In a Winter City/Chapter 1

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

IN A WINTER CITY.

A Sketch

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CHAPTER I.

Floralia was once a city of great fame. It stands upon an historical river. It is adorned with all that the Arts can assemble of beauty, of grace, and of majesty. Its chronicles blaze with heroical deeds and with the achievements of genius. Great men have been bred within its walls; men so great that the world has never seen their like again.

Floralia, in her liberties, in her citizens, in her poets and painters and sculptors, once upon a time had few rivals, perhaps, indeed, no equals, upon earth.

By what strange irony of fate, by what singular cynical caprice of accident, has this fairest of cities, with her time-honoured towers lifted to her radiant skies, become the universal hostelry of cosmopolitan fashion and of fashionable idleness? Sad vicissitudes of fallen fortunes!—to such base uses do the greatest come.

It is Belisarius turned croupier to a gaming-table; it is Cæsar selling cigars and newspapers; it is Apelles drawing for the "Albums pour Rire;" it is Pindar rhyming the couplets for "Fleur de Thé;" it is Praxiteles designing costumes for a Calico-ball; it is Phidias forming the poses of a ballet!

Perhaps the mighty ghosts of mediæval Floralia do walk, sadly and ashamed, by midnight under the shadow of its exquisite piles of marble and of stone. If they do, nobody sees them: the cigarette smoke is too thick.

As for the modern rulers of Floralia, they have risen elastic and elated to the height of the situation, and have done their best and uttermost to degrade their city into due accordance with her present circumstances, and have destroyed as much as they dared of her noble picturesqueness and ancient ways. They have tacked on to her venerable palaces and graceful towers, stucco mansions and straight hideous streets, and staring walls covered with advertisements, and barren boulevards studded with toy trees that are cropped as soon as they presume to grow a leaf, and have striven all they know to fit her for her fortunes, as her inn-keepers, when they take an antique palace, hasten to fit up a smoking-room, and, making a paradise of gas jets and liqueurs, write over it "Il Bar Americano."

It is considered very clever to adapt oneself to one's fortunes; and if so, the rulers of Floralia are very clever indeed; only the stucco and the straight streets and the frightful boulevards cost money, and Floralia has no money and a very heavy and terrible debt; and whether it be really worth while to deface a most beautiful and artistic city, and ruin your nobles and gentry, and grind down your artizans. and peasants, and make your whole province impoverished and ill-content for the mere sake of pleasing some strangers by the stucco and the hoardings that their eyes are used to at home;—well, that perhaps may be an open question.

The Lady Hilda Vorarlberg had written thus far when she got tired, left off, and looked out of the window on to the mountain-born and poet-hymned river of Floralia. She had an idea that she would write a novel; she was always going to do things that she never did do.

After all they were not her own ideas that she had written; but only those of a Floralian, the Duca della Rocca, whom she had met the night before. But then the ideas of everybody have been somebody else's beforehand,—Plato's, or Bion's, or Theophrastus's; or your favourite newspaper's;—and the Lady Hilda, although she had been but two days in the Winter City, had already in her first drive shuddered at the stucco and the hoardings, and shivered at the boulevards and the little shaven trees. For she was a person of very refined and fastidious taste, and did really know something about the arts, and such persons suffer very acutely from what the peculiar mind of your modern municipalities calls, in its innocence, "improvements."

The Lady Hilda had been to a reception too the night before, and had gone with the preconceived conviction that a certain illustrious Sovereign had not been far wrong when she had called Floralia the Botany Bay of modern society; but then the Lady Hilda was easily bored, and not easily pleased, and liked very few things, almost none;—she liked her horses, she liked M. Worth, she liked bric-à-brac, she liked her brother, Lord Clairvaux, and when she came to think of it,—well, that was really all.

The Lady Hilda was a beautiful woman, and knew it; she was dressed in the height of fashion, i.e., like a mediæval saint out of a picture; her velvet robe clung close to her, and her gold belt, with its chains and pouch and fittings, would not have disgraced Cellini's own working; her hair was in a cloud in front and in a club behind; her figure was perfect: M. Worth, who is accustomed to furnish figures as well as clothes, had a great reverence for her; in her, Nature, of whom generally speaking he is disposed to think very poorly, did not need his assistance; he thought it extraordinary, but as he could not improve her in that respect, he had to be content with draping Perfection, which he did to perfection of course.

Her face also was left to nature, in a very blamable degree for a woman of fashion. Her friends argued to her that any woman, however fair a skin she might have, must look washed out without enamel or rouge at the least. But the Lady Hilda, conscious of her own delicate bloom, was obdurate on the point.

"I would rather look washed out than caked over," she would reply: which was cruel but conclusive. So she went into the world without painting, and made them all look beside her as if they had come out of a comic opera. In everything else she was, however, as artificial as became her sex, her station, and her century.

She was a very fortunate woman; at least society always said so. The Clairvaux people were very terribly poor, though very noble and mighty. She had been married at sixteen, immediately on her presentation, to a great European capitalist of nondescript nationality, who had made an enormous fortune upon the Stock Exchanges in ways that were never enquired into, and this gentleman, whose wealth was as solid as it sounded fabulous, had had the good taste to die in the first months of their wedded life, leaving her fifty thousand a year, and bequeathing the rest of his money to the Prince Imperial. Besides her large income she had the biggest jewels, the choicest horses, the handsomest house in London, the prettiest hotel in Paris, &c, &c, &c.; and she could very well afford to have a fresh toilette a-day from her friend Worth if she chose. Very often she did choose. "What a lucky creature," said every other woman: and so she was. But she would have been still more so had she not been quite so much bored. Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that always will get in the golden slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure.

The Lady Hilda looked out of the window and found it raining heavily. When the sky of Floralia does rain, it does it thoroughly, and gets the disagreeable duty over, which is much more merciful to mankind than the perpetual drizzle and dripping of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or Middlesex. It was the rain that had made her almost inclined to think she would write a novel; she was so tired of reading them.

She countermanded her carriage; had some more wood thrown on the fire; and felt disposed to regret that she had decided to winter here. She missed all her bibelots, and all the wonderful shades and graces of colour with which her own houses were made as rich, yet as subdued in tone as any old cloisonne enamel. She had the finest rooms, here, in an hôtel which had been the old palace of Murat; and she had sent for flowers to fill every nook and corner of them, an order which Floralia will execute for as many francs as any other city would ask in napoleons.

But there is always a nakedness and a gaudiness in the finest suites of any hôtel; and the Lady Hilda, though she had educated little else, had so educated her eyes and her taste that a criant bit of furniture hurt her as the grating of a false quantity hurts a scholar. She knew the value of greys and creams and lavenders and olive greens and pale sea blues and dead gold and oriental blendings. She had to seat herself now in an arm-chair that was of a brightness and newness in magenta brocade that made her close her eyelids involuntarily to avoid the horror of it, as she took up some letters from female friends and wondered why they wrote them, and took up a tale of Zola's and threw it aside in disgust, and began to think that she would go to Algeria, since her doctors had agreed that her lungs would not bear the cold of Paris this winter.

Only there was no art in Algeria and there was plenty in Floralia, present and traditional, and so far as a woman of fashion can demean herself to think seriously of anything beyond dress and rivalry, she had in a way studied art of all kinds, languidly indeed and perhaps superficially, but still with some true understanding of it; for, although she had done her best, as became a femme comme il faut, to stifle the intelligence she had been created with, she yet had moments in which M. Worth did not seem Jehovah, and in which Society scarcely appeared the Alpha and Omega of human existence, as of course they did to her when she was in her right frame of mind.

"I shall go to Algeria or Rome," she said to herself: it rained pitilessly, hiding even the bridges on the opposite side of the river; she had a dreadful magenta-coloured chair, and the window curtains were scarlet; the letters were on thin foreign paper and crossed; the book was unreadable; at luncheon they had given her horrible soup and a vol-au-vent that for all flavour it possessed might have been made of acorns, ship-biscuit and shalots; and she had just heard that her cousin the Countess de Caviare, whom she never approved of, and who always borrowed money of her, was coming also to the Hotel Murat. It was not wonderful that she settled in her own mind to leave Floralia as soon as she had come to it.

It was four o'clock.

She thought she would send round to the bric-à-brac dealers, and tell them to bring her what china and enamels and things they had in their shops for her to look at; little that is worth having ever comes into the market in these days, save when private collections are publicly sold; she knew the Hôtel Drouot and Christie and Manson's too well not to know that; still it would be something to do.

Her hand was on the bell when one of her servants entered. He had a card on a salver.

"Does Madame receive?" he asked, in some trepidation, for do what her servants might they generally did wrong; when they obeyed her she had almost invariably changed her mind before her command could be executed, and when they did not obey her, then the Clairvaux blood, which was crossed with French and Russian, and had been Norman to begin with, made itself felt in her usually tranquil veins.

She glanced at the card. It might be a bric-à-brac dealer's.

On it was written "Duca della Rocca." She paused doubtfully some moments.

"It is raining very hard," she thought; then gave a sign of assent.

Everybody wearied her after ten minutes; still when it was raining so hard———