one, and now a cold and equable philosopher. Perhaps the diversity will amuse him. The background of my heart he will find always the same.’ ‘After all, it is necessary, is it not, to know where Archimedes placed his lever to lift the world?’
Not necessary, certainly, to Monsieur de Bellegarde. His wits did not move in the abstract: they were not even at all serviceable ‘for everyday use.’ After a year of courtship he had not yet found out whether Mademoiselle de Tuyll, with her Protestant faith, could become his legal wife, or her children his legal heirs. When Monsieur de Tuyll politely suggested that a little light on this point was to be desired, the Marquis sent him his mother’s marriage contract, a hundred pages long, which had no bearing whatever on the subject. This incompetence rather favoured his suit by provoking the mirth of the orderly parent. ‘When one laughs one is half way to being pleased, and the spectacle of the entire incapacity of a man with whom we are doing business leads one to think of him affectionately and to desire that the affair should reach the conclusion he desires: his incapacity seems to compel us to take charge of his interests.’ And, in fact, Belle, who makes this observation, took charge of Bellegarde’s interests to such purpose that we find her escaping to pay a visit, incognito, to the Bishop of Utrecht in order to settle these technical matters for herself; and – after a fall – she carries a letter for the Pope about her person until it becomes so infected with the balms of a poultice ‘that it could only serve the Holy Father for a medicament if he should chance to tumble from the Holy See.’
The Marquis came to pay his court. He was stiff and polite. ‘I am on the tight rope with him, we are very upright, very measured in our movements; point de gambades hasardées.’ He had, as Belle remarked later, ‘the least persuasive manner in the world; his conscience should be easy – seduction cannot be numbered among his sins.’ Yet she excused his awkwardness, his coldness, his incompetence; she pleaded his suit, she managed his business. What was the motive of this persistence, one might almost say of this pursuit?
It is most certain the motive was not a worldly desire to become Madame la Marquise. No one was ever more genuinely democratic, by instinct, taste, and conviction than Mademoiselle de Tuyll. All her life she detested the constraints of society. She loved simplicity, and sought to surround herself with simple folk. When the gay Hermenches described to her the delights of a country house party of seventy guests she replied with horror; a dance of Dutch peasants was more to her taste. She held the tenets of Rousseau with the assurance of a grande dame. Her brilliance and her reputation would have secured her a great place in the world of Paris: it was precisely the position she did not want. ‘My desire to see Paris might be chilled, if I were Bellegarde’s wife, by the fact that he is too grand seigneur, and his family have too many great names. I might have to conform to their grand manner, and I do not like the great, nor the grand manner, nor to conform. My chief wish would be to see Paris on foot, or in a cab; to see the arts, the artists, and the artisans; to hear the talk of the crowd and the eloquence of Clairon. I would make some chance acquaintances whom I should like and some others who would make me laugh. I would pay a big price for the lessons of Rameau, and a week before I left, for the sake of completeness, I would make acquaintance with the hairdresser and the world of fashion.’
But if the motive was not worldliness, neither, certainly, was it passion. With the best will in the world she failed to fall in love with Bellegarde. At most, and very precariously, this difficult task might be achieved (so she hoped in her more facile moods) with sufficient encouragement from the Marquis; the encouragement was not forthcoming. Yet passion was eminently part of her scheme. ‘If I did not love my husband, he would be the unhappiest of mortals…But if I love – if I love! I can do nothing by halves, I am capable of no feeble desires, no limited ambitions’; and this fervent lady proposed to marry Monsieur de Bellegarde, the ‘unseductive’ nobleman whose ‘more substantial sentiments were to replace those of a Corydon’; and what is more she meant to make him happy.
The cause of Belle’s persistence lay in her singular egoism. All her other suitors had been proposed to her by her parents, or had come forward of their own initiative; Bellegarde was her own creation, the hero of her private scheme, the puppet of her own conspiracy with Hermenches. He had loomed up, a shadowy figure, which her imagination could shape as it pleased. When the outlines became distinct and forbidding he was already a part of her will; a struggle had been engaged; her egoism was committed; and her reason worked unrestingly to justify her choice.
And Hermenches was involved. Hermenches, her choice, on whom her egoism had fastened even more profoundly, Hermenches the confidant of her unending self-analysis. Truly, as she said, it was ‘an odd thing to upset heaven and earth, to fight with monsters, for the sake of a tepid marriage.’ But marriage with Bellegarde meant freedom from Zuylen, a gratifying defeat of the monsters,…and a future for this embarrassed friendship. For embarrassed it was. ‘I fear you may hold too large a part in my thoughts, that I may be forming the habit of preoccupying myself with you too constantly, and too keenly (avec un certain mouvement trop vif). I am determined that this shall not happen. What would be the end of it? A passion perhaps, perhaps a rupture…I am convinced my parents will never give a formal consent to this marriage; if the Marquis insists on this point, you and I, Hermenches, will not pass our lives together; you will live in Bellegarde’s châteaux without me. What shall we do then with the habit that unites us? Will you be satisfied to write to me all your life, and to see me never? Our letters have been all fire, always ardent and tender: after such letters we need to meet. We shall seek each other out, Hermenches – unless we quarrel – and then beware of passion, of jealousy, instinct, madness, and confusion! If I do not marry your friend, if I think always of you, some day we shall be lovers, unless we are separated to the ends of the earth, or unless you care for me no longer.’ What is to happen to them, she asks, if she does not marry Bellegardê What is to happen, one cannot help asking, if she does?
This letter to Hermenches reveals a state of mind in Mademoiselle de Tuyll of a somewhat complicated order; a state of mind which may well have been disquieting to Monsieur de Bellegarde and the other eleven suitors. The cautious Marquis hung back. Mademoiselle de Tuyll was perfectly sympathetic: ‘I hold to the formula of liberty: every morning the Marquis must wake up with the freedom not to wish what he wished the day before’; and when she dismisses another suitor she is at pains that Bellegarde should not know it lest he should conceive his obligations to be increased. The Marquis availed himself of this liberty to the full: every morning, for the space of about four years, he woke up wishing what he had not wished the day before. But at last his painful dubiety gave place to a settled conviction. For this temperament, these conic sections, this alarming wit, this unsparing frankness, he was no match. But he found it very difficult to say so.
Unhappy Mademoiselle de Tuyll! After so many letters, after so much self-scrutiny and analysis, after ‘combats with monsters’ and visits to bishops, she was twenty-eight; and still at Zuylen the cattle browsed on, the windmills slowly turned, the barges drifted by; and still she endured the ‘privation péniblè of her unmarried state.
But all this time there had been other strings to her formidable bow. The King of Prussia, for example, had heard tell of this enchantress. A Dutch gentleman at his court, Belle said, ‘used to send His Majesty to sleep with the story of my charms.’ The King ‘liked this story as well as another,’ and desired to see Mademoiselle de Tuyll at the Prussian court. Monsieur le Comte d’Anhalt was to wed the paragon and bring her to Potsdam. The mother, sister, and friends of the Count were full of this desirable project; the Count himself, if not precisely full, was at any rate favourably disposed.
The circumstances of this proposal were eminently flattering. The Anhalts, it was said, were to receive back their princely rank; the King took a lively interest in Belle; he had seen her portrait, and advised her to give up reading Fénelon. The Count was on the point of starting for Utrecht. He was always about to start. He remained in Germany; the trepidation which Belle never failed to inspire, even at a distance, kept him rooted to the spot. Mademoiselle de Tuyll observed the process of his collapse with an amused detachment. The Count d’Anhalt served very
