Madame De Mauves eBook

This ingenious appeal left the young man uneasy.  He found himself in presence of more complications than had been in his reckoning.  To call on Madame de Mauves with his present knowledge struck him as akin to fishing in troubled waters.  He was of modest composition, and yet he asked himself whether an appearance of attentions from any gallant gentleman mightn’t give another twist to her tangle.  A flattering sense of unwonted opportunity, however—­of such a possible value constituted for him as he had never before been invited to rise to—­made him with the lapse of time more confident, possibly more reckless.  It was too inspiring not to act upon the idea of kindling a truer light in his fair countrywoman’s slow smile, and at least he hoped to persuade her that even a raw representative of the social order she had not done justice to was not necessarily a mere fortuitous collocation of atoms.  He immediately called on her.

II

She had been placed for her education, fourteen years before, in a Parisian convent, by a widowed mammma who was fonder of Homburg and Nice than of letting out tucks in the frocks of a vigorously growing daughter.  Here, besides various elegant accomplishments—­the art of wearing a train, of composing a bouquet, of presenting a cup of tea—­she acquired a certain turn of the imagination which might have passed for a sign of precocious worldliness.  She dreamed of marrying a man of hierarchical “rank”—­not for the pleasure of hearing herself called Madame la Vicomtesse, for which it seemed to her she should never greatly care, but because she had a romantic belief that the enjoyment of inherited and transmitted consideration, consideration attached to the fact of birth, would be the direct guarantee of an ideal delicacy of feeling.  She supposed it would be found that the state of being noble does actually enforce the famous obligation.  Romances are rarely worked out in such transcendent good faith, and Euphemia’s excuse was the prime purity of her moral vision.  She was essentially incorruptible, and she took this pernicious conceit to her bosom very much as if it had been a dogma revealed by a white-winged angel.  Even after experience had given her a hundred rude hints she found it easier to believe in fables, when they had a certain nobleness of meaning, than in well-attested but sordid facts.  She believed that a gentleman with a long pedigree must be of necessity a very fine fellow, and enjoyment of a chance to carry further a family chronicle begun ever so far back must be, as a consciousness, a source of the most beautiful impulses.  It wasn’t therefore only that noblesse oblige, she thought, as regards yourself, but that it ensures as nothing else does in respect to your wife.  She had never, at the start, spoken to a nobleman in her life, and these convictions were but a matter of extravagant theory.  They were the fruit, in part, of the perusal of various Ultramontane