1.F.3.3. 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 dragon-fly
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.