Juana

“The Marquis de Montefiore is reconciled to his family, who consent to receive his wife; he has gone to Italy to present her to them.”

And Juana? – The marquis never asked himself what would become of Juana; but he had studied her character, its nobility, candor, and strength, and he knew he might be sure of her silence.

He obtained a mission from one of the generals. Three days later, on the night preceding his intended departure, Montefiore, instead of returning to his own room after dinner, contrived to enter unseen that of Juana, to make that farewell night the longer. Juana, true Spaniard and true Italian, was enchanted with such boldness; it argued ardor! For herself she did not fear discovery. To find in the pure love of marriage the excitements of intrigue, to hide her husband behind the curtains of her bed, and say to her adopted father and mother, in case of detection: “I am the Marquise de Montefiore!” – was to an ignorant and romantic young girl, who for three years past had dreamed of love without dreaming of its dangers, delightful. The door closed on this last evening upon her folly, her happiness, like a veil, which it is useless here to raise.

It was nine o’clock; the merchant and his wife were reading their evening prayers; suddenly the noise of a carriage drawn by several horses resounded in the street; loud and hasty raps echoed from the shop where the servant hurried to open the door, and into that venerable salon rushed a woman, magnificently dressed in spite of the mud upon the wheels of her travelling-carriage, which had just crossed Italy, France, and Spain. It was, of course, the Marana, – the Marana who, in spite of her thirty-six years, was still in all the glory of her ravishing beauty; the Marana who, being at that time the mistress of a king, had left Naples, the fetes, the skies of Naples, the climax of her life of luxury, on hearing from her royal lover of the events in Spain and the siege of Tarragona.

“Tarragona! I must get to Tarragona before the town is taken!” she cried. “Ten days to reach Tarragona!”

Then without caring for crown or court, she arrived in Tarragona, furnished with an almost imperial safe-conduct; furnished too with gold which enabled her to cross France with the velocity of a rocket.

“My daughter! my daughter!” cried the Marana.

At this voice, and the abrupt invasion of their solitude, the prayer-book fell from the hands of the old couple.

“She is there,” replied the merchant, calmly, after a pause during which he recovered from the emotion caused by the abrupt entrance, and the look and voice of the mother. “She is there,” he repeated, pointing to the door of the little chamber.

“Yes, but has any harm come to her; is she still – ”

“Perfectly well,” said Dona Lagounia.

“O God! send me to hell if it so pleases thee!” cried the Marana, dropping, exhausted and half dead, into a chair.

The flush in her cheeks, due to anxiety, paled suddenly; she had strength to endure suffering, but none to bear this joy. Joy was more violent in her soul than suffering, for it contained the echoes of her pain and the agonies of its own emotion.

“But,” she said, “how have you kept her safe? Tarragona is taken.”

“Yes,” said Perez, “but since you see me living why do you ask that question? Should I not have died before harm could have come to Juana?”

At that answer, the Marana seized the calloused hand of the old man, and kissed it, wetting it with the tears that flowed from her eyes – she who never wept! those tears were all she had most precious under heaven.

“My good Perez!” she said at last. “But have you had no soldiers quartered in your house?”

“Only one,” replied the Spaniard. “Fortunately for us the most loyal of men; a Spaniard by birth, but now an Italian who hates Bonaparte; a married man. He is ill, and gets up late and goes to bed early.”

“An Italian! What is his name?”

“Montefiore.”

“Can it be the Marquis de Montefiore – ”

“Yes, Senora, he himself.”

“Has he seen Juana?”

“No,” said Dona Lagounia.

“You are mistaken, wife,” said Perez. “The marquis must have seen her for a moment, a short moment, it is true; but I think he looked at her that evening she came in here during supper.”

“Ah, let me see my daughter!”

“Nothing easier,” said Perez; “she is now asleep. If she has left the key in the lock we must waken her.”

As he rose to take the duplicate key of Juana’s door his eyes fell by chance on the circular gleam of light upon the black wall of the inner courtyard. Within that circle he saw the shadow of a group such as Canova alone has attempted to render. The Spaniard turned back.

“I do not know,” he said to the Marana, “where to find the key.”

“You are very pale,” she said.

“And I will show you why,” he cried, seizing his dagger and rapping its hilt violently on Juana’s door as he shouted, —

“Open! open! open! Juana!”

Juana did not open, for she needed time to conceal Montefiore. She knew nothing of what was passing in the salon; the double portieres of thick tapestry deadened all sounds.

“Madame, I lied to you in saying I could not find the key. Here it is,” added Perez, taking it from a sideboard. “But it is useless. Juana’s key is in the lock; her door is barricaded. We have been deceived, my wife!” he added, turning to Dona Lagounia. “There is a man in Juana’s room.”

“Impossible! By my eternal salvation I say it is impossible!” said his wife.

“Do not swear, Dona Lagounia. Our honor is dead, and this woman – ” He pointed to the Marana, who had risen and was standing motionless, blasted by his words, “this woman has the right to despise us. She saved our life, our fortune, and our honor, and we have saved nothing for her but her money – Juana!” he cried again, “open, or I will burst in your door.”

His voice, rising in violence, echoed through the garrets in the roof. He was cold and calm. The life of Montefiore was in his hands; he would wash away his remorse in the blood of that Italian.

“Out, out, out! out, all of you!” cried the Marana, springing like a tigress on the dagger, which she wrenched from the hand of the astonished Perez. “Out, Perez,” she continued more calmly, “out, you and your wife and servants! There will be murder here. You might be shot by the French. Have nothing to do with this; it is my affair, mine only. Between my daughter and me there is none but God. As for the man, he belongs to me. The whole earth could not tear him from my grasp. Go, go! I forgive you. I see plainly that the girl is a Marana. You, your religion, your virtue, were too weak to fight against my blood.”

She gave a dreadful sigh, turning her dry eyes on them. She had lost all, but she knew how to suffer, – a true courtesan.

The door opened. The Marana forgot all else, and Perez, making a sign to his wife, remained at his post. With his old invincible Spanish honor he was determined to share the vengeance of the betrayed mother. Juana, all in white, and softly lighted by the wax candles, was standing calmly in the centre of her chamber.

“What do you want with me?” she said.

The Marana could not repress a passing shudder.

“Perez,” she asked, “has this room another issue?”

Perez made a negative gesture; confiding in that gesture, the mother entered the room.

“Juana,” she said, “I am your mother, your judge; you have placed yourself in the only situation in which I could reveal myself to you. You have come down to me, you, whom I thought in heaven. Ah! you have fallen low indeed. You have a lover in this room.”

“Madame, there is and can be no one but my husband,” answered the girl. “I am the Marquise de Montefiore.”

“Then there are two,” said Perez, in a grave voice. “He told me he was married.”

“Montefiore, my love!” cried the girl, tearing aside the curtain and revealing the officer. “Come! they are slandering you.”

The Italian appeared, pale and speechless; he saw the dagger in the Marana’s hand, and he knew her well. With one bound he sprang from the room, crying out in a thundering voice, —

“Help! help! they are murdering a Frenchman. Soldiers of the 6th of the line, rush for Captain Diard! Help, help!”

Perez had gripped the man and was trying to gag him with his large hand, but the Marana stopped him, saying, —

“Bind him fast, but let him shout. Open the doors, leave them open, and go, go, as I told you; go, all of you. – As for you,” she said, addressing Montefiore, “shout, call for help if you choose; by the time your soldiers get here this blade will be in your heart. Are you married? Answer.”

Montefiore, who had fallen on the threshold of the door, scarcely a step from Juana, saw nothing but the blade of the dagger, the gleam of which blinded him.

“Has he deceived me?” said Juana, slowly. “He told me he was free.”

“He told me that he was married,” repeated Perez, in his solemn voice.

“Holy Virgin!” murmured Dona Lagounia.

“Answer, soul of corruption,” said the Marana, in a low voice, bending to the ear of the marquis.

“Your daughter – ” began Montefiore.

“The daughter that was mine is dead or dying,” interrupted the Marana. “I have no daughter; do not utter that word. Answer, are you married?”

“No, madame,” said Montefiore, at last, striving to gain time, “I desire to marry your daughter.”

“My noble Montefiore!” said Juana, drawing a deep breath.

“Then why did you attempt to fly and cry for help?” asked Perez.

Terrible, revealing light!

Juana said nothing, but she wrung her hands and went to her arm-chair and sat down.

At that moment a tumult rose in the street which was plainly heard in the silence of the room. A soldier of the 6th, hearing Montefiore’s cry for help, had summoned Diard. The quartermaster, who was fortunately in his bivouac, came, accompanied by friends.

“Why did I fly?” said Montefiore, hearing the voice of his friend. “Because I told you the truth; I am married – Diard! Diard!” he shouted in a piercing voice.

But, at a word from Perez, the apprentice closed and bolted the doors, so that the soldiers were delayed by battering them in. Before they could enter, the Marana had time to strike her dagger into the guilty man; but anger hindered her aim, the blade slipped upon the Italian’s epaulet, though she struck her blow with such force that he fell at the very feet of Juana, who took no notice of him. The Marana sprang upon him, and this time, resolved not to miss her prey, she caught him by the throat.

“I am free and I will marry her! I swear it, by God, by my mother, by all there is most sacred in the world; I am a bachelor; I will marry her, on my honor!”

And he bit the arm of the courtesan.

“Mother,” said Juana, “kill him. He is so base that I will not have him for my husband, were he ten times as beautiful.”

“Ah! I recognize my daughter!” cried the mother.

“What is all this?” demanded the quartermaster, entering the room.

“They are murdering me,” cried Montefiore, “on account of this girl; she says I am her lover. She inveigled me into a trap, and they are forcing me to marry her – ”

“And you reject her?” cried Diard, struck with the splendid beauty which contempt, hatred, and indignation had given to the girl, already so beautiful. “Then you are hard to please. If she wants a husband I am ready to marry her. Put up your weapons; there is no trouble here.”

The Marana pulled the Italian to the side of her daughter’s bed and said to him, in a low voice, —

“If I spare you, give thanks for the rest of your life; but, remember this, if your tongue ever injures my daughter you will see me again. Go! – How much ‘dot’ do you give her?” she continued, going up to Perez.

“She has two hundred thousand gold piastres,” replied the Spaniard.

“And that is not all, monsieur,” said the Marana, turning to Diard. “Who are you? – Go!” she repeated to Montefiore.

The marquis, hearing this statement of gold piastres, came forward once more, saying, —

“I am really free – ”

A glance from Juana silenced him.

“You are really free to go,” she said.

And he went immediately.

“Alas! monsieur,” said the girl, turning to Diard, “I thank you with admiration. But my husband is in heaven. To-morrow I shall enter a convent – ”

“Juana, my Juana, hush!” cried the mother, clasping her in her arms. Then she whispered in the girl’s ear. “You must have another husband.”

Juana turned pale. She freed herself from her mother and sat down once more in her arm-chair.

“Who are you, monsieur?” repeated the Marana, addressing Diard.

“Madame, I am at present only the quartermaster of the 6th of the line. But for such a wife I have the heart to make myself a marshal of France. My name is Pierre-Francois Diard. My father was provost of merchants. I am not – ”

“But, at least, you are an honest man, are you not?” cried the Marana, interrupting him. “If you please the Signorina Juana di Mancini, you can marry her and be happy together. – Juana,” she continued in a grave tone, “in becoming the wife of a brave and worthy man remember that you will also be a mother. I have sworn that you shall kiss your children without a blush upon your face” (her voice faltered slightly). “I have sworn that you shall live a virtuous life; expect, therefore, many troubles. But, whatever happens, continue pure, and be faithful to your husband. Sacrifice all things to him, for he will be the father of your children – the father of your children! If you take a lover, I, your mother, will stand between you and him. Do you see that dagger? It is in your ‘dot,’” she continued, throwing the weapon on Juana’s bed. “I leave it there as the guarantee of your honor so long as my eyes are open and my arm free. Farewell,” she said, restraining her tears. “God grant that we may never meet again.”

At that idea, her tears began to flow.

“Poor child!” she added, “you have been happier than you knew in this dull home. – Do not allow her to regret it,” she said, turning to Diard.

The foregoing rapid narrative is not the principal subject of this Study, for the understanding of which it was necessary to explain how it happened that the quartermaster Diard married Juana di Mancini, that Montefiore and Diard were intimately known to each other, and to show plainly what blood and what passions were in Madame Diard.

CHAPTER III. THE HISTORY OF MADAME DIARD

By the time that the quartermaster had fulfilled all the long and dilatory formalities without which no French soldier can be married, he was passionately in love with Juana di Mancini, and Juana had had time to think of her coming destiny.

An awful destiny! Juana, who felt neither esteem nor love for Diard, was bound to him forever, by a rash but necessary promise. The man was neither handsome nor well-made. His manners, devoid of all distinction, were a mixture of the worst army tone, the habits of his province, and his own insufficient education. How could she love Diard, she, a young girl all grace and elegance, born with an invincible instinct for luxury and good taste, her very nature tending toward the sphere of the higher social classes? As for esteeming him, she rejected the very thought precisely because he had married her. This repulsion was natural. Woman is a saintly and noble creature, but almost always misunderstood, and nearly always misjudged because she is misunderstood. If Juana had loved Diard she would have esteemed him. Love creates in a wife a new woman; the woman of the day before no longer exists on the morrow. Putting on the nuptial robe of a passion in which life itself is concerned, the woman wraps herself in purity and whiteness. Reborn into virtue and chastity, there is no past for her; she is all future, and should forget the things behind her to relearn life. In this sense the famous words which a modern poet has put into the lips of Marion Delorme is infused with truth, —

“And Love remade me virgin.”

That line seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially vaudevillist spirit of the pit.

So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded, hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart’s legality, which women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least reflective. Juana became profoundly sad as she saw the nature and the extent of the life before her. Often she turned her eyes, brimming with tears proudly repressed, upon Perez and Dona Lagounia, who fully comprehended, both of them, the bitter thoughts those tears contained. But they were silent: of what good were reproaches now; why look for consolations? The deeper they were, the more they enlarged the wound.

One evening, Juana, stupid with grief, heard through the open door of her little room, which the old couple had thought shut, a pitying moan from her adopted mother.

“The child will die of grief.”

“Yes,” said Perez, in a shaking voice, “but what can we do? I cannot now boast of her beauty and her chastity to Comte d’Arcos, to whom I hoped to marry her.”

“But a single fault is not vice,” said the old woman, pitying as the angels.

“Her mother gave her to this man,” said Perez.

“Yes, in a moment; without consulting the poor child!” cried Dona Lagounia.

“She knew what she was doing.”

“But oh! into what hands our pearl is going!”

“Say no more, or I shall seek a quarrel with that Diard.”

“And that would only lead to other miseries.”

Hearing these dreadful words Juana saw the happy future she had lost by her own wrongdoing. The pure and simple years of her quiet life would have been rewarded by a brilliant existence such as she had fondly dreamed, – dreams which had caused her ruin. To fall from the height of Greatness to Monsieur Diard! She wept. At times she went nearly mad. She floated for a while between vice and religion. Vice was a speedy solution, religion a lifetime of suffering. The meditation was stormy and solemn. The next day was the fatal day, the day for the marriage. But Juana could still remain free. Free, she knew how far her misery would go; married, she was ignorant of where it went or what it might bring her.

Religion triumphed. Dona Lagounia stayed beside her child and prayed and watched as she would have prayed and watched beside the dying.

“God wills it,” she said to Juana.

Nature gives to woman alternately a strength which enables her to suffer and a weakness which leads her to resignation. Juana resigned herself; and without restriction. She determined to obey her mother’s prayer, and cross the desert of life to reach God’s heaven, knowing well that no flowers grew for her along the way of that painful journey.

She married Diard. As for the quartermaster, though he had no grace in Juana’s eyes, we may well absolve him. He loved her distractedly. The Marana, so keen to know the signs of love, had recognized in that man the accents of passion and the brusque nature, the generous impulses, that are common to Southerners. In the paroxysm of her anger and her distress she had thought such qualities enough for her daughter’s happiness.

The first days of this marriage were apparently happy; or, to express one of those latent facts, the miseries of which are buried by women in the depths of their souls, Juana would not cast down her husband’s joy, – a double role, dreadful to play, but to which, sooner or later, all women unhappily married come. This is a history impossible to recount in its full truth. Juana, struggling hourly against her nature, a nature both Spanish and Italian, having dried up the source of her tears by dint of weeping, was a human type, destined to represent woman’s misery in its utmost expression, namely, sorrow undyingly active; the description of which would need such minute observations that to persons eager for dramatic emotions they would seem insipid. This analysis, in which every wife would find some one of her own sufferings, would require a volume to express them all; a fruitless, hopeless volume by its very nature, the merit of which would consist in faintest tints and delicate shadings which critics would declare to be effeminate and diffuse. Besides, what man could rightly approach, unless he bore another heart within his heart, those solemn and touching elegies which certain women carry with them to their tomb; melancholies, misunderstood even by those who cause them; sighs unheeded, devotions unrewarded, – on earth at least, – splendid silences misconstrued; vengeances withheld, disdained; generosities perpetually bestowed and wasted; pleasures longed for and denied; angelic charities secretly accomplished, – in short, all the religions of womanhood and its inextinguishable love.

Juana knew that life; fate spared her nought. She was wholly a wife, but a sorrowful and suffering wife; a wife incessantly wounded, yet forgiving always; a wife pure as a flawless diamond, – she who had the beauty and the glow of the diamond, and in that beauty, that glow, a vengeance in her hand; for she was certainly not a woman to fear the dagger added to her “dot.”

At first, inspired by a real love, by one of those passions which for the time being change even odious characters and bring to light all that may be noble in a soul, Diard behaved like a man of honor. He forced Montefiore to leave the regiment and even the army corps, so that his wife might never meet him during the time they remained in Spain. Next, he petitioned for his own removal, and succeeded in entering the Imperial Guard. He desired at any price to obtain a title, honors, and consideration in keeping with his present wealth. With this idea in his mind, he behaved courageously in one of the most bloody battles in Germany, but, unfortunately, he was too severely wounded to remain in the service. Threatened with the loss of a leg, he was forced to retire on a pension, without the title of baron, without those rewards he hoped to win, and would have won had he not been Diard.

This event, this wound, and his thwarted hopes contributed to change his character. His Provencal energy, roused for a time, sank down. At first he was sustained by his wife, in whom his efforts, his courage, his ambition had induced some belief in his nature, and who showed herself, what women are, tender and consoling in the troubles of life. Inspired by a few words from Juana, the retired soldier came to Paris, resolved to win in an administrative career a position to command respect, bury in oblivion the quartermaster of the 6th of the line, and secure for Madame Diard a noble title. His passion for that seductive creature enabled him to divine her most secret wishes. Juana expressed nothing, but he understood her. He was not loved as a lover dreams of being loved; he knew this, and he strove to make himself respected, loved, and cherished. He foresaw a coming happiness, poor man, in the patience and gentleness shown on all occasions by his wife; but that patience, that gentleness, were only the outward signs of the resignation which had made her his wife. Resignation, religion, were they love? Often Diard wished for refusal where he met with chaste obedience; often he would have given his eternal life that Juana might have wept upon his bosom and not disguised her secret thoughts behind a smiling face which lied to him nobly. Many young men – for after a certain age men no longer struggle – persist in the effort to triumph over an evil fate, the thunder of which they hear, from time to time, on the horizon of their lives; and when at last they succumb and roll down the precipice of evil, we ought to do them justice and acknowledge these inward struggles.

Like many men Diard tried all things, and all things were hostile to him. His wealth enabled him to surround his wife with the enjoyments of Parisian luxury. She lived in a fine house, with noble rooms, where she maintained a salon, in which abounded artists (by nature no judges of men), men of pleasure ready to amuse themselves anywhere, a few politicians who swelled the numbers, and certain men of fashion, all of whom admired Juana. Those who put themselves before the eyes of the public in Paris must either conquer Paris or be subject to it. Diard’s character was not sufficiently strong, compact, or persistent to command society at that epoch, because it was an epoch when all men were endeavoring to rise. Social classifications ready-made are perhaps a great boon even for the people. Napoleon has confided to us the pains he took to inspire respect in his court, where most of the courtiers had been his equals. But Napoleon was Corsican, and Diard Provencal. Given equal genius, an islander will always be more compact and rounded than the man of terra firma in the same latitude; the arm of the sea which separates Corsica from Provence is, in spite of human science, an ocean which has made two nations.