Mademoiselle de Verneuil

“ However, the departure of Corentin seemed to lessen the young man’s distrust, and he began to cast on Mademoiselle de Verneuil certain looks which betrayed an immoderate admiration for women, rather than the respectful warmth of a dawning passion. The young girl grew more and more reserved, and gave all her attentions to Madame du Gua. The youth, angry with himself, tried, in his vexation, to turn the tables and seem indifferent. Mademoiselle de Verneuil appeared not to notice this manoeuvre ”

“ Beauty is the only queen a Republican can serve.”
Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s eyes, as she watched him depart, shone with such natural pleasure, she looked at Francine with a smile of intelligence which betrayed so much real satisfaction, that Madame du Gua, who grew prudent as she grew jealous, felt disposed to relinquish the suspicions which Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s great beauty had forced into her mind. ”

“ Francine, Madame du Gua, and her son had all risen from their seats. Mademoiselle de Verneuil hastily advanced and stood between them and the commandant, who smiled amusedly; then she rapidly unfastened the frogged fastenings of her jacket. Acting with that blindness which often seizes women when their self-love is threatened and they are anxious to show their power, as a child is impatient to play with a toy that has just been given to it, she took from her bosom a paper and presented it to Hulot. ”

“ They looked at each other in silence.
“I am lost!” thought Mademoiselle de Verneuil.
“She is deceiving me!” thought Corentin. “Marie,” he continued, “I have two maxims. One is never to believe a single word a woman says to me—that’s the only means of not being duped; the other is to find what interest she has in doing the opposite of what she says, and behaving in contradiction to the facts she pretends to confide to me. I think that you and I understand each other now.”
“Perfectly,” replied Mademoiselle de Verneuil. “You want proofs of my good faith ”

“ Keep his memory in your heart; do not make it an anguish to you. If there were no joys in hopeless love, what would become of us, poor women that we are? God, of whom you never think, Marie, will reward us for obeying our vocation on this earth,—to love, and suffer.”
“Dear,” replied Mademoiselle de Verneuil, taking Francine’s hand and patting it, “your voice is very sweet and persuasive. Reason is attractive from your lips. ”

“ You may choose to be blind, but your friends are keeping their eyes open to protect you.”
“Madame,” replied the Gars, his eyes flashing with anger, “be warned; take no steps against that lady, nor against her escort; if you do, nothing shall save you from my vengeance. I choose that Mademoiselle de Verneuil is to be treated with the utmost respect, and as a lady belonging to my family. We are, I believe, related to the de Verneuils.”
The opposition the marquis was made to feel produced the usual effect of such obstacles on all young men. ”

“ They all wish to offer themselves as virgins on love’s altar; and if they are not so, the deception they seek to practise is at least a homage which they pay to their lovers. These thoughts passed rapidly through the mind of the young man and gratified him. In fact, for both, this mutual examination was an advance in their intercourse, and the lover soon came to that phase of passion in which a man finds in the defects of his mistress a reason for loving her the more.
Mademoiselle de Verneuil was thoughtful. ”

“ The vexation of a desired woman is powerfully attractive; her anger, like her submission, is imperious; many are the fibres she touches in a man’s heart, penetrating and subjugating it. Was this scene only another aspect of Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s coquetry? In spite of his sudden passion the unnamed lover had the strength to distrust a woman thus bent on forcing from him a secret of life and death. ”

“ If I do not have that man, who dared to despise me, at my feet humble and submissive, if I do not make him my lackey and my slave, I shall indeed be base; I shall not be a woman; I shall not be myself.”
The house which Corentin now hired for Mademoiselle de Verneuil offered many gratifications to the innate love of luxury and elegance that was part of this girl. ”

“ Such preparations have a secret, ineffable happiness about them; they cause so many delightful emotions that a woman as she makes them forgets her doubts; and Mademoiselle de Verneuil forgot hers. There is in truth a religious sentiment in the multiplicity of cares taken for one beloved who is not there to see them and reward them, but who will reward them later with the approving smile these tender preparations (always so fully understood) obtain. Women, as they make them, love in advance ”

“ He advanced to seize her hand, trying to make her take his passion for gratitude; but Mademoiselle de Verneuil was not a woman to be thus misled. So, smiling in a way to give some hope to this new lover, she drew back a few steps and said: “You might make me regret my confidence.”
“The imagination of a young girl is more rapid than that of a woman,” he answered, laughing.
“A young girl has more to lose than a woman.”
“True; those who carry a treasure ought to be distrustful.”
“Let us quit such conventional language,” she said, “and talk seriously. You are to give a ball at Saint-James. ”

“ If she loves him and is willing to commit a folly, she must be justified by great and heroic reasons. Forgive me this logic, rare in my sex; but for the sake of your happiness,—and my own,” she added, dropping her head,—“I will not allow either of us to deceive the other, nor will I permit you to think that Mademoiselle de Verneuil, angel or devil, maid or wife, is capable of being seduced by commonplace gallantry.” ”

“ There was even a sort of vulgar embarrassment, an awkwardness which destroyed all the pleasure which Mademoiselle de Verneuil and the young sailor had begun by expecting. But women have such wonderful conventional tact, they are so intimately allied with each other, or they have such keen desires for emotion, that they always know how to break the ice on such occasions. ”

“ But presently she expects no longer, she hopes no more, she questions silence; the slightest sound is to her an omen; doubt hooks its claws once more into her heart; she burns, she trembles, she is grasped by a thought which holds her like a physical force; she alternates from triumph to agony, and without the hope of coming happiness she could not endure the torture. A score of times did Mademoiselle de Verneuil raise the window-curtain, hoping to see the smoke rising above the rocks; but the fog only took a grayer tone, which her excited imagination turned into a warning. ”

“ VERNEUIL (Mademoiselle de) , probably a relative of the preceding; sister of the Prince de Loudon, the Vendean cavalry general; she went to Mans to save her brother, and died on the scaffold in 1793, after the Savenay affair. [The Chouans.]
VERNEUIL (Duc de) , son of the Duc Victor-Amedee de Verneuil, and brother of Madame Alphonse de Montauran, with whom he had a lawsuit over the inheritance left by their father; during the Restoration he lived in the town of Alencon and was on intimate terms with the D'Esgrignons of that place. ”

“ But Marie de Medicis was far from evincing the delight which he had anticipated at his avowed wish that she should share with him in the hopes and disappointments of royalty; her ambition had not then been thoroughly awakened; she still felt as [pg 328] a wife and as a woman rather than as a Queen; and an insolence from Madame de Verneuil occupied her feelings more nearly than a threatened conspiracy. ”

“ Madame de Verneuil returned to Paris, surrounded by adulation and splendour, and the King was left at liberty to bestow some portion of his thoughts upon his expected bride. It is probable, indeed, that the portrait of Marie presented to him by the Grand Duchess had excited his curiosity and flattered his self-love; for it was more than sufficiently attractive to command the attention of a monarch even less susceptible to female beauty than himself. ”

“ As a wife, she saw her rights invaded--as a mother, the legitimacy of her son questioned--and as a queen her dignity compromised. What very inferior causes have produced disastrous effects even in private life! The only subject of astonishment which can be rationally entertained is the comparative patience with which at this period of her career she submitted to the humiliations that were heaped upon her.
In vain did she complain to her royal consort of the insulting calumnies of Madame de Verneuil ”

“ He sends her a million kisses, and vows that all he asks of life is that she shall always love him entirely and him alone.
One would have thought that such a conquest of a King and such triumph over a Queen would have gratified the ambition of the most exacting of women. But the Marquise de Verneuil seems to have found small satisfaction in her victories. When she was not provoking quarrels with Henri, which roused him to such a pitch of anger that at times he threatened to strike her, she received his advances with a coldness or a sullen acquiescence calculated to chill the most ardent lover. ”

“ Madame de Verneuil was in despair; the coveted sceptre was sliding from within her grasp, and with the ill-judged hope of regaining the affections of her royal lover by exciting his jealousy, she encouraged the attention of the Duc de Guise, who, undismayed by the previous attempt of his brother to divert the affections of another of the royal favourites and its unfortunate result, at length openly avowed himself the suitor of the brilliant Marquise, and even [pg 408] promised to make her his wife ”

“ Meanwhile Madame de Verneuil, far from imitating the humility of her relatives, openly declared that, whatever might be the result to herself, she should never regret the measures which she had adopted to obtain justice for herself and her children; and when on one occasion she was urged to make the concessions by which alone she could hope for pardon, she answered haughtily: "I have no fear of death; on the contrary, I shall welcome it. If the King takes my life, it will at least be allowed that he sacrificed his own wife, for I was Queen before the Italian woman. ”

“ You English are so cold; Mademoiselle is not, but reminds me of the women of my own love-warm, sun-lit land. It was my intention to have called upon Mademoiselle Vernon at her hotel on to-morrow ere the sun had set, to ask her if she would be the light of my life by doing me the great honour of accepting my name, hand and fortune. ”

“ Whatever extenuation may be found for Madame de Verneuil in such an attempt as this; whatever indulgence may be conceded to a woman baffled in her ambition, misled by her confidence in a supposititious claim, and urged on by a blind and uncalculating affection for her children, it is difficult to find any excuse for the persevering ingratitude of her step-brother. As regards M. d'Entragues, we have already shown that he had more than sufficient cause for seeking revenge upon a monarch who sacrificed every important consideration to the [pg 274] passion of the moment ”

“ Under all circumstances, this accusation was most unfortunate and ill-judged, and should in itself have [pg 081] sufficed to open the eyes of the monarch, who had, assuredly, had sufficient experience in female tactics to be quite aware that where a woman is compelled mentally to condemn herself, she is the most anxious to transfer her fault to others, and to blame where she is conscious of being open to censure. Madame de Verneuil had not, however, in this instance at all miscalculated the extent of her influence over the royal mind ”

“ The Queen, whose irritation had reached its climax, was less easily persuaded; or the astute Concini, who was ever daring where his personal fortunes might be benefited, sacrificed his royal mistress to his own interests; for we find it recorded that some time subsequently, when Madame de Verneuil was residing at her hôtel in Paris, the Florentine favourite privately informed the monarch that Marie had engaged some persons on whom she could rely, to insult the Marquise ”

“ The earnest wish to please of the favourite was contrasted with the coldness of Marie de Medicis, the wit of the one with the haughty superciliousness of the other; in short, the longer that the King discoursed upon the subject, the more perfect became the conviction [pg 247] of his listener that the late meeting, tempestuous as it was, had sufficed to restore to Madame de Verneuil at least a portion of her former power.
"I have no society in my wife," pursued the monarch; "she neither amuses nor interests me. ”

“ Madame de Verneuil, whose pride was piqued by her exclusion from the royal circle, was desirous to gain at any price the countenance of Marie, and to be admitted to her private assemblies, where alone she could carry out her more extended plan of ambition; while the wily Italian, rendered only the more pertinacious by difficulty, and anxious moreover to secure a post which would at all times enable her to remain about the person of the Queen, thought no price too great, even the dishonour of her royal foster-sister, to obtain her object, and thus a mutual promise was made ”

“ Madame de Vernon has a daughter, Mathilde, beautiful and sanctimonious, whom she desires to marry to Léonce de Mondoville, a young Spaniard of noble birth and aristocratic prejudices. Madame de Vernon has in the whole world one friend, Delphine d'Albémar, a miracle of grace, wit, and beauty, who does acts of unheard of generosity, and generally by some evil chance accomplishes them at the moment when they lead to unlucky results for herself. She is a young widow, and has been left by her elderly and devoted husband a fortune, of which she proceeds to divest herself as rapidly as possible. ”