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FOUR AND FOUR
It is hard nowadays to picture to one's self what a pleasure-trip
of students and grisettes to the country was like, forty-five
years ago.The suburbs of Paris are no longer the same; the physiognomy
of what may be called circumparisian life has changed completely
in the last half-century; where there was the cuckoo, there is
the railway car; where there was a tender-boat, there is now the
steamboat; people speak of Fecamp nowadays as they spoke of Saint-Cloud
in those days.The Paris of 1862 is a city which has France for
its outskirts.
The four couples conscientiously went through with all the
country follies possible at that time.
The vacation was beginning, and it was a warm, bright, summer
day.
On the preceding day, Favourite, the only one who knew how
to write, had written the following to Tholomyes in the name of
the four:
"It is a good hour to emerge from happiness."
That is why they rose at five o'clock in the morning.Then they
went to Saint-Cloud by the coach, looked at the dry cascade and
exclaimed, "This must be very beautiful when there is water!"They
breakfasted at the Tete-Noir, where Castaing had not yet been;
they treated themselves to a game of ring-throwing under the quincunx
of trees of the grand fountain; they ascended Diogenes' lantern,
they gambled for macaroons at the roulette establishment of the
Pont de Sevres, picked bouquets at Pateaux, bought reed-pipes
at Neuilly, ate apple tarts everywhere, and were perfectly happy.
The young girls rustled and chatted like warblers escaped from
their cage.
It was a perfect delirium.
From time to time they bestowed little taps on the young men.
Matutinal intoxication of life! adorable years! the wings of
the dragonfly quiver.
Oh, whoever you may be, do you not remember?
Have you rambled through the brushwood, holding aside the branches,
on account of the charming head which is coming on behind you?
Have you slid, laughing, down a slope all wet with rain, with
a beloved woman holding your hand, and crying, "Ah, my new
boots! what a state they are in!"
Let us say at once that that merry obstacle, a shower, was
lacking in the case of this good-humored party, although Favourite
had said as they set out, with a magisterial and maternal tone,
"The slugs are crawling in the paths,--a sign of rain, children."
All four were madly pretty.
A good old classic poet, then famous, a good fellow who had
an Eleonore, M. le Chevalier de Labouisse, as he strolled that
day beneath the chestnut-trees of Saint-Cloud, saw them pass about
ten o'clock in the morning, and exclaimed, "There is one
too many of them," as he thought of the Graces.Favourite,
Blachevelle's friend, the one aged three and twenty, the old one,
ran on in front under the great green boughs, jumped the ditches,
stalked distractedly over bushes, and presided over this merry-making
with the spirit of a young female faun.Zephine and Dahlia, whom
chance had made beautiful in such a way that they set each off
when they were together, and completed each other, never left
each other, more from an instinct of coquetry than from friendship,
and clinging to each other, they assumed English poses; the first
keepsakes had just made their appearance, melancholy was dawning
for women, as later on, Byronism dawned for men; and the hair
of the tender sex began to droop dolefully.
Zephine and Dahlia had their hair dressed in rolls.
Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing their
professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed between
M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.
Blachevelle seemed to have been created expressly to carry
Favourite's single-bordered, imitation India shawl of Ternaux's
manufacture, on his arm on Sundays.
Tholomyes followed, dominating the group.
He was very gay, but one felt the force of government in him;
there was dictation in his joviality; his principal ornament was
a pair of trousers of elephant-leg pattern of nankeen, with straps
of braided copper wire; he carried a stout rattan worth two hundred
francs in his hand, and, as he treated himself to everything,
a strange thing called a cigar in his mouth.Nothing was sacred
to him; he smoked.
"That Tholomyes is astounding!" said the others,
with veneration."What trousers!
What energy!"
As for Fantine, she was a joy to behold.
Her splendid teeth had evidently received an office from God,--laughter.
She preferred to carry her little hat of sewed straw, with
its long white strings, in her hand rather than on her head.
Her thick blond hair, which was inclined to wave, and which
easily uncoiled, and which it was necessary to fasten up incessantly,
seemed made for the flight of Galatea under the willows.
Her rosy lips babbled enchantingly.The corners of her mouth
voluptuously turned up, as in the antique masks of Erigone, had
an air of encouraging the audacious; but her long, shadowy lashes
drooped discreetly over the jollity of the lower part of the face
as though to call a halt.
There was something indescribably harmonious and striking about
her entire dress.She wore a gown of mauve barege, little reddish
brown buskins, whose ribbons traced an X on her fine, white, open-worked
stockings, and that sort of muslin spencer, a Marseilles invention,
whose name, canezou, a corruption of the words quinze aout, pronounced
after the fashion of the Canebiere, signifies fine weather, heat,
and midday.The three others, less timid, as we have already said,
wore low-necked dresses without disguise, which in summer, beneath
flower-adorned hats, are very graceful and enticing; but by the
side of these audacious outfits, blond Fantine's canezou, with
its transparencies, its indiscretion, and its reticence, concealing
and displaying at one and the same time, seemed an alluring godsend
of decency, and the famous Court of Love, presided over by the
Vicomtesse de Cette, with the sea-green eyes, would, perhaps,
have awarded the prize for coquetry to this canezou, in the contest
for the prize of modesty.The most ingenious is, at times, the
wisest.
This does happen.
Brilliant of face, delicate of profile, with eyes of a deep
blue, heavy lids, feet arched and small, wrists and ankles admirably
formed, a white skin which, here and there allowed the azure branching
of the veins to be seen, joy, a cheek that was young and fresh,
the robust throat of the Juno of AEgina, a strong and supple nape
of the neck, shoulders modelled as though by Coustou, with a voluptuous
dimple in the middle, visible through the muslin; a gayety cooled
by dreaminess; sculptural and exquisite--such was Fantine; and
beneath these feminine adornments and these ribbons one could
divine a statue, and in that statue a soul.
Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of it.Those
rare dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful who silently
confront everything with perfection, would have caught a glimpse
in this little working-woman, through the transparency of her
Parisian grace, of the ancient sacred euphony.
This daughter of the shadows was thoroughbred.
She was beautiful in the two ways-- style and rhythm.
Style is the form of the ideal; rhythm is its movement.
We have said that Fantine was joy; she was also modesty.
To an observer who studied her attentively, that which breathed
from her athwart all the intoxication of her age, the season,
and her love affair, was an invincible expression of reserve and
modesty.She remained a little astonished.
This chaste astonishment is the shade of difference which separates
Psyche from Venus.Fantine had the long, white, fine fingers of
the vestal virgin who stirs the ashes of the sacred fire with
a golden pin.
Although she would have refused nothing to Tholomyes, as we
shall have more than ample opportunity to see, her face in repose
was supremely virginal; a sort of serious and almost austere dignity
suddenly overwhelmed her at certain times, and there was nothing
more singular and disturbing than to see gayety become so suddenly
extinct there, and meditation succeed to cheerfulness without
any transition state.This sudden and sometimes severely accentuated
gravity resembled the disdain of a goddess.
Her brow, her nose, her chin, presented that equilibrium of
outline which is quite distinct from equilibrium of proportion,
and from which harmony of countenance results; in the very characteristic
interval which separates the base of the nose from the upper lip,
she had that imperceptible and charming fold, a mysterious sign
of chastity, which makes Barberousse fall in love with a Diana
found in the treasures of Iconia.
Love is a fault; so be it.
Fantine was innocence floating high over fault.
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