Chapter XX: The Face in the Crowd

Isabella had loved her mother, truly if rather fearfully, and in return had been loved by her with as condescending a devotion as a spirit so incessantly restless and ambitious as that of Louis XV.’s eldest daughter could lavish on a child not born into the first order of creation. How the indomitable sick woman had rejoiced in that early fulfilment of her hopes, when the Austrian ambassador had come to put an end to her doubts and apprehensions, her communications to her husband show. She was jubilant; and so was impure old Bien-aimé, who wrote the most touching and beautiful letter to congratulate his son-in-law on the event, a letter full of sentiments “de les exprimer pourrait les diminuer.” And now, before she might see brought to ripeness any one of the countless schemes she was perpetually revolving in her feverish brain for her family’s aggrandisement, she had herself dropped in a moment from the tree like a rotten medlar.

The shock of her death did more to bring poor Isabel to her senses than the harshest tyranny could have done. It seemed a very retribution on her for her sins; and I doubt, if it had been possible to marry her then offhand, but she would have acquiesced in her fate--with despairing, perhaps, but without further revolt. The thought that during all this time, while her mother had been sojourning for her health’s sake at Versailles, she had been planning in her guilty soul an act which, if committed, would have struck the deadliest of blows at the pride and trusting affection, possibly at the life itself, of that beloved parent, filled her with inexpressible remorse. She went in these days with a face so pale and scared, that one might have believed her haunted by the thought of her own direct responsibility for the tragedy. The very memory of what had been seemed to her a profanation to the sainted dead. She strove to cleanse her conscience of all offence, even to the lingering shadow of a dream which now could never come to be realised. She told herself so: it was ended and finally; how, even if but one star from its firmament were allowed to twinkle on, could she kneel and pray, without blasphemy, for the repose of her mother’s soul?

To her father, in this emotional reaction, she wistfully and naturally turned. Their common sorrow brought them closer together than they had ever been as yet; and, while mothering his weakness and his distress, she bitterly reproached herself for all that past unfilial attitude of hers towards what she had considered his shallowness and vanity. Now she recognised, or believed that she recognised, how much more fondly wise than its chosen expression had been the purpose underlying that attempt of his upon her faith. She no longer blamed him for it, because his method had been simply characteristic.

It had been characteristic, indeed, as was no less the selfish quality of his present grief. He bewailed his loss, almost as if it implied some treachery to himself. Having grown resigned in submission to the stronger will, to which he had conceded the practical management of all his affairs of State and policy, he felt as if cruelly abandoned by it at that moment in the promised maturation of its schemes when its support was most needed. It was always his helplessness rather than his sorrow that came uppermost in the tale of woe; and perhaps to the heart of the woman and potential mother that made the surest appeal. In ministering to his despair Isabella forgot her own.

And yet it is not to be inferred that Don Philip had been other than devoted in his way to the vigorous soul who through such long years had been his spirited coadjutor and support. To do him justice, he had purposed on the first warning note of tragedy to set out for Versailles--an intention for which the king his father-in-law, when he came to hear of it, had gently rebuked him. And, indeed, the journey would have been in vain. Short shrift and shift was the order in all cases where that dreaded scourge proved mortal; and scarce was the breath out of the august body before it was being hurried away by night to the royal mausoleum of Saint Denis, where it was lowered with scant ceremony into the vault from which, thirty years later, the ghouls of the Revolution were to tear it, with fifty others, to scatter its still impregnated dust to the winds. It was from Marly--whither the Court, after its custom, had already fled the terror--that Louis wrote his mild reproof, ending it with the words “mes yeux baignent de larmes.”

So Don Philip, frustrated in his dutiful design, stayed on at home, and regarded and pitied himself with something of the stupefaction of the dreamer, who, thinking himself standing among company, discovers suddenly that he has forgotten to put on his clothes. Thus he felt as if delivered naked and aghast to a situation with which he was quite unable to cope. He had leaned so long on that imperious will that he seemed to have lost his capacity for standing alone.

His prostration was even abject while it lasted; but the true quality of grief is to be measured more by endurance than collapse. Those who succumb easily revive easily, and it was not to be supposed but that that volatile brain would quickly rally from its depression under the stimulus of such local distractions as offered.

Those were necessarily at first of a mortuary complexion, touching such matters as the depth and period of the court mourning, the fasts to be observed and the masses to be sung. The opportunities presented by obsequies are only fully appreciated by two classes--those standing at the opposite social extremes. A funeral is the poor man’s chance, and the prince’s, since each in his way borrows a relative distinction from the Majesty of Death. In the one case it is a brief affair, in the other a protracted; but at the bottom of both there is the same sentiment of reflected glory. Whether it be a lying-in-state, or a hearse with one poor coach to follow, it is the corpse which ennobles the relatives, and makes them greater than themselves by reason of their kinship with it.

Now the widower awoke to the exciting potentialities of his position as chief mourner, and to the realisation that a living ass might command more attention than a dead lioness. As executor to the mighty departed, it was his to rule, and thereby to take the credit for, the quality of the honours to be accorded her. He extracted, at least, some revivifying comfort from the process, some soothing flattery from the profuse condolences of his subjects. When the dead was declared great and unforgettable--and, indeed, whatever the personal trend of Louise Elizabeth’s ambition, her forceful character had left its stamp upon her times--he inhaled the incense as proffered to his own nostrils. His vanity swallowed the innumerable eulogies, monodies and elegiacs, extolling the deceased’s virtues, and, waxing fat upon them, like Jeshurun kicked. “Where, then,” ended one passionate encomiast, Frugoni, an abbé, “O, where, then, Death, is thy sting!” It is certain that, if it lay rankling in that bereaved heart, there was also much solace of honey to alleviate the pain it caused.

In short the duke only took means according to his lights to forget his trouble; and what should we all do, under like circumstances, but so study to fight the brooding demon of morbidity? Did he find a wholesome diversion in discussing with la Coque the details of a mourning coat, the braided sorrow of its cuffs, the sad expressive disposition of its buttons, why grudge him that comfort simply because we ourselves could see none in it? If a man can find solace for his grief in cat’s-cradle, by all means let him play with strings. The two played with strings in another sense, composing between them a touching threnody, thick with the most harassing sobs and wails, to which their own tears responded plentifully. They enjoyed it all immensely in a sort of smug lugubrious way. His Highness looked double the man he had been after a week or two’s enjoyment of these softly melancholy preoccupations.

To Isabella, standing wistful and sorrowful in the background, the improvement in her father’s spirits brought, with a greater ease on his account, some vague feeling of distress. She was glad to see him shed his despair for a healthier sentiment; yet she could not but marvel over the choice of the means he could adopt, and find sufficient, for the medicining of a sick soul. She tried to blind herself to the essential shallowness of the nature which could thus console its tragedy with sweetmeats; she tried to make allowances, to be steadfastly loyal to her own converted sense of duty; yet the conscious truth in her would not be so hoodwinked, or wholly justify to her the self-sacrifice of which she had been so lavish.

Still she would have remained faithful to its ideals, if only he had continued to cling to her; but, as she felt herself, her sympathy and loving support, needed by him less and less--even at last, as he developed these other healing resources, impatiently rejected--a sense of such loneliness settled upon her as brought her own soul near the verge of despair. She shrank back, like one who has put out a confident hand to caress a dog, and has been savagely torn for one’s trust. Thenceforth she seemed to realise, as she had never done yet, the complete misery of her state. She had thrown away the substance to grasp at the shadow, and her reward was in the righteousness of utter desolation.

One day Fanchette alluded before her, with a disdainful lip, to a poor little neglected herb, which had stood long untended on its table in a sunless corner.

“Shall I throw it away, your Highness?” she said. “I think it is dead.”

“Dead!” The word brought a shock of colour to the girl’s cheek, which fled as quickly, leaving it ashy white. She seemed to have awakened in an instant as from a distressed dream to the reality of something left beside her when she fell asleep. So a mother, irresistibly overcome, might startle to reconsciousness of her baby weakling, and sit up aghast, with panic ears strained for reassurance of the soft-drawn breaths. Her baby--theirs! and dying or dead! She looked, with wide eyes glazed, staring at the pretty piteous thing, which her heart, in its stupefaction, had forgotten. And then a rush of anger swept her, coming from what source the power that made the feminine must answer.

“Why do you refer to it like that?” she said. “Am I to submit for ever to your insults and innuendoes? You should have made it your duty to water it without consulting me. What has it done, poor thing, to be so cruelly treated? Please to attend to it at once.”

And she walked haughtily away, scornful of the storm she knew her reproof would evoke in that hysteric bosom; careless of how her words might rankle and give forth poisonous humours.

But that night she dreamed that she awoke and saw her lover stand beside her; and his face to her ghast eyes appeared all thinly laced with blood; and in his hand he held a shrunk and withered plant.

“Dead!” he moaned: “O, faithless and untrue, look here! Dead, dead!”

And so wailing, while she strove madly for speech, he passed and faded, seeming to melt away into the darkness; and, struggling, she awoke in truth, her cheeks all wet with tears, and held out wild entreating arms.

“No!” she whispered: “Beloved--no, no! Not to take it with you--not to kill me like that! I will be true; I will never sin to it or you again.” And so she lay sobbing, a great fear and rapture at her heart.

Then, suddenly, listening, with panic pulses, she rose, and, the cold moonbeams playing on her white breast and feet, stole to a shadowy corner, and gasped with joy to find _it_ still was there, and felt the soil to see that it was moist, and let her tears drop on the shrunken leaves.

She remembered all this the next morning as something that strangely hovered between fact and fancy--a half actual, half dreaming ecstasy like a sleepwalker’s. But, while she could not kill the impression of joy it had recreated in her, she still strove to remain faithful to her resolution of duty to her mother’s memory. That was an impossible compromise, of course; but it sufficed the situation, while matters, owing to the mourning, hung in abeyance.

On the 2nd of February, following that fatal December, a solemn requiem mass for the repose of the soul of Madame Louise-Elizabeth of France, eldest daughter of the King, Infanta of Spain, and Duchess of Parma, was sung at Paris in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. There were present the Dauphin and Dauphiness, Mesdames Adélaïde and Victoire, younger sisters of the deceased, and a host of court notables. The funeral oration was pronounced by the Bishop of Troyes, who, says the chronicler, “found nothing to say about the deceased except the usual banalities, and who even pushed hyperbole so far as to eulogise Don Philip, representing him as one ‘adorned with every talent which makes for the first success, with every quality which merits it, unshirking the least labour which assures it.’”

That flattery, when it reached the ears of its object, may likely have stimulated him to an emulation, and more than an emulation, of the “pomp and circumstance” of the Parisian “service solennel.” Anyhow, to the public obsequies of the late duchess, which were announced to be held in the Church of the Madonna della Steccata, at Parma, on the 27th March following, all the ingenuity of symbol and device of which an upholstering brain was capable was brought into play, with a result calculated to impress the most flippant with the dignity and majesty of death as interpreted by a master in the art of “make-up.”

To quote, somewhat loosely, the words of the same chronicler: “The interior of the church [a fine Renaissance structure, in the Greek form, dating from the early sixteenth century] was hung with black cloth embellished with a mosaic of bones and tears. Six Corinthian pillars fluted with silver had been erected at intervals round the nave. Medallions, representing the virtues of the princess, and ornamented with inscriptions and ermine-lined draperies, filled the intercolumniations of the arches both great and small. The octagonal catafalque set in the midst bore the arms of Madame on a field of tears and fleurs-de-lys. Below this rose a pyramid draped with black velvet, having on its summit a crown veiled in crêpe; while around were grouped six white marble statues representing Religion, Faith, Hope, Charity, and two others that stood for Death. From the vaulted roof hung a great baldaquin ornamented with five sable plumes.

“The presence of the court bishop, the stately and melancholy intoning, combined, with the throb of the organ, the wailing of the stringed instruments and the countless lights, to give to the ceremony a majesty worthy of the Infanta.”

Rather an abrupt pull-up that, as if the author in the midst of his declamation had been hit suddenly in the middle. But enough has been described to illustrate the fertility of the brain responsible for the decorations.

On the day of the service, the streets from an early hour were thronged with sombre-clad citizens all hurrying to anticipate all others in the securing of the best places for viewing and hearing. It was a cold clear morning, and the soaring dome of the church, surmounting its four shallow cupolas, seemed to glitter very remote and quiet up in its blue vault. More than all the glooming symbols in the depths below it spoke the free tranquil thought of immortality, lovely and consoling; and so it seemed to two sad unmothered eyes, that caught a glimpse of it through the window of the state coach, as that solemn vehicle approached the porch.

By now all business was suspended in the city, a tithe of whose population was packed away within those close and throbbing walls, while hundreds, unable to gain a footing in the building, crowded the Piazza and all the approaches outside, awaiting the arrival of the ducal party.

Among these watchers was a young gentleman, who had come riding in that morning from Mantua thirty miles away. He had left the old Virgilian town at midnight, being hard pressed for time, and had entered Parma to the clang of tolling bells, many and monotonous. The sound at first had knocked upon his heart with a strange foreboding, and he had reined in, with a thick catch at his throat. What did this melancholy music portend--and these sombre crowds, all silent, all intent, all streaming in one direction?

“His slackening steps pause at the gate--
Does she wake or sleep?--the time is late--
Does she sleep now, or watch and wait?
She has watched, she has waited long,
Watching athwart the golden grate
With a patient song.”

A mad conceit--an insane fear. And yet--he bent, put a brief hoarse question to a passer-by and learnt the truth.

Her mother--dead some months now, as he knew. He breathed out a little laugh of relief, reckless, self-scornful, and pushed on his way. In so far, at least, the occasion was opportune; he might see her, and not be seen. It was for that very purpose he had taken advantage of the sudden armistice to hurry from Lusatia, while the fighting he had been engaged in was suspended, and speed these long leagues back to the Lombard plains. He had travelled day and night; he was war-worn and spent with weariness; yet he would think his pains well recompensed by one glimpse of the loved face. Only for one moment to stay the insatiable hunger of his heart--to acquire new nerve and resolution for the end that could not now be long delayed. He desired, he told himself, to learn that she was reconciled and happy; that the ruin with which he had threatened her young life was averted, and then he would leave her once more, this time never to return. And so men will go out of their way to lie to themselves, knowing that the truth stands steadfast to the good resolution which first inspired it.

He put up his horse, and, strolling out, mingled with the people. He was reckless of discovery, as one must be who is reckless of his life. He had timed his approach to the church so fortuitously that he could see, over the heads of the mob, the ducal cortège as it accompanied the carriages. The nearness of her presence--though, penned as he was within that living wall, he could distinguish nothing of it--made his veins throb between rapture and agony. And then he bent himself, as the pressure of the crowd relaxed, and it resigned itself to the long hour of waiting before the reappearance of the august mourners, to edging a passage to some nearer coign of vantage, where he might watch, himself unobserved.

His cool persistence--his military bearing and assurance, perhaps--gained him his purpose by degrees. When within two or three of the foremost row, under the shadow of a buttress he stopped and stood fast, abiding the mad moment.

The swell of the organ came to him; the sweet voices of the choir. Something seemed to rise in his heart, half-suffocating him. And then a magnetic thrill ran through the crowd, and he knew that he was to face the ordeal.

The ducal carriage already waited at the steps. There came out first from the great portal a little group of her Highness’s women, and he saw that one of them was Fanchette. At that very moment a surge of the crowd drove him forward and almost from his feet, so that to save himself he had to “rush” two or three of the steps, and to pause an instant to recover his balance before re-descending them. In that second, the girl, looking round, was aware of him, and bending immediately, as if to withdraw her skirts from his neighbourhood, whispered: “At four o’clock, on the Mezzo bridge.”

The next moment, hustled by the guards, he was down again, and near his former position. But the slight disturbance had attracted the attention of a young lady just issuing from the church on her father’s arm. One instant she turned her eyes and saw him; the next, with a little swerve, momentary, scarce perceptible, she was going down the steps to the carriage.