and her guests passed onward, and in their Valois dresses were soon seated in the summer banqueting-room: a modern addition to the château, an open loggia in the Italian style, with marble floor and marble columns, one side open to the air, the other sides rich in white marble bas-reliefs by French sculptors; the ceiling had been painted by Puvis de Chavannes with the story of Europa. In each corner there were tall palms in large square cases of white porcelain; the white columns were garlanded by passion-flowers, which grew without; at either end there was a fountain, their basins filled with gold fish and water-lilies; through the columns the whole enchanting view of the west gardens was seen stretching far away to where the Loire waters spread wide as a lake and mirroring the newly-risen moon.
'I had it built,' she said, in answer to some one who complimented her upon it. 'There is a great dining-hall and a small dining-room indoors, but neither are fitted for summer evenings. It is a barbarism to be shut up within four walls just as the moon rises and the nightingales sing. The matter of food is always a distressingly coarse question; nothing can really spiritualise or redeem it, but at least it may be divested of some of its brute aspects. A delicate cuisine does that for us in some measure, and the scene we have around us may do more. The London and Paris habit of sitting in mere boxes, more or less well decorated, is horrible. Perfect ease, vast space, and soft shadowy distances are absolutely necessary to preserve illusions as we dine.'
And to that end she had caused to be built the loggia of Amyôt, with as much celerity and breathless obedience to her commands as the architects of the East showed a sultan of Bagdad or Benares when he bade a palace of marble uprise from the sand. Her fine taste would not have allowed her to hurt the architecture of Amyôt with any incongruity, however much her caprices might have desired it; but the marble loggia accorded in exterior with the Renaissance outline of the château, and the tone of Primaticcio and the epoch of Jean Goujon had been faithfully followed in its internal decoration.
'What a perfect place it is!' said one of her guests to her after dinner.
She smiled.
'In August, yes. When the terraces are hung with ice, and the forests black with winter storm, it is not so perfect. All places have their season, like all lives.'
'There are some places, like some lives, which can never lose their beauty.'
'Do you think so? I have never found them. When one knows every leaf, every stone, every fence, the beauty of the place fades for us as it does when one knows every impulse, every prejudice, every fault, and every virtue of the life.'
'A melancholy truth—if it be a truth. Perhaps it is only half a one. There are people who love their homes.'
'There are prisoners who have loved their cells! Amyôt is delightful in many ways, but I have no more sense of home in it than a swallow has in the eaves it builds under for one summer. You must go to the vinedresser's wife in the cliff cabin on the river for that.'
'Then the vinedresser's wife has a jewel which the great châtelaine's crown is without?'
'A jewel? Are you sure it is a jewel? I think there is much to be said in favour of the restlessness of our world, it saves us from rust and reflection; it makes us unprejudiced and cosmopolitan; it annihilates nationalities and antipathies. I imagine, if Horace had lived now, he would never have been still; he would have seen the farm in its pleasantest season, and that only. He would have carried with him the undying lamp of his enchanting temperament, and he would have been happy anywhere.'
'But is it really incomprehensible to you, the love of home?'
'I think so. I have lived in too many places. We are a few months here, a few months in Paris, a few weeks in the Riviera, a few weeks in Russia, or Vienna, or London. It is impossible to carry about the sense of home peripatetically with you as the snail carries his shell. The sparrow feels it, the swallow does not. I have always had a number of houses in which I spend a number of months, of weeks, of days. I like each of them to be perfect in its own way, and I like each to have copies of my favourite books in it: the sight of Goethe, of Molière, of Horace makes one feel chez soi. That is as near "home" as I approach. I imagine all happiness is much more a matter of temperament than of place or of circumstance.'
'I do not believe you are happy even now!'
It was a personal speech, and too bold a one to be justified even by intimate and privileged friendship. But she was moved to it by that ever ready and pitiless self-analysis which made her as severe a critic of herself as of others.
'Happy? Oh, I must be,' she said with a smile. 'Who on earth should be happy if I am not? I have all the vulgar attributes of happiness in profusion and all the more delicate ones too. If I am not so, it can only be because my temperament is the very opposite of a porte-bonheur like Horace's. I have always expected too much of everything and of everybody, and yet I am not at all what you would call an imaginative person. I ought to be prosaically contented with the world as it is. But I am not.'
It was a sultry and lovely August night. The sky was radiant and the white lustre of the full moon shone over all the scene, making the gardens, the terraces, the fountains, the parterres of flowers light as day, and leaving the masses of the great forest which surrounded them in deepest shadow. It was haunted ground, this stately and royal place where both Marguerites had passed in turn summers dead three centuries ago; where the one, witty, wise and faithful, had read the tales of her Heptameron beneath its spreading oaks; and the other, lovely, perilous and faithless, had gathered its roses and ruffled them, murmuring the 'un peu—beaucoup—passionnément,' as one passion hotly chased another from her fickle breast, each scarce living the life of the gathered rose.
The present châtelaine of Amyôt, leaning against one of the marble columns of her summer dining-hall, and listening to the words of a friend who dared tell her truths, looked out into the wide white moonlight, on to the trellised rose walks, the turf smooth as velvet, bordered with ground ivy; the marble statues standing against the high walls of close-clipped evergreens; the deep and sombre forests which held the heart of so many secrets, the story of so many lives and of so many deaths, safe shut away for ever, dumb and dead in the eternal mystery of its vernal solitudes. If she were not happy who should be?
But happiness—what an immense word!—or what a little one! A poet's dream of paradise, or the peasant's contentment in the chimney-corner and the pot of soup! Which you will—but never both at once.
She was as happy as a very analytical and fastidious nature can possibly be, but at times her old enemy dissatisfaction looked in over the flowers and through the golden air. She was pursued by her old consciousness that the human race was after all exceedingly limited in its capabilities, and the lives of men on the whole very wearisome. There was with her that vague disappointment and dissatisfaction which come to most of us when we have done what we wished to do. There is a monotony even in what is most agreeable, which makes all happiness dull after awhile. Priests tells us that this unpleasant weariness is intended to detach us from the joys of earth, and philosophers are content to find its solution in the physiology of the senses. But whether explained sentimentally or scientifically, the result is the same: that expectation makes up so large a component part of pleasure that, when there is nothing new to expect, pleasure becomes so attenuated as to be scarcely visible.
All loves which have been constant and become famous have been those to which immense difficulties arose, where perils supplied the element of an unending interest. It is when they can only behold each other in the stolen hours of the moonlight, that Romeo and Giulietta are to each other divinely fair. Were they condemned to face each other at dinner every night for ten years, what divinity would be left for either in the eyes of the other?
Habit and love cannot dwell together. As well ask the rose to flower beneath
