The Lily of the Valley | Page 8

mother was forced to employ her usual seamstress, who--according
to provincial custom--could do all kinds of sewing. A bottle-blue coat
had been secretly made for me, after a fashion, and silk stockings and
pumps provided; waistcoats were then worn short, so that I could wear
one of my father's; and for the first time in my life I had a shirt with a
frill, the pleatings of which puffed out my chest and were gathered in to
the knot of my cravat. When dressed in this apparel I looked so little
like myself that my sister's compliments nerved me to face all Touraine
at the ball. But it was a bold enterprise. Thanks to my slimness I
slipped into a tent set up in the gardens of the Papion house, and found
a place close to the armchair in which the duke was seated. Instantly I
was suffocated by the heat, and dazzled by the lights, the scarlet
draperies, the gilded ornaments, the dresses, and the diamonds of the
first public ball I had ever witnessed. I was pushed hither and thither by
a mass of men and women, who hustled each other in a cloud of dust.
The brazen clash of military music was drowned in the hurrahs and
acclamations of "Long live the Duc d'Angouleme! Long live the King!
Long live the Bourbons!" The ball was an outburst of pent-up
enthusiasm, where each man endeavored to outdo the rest in his fierce
haste to worship the rising sun,--an exhibition of partisan greed which
left me unmoved, or rather, it disgusted me and drove me back within
myself.
Swept onward like a straw in the whirlwind, I was seized with a
childish desire to be the Duc d'Angouleme himself, to be one of these
princes parading before an awed assemblage. This silly fancy of a
Tourangean lad roused an ambition to which my nature and the
surrounding circumstances lent dignity. Who would not envy such

worship?--a magnificent repetition of which I saw a few months later,
when all Paris rushed to the feet of the Emperor on his return from Elba.
The sense of this dominion exercised over the masses, whose feelings
and whose very life are thus merged into one soul, dedicated me then
and thenceforth to glory, that priestess who slaughters the Frenchmen
of to-day as the Druidess once sacrificed the Gauls.
Suddenly I met the woman who was destined to spur these ambitious
desires and to crown them by sending me into the heart of royalty. Too
timid to ask any one to dance,--fearing, moreover, to confuse the
figures,--I naturally became very awkward, and did not know what to
do with my arms and legs. Just as I was suffering severely from the
pressure of the crowd an officer stepped on my feet, swollen by the
new leather of my shoes as well as by the heat. This disgusted me with
the whole affair. It was impossible to get away; but I took refuge in a
corner of a room at the end of an empty bench, where I sat with fixed
eyes, motionless and sullen. Misled by my puny appearance, a
woman--taking me for a sleepy child--slid softly into the place beside
me, with the motion of a bird as she drops upon her nest. Instantly I
breathed the woman-atmosphere, which irradiated my soul as, in after
days, oriental poesy has shone there. I looked at my neighbor, and was
more dazzled by that vision than I had been by the scene of the fete.
If you have understood this history of my early life you will guess the
feelings which now welled up within me. My eyes rested suddenly on
white, rounded shoulders where I would fain have laid my head,
--shoulders faintly rosy, which seemed to blush as if uncovered for the
first time; modest shoulders, that possessed a soul, and reflected light
from their satin surface as from a silken texture. These shoulders were
parted by a line along which my eyes wandered. I raised myself to see
the bust and was spell-bound by the beauty of the bosom, chastely
covered with gauze, where blue-veined globes of perfect outline were
softly hidden in waves of lace. The slightest details of the head were
each and all enchantments which awakened infinite delights within me;
the brilliancy of the hair laid smoothly above a neck as soft and velvety
as a child's, the white lines drawn by the comb where my imagination
ran as along a dewy path,--all these things put me, as it were, beside

myself. Glancing round to be sure that no one saw me, I threw myself
upon those shoulders as a child upon the breast of its mother, kissing
them as I laid my head there. The woman uttered a piercing cry,