The weight of the name

CONTENTSCHAPTER Landri II. A Grand Seigneur III. The Tragic Underside of a Grand Existence IV. The Tragic Underside of a Grand Existence (Concluded) V. In Uniform VI. The Will VII. All Save Honor VIII. On a Scent IX. Separation X. Epilogue THE WEIGHT OF THE NAME I LANDRIThe automobile turned sharply about the chevet of Saint-François-Xavier. With an instinctive movement, Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp seized the megaphone. He called to the chauffeur to stop before one of the side entrances. The powerful limousin was still in motion when he jumped out upon the sidewalk and disappeared within the church, to reappear a few seconds later, by way of the main portal, on Boulevard des Invalides. With the elegant and self-assured bearing characteristic of Landri, with his charming face, at once soldierly and thoughtful, which a proud, almost haughty mouth, beneath the slightly tawny veil of the mustache, would have made too stern had not the eyes, of a caressing brown, softened its expression, that childlike stratagem could mean, but one thing,—the desire, to guard from curiosity and comments a clandestine rendezvous. It was true, but—a circumstance which would have made the officers of the dragoon regiment in which the young count was serving as a lieutenant burst with laughter—he had this rendezvous with a woman with whom he was madly in love without having ever obtained anything from her. What do I say? He had not even ventured, except on one occasion, to speak to her of his sentiments. How many elements in his life had conspired to make him a fop and blasé: that face and that profession, his fortune and his name—one of the best in France, which had lacked nothing but the éclat of great offices at court! But Landri was born romantic. He was still romantic at twenty-nine. In him, as in the hearts of all genuinely tender-hearted men, emotion neutralized vanity. He had met Madame Olier in 1903. That was the name of the woman in question, a widow to-day, then the wife of one of his comrades. It was now 1906, so that he had loved her for three years. It had never entered his head that such perseverance in a dumb and unselfish devotion was a delusion. He thought so less than ever on this warm and, so to speak, languid morning of late November, as he went his way, drawn on, uplifted by a proximate hope. Although he had reasons for very serious reflection, the air seemed light to him, his step was buoyant on the sidewalks of that ancient quarter, of which he recognized the most trivial features. Behind him the dome of the Invalides stamped the gold of its cupola on a pallid, pearl-gray mist. At his right the slender towers of Saint-François soared aloft in a transparent vapor. At his left the trees of a large private garden waved their almost leafless branches over the enclosing wall, and, as far as one could see, the populous Boulevard de Montparnasse stretched away, swarming with tramways and omnibuses, with cabs and drays. In due time the young man turned into Rue Oudinot, then into Rue Monsieur. There he paused before a porte-cochère, the door of which, although it was ajar, he hesitated for some seconds to open. This door gave access to a courtyard, at whose farther end was hidden one of those dainty, oldish hôtels, pleasing to the eye, albeit out of style, of which that street with its ancien-régime name contained some half-score or more a quarter of a century since. Alas! they are vanishing one by one. As soon as the owner of one of them dies, the crowbars of the demolishers set to work. An aristocratic plaything of stone is razed to the ground. In its place rises one of those vulgar income-producing houses, on whose threshold one finds it difficult to imagine the lingering of such a lover as this. To be sure, it is simply prejudice. In the eyes of a man in love, the profile of his mistress, espied in the cage of an elevator, would bedeck with poesy and fascination the staircase of one of those monstrosities in brick and steel which the Americans brutally call "sky-scrapers." All the same, there is a more intimate, a more penetrating sweetness in a perfect accord between the setting in which a woman lives and the passion that she inspires. This sweetness Landri de Claviers had ecstatically intoxicated himself with in all his visits to that hermitage on Rue Monsieur. Never had he savored it more deeply than at this moment, when he was about to risk a step most important for the future of his love. He had come to Valentine Olier's house with the firm determination to bring about a decisive interview between them, and to ask her for her hand. If he had insisted that she should receive him at a most unseasonable hour, he had had for that insistence imperative reasons which excused him beforehand for his indiscretion. His timidity before that day, and the rapid throbbing of his pulse as he finally crossed the courtyard, did not come from an embarrassment of the sort that can be explained. It was the sinking of the heart from excess of emotion, which accompanies over-powerful desire in untried sensibilities. Naturally refined, Landri had not aged himself prematurely by the abuse of precocious experiments. To this young man, who was really entitled to be so called, what awaited him behind the curtains of that ground floor was the happiness or the misery of his whole life. But, we repeat, he hoped. His eyes feasted themselves, as their custom was, on the lines of that façade, so closely associated with the image of his Valentine. Ah! would she ever be his? A reflection of her person illuminated in his eyes that two-story building, charming in very truth, whose light pilasters, modest decorations, pediment with balustrades, and niches adorned with classic busts, presented a perfect specimen of the architecture of the time of Louis XVI,—a composite style, antique and pastoral, like that extraordinary epoch itself, in which a moribund society played at idyls—awaiting the tragedy—amid Pompeian architecture. This hôtel had been the "folly" of one of the luxurious farmers-general of that day. To-day the petite maison, divided bourgeois-fashion into small apartments, numbered among its tenants, besides the officer's widow, a retired magistrate on the first floor, and on the second the head of a department in the ministry. Thus an elegant caprice, originally designed for the suppers of a rival of Grimod de la Reynière, found itself giving shelter to existences of quasi-cloistral regularity. How gratifying to Landri was Madame Olier's choice of a habitation so retired! Left free and alone, at twenty-seven years, with an infant son, with no near relatives, having few kindred in the world and a modest fortune, Valentine had valued in that apartment the very thing that would have disgusted so many women,—the charm of oblivion, of silence and of meditation. On the other side the ground floor looked upon a very small garden, adjoining others much larger; and as the dividing wall was concealed beneath a cloak of ivy, that enclosure of a few square yards seemed like the corner of a park. As he pressed the electric bell, Landri was sure that the only servant, answering the ring, would conduct him through the narrow reception-room and the salon with its covered furniture, to a tiny room, looking on the garden at the rear, which Madame Olier used as a second salon. She would be there, writing, at the little movable table which she placed by the fire or by the door-window according to the season. Or else she would be reading, seated on the bergère covered with an old striped stuff, dead pink and faded green, always the same. Or else her slender fingers would be busy with her embroidery needle. Correspondence, reading, work or music,—a piano which she rarely opened except when alone, told of that taste of hers,—her occupation would be constantly interrupted by a glance at the path in the garden, where her son Ludovic was playing. Landri found therein an image of what the whole life of that widow and mother had been during the year since she had lost her husband! Great God! how dearly he loved the young woman for having thus proved to him how justly he had placed her so far apart from all other women from the moment of their first meeting! Valentine was there, in fact, in the small salon softly lighted by the morning sun which was just making its way through a last film of mist. She was apparently engrossed by an endless piece of embroidery. But the music portfolio, still open on the piano, and the stool pushed back a little way, might have betrayed to the young man how she had passed the time while awaiting his coming. Still another sign betokened her agitation. She had not her child with her. Contrary to her custom she had sent him out to walk at ten o'clock. Why, if not that she might be alone with her thoughts? Her self-control, however, enabled her to welcome her visitor with the same inclination of the head as usual, friendly yet reserved, the same smile of distant affability. At most the quivering of the eyelids betrayed a nervousness which was contradicted by the even tones of her voice and by the impenetrable glance of her limpid blue eyes. Such women as she, with hair of a pale gold, almost wavy, with slender hands and feet, with a tapering figure, and dainty gestures, seem destined to allow their faintest impressions to appear on the surface, one judges them to be so vibrant and quivering. On the contrary, it is generally the case that no one can be more secretive than such creatures, all delicacy and all emotion as they are. Their very excess of nervousness becomes in them a source of strength. From their first experience of the world they comprehend to what degree the acuteness of their sensations renders them exceptional, solitary beings. By one of those instincts of self-defence which the moral nature possesses no less than the physical nature, they manœuvre so as to conceal their hearts, in order that life may not brutalize them. They become, as it were, ashamed of their emotions. They hold their peace, at first concerning the most profound of them, then concerning the most superficial. And thus they end by developing a power of external impassiveness which adds to their charm the attractive force of an enigma, especially as this intentional dualism, this constant watch upon themselves, this prolonged contrast between what they show and what they feel, between their real personality and avowed personality, does not fail to exert some influence even on their manner of feeling and thinking. They are capable of the nicest shades of discrimination, even to subtlety, when they are pure; and, if they are not pure, even to stratagem, for the fascination or the despair of the man who falls in love with them, according as he, in his turn, is very complex or very simple. Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp was both, for reasons which were connected with the peculiar features of his destiny. Thus he had already suffered much through that woman, and still had owed to her the most delicious hours that his youth, darkened by an inborn and acquired melancholy, had ever known. The first words exchanged between him and Madame Olier will enable us to understand why, and at the same time what dangerous, almost unhuman, chimeras can suggest themselves to a scrupulous sentimental woman like Valentine, who loves love and fears it, who cannot determine either to deprive herself of an affection that is dear to her, or to sacrifice her self-esteem by abandoning herself to it, who becomes agitated without losing her head, and whose pulses throb without causing her to abdicate her reason. But the hour had come to have done with all equivocation. The young man's mind was made up. The young woman had read it between the enigmatical lines of his letter. She read it in those eyes, whose glances she had so often dominated in the past three years, simply by her attitude. No earthly power would prevent Landri from speaking to-day. She knew it. She knew what words he would utter, and she was preparing to listen to them, and then to reply, perturbed to the inmost depths of her being, and outwardly so calm in her mourning garb. She was dressed as if to go out, in order to have a pretext for breaking off the visit at her pleasure. The black cloth and crêpe gave to her delicately hollowed cheeks an ivory-like pallor which made her even lovelier.