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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
This is the story of Madame de's earrings. It is a story of jewellery, of love, of denial, of society that has the simplicity of a fairy tale and the elegance of an eighteenth century roman-à-clef. The most famous work by Louise de Vilmorin, this novella became The Earrings of Madame de, a 1952 Max Ophüls film.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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LOUISEDE VILMORIN
MADAME DE
Translated from the French by Duff Cooper
To my sister-in-law Andrée de Vilmorin
Contents
MADAME DE
WHENEVER love touches history, events of the past belong to the present.
Elegance rather than beauty was accounted the mark of merit in the circle of society to which Mme de belonged and in that circle Mme de herself was acknowledged to be of all women the most elegant. She set the fashion among those who knew her and, as the men said she was inimitable, sensible women sought to imitate her. They hoped that some glint of her lustre might shine on them, and that their ears might catch some echo of the adulation she received. Wherever her approval fell, distinction was conferred; she was original in all her ways; she made the commonplace seem rare, and she always did what nobody expected.
M. de was a rich man. He was proud of his wife and refused her nothing. He never questioned her about the money she spent, so she had no cause to fear his reproaches, yet from a sort of weakness, not unmixed with a desire to prove her cleverness, when he admired some object she had just bought or a dress she was wearing for the first time, she could not resist saying that it had cost her half of what she had actually paid for it. So Mme de hid from M. de the total amount of the bills that she was incurring. After this had been going on for a few years she found herself seriously in debt, which caused her at first anxiety, then anguish and finally despair. It was the more difficult for her to find the courage to tell her husband because she had been deceiving him for so long, and because he had always treated her with the greatest generosity. Unwilling to lose either his admiration or his confidence, she decided that the secret sale of some jewellery was the only way in which she could solve her problem.
It would be unwise, she thought, to get rid of an heirloom, or of a large number of jewels of inferior value, owing to the difficulty of accounting for their disappearance; so she decided, when she had gone through her jewel case, to sell a pair of earrings made of two superb diamonds, cut in the shape of hearts. It had been a splendid present which M. de had given her on the day after their marriage.
She called on her jeweller. He was a thoroughly reliable man; in the houses of many of his most important customers he was as much a friend as a jeweller. She swore him to secrecy, and spoke to him in such a way that he received the impression that M. de was aware of what his wife was doing. The jeweller assumed that M. de had some private money troubles, and wishing to help him without letting Mme de realise what he suspected, he tactfully asked:
“But, Mme, what will you say to M. de?”
“Oh,” she answered, “I shall tell him I’ve lost them.”
“You are so charming that I am sure people always believe whatever you say,” said the jeweller, and he bought the earrings.
Mme de paid her debts, and her beauty, free of care, shone brighter than ever.
At a ball a week later Mme de suddenly clasped her hands to her ears and cried out:
“Heavens, I’ve lost my earrings! They must have fallen off while I was dancing.”
Several people who had stopped dancing and were standing round said she had not been wearing them that evening.
“Yes, I was. I’m sure I had them,” she said, and still hiding her ears with her hands she ran to her husband.
“My earrings! My two hearts! I’ve lost them! They fell off. Look, look,” she cried, removing her hands.
“You were not wearing your earrings this evening,” replied M. de. “I am absolutely sure of it. I noticed it when we left, and as we were already very late I was careful not to mention it, for I was afraid you would send for them and make us still later.”
“You are wrong. I know you are,” she answered. “I hesitated whether to put on my hearts or my emeralds and it was my hearts that I chose.”
“Then you must have left them on your dressing table. I was hurrying you and you didn’t notice what you were doing,” said M. de and after a moment’s pause he went on, “Are you sure you weren’t holding them in your hand, meaning to put them on in the carriage, as you sometimes do?”
“In the carriage? They may have fallen in the carriage,” she said, “but I think it unlikely.”
She seemed terribly upset. M. de begged her to wait calmly, and in his anxiety to set her mind at rest sent for lanterns and went out himself to make a thorough search of the carriage. He then drove home, where he looked in the jewel case. When his search proved in vain he rang the bell, and woke up the servants. He questioned his wife’s maid.
“I can’t remember for certain,” she replied, “but I’ve never seen Madame go out in the evening without her earrings.”
Since the earrings were not in the house it followed that Mme de must have taken them with her. M. de could form no other conclusion. Worried and empty-handed he returned to the ball. There he found an atmosphere of distress, doubt and embarrassment. Nobody liked to dance, the band stopped playing and the evening came to an end.
On the following day there were paragraphs in the morning papers referring to the incident and giving the impression that it was a question of theft. The jeweller found himself in the unpleasant position of not being able to divulge the secret which had madehim the honest possessor of jewels that were now believed to have been stolen. After an hour’s cogitation he put the earrings in a case and called at the house of M. de, who received him immediately.
“I’m sure you’ve come to tempt me,” said M. de welcoming him.
“I wish I had, my dear sir,” replied the jeweller, “but not today. I’ve never been so put out as this morning and before bothering you, offending you perhaps, I must appeal to your discretion.”
“A secret?” asked M. de.
“A secret, and a question of conscience,” said the jeweller.
M. de looked him straight in the eyes.
“I will be discreet,” he answered. “I promise. Speak. I’m listening.”
The jeweller then told him how he had been visited by Mme de, how she had brought him the diamond hearts and how, not being able to believe that she was selling such valuable jewels without the knowledge of her husband, he had thought he was doing them both a service when he made the purchase. With these words he took the case out of his pocket, opened it and added:
“You will understand my feelings when I read in the papers this morning that it was suspected that these earrings had been stolen.”
Although M. de was sad to learn that for a long time his wife had been misleading him and that by concealing her debts she had done harm to his credit and his good name; although he was shocked by the cold-blooded deception that she had practised the evening before at the ball, by the silence with which she had accepted the rumours that were going round the town and by her hypocrisy in pretending to be unhappy, yet he gave no sign of what he was feeling but thanked the jeweller for having called. They exchanged a few masculine jokes about the unreliability of women, even the most reliable ones, after which M. de bought back the earrings.
“I’m sorry to have to sell them to you for the second time,” said the jeweller.
M. del aughed. “Don’t apologise,” he said, “I’m delighted to have got them back.”
M. de had a mistress, a beautiful Spanish lady with whom he was beginning to fall out of love. It happened that she was leaving on that very day for South America, and as Mme de had shown by selling her diamond hearts that she set small store by them, it seemed to him that he could not do better than give them to this beautiful lady, as though to reward her for going away before putting him to the trouble of breaking with her. She accepted them quite naturally as though there were nothing unusual in his making her such a valuable present, and this flattered M. de’s vanity. He took her to the station and saw her into her compartment. As he walked down the platform she leant out of the carriage window and as the train left he replied to her gestures of farewell by putting his gloves to his lips and waving them as though to shower her with kisses. Then he went home.
He found Mme de alone in her small sitting-room,
