Poor Adeline, incapable
of imagining a patch, of pinning a rosebud in the very middle of her
bosom, of devising the tricks of the toilet intended to resuscitate
the ardors of exhausted nature, was merely well dressed. A woman is
not a courtesan for the wishing!
"Woman is soup for man," as Moliere says by the mouth of the judicious
Gros-Rene. This comparison suggests a sort of culinary art in love.
Then the virtuous wife would be a Homeric meal, flesh laid on hot
cinders. The courtesan, on the contrary, is a dish by Careme, with its
condiments, spices, and elegant arrangement. The Baroness could not
--did not know how to serve up her fair bosom in a lordly dish of lace,
after the manner of Madame Marneffe. She knew nothing of the secrets
of certain attitudes. This high-souled woman might have turned round
and round a hundred times, and she would have betrayed nothing to the
keen glance of a profligate.
To be a good woman and a prude to all the world, and a courtesan to
her husband, is the gift of a woman of genius, and they are few. This
is the secret of long fidelity, inexplicable to the women who are not
blessed with the double and splendid faculty. Imagine Madame Marneffe
virtuous, and you have the Marchesa di Pescara. But such lofty and
illustrious women, beautiful as Diane de Poitiers, but virtuous, may
be easily counted.
So the scene with which this serious and terrible drama of Paris
manners opened was about to be repeated, with this singular difference
--that the calamities prophesied then by the captain of the municipal
Militia had reversed the parts.
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