THE EXTRAORDINARY CONFESSIONS OF DIANA PLEASE

HERE “ENGLISHED” FROM THE ORIGINAL SHORTHAND NOTES, IN FRENCH, OF M. LE MARQUIS DE C——, A FRIEND TO WHOM SHE DICTATED THEM,

BY BERNARD CAPES AUTHOR OF “THE LAKE OF WINE,” “PLOTS” ETC. ETC.

METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON 1904

INTRODUCTORY

“I am convinced she rivalled, at fifty, the exquisite Diane de Poitiers herself, in the brightness of her wit and the perfection of her form, and might have passed as triumphantly a like test of the marble.”

The Marquis de C—— in his “Foreword.”

If the public seeks any apology for this introduction to it, at a late date, of the extraordinary woman whose self-dictated Memoirs form the staple of the following pages, it must look for it in the references of her contemporaries; it will be far from gathering it from her own autobiography.

Diane Rosemonde de St. Croix (to give her her proper mother-title) considered that she owed to Romance, in a glowing age, what, in a practical one, is conceded by a thousand dull and petty vanities to a vulgar curiosity—her personal reminiscences. She had at least the justification of her qualities, and the good fortune to find, in her latter-day friend, the Marquis de C——, an enthusiastic historian of them. In the question of their appeal, one way or the other, to the English reader, the present transcriber (from the original French notes) must hold himself responsible both for choice and style.

Madame de St. Croix was a “passionist,” as the French called Casanova; and, indeed, she had many points in common with that redoubtable adventurer: an unappeasable vagabondism; a love of letters; an ardent imagination; an incorruptible self-love; and, lastly, what we may term an exotic orthodoxy. If, subscribing to the universal creed which makes man’s soul his fetish, she worshipped an exacting god, she was at least always ready to sacrifice the world to gratify it, and now, no doubt, very logically sings among the angels.

In the matter of her more notorious characteristics, M. de C——, lest her part on earth should suffer misconstruction by the censorious, is so good as to speak with some show of finality. “I deny,” he says, “the title adventuress to my charming and accomplished friend. It is nothing if not misleading. Every day we venture something, for love, for hunger, for ambition. He who deviates from rice and barley-water, venturing on spiced dishes, makes every time an assault on his epigastrium. He who is not content with an ignoble mediocrity, though he do no more than take pains with a letter, is a candidate for fame. And as for love, it does not exist on the highway. Why should it imply distinction to call a man an adventurer, and be invidious to style a woman adventuress? Ulysses dallying in Ææa is surely no more honourable a sight than Godiva traversing Coventry in an adorable deshabille. To have the wide outlook, the catholic sympathy—is that to merit defamation? No, it is to be heroically human. Better sin like an angel, I say, than be a sick devil and virtuous.”

It remains only to mention that the present transcript conducts no further than to the finish of a dramatic period of Madame de St. Croix’s story; and to that, even, at the expense of a considerable lacuna (referred to in its place), which no research has hitherto been successful in filling. It is hoped, however, that, in what is given, enough will be found to interest.

B. C.

[Note.—An ingenious etymologist supplies a likely derivation for the “duck-stone,” so often mentioned in the text, from the Slavic dook or duk, signifying to spirit away. Accepting this genesis, the duck-stone, given to Mrs. Please by the gypsy, becomes the dook, or bewitching-stone, and is imbued with whatever virtues our faith or our credulity may suggest.]

THE EXTRAORDINARY CONFESSIONS OF DIANA PLEASE[1]

I. I MAKE MY DÉBUT

At my friend M. de C——’s instigation I sit down in the noon of my life to talk of its morning.

I look first to your gallantry, my dear Alcide, to see that this statement is not misconstrued. That I have a past argues nothing of my remoteness from it. In comparison with the immortality which is surely to be mine, everything on this side is youth. I am seventeen, or thirty-seven, or whatever I choose; and I intend that Heaven, whenever it calls me, shall find me irresistible. Possessing all the ages, it cannot grudge me my arbitrary disposition of my own little term.

Now, tell your friends, my dear Alcide, that to succeed in life one must never ask a woman her age or a man his intentions; and so we shall all be comfortable.

I owe my mother the most whimsical of grudges, my existence. I will nickname her the Comtesse de l’Ombre, and so shall abuse no confidences in relating of my debt to her, and to “Lovelace,” her collaborator in the romance of which I am the heroine. She was very beautiful; and he, an English cadet of distinction, was an aristocratic paragon.

At the age of sixteen, convinced of the hollowness of life, she had taken the veil, and become the Sister Agnès of the Communauté de Madelonnettes, Notre Dame de la Charité, in Paris, whence a year later she was transferred to an English branch of the house. Hence and from her duty my father, whom she had approached upon a begging mission, succeeded unhappily in inveigling her.

To the day of her death my mother bore the disfiguring sign of a little cross on her breast. It has succeeded to me, but in a faint reflection, a grain de beauté, only. I will tell you, in a word, the story of my inheritance.

The ladies of les Madelonnettes had, in inviting all the feminine vices to their inauguration ceremony, with the object to pension them off handsomely, overlooked the bad fairy Jealousy. Thou knowest, Alcide, the meanness of this witch. To revenge herself, she cast Lovelace into their midst, as Eris cast the apple of discord upon the nuptial board of Thetis; and poor de l’Ombre was made the consequent scapegoat. Driven forth in ignominy from the fold, she could not suffer so much but that one, over zealous or jealous, must strike her an envious blow across the bosom, on which she always wore a little crucifix, the gift of her father. The ebony cut in and left an indelible scar, to which I was to succeed in pathetic earnest of my origin. It has never ceased to be a symbol to me of the vanity of self-renunciation. How can we deny ourselves, and not deny One after whose image we are made?

I was born in a lodging at Brighthelmston, whither my father had conveyed my mother. The town, which has always possessed an attraction for me, was at that time a very paltry affair of scattered houses, to which the mumpish or melancholic came periodically to salt their spleens against a fresh course of dissipations. Locality has never, however, influenced my temper. The perfume of contentment breathes from within, and is not to be affected by soil or surroundings. Let us who have good constitutions continue, as the way is, to accept them for virtues, and to abhor the dyspeptic as unclean. Let us have the discretion to ask no questions of our neighbours about what we don’t understand in this entertaining comedy of life. So shall we justify ourselves to ourselves, and avoid being made uncomfortable. Is it not so, my friend?

My mother had never, I do believe, had a doll till I came. She was very young, even then, and could not tire of playing with me in our pretty cottage near the Steine. And I responded in all endearing gaiety and innocence, with the very trustfulness of which she must, I fear, have come to reproach her apostasy.

Maybe she did, for, as time went on, I can recall a cloud settling upon her brow—the shadow, perhaps, of the yoke under which she was passing from girlhood to womanhood. I was already four when she came of age. O, mon chéri! think of the tragedy of those italics! And think of me, a child of a precocious observation, and little ears as pinkly susceptible to murmurs as the inside of a shell, doomed to wake—wake to some misty understanding of the unusual in our relations!

By and by I even confided my suspicions to my father, whom I adored, and who visited us occasionally, coming down from town very elegant and mondain and in great company. He laughed, and then frowned over at mamma, who returned his look steadily.

“Dear sir,” she said only, “the child is growing very critical. Do not encourage her, and make this cross harder than I can bear.”

“But I too have a cross,” I said; “only it is little and faint, and not blushing like maman’s.”

My papa laughed again, and again frowned, saying, “It is a fact, and hard on the infant, who has done nothing to deserve it.”

Then he pushed me from him, and rose, and, going to the door, turned at it with a peevish face.

“I weary of these heroics,” said he. “If you persist in them, remember that you are qualified, more than ever, for les Madelonnettes.”

He went; and she cried out, as if over some dreadful awakening. But thenceforth, for some reason, our confidences grew estranged. I loved my poor mamma so well, that I think she should not have responded by striving to make heir to her melancholy the innocent cause of it. At the root of all our moral revolt is a sense of the injustice of original sin. I, at least, had done nothing to make me unhappy.

Presently I was given a governess, my dear careless father’s nominee. She was French, a ci-devant maîtresse de pension, very lazy and self-indulgent, and, if not sleeping, she was always ogling for unattached beaux. Vicious and insolent, she delighted in prompting me to reflections on my mother’s self-reserve, and “honour” was as much in her mouth as false teeth. I learned nothing from her but indecorum and innuendo.

One day—for the moral to her teaching (it was when I was ten years old)—I was playing truant on the downs, when I saw a small smutty baby crawl from under a bush into the road at the very moment that a carriage, wildly driven, was approaching. I had just time to notice the gilded splendour of the equipage, and, perhaps,—let us be frank, my friend,—to be inspired to heroism by the sight, before I leapt and snatched up the child from under the very feet of the galloping horses. As the chariot thundered by, an elegantly groomed head thrust itself from the window, and a ruffled hand, waving to me standing there unhurt but bewildered, flung back a gold coin into the dust. I turned my back immediately, disillusioned, by the insolence of the acknowledgment, as to the disinterested quality of my deed, and the more so as the baby was, parler franchement, decidedly unpleasant. I put the imp down, and began to re-order my little ruffled plumes. Wouldst thou hear what they were, my Alcide? I can recall them at this hour: A dainty gipsy hat knotted to a blue ribbon; a stomacher laced

over with silver twist, and a skirt to the ankles, both of flowered lustring; three pair of ruffles at my bare elbows; a black solitaire at my neck, and black shoes with red heels and the prettiest of paste buckles.

Alas! how better than our sins of yesterday do we remember the stockings we wore to sin in! Let me, for penance, concede to history these my failings. I was, in fact, colourless in complexion, like tinted porcelain, with what my detractors used to call spun-glass hair, and the eyes of a Dresden shepherdess. And I was not at that time light on my feet, with which my volatile spirits were always at odds.

Now, as I smoothed my skirt, I was aware of a mad gipsy woman hurrying from the bank towards me, and crying and gesticulating as she came. She caught up the infant, and, finding it unharmed, put it down again, and fawned upon me inarticulate. Then she broke off to curse the distant carriage up hill and down, and finally went to pick up the coin from the very spot where she had not failed to mark its fall.

“It is yours,” she said, striding back to me. “Take it!”

“You can keep it,” I answered, with my little nose in the air. “A lady does not want for money.”

She slipped it into her pocket, and fell on her knees before me.

“Nor beauty, nor love, nor silken raiment,” she cried; “and yet they are not all. Think, my darling! There be no need so wild but the poor grateful gipsy may show a way to gratify it.”

I laughed, half annoyed and half frightened; and then, suddenly and oddly, there came into my head the thought of the stocking needle the gouvernante was wont to stick into my bosom at meals, to prevent me stooping and rounding my back. Must I confess, my Alcide, that there was ever a time when thy Diane was a little less or more than a sylph?

“Make me light,” I said, “so that I can dance without feeling the ground.”

She looked at me strangely a moment, then all about her in a stealthy way, while she slipped her hand into her pocket.

“Hush!” she said. “For none other but you. Only tell not of it.” And she brought up a little greasy packet, of parchment writ round with characters, like a Hebrew phylactery.

“Have you ever heard tell of the duck-stone?” she whispered.

I shook my head, full of curiosity.

“No,” she said, “nor any of thine. It fell from the sky, from another world, deary, that’s strange to ours, and the gipsies found it in the wild places of the woods. There was a smell came from it like the sugar of all flowers, and it was as light as foam and as hard as the beaten rocks.”

She undid the packet while she spoke, and I saw a number of tiny grey cubes, like frothy pumice-stone, one of which she detached, and gave to me.

“It wrought upon them even to madness,” she said, “so that they took and broke it with their mattocks. And, lo! the nameless thing was found in its scattered parts a virtue, even like the poisons which, taken in little, heal. Smell to it when the world is dark, and your brain shall flash into light, like an inn to the tired traveller. Smell to it when your feet go sick and heavy, and you shall feel them like the birds’ whose bones are full of wind. But tell not of the gift or giver, lest I die!”

Involuntarily, as she spoke, I had raised the stone to my nostrils. A faint scent as of menthene intoxicated my brain. The downs and the sky swam before me in one luminous mist. Lightness and delight took all my soul and body with rapture....

A shout brought me to myself. I was sitting on the grass, with the duck-stone still tight in my clutch. The gipsy was gone, how long I could not tell, and up the road was coming a second cortège, more brilliant than the former. A dozen young fellows, all volunteer runners and dressed in white, preceded a coach in which sat a rich-apparelled lady, very bold and handsome, and escorted by a splendid cavalcade of gentlemen. It was the Duchess of Cumberland, who followed her husband to the seaside, as I was to learn by and by; for while I was collecting my drowsy young wits to look, a wonderful thing happened. A horseman drew up with a cry, dismounted, seized and bore me to his saddle, and rode away with me after the carriage. It was my father, flushed and jovial, the pink and Corinthian of his company, as he always was.

He showed no curiosity over the encounter, nor scruple in taking me with him. He was in wild spirits, laughing and teasing, and sometimes he reeled in his saddle in a way to endanger my balance. But the rush of air restored me to myself, and I had the wit, for all my excitement, to slip my charm, which I still held, into a pocket.

So we raced for the town, and presently drew up at the Castle Tavern, where His Royal Highness and his wife, the late Mrs. Horton, were quartering themselves.

The time which followed is confused in my remembrance. I was put in charge of a chambermaid, given a dish of tea and cake, and presently fell fast asleep, to awake smiling and rosy to the summons of my pleasant Clarinda. A lackey in a magnificent scarlet livery awaited me at the door, received me into his arms, and carried me downstairs to a long room blazing with waxlights, where, at a white table spilt all over with a profusion of fruit and crystal, sat a gorgeous company of gentlemen and ladies. Such silks and laces, such feathers and diamonds, I had never in my young day encountered. It was like the most beautiful fair I had ever seen, and the red faces of the company were the coloured bladders bobbing in the stalls. Still, I had not lost my self-possession, when my father reeled round in his chair, and catching me away from the servant, set me on my feet on the table itself.

I was a little confused by the tumult which greeted my exaltation.

“Diane,” whispered my father in my ear, “go and tell the duke in a pretty speech that I send my love to him.”

I flicked up my skirts, and went off immediately among the fruit and decanters. My progress was a triumph. The women clapped in artificial enthusiasm, and the men stopped me to kiss my little shoes. And presently down that long lane I saw the duke’s smiling face awaiting me. It was not a temperate face, it is true; its thirty-four years were traced upon it in very crooked hieroglyphics. But then—c’est la dernière touche qu’informe—the royal star of the garter glittering on the apricot coat beneath made everything handsome. By his side sat the lady his duchess, née Luttrell, as brand-new as I to her exaltation. But it was the difference between Hebe and Thais. For all my innocence I felt that, and did not fear her rivalry. I dropped a little curtsey amongst the grapes and melons.

“Monsieur,” I said, “my papa wishes to make you a pretty gift, and sends you his love.”

He applauded, laughing, as did all the table, and lifted me down to his lap.

“What price for the love?” he cried. “See, I return him a dozen kisses.”

He kept me, however, plying me with bonbons, while madam tittered and fanned herself vexedly.

“You will make the little ape sick, Enrico,” she said. “Put her down; for shame!”

“I know where to stop,” I retorted; and “By God, you do!” said the duke, with a great laugh, and held me tight.

I had a thimbleful of liqueur from his hand by and by, which made me think of the duck-stone. I was the little queen of the evening, and a delight to my father and all.

“Faith!” said a merry Irish rapparee, a bit of a courtier captain, “man has been vainly trying to fit woman into the moral scheme ever since she made herself out of his ninth rib, and the fashions out of a fig-leaf; and here, in the eighteenth century Anno Domini, is the result.”

I was carried on to the Steine presently by my father, my little brain whirling. The whole of the Castle Tavern, and every house and shop adjacent, were illuminated; and the lights and crowds of people quite intoxicated me. There were sports enacting on all sides, and I screamed with laughter to see a jingling match, played for a laced coat and hat, in which the jingler, hung with bells, dodged and eluded and dropped between the legs of the blindfolded who sought to capture him. Then there was a foot-race, run by young women for a Holland smock; and I jeered at their self-conscious antics with all my little might, as they went giggling into place, coy and hobbledehoy, and pushed and quarrelled secretly, and stopped the starter to do up their greasy tresses, and then, all but the winner, snivelled over the result, pronouncing it unfair.

Presently I was taken to see an ox roasted whole; and it was here, while we were looking on at the lurid tumult, occurred a rencontre which was to alter the whole current of my life. A fat, drunken sweep in his war-paint jostled my father, who, himself in the fury of wine, turned and felled the beast to the ground. We were isolated from our friends at the moment, and a ring was immediately formed, and the sweep called upon to stand up and pay his interest like a man. He rose, nothing loth, it seemed, and faced my father, who was forced to engage.