The Princesse De Cleves Page 12
‘I have no idea, madame,’ he resumed, ‘what anyone can have said to Mme la Dauphine, but I have no personal interest in this letter: it is addressed to the Vidame.’
‘I believe you,’ Mme de Clèves replied, ‘but the Dauphine was told the contrary and she will hardly be persuaded that the Vidame’s letters should fall out of your pocket. This is why, unless you have some reason which I do not know to conceal the truth from the Dauphine, I advise you to acknowledge it.’
‘I have nothing to acknowledge,’ he said. ‘The letter is not addressed to me and, while there may be someone whom I should hope to convince of that fact, it is not the Dauphine. But, madame, since the fate of M. le Vidame is at stake here, please allow me to inform you of some things you should know.’
By her silence, Mme de Clèves showed she was willing to listen and M. de Nemours recounted, as briefly as he could, everything the Vidame had told him. Although these facts were of a kind to excite astonishment and deserve the listener’s attention, Mme de Clèves heard him out with such extreme coolness that she seemed not really convinced of what he was saying, or else indifferent to it. This was her attitude until M. de Nemours mentioned the note from Mme d’Amboise, which was addressed to the Vidame de Chartres and supplied proof of everything he had said. Since Mme de Clèves knew that this person was a friend of Mme de Thémines, she found M. de Nemours’s story had some plausibility, which made her think that the letter was perhaps not written to him. Suddenly, and in spite of herself, this idea dispelled the coldness that she had felt up to then. The prince, after reading out the note that proved what he was saying, gave it to her to read and told her that she would recognize the writing; she could not prevent herself from taking it, looking at the top to see it was addressed to the Vidame de Chartres and reading it from top to bottom to find out if the letter that Mme d’Amboise wanted was the same as the one in her possession. M. de Nemours went on to tell her everything he thought necessary to convince her; and, since one is easily convinced of a welcome truth, he persuaded Mme de Clèves that he had nothing to do with the letter.
At that, she turned to discussing the Vidame’s dilemma and the danger he was in, reproving his misconduct and seeking how he could be helped. She expressed her astonishment at the Queen’s behaviour and admitted to M. de Nemours that she had the letter: in short, as soon as she believed him innocent, she conversed calmly and openly on those same matters that she had previously scorned to listen to. They agreed that the letter must not be returned to the Reine Dauphine, in case she were to show it to Mme de Martigues, who knew Mme de Thémines’s handwriting and who, because of her interest in the Vidame, would easily guess it was addressed to him. They also decided that the Reine Dauphine should not be told everything concerning her mother-in-law, the Queen. With pleasure (since she had the excuse that it concerned her uncle’s business) Mme de Clèves agreed to keep all the secrets M. de Nemours confided in her.
The prince would not have continued for ever speaking about the affairs of the Vidame de Chartres and this freedom to talk with her would have made him more audacious than he had yet dared to be, were it not that a message was brought to Mme de Clèves, commanding her to attend the Dauphine. M. de Nemours was obliged to leave; he went to the Vidame’s to say that, after leaving him, he had thought it more appropriate to enquire of Mme de Clèves, being the Vidame’s niece, rather than go directly to the Dauphine. There was good reason to approve his actions and to hope they would be crowned with success.
Meanwhile, Mme de Clèves dressed promptly to go to the Reine Dauphine’s. No sooner had she entered the room than the Dauphine called her over and whispered:
‘I have been expecting you for two hours and never have I been so hard put to disguise the truth as I was this morning. The Queen heard about the letter that I gave you yesterday, and she thinks it was the Vidame de Chartres who dropped it: you know she takes an interest in him. She had them look for the letter; she asked Chastelart for it, and he said that he had given it to me; so they came and asked me for it on the pretext that it was a fine letter which the Queen was curious to see. I did not dare say that you had it; I thought she would imagine I had entrusted it to you because of your uncle, the Vidame, and that he and I were closely in league with one another. I have already felt she was mortified at my seeing him so often. So I told her that the letter was in the clothes I was wearing yesterday and that the person who has my keys had gone out. Quickly give me the letter,’ she continued, ‘so that I can send it to her, and read it before sending, to see if I can recognize the hand.’
Mme de Clèves was more embarrassed than she had expected.
‘I am not sure how you can, madame,’ she replied, ‘since M. de Clèves, to whom I gave it to read, gave it back to M. de Nemours, who came this morning to beg him to ask you for it. M. de Clèves was rash enough to mention that he had it and weak enough to give in to M. de Nemours’s entreaties for its return.’
‘You have put me in the most embarrassing situation possible,’ the Dauphine answered, ‘and you were wrong to give the letter back to M. de Nemours: since I gave it to you, you should not have returned it without my permission. What do you expect me to tell the Queen, and what will she think? She will have good grounds for believing that I am personally concerned in this letter and there is something between the Vidame and me. She will never be persuaded that the letter belongs to M. de Nemours.’
‘I am most distressed,’ Mme de Clèves said, ‘at having put you in such a quandary. I can see how embarrassing it is, but it is M. de Clèves’s fault and not mine.’
‘On the contrary,’ returned the Dauphine, ‘it is your fault for giving him the letter: there is not a woman in the world except you who confides all that she knows in her husband.’
‘I believe I was wrong, madame,’ said Mme de Clèves. ‘But think how to put right my mistake, instead of criticizing it.’
‘Do you not remember, more or less, what was in the letter?’ the Dauphine asked.
‘Yes, madame,’ she replied, ‘I do: I read it more than once.’
‘If that is so,’ the Dauphine went on, ‘you must go immediately and have it written out in an unrecognizable hand. I shall send it to the Queen: she will not show it to those who have already seen it. Or, even if she does, I shall continue to maintain it is the one I was given by Chastelart, and he will not dare to contradict me.’
Mme de Clèves agreed to this solution, particularly as she had the idea that she would send to M. de Nemours to have another sight of the letter itself, so that she could copy it word for word and have the writing imitated more or less closely, thinking that this would certainly mislead the Queen. As soon as she arrived home, she told her husband about the Dauphine’s dilemma and asked him to send for M. de Nemours. This was done: he came post-haste. Mme de Clèves recounted everything that she had already told her husband and asked him for the letter, but M. de Nemours replied that he had already returned it to the Vidame de Chartres, who had been so overjoyed at having it and finding that he had escaped the danger he was in, that he had instantly sent it back to Mme de Thémines’s friend. Mme de Clèves was now in a fresh quandary. But, at last, after some discussion, they decided to do the letter from memory. They shut themselves up to work: orders were given at the door that no one should be let in and all M. de Nemours’s servants were sent away.
This atmosphere of intrigue and confidentiality had no slight charm for the prince and even for Mme de Clèves. Her husband’s presence and the involvement of the Vidame de Chartres somehow overcame her misgivings. She knew only the pleasure of seeing M. de Nemours, and felt a pure and undiluted joy such as she had never before experienced: this joy gave a freedom and animation to her spirits which M. de Nemours had not previously seen in her, and which made him love her still more. Never yet having enjoyed such pleasurable moments, he was full of vitality and wit: when Mme de Clèves wished to start remembering the letter and writing it, the prince, instead of helping her seriously, c
ontinually interrupted with amusing asides. Mme de Clèves responded in the same spirit, so they had already been shut up together for a long time, and twice messengers had come from the Dauphine to tell Mme de Clèves to make haste, but they had not yet half completed the letter.
M. de Nemours was quite content to prolong a time that he found so agreeable, and forgot he was acting on behalf of his friend. Mme de Clèves was not bored and similarly forgot the interests of her uncle. In the end, the letter was hardly completed by four o’clock, and so badly, the writing of the copy looking so unlike that it was intended to imitate, that the Queen must realize the truth unless she had very little wish indeed to uncover it. So she was not deceived, despite the care that was taken to convince her the letter was addressed to M. de Nemours. She not only remained convinced that it belonged to the Vidame de Chartres, but she also believed that the Dauphine was involved and that they had some kind of understanding. This idea so greatly fuelled her hatred for the Dauphine that she never forgave her, but persecuted her until she had driven her out of France.
As for the Vidame de Chartres, he was ruined in her eyes and – whether it was that the Cardinal of Lorraine had already gained an ascendancy over her, or that the affair of the letter, by showing her that she had been deceived, helped to discover other deceptions that the Vidame had already practised on her – one thing at least is certain: he could never honestly make amends to her and their relationship came to an end. Later, she ruined him over the Amboise conspiracy,20 in which he was involved.
When the letter had been sent to the Dauphine, M. de Clèves and M. de Nemours went away, and Mme de Clèves was left alone. As soon as she was no longer sustained by the joy that one feels in the presence of what one loves, she awoke as it were from a dream. She considered, with amazement, the huge difference between her state the evening before, and her state then. She called to mind what bitterness and coolness she had shown M. de Nemours when she still believed Mme de Thémines’s letter was addressed to him; and what calm and sweetness had replaced that bitterness, as soon as he persuaded her that the letter was nothing to do with him. When she recalled that, the day before, she had accused herself of a crime because she had given him signs of her feelings – feelings that might have been inspired by compassion alone – and that, through her bitterness, she had exhibited marks of jealousy that were most certainly proof of love, she could no longer recognize herself. And when, moreover, she considered that M. de Nemours realized she knew his feelings for her, and that he saw, too, in spite of her knowing this, that she did not treat him ill, even in the presence of her husband, but on the contrary had never looked on him with such favour; and that it was because of her that M. de Clèves had sent to fetch him and that they had just spent an afternoon alone together, then she considered that she had an understanding with M. de Nemours and was deceiving the husband who least deserved it of any in the world; and she was ashamed to appear so little worthy of esteem, even in the eyes of her lover. But what she found harder to bear than all this, was the memory of the state in which she had spent the night and the agony she had suffered at the idea that M. de Nemours loved another, and that she was being deceived.
Until this time, she had experienced none of the mortal pangs of mistrust and jealousy. She had only thought to prevent herself from loving M. de Nemours and had not yet begun to fear that he might love someone else. Although her suspicions about the letter had been dispelled, they had still managed to open her eyes to the danger of being deceived and given her ideas of mistrust and jealousy that she had never before known. She was surprised at not having previously considered how unlikely it was that a man like M. de Nemours, who had always shown himself to be so frivolous in his dealings with women, might be capable of a sincere and lasting attachment. She thought it almost impossible that she should be satisfied with his love. ‘And, even if I were to be,’ she asked herself, ‘what should I hope to do with it: tolerate it? Respond to it? Do I wish to become involved in an affair? To fail M. de Clèves? To fail myself? And do I wish, finally, to lay myself open to the bitter regrets and mortal agonies of love? I have been brought down and overcome by an impulse that is carrying me away in spite of myself. Every resolution on my part is useless: my thoughts were the same yesterday as they are today, yet I am doing today precisely the opposite of what yesterday I resolved. I must tear myself away from the presence of M. de Nemours, I must go to the country, however eccentric such a journey may seem; and, if M. de Clèves insists on preventing it or knowing the reason for it, perhaps I shall do him – and myself also – the disservice of telling him why.’ She remained determined to follow this course and spent the evening at home, without going to find out from the Dauphine what had happened to the forgery of the Vidame’s letter.
On M. de Clèves’s return, she told him that she wanted to go to the country, that she was unwell and had a need to take the air. To M. de Clèves she seemed to possess a beauty that did not persuade him she was seriously ill. At first he made light of the proposed journey and replied that she was forgetting the forthcoming marriage of the princesses and the tournament: she had not long to prepare herself, if she was to appear with the same splendour as the other ladies. Her husband’s arguments did not weaken her resolve. She begged him to agree that while he was away in Compiègne with the King, she should go to Coulommiers, a fine house one day’s journey from Paris, which they were having expertly built for them. M. de Clèves consented and she left, with the intention of staying for some time, while the King set out for Compiègne where he was due to remain only a few days.
M. de Nemours had been greatly distressed at not seeing Mme de Clèves again since the afternoon which they had passed so agreeably and which had raised his hopes. His impatience to see her gave him no rest so that, when the King returned to Paris, he decided to visit his sister, the Duchesse de Mercoeur, who lived in the country, not far from Coulommiers. He invited the Vidame to accompany him. The latter readily accepted the invitation, which M. de Nemours made in the hope of seeing Mme de Clèves and calling on her with the Vidame.
Mme de Mercoeur welcomed them with much warmth and thought only how to amuse them and offer them all the pleasures of country life. While they were out stag-hunting, M. de Nemours wandered into the forest. Enquiring his way back, he learned that he was close to Coulommiers. Hearing the name, without further thought, or knowing what he intended to do, he rode off at full speed in the direction he had been shown. He arrived in the forest and allowed himself to be guided by chance along well-made roads, guessing they led to the château. At the end of the road he came across a pavilion, the lower floor of which consisted of a large drawing room flanked by two closets, the first opening on a flower garden, only separated by fencing from the woods, and the second looking down a broad avenue through the park. He went inside and would have stopped to admire the pavilion, were it not that he saw M. and Mme de Clèves coming along the avenue across the park, attended by a large number of servants. Since he had not expected to see M. de Clèves, whom he had left with the King, his first impulse was to hide. He went into the closet overlooking the flower garden, thinking to leave through a door that led into the forest. But, seeing that Mme de Clèves and her husband had sat down in the pavilion, while their servants remained in the park and would not approach him without going through the place where M. and Mme de Clèves had stopped, he could not resist the pleasure of seeing her or his curiosity to eavesdrop on her conversation with a husband who caused him more jealousy than any of his rivals.
He heard M. de Clèves say to his wife:
‘But why do you not wish to return to Paris? What can keep you in the country? For some time now you have shown a fondness for solitude that surprises and pains me, since it keeps us apart. I even find you more than usually sad and I am afraid that you have some secret sorrow.’
‘I have nothing distressing on my mind,’ she answered, uneasily. ‘But the turmoil of the court is so great and there are always so many peop
le at your house, that it is inevitable one should grow weary in body and mind, and wish to rest.’
‘Rest,’ he replied, ‘is hardly natural for someone of your age. Your activities, both at home and at court, are not such as to exhaust you, and what I find more worrying is that you may be only too pleased to be separated from me.’
‘You would be most unjust, were you to think that,’ she returned, with increasing embarrassment. ‘But I beg you to leave me here. If you could stay with me, I should be overjoyed, provided you stayed alone and did not want to be surrounded by that endless crowd of people, who hardly ever leave you.’
‘Ah, madame!’ M. de Clèves exclaimed. ‘Your manner and your words tell me that you have some reason for wishing to be alone that I do not know, and I implore you to say what it is.’
He urged her for a long time to give him her reason, though he could not force her to do so. And, after resisting in a way that only excited his curiosity still further, she lapsed into a deep silence, with downcast eyes; then suddenly, looked up at him and spoke:
‘Do not oblige me,’ she said, ‘to admit something to you that I do not have the strength to admit, though I have many times intended to do so. Only consider that it is unwise for a woman of my age, who is mistress of her own conduct, to remain exposed in the midst of the court.’
‘What are you trying to suggest, madame?’ M. de Clèves exclaimed. ‘I am afraid that I might offend you if I were to put it in words.’
Mme de Clèves said nothing and her silence confirmed what her husband was thinking.
‘You do not answer,’ he went on. ‘And that means that I am correct.’
‘So be it, then,’ she replied, throwing herself at his feet. ‘I am going to make a confession to you that no wife has ever made to her husband; but the innocence of my conduct and of my intentions gives me strength. It is true that I have reason to leave the court and that I wish to avoid the dangers that sometimes threaten women of my age. I have never given the slightest sign of weakness and I should not fear to exhibit any if you were to allow me to retire from court, or if I still had Mme de Chartres’s help to guide me. Perilous though it is, I am happy to take this course so that I may keep myself worthy to belong to you. I beg you a thousand times to forgive me, if my feelings displease you, but at least I shall never displease you by my actions. Consider that, to do what I am now doing, one must have more affection and esteem for a husband than a wife has ever had. Guide me, have pity on me, and love me still, if you can.’