Othmar. Ouida
which were the chief social and royal diversion of the Italy of Lucrezia Borgia and the France of Marguerite de Valois.
It was a golden August afternoon, towards the close of a day which had been hot, fragrant, full of lovely lights and shadows. Throned on a hill a mighty castle rose, aerial, fantastic, stately, with its colonnades of stone rose-garlanded, and its stone staircases descending into bowers of foliage and foam of flowers. Its steep roofs were as sheets of silver in the sun, its many windows caught the red glow from the west, and its bastions shelved downward to meet smooth-shaven lawns and thickets of oleanders luxuriant with blossom, crimson, white, or blush-colour. In the woods around, the oaks and beeches were heavy with their densest leafage; the deer couched under high canopies of bracken and osmunda; and the wild boars, sunk deep in tangles of wild clematis and beds of meadow-sweet, were too drowsy in the mellow warmth to hear the sounds of human laughter which were wafted to them on the windless air. In the silent sunshiny vine-clad country which stretched around those forests, in 'le pays de rire et de ne rien faire,' from many a steep church-steeple and many a little white chapel on the edge of the great rivers or in the midst of the vast wheat-fields, the vesper-bell was sounding to small townships and tiny hamlets.
It was seven o'clock, and the Court of Love was still open; the chamber of council, or throne-room, being a grassy oval, with grassy seats raised around it, like the seats of an amphitheatre; an open space where the forest joined the gardens, with walls, first of clipped bay, and then of dense oak foliage, around it; the turf had been always kept shorn and rolled, and the evergreens always clipped, and a marble fountain in the centre of the grass, of fauns playing with naiads, bore an inscription testifying that, in the summer of the year of grace 1530, the Marguerite des Marguerites had held a Court of Love just there, using those same seats of turf, shadowed by those same oak-boughs.
'Why should we not hold one also? If we have advanced in anything, since the Valois time, it is in the art of intellectual hair-splitting. We ought to be able to argue as many days together as they did. Only, I presume, their advantage was that they meant what they said, and we never or seldom do. They laughed or they sighed, and were sincere in both; but we do neither, we are gouailleurs always, which is not a happy temperament, nor an intellectually productive one.'
So had spoken the mistress of that stately place; and so, her word being law, had it been in the sunset hours before the nine o'clock dinner; and it was a pastime well suited to the luminous evenings of late summer in
The hush of old warm woods that lie
Low in the lap of evening, bright
And bathed in vast tranquillity.
She, herself, was seated on an ivory chair, carved with Hindoo steel, and shaped like a curule chair of old Rome. Two little pages, in costumes of the Valois time, stood behind her, holding large fans of peacock's plumes.
'They are anachronisms,' she had said with a passing frown at the fans, 'but they may remain, though quite certainly the Valois did not know anything of them any more than they knew of blue china and yellow tea.'
But the gorgeous green and gold and purple-eyed plumes looked pretty, so she had let them stay.
'We shall have so many jarring notes of "modernity" in our discussions,' she had said, 'that one note the more in decoration does not matter;' and, backed by them, she sat now upon her ivory throne, an exquisite figure, poetic and delicate, with her cream-white skirts of the same hue as her throne, and her strings of great pearls at her throat. Next her was seated an ecclesiastic of high eminence, who had in vain protested that he was wholly out of place in such a diversion. 'Was Cardinal Bembo out of place at Ferrara and Urbino?' she had objected; and had so successfully, in the end, vanquished his scruples, that the late sunbeams, slanting through the oak-leaves and on to that gay assemblage, had found out in it his handsome head and his crimson sash, and his blue eyes full of their and keen witty observation, and his white hands folded together on his knee.
In a semicircle whose wings stretched right and left were ranged the gentlemen and ladies who formed momentarily the house party of the château; great people all; all the women young and all the men brilliant, no dull person amongst them, dulness being the one vice condemned there without any chance of pardon. They were charming people, distinguished people, handsome people also, and they made a gay and gracious picture, reclining or sitting in any attitudes they chose on these grassy slopes, which had seen the court of Francis and of both Marguerites:
Above their heads floated a silken banner, on which, in letters of gold, were embroidered the wise words, 'Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit!'
'To return to our original demand—what is the definition of Love?' asked their queen and president, turning her lovely eyes on to the great ecclesiastic, who replied with becoming gravity:
'Madame, what can a humble priest possibly know of the theme?'
She smiled a little. 'You know as much as Bembo knew,' she made answer.
'Ah no, Madame! The times are changed.'
'The times, perhaps; not human nature. However, this is the question which must be first decided by the Court at large: How is the nature of Love to be defined?'
A gentleman on her left murmured:
'No one can tell us so as well you, Madame, who have torn the poor butterfly in pieces so often sans merci.'
'You have broken the first rule of all,' said the sovereign, with severity. 'The discussion is to be kept wholly free from all personalities.'
'A wise rule, or the Court would probably end, like an Italian village festa, in a free use of the knife all round.'
'If you be not quiet you will be exiled for contempt of court, and shut up in the library to write out Ovid's "Ars Amatoria." Once more, I inquire, how are we to define Love?'
'It was never intended to be defined, but to be enjoyed.'
'That is merely begging the question,' said their Queen. 'One enjoys music, flowers, a delicate wine, a fine sunset, a noble sonnet; but all these things are nevertheless capable of analysis and of reduction to known laws. So is Love. I ask once more: How is it to be defined? Does no one seem to know? What curious ignorance!'
'In woman, Love may be defined to be the desire of annexation; and to consist chiefly in a passionate clinging to a sense of personal property in the creature loved.'
'That is cynical, and may be true. But it is not general enough. You must not separate the love of man and the love of woman. We speak of Love general, human, concrete.'
'With all deference I would observe that, if we did not separate the two, we should never arrive at any real definition at all, for Love differs according to sex as much as the physiognomy or the costume.'
'Real Love is devotion!' said a beautiful blonde with blue eyes that gazed from under black lashes with pathetic tenderness.
'Euh! euh!' murmured one impertinent.
'Oh, oh!' murmured another.
'Ouiche!' said a third under his breath.
The sovereign smiled ironically:
'Ah, my dear Duchesse! all that died out with the poets of 1830. It belongs to the time when women wore muslin gowns, looked at the moon, and played the harp.'
'If I might venture on a definition in the langue verte,' suggested a handsome man, seated at the feet of the queen, 'though I fear I should be turned out of Court as Rabelais and Scarron are turned out of the drawing-room——'
'We can imagine what it would be, and will not give you the trouble to say any more. If the definition of Love be, on the contrary, left to me, I shall include it all in one word—Illusion.'
'That is a cruel statement!'
'It is a fact. We have our own ideal, which we temporarily place in the person, and clothe with the likeness, of whoever is fortunate enough to resemble it superficially enough to delude us, unconsciously, into doing so. You remember the hackneyed saying of the philosopher