The Princesse De Cleves Page 10
Great lists were set up close to the Bastille, extending from the Château de Tournelles, across the rue Saint-Antoine, as far as the royal stables. On each side there was scaffolding and banked seating with covered boxes to form a sort of gallery which was very fine to look at and could accommodate an infinite number of people. Not one of the princes and lords could think of anything but to order all that was necessary for them to appear to the best advantage and to include, in their ciphers and devices, some gallantry appropriate to the women they loved.
A few days before the arrival of the Duc d’Albe, the King had a game of tennis with M. de Nemours, the Duc de Guise and the Vidame de Chartres. The Queens came to see them play, followed by all the ladies and, among these, Mme de Clèves. When the game was done, as everyone was leaving the court, Chastelart went up to the Reine Dauphine and told her that, by chance, he had come into possession of a love letter that had fallen out of M. de Nemours’s pocket. The Dauphine, ever curious to know anything at all about the prince, told Chastelart to give it to her. She took it and followed the Queen, her mother-in-law, who had come with the King to inspect work on the lists. When they had been there for a little while, the King asked for some horses that he had had brought a short time before. Though they were not yet broken in, he wanted to ride them and gave some to all those who had followed him. The King and M. de Nemours found themselves on the most fiery: the two horses tried to charge one another. M. de Nemours, fearful that the King might be hurt, backed off sharply and turned his horse against a pillar of the exercise area, with such force that it shook. People ran across, thinking he had sustained a considerable injury. Mme de Clèves, more than anyone, thought him seriously hurt. Because of her feeling for the prince she experienced an anxiety and distress that she did not think to hide. She went up to him with the Queens, with a look of such concern that even someone less directly involved than the Chevalier de Guise would have seen it: so he noticed it easily and gave far more attention to the state of Mme de Clèves than to that of M. de Nemours. The blow that the prince had given himself stunned him to such an extent that he remained for some time with his head resting on those who were supporting him. When he looked up, the first thing he saw was Mme de Clèves, and he recognized the sympathy that she felt for him in her expression, which he returned in a way that allowed her to see how deeply he was touched by it. Then he thanked the Queens for the kindness they showed him and offered them his excuses for appearing in such a state in front of them. The King ordered him to go and rest.
Mme de Clèves, recovering from her fright, soon reflected on the signs of it that she must have given. The Chevalier de Guise did not long leave her to hope that it had gone unobserved. He offered her his hand to conduct her from the lists.
‘I am more to be pitied than M. de Nemours, madame,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, if I put aside the deep respect that I have always had for you and disclose the extent of my pain at what I have just witnessed: this is the first time that I have been bold enough to speak to you, and it will be the last. Death, or at least an everlasting exile, will remove me from a place in which I can no longer live, since I have just lost the melancholy consolation of believing that all those who dare to look upon you are as unfortunate as I am.’
Mme de Clèves answered with only a few disjointed words, as if she had not understood the implications of what the Chevalier de Guise was saying. In other circumstances, she would have been offended at him for speaking about his feelings for her; but at that moment, she experienced only the confusion of realizing that he had noticed hers for M. de Nemours. The Chevalier de Guise was certain of it, and so stricken with anguish that he resolved from that day onward never to hope that he might be loved by Mme de Clèves. But in order to renounce this project, that had seemed to him so difficult and so glorious, he needed to have another great enterprise to occupy him. He decided to take Rhodes18 – an idea he already had in mind – and when death removed him from the world in the flower of youth, at a moment when he had gained the reputation of one of the greatest princes of his time, he expressed only one regret on leaving this life: that of having failed to carry out this fine resolve, when he considered its success guaranteed by the effort he had devoted to it.
Mme de Clèves, after leaving the lists, went to the Queen’s, greatly preoccupied with what had happened. M. de Nemours arrived shortly afterwards, finely dressed, as though unaffected by his accident. If anything, he seemed uncommonly cheerful, and his joy at what he thought he had observed gave him an air that made him even more than usually attractive. Everybody was surprised at his entrance and no one failed to ask after his health, except Mme de Clèves who stayed by the fireplace and did not appear to see him. The King emerged from an inner room and, seeing him in the company, called him over to talk about his fall. M. de Nemours passed by Mme de Clèves and whispered:
‘Today, madame, I was given a sign of your pity, but that is not what I most deserve.’
Mme de Clèves had guessed he had noticed her concern for him and was proved right by these words. She had been very disturbed at finding she was no longer able to hide her feelings and at having revealed them to the Duc de Guise. She was also much troubled by the fact that M. de Nemours knew of them, but the regret was not unmixed with something akin to pleasure.
The Reine Dauphine, most impatient to know what was in the letter that Chastelart had given her, came over to Mme de Clèves:
‘Go and read this letter,’ she said. ‘It is addressed to M. de Nemours and is evidently from that mistress for whom he has abandoned all the rest. If you cannot read it at once, keep it. Come to me this evening when I retire, to return it and to tell me if you recognize the handwriting.’
At this, the Dauphine left Mme de Clèves, who was so overcome that it was some time before she could move. Her impatience and anxiety prevented her from staying longer at the Queen’s house: she left for home, though it was before the time when she usually did so. She held the letter in a trembling hand; her thoughts were so confused that she had no clear thought at all; and she was in a state entirely new to her, a kind of unbearable anguish unlike anything that she had ever previously felt. As soon as she was in her room, she opened the letter and found as follows:
I have loved you too much to allow you to think that the change you see in me is due to inconstancy; I wish to tell you that it is caused by your infidelity. You will be astonished to hear me speak of your infidelity; you had concealed it so astutely from me, and I have taken such care to hide my knowledge of it from you, that you are rightly surprised to find that I know about it. I am myself astonished at having been able to conceal the signs of this. No pain has ever been so great as that I feel. I thought you were passionately in love with me: I had ceased to hide my own passion for you and, even at the moment when I allowed you every proof of it, I learned that you were deceiving me, that you loved someone else and were evidently sacrificing me to this new love. I realized it on the day of the tilting at rings: this explains my absence. I pretended to be ill, to hide the turmoil in my mind; but I became ill in reality: my body could not bear such violent anguish. When I began to recover, I still pretended to be very sick, so that I might have an excuse for not seeing you or writing to you. I needed time to decide how I should act; twenty times, I made and unmade the same resolutions; but at last I decided you did not deserve to witness my suffering, and resolved to conceal it. I wanted to wound your pride, by letting you know that my feelings were diminishing of their own accord. In that way, I hoped to lessen the value of the sacrifice you made in rejecting them: I did not want you to have the pleasure of exhibiting how much I loved you, so that you might appear more attractive as a result. I resolved to write to you in a cool and listless manner, so that when you showed her the letters they would suggest the idea that it was possible to stop loving you. I did not want to give her the pleasure of finding out that I knew she had triumphed over me, or to increase her triumph by my despair and my rebukes. I thought that I should
not punish you enough by breaking with you, and that I should inflict only a slight wound by ceasing to love you when you no longer loved me. It occurred to me that you would have to love me yourself to feel the pain that so cruelly tormented me: that of not being loved. I thought that, if there was one thing that might revive your feeling for me, it was to show you that my own feelings had changed; but to do so by pretending to hide the fact from you, as if I did not have the strength to admit it. I fixed on this resolve – but how difficult it was to make and, when I saw you again, how impossible it seemed to carry out! A hundred times, I was on the point of bursting into recriminations and tears: I was still in a state of health that served to disguise my distress and my anguish from you. From then on, I was sustained by the pleasure of using deception towards you as you had towards me; yet I was so unnaturally insistent in saying and writing that I loved you, that you noticed, sooner than I intended, how my feelings had changed. You were hurt, you reproached me for it. I tried to reassure you, but in so constrained a manner that you were still more convinced I no longer loved you. In short, I did everything I had meant to do. The capriciousness of your heart urged you towards me, the more you saw me distance myself from you. I enjoyed my vengeance to the full: it seemed you loved me more than ever and I showed that I no longer loved you. I had reason to believe you had altogether given up the person for whom you had left me, and also to be persuaded that you had never spoken about me to her; but your return and your discretion cannot make up for your infidelity. Your heart was divided between me and another; you deceived me. That is enough to deprive me of pleasure in being loved as I felt I deserved, and to confirm me in the resolution that so surprises you: never to see you again.
Mme de Clèves read and reread this letter several times, yet without knowing what it was she had read. All she could see was that M. de Nemours did not love her as she had believed, but that he loved other women and was deceiving them as he was her. What a thing that was to see and know for a person of her temperament, passionately in love, who had just displayed her feelings to a man whom she judged unworthy, and to another whom she had scorned for love of him! There could be no sharper or more bitter anguish than she felt, and it seemed to her that the acuteness of the pain derived from what had occurred during the day and that, if M. de Nemours had not had any reason to believe that she loved him, she would not have been troubled by his loving someone else. But she was wrong, for this pain that she found so unbearable was jealousy, with all the torments that it brings. From the letter, she saw that M. de Nemours had a long-standing affair. It seemed to her that the writer of the letter showed intelligence and character, and deserved to be loved; she admired her willpower, which she judged superior to her own, and envied the strength of mind that had enabled the woman to hide her feelings from M. de Nemours. From the end of the letter, she saw that the writer believed herself to be loved; and the idea occurred to her that the discretion the prince had shown, and which she had found so touching, was perhaps merely because of his love for this other, whom he did not want to displease. In fact, she had every thought that could increase her wretchedness and her despair. Bitterly she reproached herself, reflecting on her mother’s advice! How much she regretted not having more stubbornly insisted upon leaving society, despite M. de Clèves, or for not having pursued her idea of telling him about her feelings for M. de Nemours! She thought it would have been better to disclose them to her husband – knowing his kindness and seeing it was in his interest to keep the secret – rather than reveal them to a man who was unworthy and unfaithful, who was perhaps using her, and only wanted her love to satisfy his pride and vanity. In short, she considered any misfortune and any extremity less than having shown M. de Nemours that she loved him, knowing that he loved someone else. Her one consolation was to think that, at least, knowing this, she had nothing more to fear from herself and that she would be entirely cured of her affection for the prince.
She disregarded the Dauphine’s instruction to attend her on retiring. She took to her bed and pretended to be unwell, so that when M. de Clèves returned from court, he was told that she was asleep. She was, in reality, far from the ease of mind conducive to sleep. She passed the night doing nothing except to torment herself, rereading the letter she had been given.
Mme de Clèves was not the only person whose repose was disturbed by this letter. The Vidame de Chartres (for it was he, and not M. de Nemours, who had mislaid it) was in a state of extreme anxiety. He had spent the whole evening with M. de Guise, who had given a grand dinner for the Duc de Ferrare, his brother-in-law, and all the young people of the court. By chance, while they were at dinner, the conversation turned to well-composed letters. The Vidame de Chartres said that he had one on him that was finer than any that had ever been written. He was urged to show it, but declined. M. de Nemours pretended that he had no such thing and was merely boasting. The Vidame answered that this was testing his discretion to the limit; that nonetheless he would not show the letter, but read some passages of it from which they might judge that few men had ever received its like. At this, he tried to find the letter, but could not; he looked for it in vain, while they taunted him; but he was so visibly disturbed that they let the matter drop. He took his leave earlier than the rest, and hurried home impatiently to find out if he had left the missing letter behind. While he was still looking for it, one of the Queen’s first footmen arrived, to tell him the Vicomtesse d’Uzès thought he should be advised immediately that people were saying at the Queen’s house that he had dropped a love letter from his pocket at the tennis court; that they had described much of the content of the letter; that the Queen had been very curious to see it and had asked one of her courtiers to get it for her, but he replied that it had been entrusted to Chastelart.
The first footman told the Vidame de Chartres a number of other things that greatly concerned him. He left at once to visit a gentleman who was a close friend of Chastelart. He had him roused (though it was an extraordinary hour to ask for a letter), without saying who requested or who had lost it. Chastelart, convinced that it belonged to M. de Nemours and that he was in love with the Dauphine, had no doubt Nemours was the person asking for it to be returned. He took a malicious pleasure in sending the reply that he had entrusted the letter to the Dauphine: the man brought this answer to the Vidame de Chartres. This merely increased his concern and gave him new cause. After puzzling for a long time over what he should do, he decided that only M. de Nemours could help him out of his dilemma.
He went to his house and into his room. It was barely daybreak and the prince was sleeping calmly: what he had seen of Mme de Clèves the previous day had given him nothing but agreeable thoughts. He was very surprised at being woken up by the Vidame de Chartres, and asked if it was in revenge for what he had said over dinner that he had come to disturb his sleep. But the Vidame’s face clearly showed that what had brought him was no jesting matter.
‘I am here to confide in you the most important affair of my life,’ he said. ‘I know quite well that you will not thank me for doing so, since I need your help; but I know too that I should forfeit your respect if I had told you what I am about to say, unless I were obliged to do so. I have lost the letter I mentioned yesterday evening: it is most vital that no one should know it was addressed to me. It was seen by several people who were at the tennis court where it fell out of my pocket. You were also there, and I beg you to let it be known that it was you who lost it.’
‘You must think I have no mistress of my own,’ M. de Nemours said, smiling, ‘otherwise you would not make such a proposal or imagine that there is no one from whom I might be estranged, if she were to think that I receive such letters.’
‘Please take me seriously, I beg you,’ said the Vidame. ‘If you have a mistress – and I am quite sure you do, though I have no idea who she is – you can easily exonerate yourself: I will give you everything you need to do so. And even if you did not exonerate yourself, the worst that could happen would b
e for you to fall out for a short time. But in my case, this business could dishonour someone who has loved me passionately and who is one of the most admirable women in the world; and, in addition, I risk becoming the object of an implacable hatred that will cost me my fortune and perhaps more besides.’
‘I cannot follow everything that you are telling me,’ M. de Nemours said, ‘but you are implying that the rumour about a great princess, and her interest in you, was not altogether unfounded.’
‘Nor was it,’ answered the Vidame de Chartres, ‘though I wish to God that it had been: I should not then be in my present predicament. But I shall have to tell you the full story, so that you may understand the danger I am in.
‘Since I was first at court, the Queen19 has always favoured me with her condescension and kindness, and I had reason to believe that she was well-disposed towards me. Yet there was nothing exceptional and it never occurred to me to have any feeling for her apart from respect. Indeed, I had a profound attachment to Mme de Thémines: seeing her, you can easily imagine that one could be much in love, if she felt the same, and so I was.
‘Some two years ago, when the court was at Fontainebleau, I found myself two or three times talking to the Queen, on occasions when there were few others present. She seemed pleased by my conversation and responsive to everything I said. One day, in particular, we began to talk about trust. I said that there was no one who had my full confidence, that I thought a person would always repent of giving it, and that I knew many things I had never spoken about. The Queen told me that she respected me the more for it; that she had found no one in France able to keep a secret and was more inhibited by this than by anything, since it deprived her of the pleasure of imparting her confidence; and that it was necessary, in life, to have someone to whom one could talk, especially for those of her rank. On the following days, she returned several times to the topic, and even told me some private news. Finally, I concluded that she hoped to ensure my secrecy and wanted to confide in me. This idea drew me closer to her, I was touched by the mark of her favour and I paid court to her with much greater assiduity than before.