Old Love Stories Retold | Page 4

a house situated on the Avenue Matignon, not far from the Rond-Point of the Champs-Elysees. His windows, overlooking the avenue, opened on a narrow balcony, covered in hot weather with a striped linen awning, such as appears in front of small cafes. The apartments consisted of three or four rooms--the dining-room and two rooms used by the master and the mistress of the house. A very low couch, behind a screen encased in wall-paper, several chairs, and opposite the door a walnut-wood secretary, formed the entire furniture of the invalid's chamber. I nearly forgot to mention two framed engravings, dated from the early years of Louis Philippe's reign--the 'Reapers' and the 'Fisherman,' after Leopold Robert. So far the arrangements of the rooms evidenced no trace of a woman's presence, which showed itself in the adjoining chamber by a display of imitation lace, lined with transparent yellow muslin, and a corner-cupboard covered with brown velvet, and more especially by a full-length portrait, placed in a good light, of Mme. Heine, with dress and hair as worn in her youth--a low-necked black bodice, and bands of hair plastered down her cheeks--a style in the fashion of about 1840.
"She by no means realized my ideal Mme. Heine. I had fancied her refined, elegant, languishing, with a pale, earnest face, animated by large, perfidious, velvety eyes. I saw, instead, a homely, dark, stout lady, with a high colour and a jovial countenance, a person of whom you would say she required plenty of exercise in the open air. What a painful contrast between the robust woman and the pale, dying man, who, with one foot already in the grave, summoned sufficient energy to earn not only enough for the daily bread, but money besides to purchase beautiful dresses. The melancholy jests, which obliging biographers constantly represent as flashes of wit from a husband too much in love not to be profuse, never deluded anybody who visited that home. It is absurd to transform Mme. Heine into an idyllic character, whilst the poet himself never dreamed of representing her in that guise. Why poetize at the expense of truth?--especially when truth brings more honour to the poet's memory."
One is sorry that Heine has not risen again to enjoy this. One can easily picture his reading it and, turning tenderly to his "Treasure," his "Heart's Joy," with that everlasting boy's look on his face, saying: "Never mind, Damschen. We know, don't we? They think they know, but we know." And with what a terrible snarl he would say, "My ideal Mme. Heine!"
"My ideal Mme. Heine!" No doubt "la Mouche" thought she might have been that, had all the circumstances been different, had Heine not already been married for years and had he not been a dying man. We may be quite sure what Heine would have thought of the matter, and quite sure what she was to him. Mathilde, we know, was unhappy about the visits of the smart young lady who talked Shakespeare and the musical glasses so glibly, and who held her husband's hand as he lay on his mattress-grave, and wore a general air of providing him with that intellectual companionship which was so painfully lacking in his home. Yet we who know the whole story, and know her husband far better than she, know how little she really had to fear from the visits of "Camille Selden." To Heine "la Mouche" was merely a brilliant flower, with the dew of youth upon her. His gloomy room lit up as she entered, and smelled sweet of her young womanhood hours after she had gone. But "the ideal Mme. Heine"? No! Heine had found his real Mme. Heine, the woman who had been faithful to him for years, had faced poverty and calamity with him, and had nursed him with laughing patience, day in and day out, for years. Heine had good reason for knowing how "the ideal Mme. Heine" would have treated him under such circumstances; for little bas-bleue "Mouche" had only to have a bad cold to stay away from the bedside of her hero, though she knew how he was counting the minutes to her coming, in the nervous, hysterical fashion of the invalid. One of his bitterest letters reproaches her with having kept him waiting in this way:
"Tear my sides, my chest, my face, with red-hot pincers, flay me alive, shoot, stone me, rather than keep me waiting.
"With all imaginable torture, cruelly break my limbs, but do not keep me waiting, for of all torments disappointed expectation is the most painful. I expected thee all yesterday afternoon until six o'clock, but thou didst not come, thou witch, and I grew almost mad. Impatience encircled me like the folds of a viper, and I bounded on my couch at every ring,