And yet Frenchmen are said to be fickle!
The men are hideous anyway, whatever they put on their heads. I have
seen nothing but worn, hard faces, with no calm nor peace in the
expression; the harsh lines and furrows speak of foiled ambition and
smarting vanity. A fine forehead is rarely seen.
"And these are the product of Paris!" I said to Miss Griffith.
"Most cultivated and pleasant men," she replied. I was silent.
The heart of a spinster of thirty-six is a well of
tolerance. In the evening I went to the ball, where I kept close to my mother's
side. She gave me her arm with a devotion which did not miss its
reward. All the honors were for her; I was made the pretext for
charming compliments. She was clever enough to find me fools for my
partners, who one and all expatiated on the heat and the beauty of the
ball, till you might suppose I was freezing and blind. Not one failed
to enlarge on the strange, unheard-of, extraordinary, odd, remarkable
fact--that he saw me for the first time.
My dress, which dazzled me as I paraded alone in my white-and-gold
drawing-room, was barely noticeable amidst the gorgeous finery of most
of the married women. Each had her band of faithful followers, and
they all watched each other askance. A few were radiant in triumphant
beauty, and amongst these was my mother. A girl at a ball is a mere
dancing-machine--a thing of no consequence whatever.
The men, with rare exceptions, did not impress me more favorably here
than at the Champs-Elysees. They have a used-up look; their features
are meaningless, or rather they have all the same meaning. The proud,
stalwart bearing which we find in the portraits of our ancestors--men
who joined moral to physical vigor--has disappeared. Yet in this
gathering there was one man of remarkable ability, who stood out from
the rest by the beauty of his face. But even he did not rouse in me
the feeling which I should have expected. I do not know his works, and
he is a man of no family. Whatever the genius and the merits of a
plebeian or a commoner, he could never stir my blood. Besides, this
man was obviously so much more taken up with himself than with anybody
else, that I could not but think these great brain-workers must look
on us as things rather than persons. When men of intellectual power
love, they ought to give up writing, otherwise their love is not the
real thing.
The lady of their heart does not come first in all their
thoughts. I seemed to read all this in the bearing of the man I speak
of. I am told he is a professor, orator, and author, whose ambition
makes him the slave of every bigwig.