken it with your own hands. Consider what I would have to do if the two of you had come to blows and the same misfortune had followed. I know very well that in the eyes of the world it is not the same thing. But in mine there is no difference, because I know that it is through you that he died, and that it was because of me."
"Ah, Madame," said Monsieur de Nemours, "what a phantom of duty you are setting against my happiness! What, Madame, will an empty, groundless thought keep you from making a man happy whom you do not hate? What! Could I have conceived the hope of spending my life with you; could my fate have led me to love the most admirable woman in the world; could I have seen in her everything that makes a woman adorable; could she have not hated me, and could I have found in her conduct everything a man could wish for in a wife? Because, after all, Madame, you are perhaps the only woman in whom those two things have ever been found together to the degree they are in you. Every man who marries a woman who loves him trembles as he marries her, and looks with fear at the way she behaved with him, wondering how she will behave with others. But in you, Madame, there is nothing to fear, and nothing but reasons for admiration. Could I have looked, I say, on such great happiness, only to see you yourself raise obstacles to it? Ah, Madame, you forget that you have set me apart from the rest of men. Or rather, you never did set me apart. You were mistaken, and I flattered myself."
"You did not flatter yourself," she answered. "The reasons of my duty might not seem so strong to me without that preference you suspect, and it is that preference that makes me foresee misery if I bind myself to you."
"I have nothing to answer, Madame," he said, "when you show me that you are afraid of misery. But I confess that after everything you have been willing to tell me, I did not expect to meet so cruel a reason."
"It is so far from being an insult to you," said Madame de Cleves, "that I find it very hard even to tell you."
"Alas, Madame," he replied, "what can you be afraid of that flatters me too much, after what you have just said to me?"
"I want to go on speaking to you with the same sincerity I began with," she said, "and I am going to set aside all the reserve and all the delicacy I ought to keep in a first conversation. But I beg you to hear me out without interrupting.
"I believe I owe your devotion the small reward of hiding none of my feelings from you, and of letting you see them as they are. This will probably be the only time in my life that I will allow myself to show them to you. And yet I cannot admit without shame that the certainty of no longer being loved by you as I am now seems to me such a horrible misfortune that, even if I had no insurmountable reasons of duty, I doubt whether I could bring myself to risk it. I know that you are free, that I am free, and that things stand in such a way that the world might have no cause to blame you, or me either, if we bound ourselves to each other forever. But do men keep their passion in those eternal bonds? Should I hope for a miracle in my favor? And can I put myself in a position to watch the certain end of a passion I would have made my whole happiness? Monsieur de Cleves was perhaps the only man in the world capable of keeping love alive in marriage. My fate did not allow me to profit from that happiness; perhaps, too, his passion lasted only because he found none in me. But I would not have the same way of keeping yours. I even believe that it is the obstacles that have made you constant. There have been enough of them to spur you on to overcome them, and my involuntary actions, or the things that chance has taught you, have given you enough hope to keep you from giving up."
"Ah, Madame," said Monsieur de Nemours, "I cannot keep the silence you impose on me. You do me too great an injustice, and you show me too plainly how far you are from being on my side."
"I admit," she answered, "that passions may lead me, but they cannot blind me. Nothing can keep me from seeing that you were born with every disposition for love affairs, and every quality that brings success in them. You have already had several passions; you would have others; I would no longer make you happy; I would see you with another woman as you had been with me. It would be a mortal grief to me, and I could not even be sure of escaping the misery of jealousy. I have said too much to you to hide that you have already made me feel it. The evening the Queen Dauphine gave me that letter of Madame de Thémines's, which they said was addressed to you, I suffered such cruel pain that I have kept an idea of it ever since, and it makes me believe that jealousy is the greatest of all evils.
"Out of vanity or out of taste, every woman wants to attach you to her. There are few whom you do not please; my own experience would make me believe that there is none whom you could not please. I would always believe you in love and loved in return, and I would not often be wrong. And in that state, all the same, I would have no course open to me but to suffer; I do not even know if I would dare to complain. One can reproach a suitor. But can one reproach a husband, when all one has to reproach him with is that he no longer loves? And even if I could get used to that kind of misery, could I get used to the other kind: to believing that I always see Monsieur de Cleves accusing you of his death, reproaching me for having loved you, for having married you, and making me feel the difference between his devotion and yours? It is impossible," she went on, "to set aside reasons so strong. I must stay in the state I am in, and keep to the resolutions I have made never to leave it."
"Oh, do you believe you can, Madame?" cried Monsieur de Nemours. "Do you think your resolutions will hold out against a man who adores you, and who is fortunate enough to please you? It is harder than you think, Madame, to resist what pleases us and what loves us. You have done it by a virtue so strict that there is hardly an example of it. But that virtue no longer stands against your feelings, and I hope you will follow them in spite of yourself."
"I know very well that there is nothing harder than what I am undertaking," replied Madame de Cleves. "I distrust my own strength, with all my reasons. What I believe I owe to the memory of Monsieur de Cleves would be weak on its own if my peace of mind did not support it; and the reasons of my peace of mind need the support of my duty. But though I distrust myself, I believe I will never overcome my scruples, and I have no hope of overcoming the feeling I have for you either. It will make me unhappy, and I will deny myself the sight of you, whatever it costs me to do it. I beg you, by all the power I have over you, not to seek any occasion to see me. I am in a state that makes crimes of everything that might be permitted at another time, and propriety alone forbids any dealings between us."
Monsieur de Nemours threw himself at her feet and gave way to all the different feelings that shook him. He showed her, by his words and by his tears, the most ardent and the most tender passion that ever touched a heart. Madame de Cleves's heart was not unmoved; and looking at him with eyes a little swollen with tears, she cried:
"Why must it be that I can accuse you of Monsieur de Cleves's death? Why did I not come to know you only after I was free, or why did I not know you before I was bound? Why does fate separate us by an obstacle so impossible to overcome?"
"There is no obstacle, Madame," said Monsieur de Nemours. "You alone stand in the way of my happiness. You alone are imposing on yourself a law that virtue and reason could not impose on you."
"It is true," she replied, "that I am sacrificing a great deal to a duty that exists only in my imagination. Wait and see what time may do. Monsieur de Cleves has only just died, and that dreadful sight is too close for me to see things clearly and distinctly. In the meantime, take what pleasure there is in having made yourself loved by a woman who would never have loved anyone if she had never seen you. Believe that the feelings I have for you will last forever, and that they will remain the same whatever I do. Goodbye," she said. "This is a conversation that shames me. Give an account of it to the Vidame; I consent to that, and I ask it of you."
With these words she went out, and Monsieur de Nemours could not hold her back. She found the Vidame in the next room. He saw her so agitated that he did not dare speak to her, and he handed her into her carriage without a word. He went back to Monsieur de Nemours, who was so full of joy, sadness, shock and admiration, of every feeling, in short, that a passion full of fear and hope can give, that he was not in command of his reason. It was a long time before the Vidame could get him to give an account of his conversation. He did it at last; and Monsieur de Chartres, without being in love, admired the virtue, the mind and the worth of Madame de Cleves no less than Monsieur de Nemours did himself. They considered what Nemours might hope for from his fate; and whatever fears his love might give him, he agreed with the Vidame that it was impossible for Madame de Cleves to hold to her present resolutions. All the same, they agreed that her orders had to be obeyed. If the world noticed his attachment to her, they feared she would make declarations and bind herself before society to commitments she would then keep, for fear people might think she had loved him while her husband was alive.
Monsieur de Nemours decided to follow the King. It was a journey he could not very well avoid in any case, and he resolved to go, without even trying to see Madame de Cleves again from the place where he had sometimes watched her. He begged the Vidame to speak to her. What did he not say for him to repeat to her! What an endless number of reasons to persuade her to overcome her scruples! In the end, a good part of the night had gone before Monsieur de Nemours thought of leaving him in peace.
Madame de Cleves was in no state to find any. It was so new a thing for her to have broken out of the constraint she had imposed on herself, to have allowed someone, for the first time in her life, to tell her that he loved her, and to have said herself that she loved him, that she no longer knew herself. She was shocked at what she had done; she regretted it; she was glad of it. All her feelings were full of agitation and passion. She went over again the reasons of duty that stood in the way of her happiness. She grieved to find them so strong, and she regretted having shown them so plainly to Monsieur de Nemours. The thought of marrying him had come into her mind as soon as she had seen him again in that garden, but it had not made the same impression on her as the conversation she had just had with him, and there were moments when she found it hard to understand how she could be unhappy if she married him. She would gladly have been able to tell herself that she was wrong, both in her scruples about the past and in her fears for the future. At other moments reason and duty showed her the very opposite, and swept her quickly to the resolution never to remarry and never to see Monsieur de Nemours again. But that was a very violent resolution to fix in a heart as touched as hers, and so newly given over to the charms of love. In the end, to give herself some calm, she told herself that there was no need yet to force herself to any resolution; propriety gave her a considerable time to make up her mind. But she resolved to stand firm on one thing: she would have no dealings with Monsieur de Nemours.
The Vidame came to see her, and he pleaded Nemours's cause with all the wit and all the care imaginable. He could not make her change her own conduct, or the rule she had laid on Monsieur de Nemours. She told him that she meant to remain in the state she was in; that she knew it would be hard to carry out, but that she hoped to have the strength for it. She made him see so clearly how deeply she was affected by the belief that Monsieur de Nemours had caused her husband's death, and how convinced she was that in marrying him she would be acting against her duty, that the Vidame feared it would be no easy thing to remove that impression. He did not tell Nemours what he thought. When he gave him an account of the conversation, he left him all the hope that reason ought to give a man who is loved.
They set out the next day to join the King. The Vidame wrote to Madame de Cleves, at Monsieur de Nemours's request, to speak to her of him; and in a second letter that soon followed the first, Monsieur de Nemours added a few lines in his own hand. But Madame de Cleves, who did not want to break the rules she had set herself, and who feared the accidents that can happen with letters, sent word to the Vidame that she would receive no more of his letters if he went on speaking to her of Monsieur de Nemours. She said it so firmly that Nemours himself asked him not to mention his name again.
The court went with the Queen of Spain as far as Poitou. During this absence Madame de Cleves was left to herself; and the farther she was from Monsieur de Nemours and from everything that could remind her of him, the more she called up the memory of Monsieur de Cleves, which she made it a point of honor to keep alive. The reasons she had for not marrying Monsieur de Nemours seemed to her strong on the side of her duty and insurmountable on the side of her peace of mind. The end of his love, and the miseries of jealousy, which she believed were certain in any marriage, showed her a sure misfortune she would be throwing herself into. But she also saw that she was attempting an impossible thing: to resist, face to face, the most attractive man in the world, whom she loved and who loved her, and to resist him over something that offended neither virtue nor propriety. She judged that only absence and distance could give her any strength. She found she needed it, not only to hold to her resolution not to bind herself, but even to keep herself from seeing Monsieur de Nemours; and she resolved to make a fairly long journey, so as to pass all the time that propriety obliged her to live in retirement. Some large estates she owned toward the Pyrenees seemed to her the fittest place she could choose. She left a few days before the court came back; and as she went, she wrote to the Vidame, begging him that no one should think of asking for news of her, or of writing to her.
Monsieur de Nemours grieved over this journey as another man would have grieved over the death of the woman he loved. The thought of being deprived for so long of the sight of Madame de Cleves was a keen pain to him, above all at a time when he had felt the pleasure of seeing her, and of seeing her touched by his passion. Still, there was nothing he could do but grieve. But his grief grew a great deal worse. Madame de Cleves, whose mind had been so agitated, fell violently ill as soon as she reached her house, and the news came to court. Monsieur de Nemours was inconsolable; his grief bordered on despair and wild behavior. The Vidame had great trouble keeping him from showing his passion to the world. He had great trouble, too, holding him back, and talking him out of his plan to go and ask for news of her himself. The Vidame's kinship and friendship served as a pretext for sending several couriers. At last it was known that she was out of the extreme danger she had been in; but she sank into a lingering illness that left little hope for her life.
This long and close view of death made Madame de Cleves see the things of this life with an eye very different from the one we see them with in health. The necessity of dying, which she saw so near, taught her to detach herself from everything, and the length of her illness made that a habit. When she came back from that state, she found all the same that Monsieur de Nemours had not been erased from her heart. But to defend herself against him she called to her aid all the reasons she believed she had for never marrying him. A considerable struggle went on inside her. In the end she overcame what remained of that passion, which had been weakened by the feelings her illness had given her. The thoughts of death had brought the memory of Monsieur de Cleves home to her as a reproach. That memory, which agreed with her duty, stamped itself deeply on her heart. The passions and attachments of the world appeared to her as they appear to people who take a larger and a longer view. Her health, which remained considerably weakened, helped her to keep these feelings. But because she knew what occasions can do to the wisest resolutions, she would not risk destroying her own, or go back to the places where what she had loved was to be found. On the pretext of a change of air, she withdrew to a religious house, without showing any settled intention of giving up the court.
At the first news of it, Monsieur de Nemours felt the weight of this retreat, and he saw what it meant. In that moment he believed he had nothing left to hope for. The loss of his hopes did not stop him from doing everything he could to bring Madame de Cleves back. He had the young Queen write to her; he had the Vidame write; he had the Vidame go there; but it was all useless. The Vidame saw her. She did not tell him that she had made any resolution, but he judged all the same that she would never come back. At last Monsieur de Nemours went there himself, on the pretext of going to take the waters. She was extremely agitated and surprised to learn that he had come. She sent him word by a woman of worth whom she loved, and who was with her at the time, that she begged him not to think it strange if she would not expose herself to the danger of seeing him, and of letting his presence destroy feelings she was bound to keep. She wanted him to know that, having found that her duty and her peace of mind stood against her longing to be his, everything else in the world had seemed to her so indifferent that she had given it up forever. She thought now only of the things of the next life, and no feeling remained to her but the wish to see him in the same frame of mind as herself.
Monsieur de Nemours nearly died of grief in front of the woman who spoke to him. Twenty times he begged her to go back to Madame de Cleves and arrange for him to see her. But she told him that Madame de Cleves had forbidden her not only to carry back any message from him, but even to report their conversation. In the end he had to go away, as crushed by grief as a man could be who was losing every hope of ever again seeing a woman he loved with the most violent, the most natural and the best-founded passion that ever was. Still he did not give up even then, and he did everything he could think of that might make her change her mind. At last, whole years having passed, time and absence eased his grief and put out his passion. Madame de Cleves lived in a way that left no sign that she would ever return. She spent part of the year in that religious house and the rest at home; but there, too, she lived in a retirement, and in occupations more holy, than those of the strictest convents. Her life, which was rather short, left behind examples of inimitable virtue.
While civil war was tearing France apart under the reign of Charles IX, love still found its place among so many disorders, and caused a good many of its own. The only daughter of the Marquis de Mézières was a very great heiress, both through her large fortune and through the illustrious house of Anjou from which she descended, and she was promised to the Duke of Maine, the younger brother of the Duke of Guise who was later called Le Balafré, the Scarred. Because this great heiress was still so young, the marriage was put off. In the meantime the Duke of Guise, who saw her often and saw in her the beginnings of a great beauty, fell in love with her and was loved in return. They hid their love with great care. The Duke of Guise, who did not yet have as much ambition as he has shown since, wanted passionately to marry her, but fear of the Cardinal of Lorraine, who stood in the place of a father to him, kept him from declaring himself.
That was how matters stood when the house of Bourbon, which could not watch the rise of the house of Guise without envy, saw the advantage the Guises would gain from this marriage and resolved to take it from them and profit by it themselves, by marrying the heiress to the young Prince of Montpensier. They worked at this plan with such success that Mademoiselle de Mézières's family, against the promises they had made to the Cardinal of Lorraine, resolved to give her in marriage to the young Prince. The whole house of Guise was deeply shocked by this behavior, but the Duke was crushed with grief, and because his love was at stake, he took the broken promise as an unbearable insult. His resentment soon broke out, despite the reprimands of his uncles, the Cardinal of Lorraine and the Duke of Aumale, who did not want to dig in over something they could see they were powerless to stop. He lost his temper so violently, even in the presence of the young Prince of Montpensier himself, that a hatred was born between the two of them which ended only with their lives.
Mademoiselle de Mézières was pressed by her family to marry the Prince. She saw, besides, that she could not marry the Duke of Guise, and her virtue told her how dangerous it would be to have as a brother-in-law a man she would have wished for a husband. So she resolved at last to follow her family's wishes, and she begged Monsieur de Guise to put no further obstacle in the way of her marriage. She married the Prince of Montpensier, then, and soon afterward he took her to Champigny, the usual residence of the princes of his house, to get her out of Paris, where the whole weight of the war seemed about to fall. That great city was threatened with a siege by the army of the Huguenots, the French Protestants, whose leader was the Prince of Condé, and who had just declared war on the King for the second time.
In his earliest youth the Prince of Montpensier had formed a very close friendship with the Count of Chabannes, a man a good deal older than himself and of extraordinary merit. The Count had been so touched by the young Prince's regard and trust that, against the commitments he had made to the Prince of Condé, who was holding out the hope of important posts for him on the Huguenot side, he declared for the Catholics; he could not bring himself to be opposed in anything to a man who was so dear to him. Since this change of sides had no other foundation, people doubted that it was sincere, and the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, suspected him so strongly that, once the Huguenots had declared war, she meant to have him arrested. But the Prince of Montpensier prevented it, and took Chabannes with him to Champigny when he went there with his wife.
The Count had a very gentle and agreeable mind, and he soon won the regard of the Princess of Montpensier. Before long she had no less trust and affection for him than her husband the Prince had. Chabannes, for his part, looked with admiration on all the beauty, intelligence and virtue that showed in this young princess, and he used the friendship she showed him to inspire in her a virtue of an extraordinary kind, worthy of the greatness of her birth. In a short time he made her one of the most accomplished women in the world.
The Prince went back to court, where the continuing war called him, and the Count stayed behind alone with the Princess. He went on treating her with a respect and a friendship that matched her rank and her merit. The trust between them grew on both sides, and on the Princess of Montpensier's side it grew to such a point that she told him about the feelings she had once had for Monsieur de Guise. But she told him at the same time that those feelings were almost dead; that only enough of them remained to bar the door of her heart against any new attraction; and that, with her virtue added to this last trace of an old impression, she was capable of nothing but contempt for anyone who dared to be in love with her.
The Count knew how sincere this beautiful princess was, and he could see in her, besides, a nature so set against the weakness of love affairs that he did not doubt the truth of what she said. And yet he could not defend himself against so many charms, seen every day from so close. He fell passionately in love with her. Whatever shame he felt at letting himself be overcome, he had to give way, and to love her with the most violent and the most sincere passion there ever was. If he was not master of his heart, he was master of his actions. The change in his soul brought none in his conduct, and no one suspected his love. For a whole year he took exact care to hide it from the Princess, and he believed he would always want to hide it from her.
Love did in him what it does in everyone else: it gave him the urge to speak. After all the struggles that are usual on such occasions, he dared to tell her that he loved her, well prepared to weather the storms that the Princess's pride threatened him with. But what he found in her was a calm and a coldness a thousand times worse than all the severity he had expected. She did not take the trouble to be angry with him. In a few words she set before him the difference in their rank and their age, the particular knowledge he had of her virtue and of the feelings she had once had for the Duke of Guise, and above all what he owed to the friendship and the trust of her husband the Prince. The Count nearly died of shame and grief at her feet. She tried to console him by assuring him that she would never remember what he had just said to her, that she would never let herself believe a thing so much to her disadvantage, and that she would never look on him as anything but her best friend.
These assurances consoled the Count, as one may imagine. He felt the contempt in the Princess's words in its full extent, and the next day, when he saw her again with a face as open as ever, his grief doubled. The Princess's conduct did nothing to lessen it. She lived with him with the same kindness she had always shown. When the occasion brought up the subject, she spoke to him again of the feelings she had once had for the Duke of Guise, and since fame was then beginning to publish the great qualities that were showing in that prince, she confessed that she felt joy at it, and was glad to see that he deserved the feelings she had had for him. All these marks of trust, which had been so dear to the Count, became unbearable to him. He did not dare show this to the Princess, though he did sometimes dare to remind her of what he had been so bold as to tell her.
After two years of absence, when peace had been made, the Prince of Montpensier came back to his wife, covered in the honor he had won at the siege of Paris and at the battle of Saint-Denis. He was surprised to find her beauty in such perfection, and because jealousy was natural to him, he felt some vexation at it, foreseeing that he would not be the only man who found her beautiful. He was very glad to see the Count of Chabannes again; his friendship for him had not lessened at all. In confidence, he asked him what he could tell him of his wife's mind and temper, for she was almost a stranger to him, he had spent so little time with her. The Count, with a sincerity as exact as if he had not been in love, told the Prince everything he knew in her that could make him love her, and he also advised Madame de Montpensier of everything she should do to finish winning her husband's heart and esteem.
Indeed, the Count's passion led him so naturally to think of nothing but what could add to the happiness and the honor of this princess that he forgot without any trouble the interest a man in love has in keeping the woman he loves from a perfect understanding with her husband.
The peace had barely appeared before it was gone. War began again at once, through the King's plan to have the Prince of Condé and the Admiral de Châtillon, the Huguenot leader, arrested at Noyers. The plan was discovered, preparations for war started up afresh, and the Prince of Montpensier was forced to leave his wife to go where his duty called him. Chabannes followed him to court, having fully cleared himself with the Queen Mother. It was not without extreme grief that he left the Princess, who for her part remained very sad over the dangers the war was about to expose her husband to.
The Huguenot leaders had withdrawn to La Rochelle. Since Poitou and Saintonge were on their side, the war flared up fiercely there, and the King gathered all his troops in that region. The King's brother, the Duke of Anjou, who was afterward Henri III, won great honor there by several fine actions, among them the battle of Jarnac, where the Prince of Condé was killed. It was in this war that the Duke of Guise began to hold important commands, and to make it known that he far surpassed the great hopes people had formed of him. The Prince of Montpensier, who hated him both as his personal enemy and as the enemy of his house, could not watch the Duke's growing reputation without pain, nor the friendship the Duke of Anjou showed him.
After the two armies had worn themselves out in a great many small engagements, by common consent the troops were sent home for a time. The Duke of Anjou stayed at Loches to see to all the strongholds that might be attacked. The Duke of Guise stayed there with him, and the Prince of Montpensier, with the Count of Chabannes, went home to Champigny, which was not far away. The Duke of Anjou often went to inspect the places he was having fortified. One day, when he was returning to Loches by a road that few of his party knew, the Duke of Guise, who boasted of knowing it, put himself at the head of the troop to act as guide. But after they had ridden for some time he lost his way, and found himself on the bank of a small river that he did not recognize himself. The Duke of Anjou teased him for leading them so badly. While they were halted there, as ready for amusement as young princes usually are, they noticed a small boat stopped in the middle of the river. Since the river was not wide, they could easily make out three or four women in the boat, and one in particular who seemed very beautiful to them. She was magnificently dressed, and she was watching closely two men who were fishing beside her.
This incident gave fresh amusement to the young princes and to everyone in their party. It seemed to them like something out of a romance. Some told the Duke of Guise that he had lost the way on purpose, to show them this beautiful person; others, that after what chance had done, he was bound to fall in love with her; and the Duke of Anjou maintained that he was the one who ought to be her suitor. In the end, wanting to see the adventure through, they had some of their men ride into the river as far as they could, to call out to the lady that it was Monsieur d'Anjou, who would very much like to cross to the other side of the water, and who begged to be fetched.
The lady, who was the Princess of Montpensier, heard that the Duke of Anjou was there, and from the number of people she saw on the bank she had no doubt that it was he. She had her boat brought forward to the side where he was. His fine bearing soon let her pick him out from the others, but she picked out the Duke of Guise even sooner. The sight of him stirred a confusion in her that made her blush a little, and it made her appear to these princes in a beauty they thought more than natural. The Duke of Guise knew her at once, despite the change for the better that had come over her in the three years since he had seen her. He told the Duke of Anjou who she was, and the Duke was at first ashamed of the liberty he had taken. But seeing Madame de Montpensier so beautiful, and enjoying the adventure so much, he resolved to carry it through. After a thousand apologies and a thousand compliments he invented some important business that he claimed to have on the other side of the river, and accepted the offer she made to carry him across in her boat. He got in alone with the Duke of Guise, ordering everyone who was following them to cross the river at another spot and to join them at Champigny, which Madame de Montpensier told them was only about five miles away.
As soon as they were in the boat, the Duke of Anjou asked her to what they owed such a pleasant meeting, and what she was doing in the middle of the river. She answered that she had set out from Champigny with her husband the Prince, meaning to follow him to the hunt; that she had found herself too tired and had come down to the riverbank; and that curiosity to see a salmon taken, one that had run into a net, had brought her into this boat. Monsieur de Guise took no part in the conversation. But he felt everything this princess had once awakened in his heart wake again, sharply, and he thought to himself that he would have trouble getting out of this adventure without falling back into his old chains.
They soon reached the bank, where they found Madame de Montpensier's horses and equerries waiting for her. The Duke of Anjou and the Duke of Guise helped her to mount, and she sat her horse with admirable grace. All the way home she entertained them agreeably on all sorts of subjects. They were no less surprised by the charm of her mind than they had been by her beauty, and they could not keep from letting her know how extraordinarily surprised they were. She answered their praise with all the modesty imaginable, but a little more coldly to the Duke of Guise's, wanting to keep up a pride that would prevent him from building any hope on the feelings she had once had for him.
As they rode into the first courtyard at Champigny, they found the Prince of Montpensier, who had only just come back from the hunt. He was greatly shocked to see two men riding beside his wife, and his shock became extreme when, coming closer, he recognized the Duke of Anjou and the Duke of Guise. His hatred for the latter, joined to his natural jealousy, made him find something so disagreeable in seeing these princes with his wife, without knowing how they had come to be there or what they had come to do in his house, that he could not hide his annoyance. He cleverly laid the blame for it on his fear of being unable to receive so great a prince as his rank deserved and as he himself would have wished.
The Count of Chabannes was even more troubled than Monsieur de Montpensier himself to see Monsieur de Guise beside Madame de Montpensier. What chance had done to bring these two people together seemed to him so bad an omen that he could easily foresee that this beginning of a romance would not be without a sequel. That evening Madame de Montpensier did the honors of her house with the same grace she brought to everything. In short, she pleased her guests only too well. The Duke of Anjou, who was very much a ladies' man and very handsome, could not see a prize so worthy of him without wanting it ardently. He was struck with the same illness as Monsieur de Guise, and still pretending to have extraordinary business, he stayed two days at Champigny with nothing to keep him there but Madame de Montpensier's charms, for her husband the Prince did nothing at all to press him to stay.
The Duke of Guise did not leave without letting Madame de Montpensier understand that he was to her what he had always been. Since his passion had never been known to anyone, he told her several times, in front of everybody and heard by no one but her, that his heart had not changed. Then he and the Duke of Anjou left Champigny with great regret. The two of them rode for a long time in deep silence. But at last the Duke of Anjou, suddenly imagining that what filled his own thoughts might well be the cause of the Duke of Guise's, asked him abruptly whether he was thinking about the beauty of the Princess of Montpensier. The abruptness of the question, together with what the Duke of Guise had already noticed of the Duke of Anjou's feelings, showed him that the Duke would certainly be his rival, and that it mattered very much not to let this prince discover his love. To clear away any suspicion, he answered with a laugh that the Duke himself had seemed so taken up with the very daydream he was accusing him of that he had not thought it right to interrupt; that the Princess of Montpensier's beauty was nothing new to him; that he had grown used to bearing its brilliance in the days when she was meant to be his sister-in-law; but that he could see that not everyone was so little dazzled by it. The Duke of Anjou admitted that he had never yet seen anything that seemed to him comparable to this young princess, and that he could feel the sight of her might be dangerous to him if he were often exposed to it. He wanted the Duke of Guise to agree that he felt the same, but the Duke, who was beginning to make a serious matter of his love, would admit nothing. The princes went back to Loches, and the adventure that had brought them the Princess of Montpensier often supplied their pleasant conversation.
It was no such source of amusement at Champigny. The Prince of Montpensier was unhappy about everything that had happened, without being able to say why. He thought it wrong that his wife had been in that boat. It seemed to him that she had received these princes too agreeably; and what displeased him most was to have noticed that the Duke of Guise had looked at her attentively. From that moment he conceived a furious jealousy, which made him remember the rage the Duke had shown at the time of his marriage, and it crossed his mind that even then the Duke had been in love with her. The vexation all these suspicions caused him gave the Princess of Montpensier some bad hours.
The Count of Chabannes, as was his habit, took care to keep them from falling out completely, in order to persuade the Princess by this how sincere and unselfish his passion for her was. He could not keep himself from asking her what effect the sight of the Duke of Guise had had on her. She told him that it had unsettled her, out of shame at the memory of the feelings she had once shown him; that she had found him much handsomer than he was in those days; and that it had even seemed to her that he wanted to persuade her he loved her still. But she assured him at the same time that nothing could shake the resolution she had made never to become involved. The Count of Chabannes was very glad to learn of this resolution, but nothing could reassure him about the Duke of Guise. He told the Princess that he was extremely afraid her first impressions would soon return, and he made her understand the mortal grief he would feel, for the sake of them both, if he ever saw her change her mind. The Princess of Montpensier, keeping up her usual manner with him, hardly answered what he said about his passion, and went on seeing in him only the best friend in the world, without doing him the honor of noticing that he was also a man in love with her.
When the armies were raised again, all the princes went back to them, and the Prince of Montpensier thought it best for his wife to go to Paris, so as to be no longer so close to where the war was being fought. The Huguenots laid siege to the city of Poitiers. The Duke of Guise threw himself into it to defend it, and there he did things that would by themselves have been enough to make any other life than his glorious. Then the battle of Moncontour was fought. The Duke of Anjou, after taking Saint-Jean-d'Angély, fell ill and left the army at the same time, whether from the violence of his illness or from a wish to go back and taste the rest and the pleasures of Paris, where the presence of the Princess of Montpensier was not the least of the attractions. The army was left under the command of the Prince of Montpensier, and soon afterward, peace being made, the whole court was gathered in Paris.
The Princess's beauty eclipsed every beauty that had been admired until then. She drew everyone's eyes by the charm of her mind and her person. The Duke of Anjou had not changed, in Paris, the feelings he had conceived for her at Champigny. He took extreme care to let her know it by attentions of every kind, though he was careful not to make them too conspicuous, for fear of making her husband the Prince jealous. The Duke of Guise finished falling violently in love with her. For several reasons he wanted to keep his passion hidden, so he resolved to declare it to her straight away, to spare himself all those preliminaries that always give rise to talk and scandal.
One day he was at the Queen Mother's apartments at an hour when very few people were there, and the Queen Mother had withdrawn to talk business with the Cardinal of Lorraine, when the Princess of Montpensier arrived. He resolved to take this moment to speak to her, and going up to her, he said:
"I am going to surprise you, Madame, and displease you, by telling you that I have always kept the passion you once knew of. Seeing you again has increased it so much that neither your severity, nor the Prince of Montpensier's hatred, nor the rivalry of the first prince of the kingdom could take away one moment of its violence. It would have been more respectful to let you know it by my actions than by my words; but, Madame, my actions would have told others as well as you, and I want you alone to know that I am bold enough to adore you."
At first she was so surprised and so agitated by this speech that she did not think of interrupting him. But then, having recovered herself, she was beginning to answer him when the Prince of Montpensier came in. Her agitation and confusion were painted on her face, and the sight of her husband finished unsettling her, so that she let him see more than the Duke of Guise had just told her. The Queen Mother came out of her closet, and the Duke withdrew, to cure the Prince's jealousy.
That evening the Princess of Montpensier found her husband in every bad humor imaginable. He flew into terrible rages against her and forbade her ever to speak to the Duke of Guise. She withdrew to her rooms very sad, and very much taken up with everything that had happened to her that day. The next day she saw the Duke of Guise again at the Queen Mother's, but he did not approach her; he simply left a little after she did, to show her that he had no business there when she was not. Not a day went by without her receiving a thousand hidden signs of the Duke's passion, though he never tried to speak to her of it except when no one could see him. Since she was thoroughly persuaded of this passion, she began, in spite of all the resolutions she had made at Champigny, to feel in the depths of her heart something of what had once been there.
The Duke of Anjou, for his part, left nothing undone to show her his love wherever he could see her, and he followed her continually to the apartments of the Queen Mother, his mother. His sister, Madame Marguerite, who was in love with him, was treated by him with a harshness that would have cured any passion but hers. At about this time it was discovered that this princess, who was afterward Queen of Navarre, had some attachment for the Duke of Guise, and what made it plainer was the coolness that the Duke of Anjou began to show toward the Duke of Guise. The Princess of Montpensier heard this news. It was not a matter of indifference to her, and it made her feel that she took more interest in the Duke of Guise than she had thought. Her father-in-law, Monsieur de Montpensier, was then marrying Mademoiselle de Guise, the Duke's sister, and so she was forced to see him often at the places where the wedding ceremonies brought them both.
The Princess of Montpensier could no longer bear that a man whom all France believed in love with Madame Marguerite should dare to tell her that he was in love with her. She felt insulted, and almost grieved at having deceived herself. So one day, when the Duke of Guise met her at his sister's, a little apart from the others, and tried to speak to her of his passion, she cut him off abruptly and said, in a voice that showed her anger:
"I do not understand how anyone, on the strength of a weakness one was capable of at thirteen, can have the audacity to play the lover to a woman like me, and above all when he is in love with another in full view of the whole court."
The Duke of Guise, who had a great deal of intelligence and was very much in love, needed to consult no one to understand everything the Princess's words meant. He answered her with great respect:
"I admit, Madame, that I was wrong not to scorn the honor of being my King's brother-in-law, rather than let you suspect for one moment that I could want any heart but yours. But if you will do me the favor of hearing me out, I am sure I can justify myself to you."
The Princess of Montpensier did not answer, but she did not move away, and the Duke of Guise, seeing that she was giving him the hearing he wanted, told her that Madame Marguerite had honored him with her favor without his having done anything to win it; that, having no passion for her, he had answered the honor she did him very poorly, until she gave him some hope of marrying her; that it was true the greatness to which this marriage could raise him had obliged him to pay her more attention, and that this was what had given rise to the suspicions of the King and the Duke of Anjou; that the opposition of the one and the other did not turn him from his plan; but that if the plan displeased her, he would abandon it that very hour, and never think of it again as long as he lived.
The sacrifice the Duke of Guise was making for her made the Princess forget all the severity and all the anger with which she had begun speaking to him. She changed the subject, and began to talk with him about the weakness Madame Marguerite had shown in loving him first, and about the considerable advantage he would gain by marrying her. In the end, without saying anything kind to the Duke of Guise, she let him see again a thousand charming things he had once found in Mademoiselle de Mézières. Though they had not spoken to each other for a long time, they found themselves at ease together, and their hearts slipped easily back onto a road that was not unknown to them. They ended this pleasant conversation, which left a keen joy in the Duke of Guise's mind. The Princess's joy, at learning that he truly loved her, was not small either.
But once she was alone in her closet, what reflections she made on the shame of having let herself be softened so easily by the Duke of Guise's excuses, on the awkward position she was about to plunge herself into by entering on something she had looked on with such horror, and on the frightful misfortunes her husband's jealousy could bring down on her! These thoughts made her form new resolutions, but they melted away the next day at the sight of the Duke of Guise. He never failed to give her an exact account of what passed between Madame Marguerite and himself. The new alliance between their houses gave him occasion to speak to her often, but he had no small trouble curing her of the jealousy that Madame Marguerite's beauty gave her, against which no oath could reassure her. This jealousy served the Princess of Montpensier to defend what was left of her heart against the attentions of the Duke of Guise, who had already won the greater part of it.
The King's marriage to the daughter of the Emperor Maximilian filled the court with feasts and celebrations. The King put on a ballet in which Madame Marguerite and all the princesses danced, and the Princess of Montpensier was the only woman who could rival her for the prize of beauty. The Duke of Anjou danced in a Moorish entrée, and the Duke of Guise, with four others, danced in it beside him. Their costumes were all alike, as the costumes of those who dance the same entrée usually are. The first time the ballet was performed, the Duke of Guise, before the dancing began and while he still had his mask off, said a few words in passing to the Princess of Montpensier. She saw clearly that her husband had noticed, and that made her anxious. A little later she saw the Duke of Anjou, in his mask and his Moorish costume, coming toward her to speak to her. In her agitation she took him for the Duke of Guise again, and going up to him she said:
"Have eyes for no one but Madame Marguerite tonight. I will not be jealous of it; I order it. I am being watched. Do not come near me again."
She withdrew as soon as she had said these words. The Duke of Anjou stood there as if struck by a thunderbolt. In that moment he saw that he had a rival, and a rival who was loved. From the name of Madame Marguerite he understood that the rival was the Duke of Guise, and he could not doubt that his own sister was the sacrifice that had won the Princess of Montpensier over to his rival's suit. Jealousy, spite, and rage, joining the hatred he already felt for Guise, did everything in his heart that one can imagine of the most violent kind. He would have given some bloody proof of his despair on the spot, if the dissimulation that came naturally to him had not come to his rescue and obliged him, for powerful reasons given the state of things, to attempt nothing against the Duke of Guise. All the same, he could not deny himself the pleasure of letting Guise know that he knew the secret of his love. He went up to him as they were leaving the hall where the ballet had been danced and said:
"It is too much, to dare raise your eyes to my sister and to take from me the woman I love. My regard for the King keeps me from making a scene; but remember that the loss of your life may well be the least of the ways I will one day punish your insolence."
The Duke of Guise's pride was not used to threats like these. Yet he could not answer, because the King, who was leaving at that moment, called them both. But the threats engraved in his heart a desire for vengeance that he worked all his life to satisfy.
That same evening the Duke of Anjou did him every kind of bad turn with the King. He persuaded the King that Madame Marguerite would never consent to marry the King of Navarre, the match that was being proposed for her, as long as the Duke of Guise was allowed near her; and that it was shameful to let one of his subjects, to satisfy his vanity, stand in the way of a thing that was meant to bring peace to France. The King was already bitter enough toward the Duke of Guise, and this speech made him so much more so that the next day, when he saw Guise arriving at the ball in the Queen's apartments, dressed in an endless number of jewels and dressed even better in his own good looks, he placed himself in the doorway and asked him abruptly where he was going. The Duke, without showing any surprise, said that he had come to offer the King his most humble service. The King replied that he had no need of the services Guise offered, and turned away without looking at him.
The Duke of Guise went into the hall all the same, furious at heart against both the King and the Duke of Anjou. But his pain only increased his natural pride, and in a kind of spite he kept much closer to Madame Marguerite than he usually did. Besides, what the Duke of Anjou had said to him about the Princess of Montpensier kept him from so much as glancing at her. The Duke of Anjou watched them both carefully. In spite of herself, the Princess of Montpensier's eyes showed some vexation whenever the Duke of Guise spoke to Madame Marguerite. The Duke of Anjou had understood, from what she had said to him when she took him for the Duke of Guise, that she was jealous, and he hoped to set them against each other. He came and sat beside her and said:
"It is for your sake, Madame, more than for mine, that I am going to tell you that the Duke of Guise does not deserve to have been chosen over me. Please do not interrupt me to tell me the opposite of a truth that I know only too well. He is deceiving you, Madame, and sacrificing you to my sister, just as he sacrificed her to you. He is a man capable of nothing but ambition. But since he has had the good fortune to please you, that is enough. I will not stand in the way of a happiness that I surely deserved better than he does; I would make myself unworthy of it if I went on fighting for a heart that another man possesses. It is already too much to have won nothing from you but indifference. I do not want hatred to follow it, by troubling you any longer with the most faithful passion there ever was."
The Duke of Anjou, who was truly moved by love and by grief, could barely finish these words. He had begun his speech in a spirit of spite and vengeance, but as he considered her beauty, and what he was losing in losing the hope of being loved by her, he softened. So, without waiting for her answer, he left the ball, pretending to feel unwell, and went home to brood over his misfortune.
The Princess of Montpensier was left as distressed and shaken as one can imagine. To see her reputation and the secret of her life in the hands of a prince she had treated badly, and to learn from him, beyond any doubt, that the man she loved was deceiving her, were not things likely to leave her the freedom of mind that a place meant for pleasure required. Yet she had to stay where she was, and then go to supper with the Duchess of Montpensier, her mother-in-law, who took her home with her. The Duke of Guise, who was dying of impatience to tell her what the Duke of Anjou had said to him the day before, followed her to his sister's house. But what a shock it was when, trying to talk to her, he found that she would speak to him only to heap dreadful reproaches on him. Her spite made the reproaches so confused that he could make nothing of them, except that she was accusing him of faithlessness and betrayal. He was crushed with despair to find so great an increase of pain where he had hoped for comfort from all his troubles, and he loved her with a passion that could no longer let him live in doubt of whether she loved him. So he made up his mind all at once.
"You shall be satisfied, Madame," he said. "I am going to do for you what all the power of the crown could not have made me do. It will cost me my fortune; but that is a small thing, if it satisfies you."
Without staying any longer at his sister's house, he went that very hour to find his uncles, the cardinals. Using the pretext of the bad treatment he had received from the King, he showed them how badly his fortunes needed him to make it plain that he had no thought of marrying Madame Marguerite, and he pressed them so hard that they concluded his marriage to the Princess of Porcien, which had already been talked of. The news of the marriage was known all over Paris at once. Everyone was surprised, and the Princess of Montpensier was touched by it with joy and with pain together. She was glad to see, by this, the power she had over the Duke; and at the same time she was sorry to have made him give up a thing as advantageous as marriage to Madame Marguerite.
The Duke, who wanted at least to be repaid in love for what he was losing in fortune, pressed her to grant him a private interview so that he could clear himself of the unjust reproaches she had made him. He got her to agree to be at the house of the Duchess of Montpensier, his sister, at an hour when the Duchess would not be there, so that he could speak with her alone. The Duke of Guise had the joy of being able to throw himself at her feet, of speaking freely of his passion, and of telling her what he had suffered from her suspicions. She could not get out of her head what the Duke of Anjou had said, although the way the Duke of Guise had acted should have reassured her completely. She told him the good reason she had for believing he had betrayed her, since the Duke of Anjou knew what he could only have learned from him. The Duke of Guise did not know how to defend himself, and he was as much at a loss as she was to guess what could have revealed their secret understanding.
At last, as their conversation went on, she was telling him that he had been wrong to rush into his marriage with the Princess of Porcien and to give up the match with Madame Marguerite, which was so advantageous to him; and she said he could surely tell that she had felt no jealousy about it, since on the day of the ballet she herself had begged him to have eyes for no one but Madame Marguerite. The Duke of Guise said that she might have meant to give him that order, but that she had certainly not given it. She insisted that she had. In the end, by arguing and going over it again and again, they worked out that she must have been misled by the likeness of the costumes, and that she herself had told the Duke of Anjou what she was accusing the Duke of Guise of telling him. The Duke of Guise, who was almost cleared in her mind by his marriage, was cleared entirely by this conversation. She could not refuse her heart to a man who had possessed it once before and who had just given up everything for her. So she agreed to accept his courtship, and let him believe that she was not indifferent to his passion. The arrival of the Duchess of Montpensier, her mother-in-law, ended the conversation and kept the Duke of Guise from showing her the full transports of his joy.
Some time afterward the court went to Blois, and the Princess of Montpensier went with it. There the marriage of Madame Marguerite to the King of Navarre was concluded. The Duke of Guise, who now knew no greatness and no good fortune except being loved by the Princess of Montpensier, watched the conclusion of this marriage with joy, when at any other time it would have filled him with grief. But he could not hide his love so well that the Prince of Montpensier did not catch a glimpse of it; and the Prince, no longer master of his jealousy, ordered his wife to go to Champigny. The order was very hard on her, but she had to obey. She found a way to say goodbye to the Duke of Guise in private, but she was very much at a loss to give him a safe means of writing to her. In the end, after much searching, her eye fell on the Count of Chabannes. She still counted him as her friend, without stopping to consider that he was also a man who loved her. The Duke of Guise, who knew how close the Count was to the Prince of Montpensier, was appalled that she should choose him as her go-between; but she answered for his loyalty so firmly that she reassured him. He parted from her with all the grief that absence from someone one loves passionately can cause.
The Count of Chabannes, who had been ill in Paris the whole time the Princess of Montpensier was at Blois, learned that she was going to Champigny and went to meet her on the road, to travel there with her. She showed him a thousand kindnesses and a thousand marks of friendship, and she let him see an extraordinary eagerness to talk with him alone, which at first delighted him. But what were his shock and his grief when he found that all this eagerness was only to tell him that she was passionately loved by the Duke of Guise, and that she loved him in the same way. His shock and his grief did not allow him to answer. She was so full of her passion, and found such enormous relief in talking to him about it, that she paid no attention to his silence and began to tell him the smallest details of her affair. She told him how the Duke of Guise and she had agreed to send the letters they were going to write each other through him. That was the last blow for the Count of Chabannes: to see that the woman he loved wanted him to serve his rival, and that she proposed it to him as something that ought to please him.
He was so completely master of himself that he hid all his feelings from her. He showed her only his surprise at seeing so great a change in her. At first he hoped that this change, which took away all his hope, would take away all his passion with it. But he found her so charming, her natural beauty now much increased by a certain grace the air of the court had given her, that he felt he loved her more than ever. Every confidence she made him about the tenderness and delicacy of her feelings for the Duke of Guise showed him the worth of her heart, and gave him a sharp desire to possess it. Since his passion was the most extraordinary in the world, it produced the most extraordinary effect in the world: it made him resolve to carry his rival's letters to the woman he loved.
The absence of the Duke of Guise was a deadly sorrow to the Princess of Montpensier. Hoping for no relief except from his letters, she tormented the Count of Chabannes endlessly to know whether he had received any, and almost blamed him for not having them sooner. At last some came, by a gentleman of the Duke of Guise's, and he brought them to her that very hour, so as not to delay her joy by a moment. Her joy at receiving them was extreme. She took no care to hide it, and she made him swallow, in long draughts, every poison imaginable, reading him the letters and the tender, loving reply she wrote to them. He carried that reply to the gentleman with the same loyalty with which he had delivered the letter to her, but with more pain. Still, he consoled himself a little with the thought that she would reflect on what he was doing for her, and would show him some gratitude. But he found her harsher to him from day to day, because of the sorrow she felt on other accounts, and so he took the liberty of begging her to think a little about what she was making him suffer. The Princess of Montpensier, who had no one in her head but the Duke of Guise, and who thought no one but him worthy to adore her, took it so badly that anyone else should dare to think of her that she treated the Count of Chabannes far worse on this occasion than she had the first time he spoke to her of his love.
His passion, like his patience, was extreme and proof against anything; even so, he left her and went to stay with a friend of his near Champigny. From there he wrote to her with all the anger that so strange a way of treating him could cause, but still with all the respect that was due to her rank; and in his letter he bade her farewell forever. She began to regret having taken so little care of a man over whom she had so much power. She could not bring herself to lose him, not only because of the friendship she felt for him, but also for the sake of her love, for which he was absolutely necessary to her. So she sent him word that she absolutely must speak to him once more, and that after that she would leave him free to do as he pleased. One is very weak when one is in love. The Count came back, and in less than an hour the beauty of the Princess of Montpensier, her wit, and a few kind words made him more submissive than he had ever been; and he even gave her some letters from the Duke of Guise that he had just received.
Meanwhile the court wished to draw the leaders of the Huguenots, the French Protestants, to Paris, for that horrible design that was carried out on St. Bartholomew's Day. To deceive them the better, the King sent away from him all the princes of the house of Bourbon and all those of the house of Guise. The Prince of Montpensier went back to Champigny, to finish crushing his wife with his presence. The Duke of Guise went to the country, to the house of his uncle the Cardinal of Lorraine. Love and idleness put into his mind so violent a desire to see the Princess of Montpensier that, without considering what he was risking for her and for himself, he pretended to set out on a journey. He left his whole retinue in a small town, took with him only the one gentleman who had already made several trips to Champigny, and rode there by post-horse.
Since he had no other way of reaching her except through the Count of Chabannes, he had this same gentleman write the Count a note, in which the gentleman asked him to come and meet him at a place he named. The Count of Chabannes, thinking it was only to receive letters from the Duke of Guise, went to find him. But he was extremely surprised when he saw the Duke of Guise himself, and no less distressed. The Duke, taken up with his own plan, paid no more attention to the Count's discomfort than the Princess of Montpensier had paid to his silence when she told him of her love. He began to pour out his passion and to make the Count understand that he would certainly die if the Count did not get him permission from the Princess to see her. The Count of Chabannes answered coldly that he would tell her everything the Duke wished him to say, and that he would come back with her answer.
He returned to Champigny torn by his own feelings, and torn so violently that at times he lost all awareness of what was around him. Often he resolved to send the Duke of Guise away without saying anything to the Princess of Montpensier; but the strict loyalty he had promised her changed his resolution at once. He reached her without knowing what he ought to do. Learning that the Prince of Montpensier was out hunting, he went straight to her apartment. Seeing him shaken, she sent her women out at once to learn the cause. He told her, controlling himself as best he could, that the Duke of Guise was two or three miles from Champigny and that he passionately wished to see her.
She gave a great cry at this news, and her dilemma was hardly less than the Count's. Her love set before her first the joy she would have in seeing a man she loved so tenderly. But when she thought how contrary this act was to her virtue, and that she could not see the man she loved except by letting him into her rooms at night, without her husband's knowledge, she found herself in a dreadful position. The Count of Chabannes waited for her answer as a thing that would decide his life or his death. Judging her uncertainty by her silence, he spoke up to lay before her all the dangers she would expose herself to by this meeting; and wanting to show her that he was not saying this for his own sake, he said:
"If, after everything I have just laid before you, Madame, your passion is the stronger and you wish to see the Duke of Guise, then do not let any consideration for me stop you, if consideration for your own interest does not. I do not want to deprive a person I adore of so great a satisfaction, nor be the cause of her looking for people less faithful than I am to get it for her. Yes, Madame, if you wish it, I will go and fetch the Duke of Guise this very evening, for it is too dangerous to leave him any longer where he is, and I will bring him to your apartment."
"But which way, and how?" the Princess broke in.
"Ah, Madame," cried the Count, "it is settled, since all you are weighing now is the means. He will come, Madame, that fortunate man you love. I will bring him through the park. Only give orders to the one of your women you trust most to lower, at exactly midnight, the little drawbridge that leads from your antechamber into the garden, and do not worry about the rest."
With these words he rose, and without waiting for any further consent from the Princess of Montpensier, he got back on his horse and went to find the Duke of Guise, who was waiting for him with extreme impatience. The Princess of Montpensier was left so shaken that it was some time before she came to herself. Her first impulse was to have the Count of Chabannes called back and forbid him to bring the Duke of Guise; but she did not have the strength. She thought that, without calling him back, all she had to do was not have the bridge lowered. She believed she would hold to that resolution. But when the hour of the meeting drew near, she could no longer resist the desire to see a man she believed so worthy of her, and she instructed one of her women in everything that had to be done to let the Duke of Guise into her apartment.
Meanwhile the Duke and the Count of Chabannes were approaching Champigny, but in very different states. The Duke gave his soul up to joy and to everything most delightful that hope can inspire, while the Count gave himself up to a despair and a rage that drove him a thousand times to run his sword through his rival's body. At last they reached the park of Champigny, where they left their horses with the Duke of Guise's equerry, and passing through gaps in the walls they came into the garden. In the midst of his despair the Count of Chabannes still kept some hope that reason would return to the Princess of Montpensier, and that she would finally resolve not to see the Duke of Guise. When he saw the little bridge lowered, he could no longer doubt the contrary, and it was then that he was ready to go to the last extremities. But it occurred to him that if he made any noise he would probably be heard by the Prince of Montpensier, whose apartment looked onto the same garden, and that all the trouble would then fall on the person he loved best in the world. At that his rage calmed on the spot, and he finished leading the Duke of Guise to the feet of his Princess. He could not bring himself to witness their conversation, though she let him see that she wished it, and though he would have wished it himself. He withdrew into a little passage on the side of the Prince of Montpensier's apartment, with the saddest thoughts that ever filled the mind of a man in love.
However little noise they had made in crossing the bridge, the Prince of Montpensier, who by ill luck was awake at that moment, heard it, and he had one of his valets get up to see what it was. The valet put his head out of the window, and through the darkness of the night he made out that the bridge was down. He told his master, who ordered him at once to go into the park and see what it could be. A moment later the Prince got up himself, uneasy because he thought he had heard someone walking, and went straight to his wife's apartment, which faced the bridge. Just as he was approaching the little passage where the Count of Chabannes stood, the Princess of Montpensier, who felt some shame at being alone with the Duke of Guise, asked the Count several times to come into her room. He kept excusing himself; and as she pressed him harder, possessed by rage and fury, he answered her so loudly that the Prince of Montpensier heard him, though so indistinctly that the Prince caught only a man's voice, without recognizing it as the Count's.
Such a discovery would have thrown a calmer and less jealous mind into a passion; in the Prince's it instantly roused the utmost rage and fury. He hammered on the door at once, shouting to be let in, and gave the cruelest shock in the world to the Princess, to the Duke of Guise, and to the Count of Chabannes. The Count, hearing the Prince's voice, understood at once that it would be impossible to keep him from believing there was someone in his wife's room. His passion showed him, in that moment, that if the Prince found the Duke of Guise there, Madame de Montpensier would have the grief of seeing him killed before her eyes, and that her own life would not be safe. So he resolved, with a generosity without example, to put himself in danger to save an ungrateful woman and a rival whom she loved. While the Prince of Montpensier rained blows on the door, he went to the Duke of Guise, who did not know what to do, and put him into the hands of the woman of Madame de Montpensier's who had let him in by the bridge, so that she could get him out the same way while the Count himself faced the Prince's fury.
The Duke had scarcely left the antechamber when the Prince, having broken down the door of the passage, burst into the room like a man possessed by fury and looking for someone to turn it on. But when he saw no one but the Count of Chabannes, and saw him standing motionless, leaning on the table, with sorrow written on his face, he stood motionless himself. The surprise of finding, alone and at night, in his wife's room, the man he loved best in the world, left him unable to speak. The Princess was half fainting on some cushions, and perhaps fortune never put three people in more pitiable states. At last the Prince of Montpensier, who did not believe what he saw, and who wanted to untangle the chaos he had just fallen into, spoke to the Count in a tone that showed he still had some friendship for him:
"What am I seeing? Is this an illusion or the truth? Is it possible that a man I have loved so dearly should choose my wife, out of all other women, to seduce?" Then, turning toward the Princess, he said, "And you, Madame, was it not enough to rob me of your heart and of my honor, without also robbing me of the only man who could have consoled me for those misfortunes?" And to both of them he said, "Answer me, one or the other of you, and explain to me an affair that I cannot believe is what it seems."
The Princess was in no condition to answer, and the Count of Chabannes opened his mouth several times without being able to speak.
"I am guilty toward you," he said at last, "and unworthy of the friendship you have had for me; but not in the way you may imagine. I am more unhappy than you are, and more desperate. I cannot tell you more than that. My death will avenge you, and if you choose to give it to me this moment, you will be giving me the only thing that can please me."
These words, spoken with a deadly grief and with a look that showed his innocence, far from enlightening the Prince of Montpensier, persuaded him more and more that there was some mystery in the affair that he could not guess. His despair grew with this uncertainty, and he said:
"Take my life yourself, or explain your words to me. I understand none of it. You owe me that explanation for my friendship; you owe it to my restraint, for any other man would already have avenged so painful an insult on your life."
"Appearances are very false," the Count broke in.
"Ah, this is too much," the Prince replied. "I must have my revenge, and then I will get my explanation at leisure."
With these words he moved toward the Count of Chabannes like a man carried away by rage. The Princess, fearing some disaster (though none could really have happened, since her husband had no sword), rose to put herself between them. She was so weak that the effort was too much for her, and as she came toward her husband she fell fainting at his feet. The Prince was even more moved by her fainting than he had been by the calm in which he had found the Count when he moved toward him. Unable to bear the sight of two people who stirred such painful feelings in him any longer, he turned his head away and let himself fall onto his wife's bed, crushed by an unbelievable grief. The Count of Chabannes, pierced with remorse for having abused a friendship of which he was receiving so many proofs, and seeing no way he could ever repair what he had just done, left the room abruptly. Passing through the Prince's apartment, where he found the doors open, he went down into the courtyard, had horses brought, and rode off into the countryside with nothing but his despair to guide him. Meanwhile the Prince of Montpensier, seeing that his wife did not come out of her faint, left her in the hands of her women and withdrew to his own room in deadly grief.
The Duke of Guise, who had luckily gotten out of the park, hardly knowing what he was doing, so shaken was he, rode a few miles from Champigny; but he could not go any farther without news of the Princess. He stopped in a forest and sent his equerry to learn from the Count of Chabannes what had come of this terrible affair. The equerry did not find the Count of Chabannes, but he learned from other people that the Princess of Montpensier was extraordinarily ill. What his equerry told him only increased the Duke of Guise's anxiety; and with no way to relieve it, he was forced to go back to his uncles, so as not to arouse suspicion by a longer journey.
The Duke of Guise's equerry had told him the truth in saying that Madame de Montpensier was extremely ill. For it was true that as soon as her women had put her to bed, a fever seized her so violently, and with such horrible ravings, that by the second day there was fear for her life. The Prince pretended to be ill himself, so that no one would wonder why he did not go into his wife's room. The order he received to return to court, where all the Catholic princes were being recalled to wipe out the Huguenots, drew him out of the awkward position he was in. He left for Paris, not knowing what he had to hope or to fear from his wife's illness. He had no sooner arrived than the attack on the Huguenots began, in the person of one of their leaders, the Admiral de Châtillon; and two days later came that horrible massacre so notorious throughout Europe.
The poor Count of Chabannes, who had come to hide himself at the far end of one of the suburbs of Paris so as to give himself up entirely to his grief, was swept up in the ruin of the Huguenots. The people in whose house he had taken refuge recognized him, and remembering that he had been suspected of belonging to that party, they murdered him that same night, a night so deadly to so many. In the morning the Prince of Montpensier, going out of the city to give some orders, passed along the street where Chabannes's body lay. He was seized at first with shock at this pitiful sight. Then his friendship awoke and gave him grief. But the memory of the injury he believed he had received from the Count gave him joy in the end, and he was glad to see himself avenged by the hand of fortune.
The Duke of Guise, taken up with the desire to avenge his father's death, and soon afterward full of the joy of having avenged it, let the concern to hear news of the Princess of Montpensier slip little by little from his soul. He met the Marquise de Noirmoutier, a woman of great wit and beauty, who gave him more hope than the Princess had; he attached himself to her entirely and loved her with a boundless passion that lasted until his death.
Meanwhile, after Madame de Montpensier's illness had reached its worst point, it began to lessen. Her reason came back, and finding herself a little relieved by her husband's absence, she gave some hope of living. Yet her health returned only with great difficulty, because of the bad state of her mind; and her mind was tormented afresh when she remembered that she had had no news of the Duke of Guise during her whole illness. She asked her women whether they had seen anyone, whether there were no letters; and finding nothing of what she had hoped for, she felt herself the unhappiest woman in the world, for having risked everything for a man who was abandoning her. It was a fresh blow to learn of the death of the Count of Chabannes, which she soon did through her husband's care. The Duke of Guise's ingratitude made her feel more sharply the loss of a man whose loyalty she knew so well. So many pressing griefs soon put her back into a state as dangerous as the one she had come out of. And since Madame de Noirmoutier was a woman who took as much care to publish her love affairs as other women take to hide them, hers with the Duke of Guise were so public that, far away and ill as the Princess of Montpensier was, she heard of them from so many sides that she could not doubt them. That was the fatal blow to her life. She could not withstand the grief of having lost her husband's esteem, the heart of the man she loved, and the most perfect friend there ever was. She died within a few days, in the flower of her age, one of the most beautiful princesses in the world, and one who would surely have been the happiest, if virtue and prudence had guided all her actions.