of independence; yet,
like the reed, she was ready to bend to a strong hand. She talked much
of religion, and had it not at heart, though she was prepared to find in
it a solution of her life. How explain a creature so complex? Capable
of heroism, yet sinking unconsciously from heroic heights to utter a
spiteful word; young and sweet-natured, not so much old at heart as
aged by the maxims of those about her; versed in a selfish philosophy in
which she was all unpractised, she had all the vices of a courtier, all
the nobleness of developing womanhood. She trusted nothing and no one,
yet there were times when she quitted her sceptical attitude for a
submissive credulity.

How should any portrait be anything but incomplete of her, in whom the
play of swiftly-changing colour made discord only to produce a poetic
confusion? For in her there shone a divine brightness, a radiance of
youth that blended all her bewildering characteristics in a certain
completeness and unity informed by her charm. Nothing was feigned. The
passion or semi-passion, the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual
pettiness, the coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all
spontaneous and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position
as of the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She was
wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above the world and
beneath the shelter of her name. There was something of the egoism of
Medea in her life, as in the life of the aristocracy that lay a-dying,
and would not so much as raise itself or stretch out a hand to any
political physician; so well aware of its feebleness, or so conscious
that it was already dust, that it refused to touch or be touched.

The Duchesse de Langeais (for that was her name) had been married for
about four years when the Restoration was finally consummated, which is
to say, in 1816. By that time the revolution of the Hundred Days had let
in the light on the mind of Louis XVIII. In spite of his surroundings,
he comprehended the situation and the age in which he was living; and it
was only later, when this Louis XI, without the axe, lay stricken down
by disease, that those about him got the upper hand. The Duchesse de
Langeais, a Navarreins by birth, came of a ducal house which had made
a point of never marrying below its rank since the reign of Louis XIV.
Every daughter of the house must sooner or later take a _tabouret_ at
Court. So, Antoinette de Navarre