Ouida The Massarenes

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-98826-109-0
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 570 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

The Massarenes is a novel by Ouida that tells the story of a wealthy and powerful European family, the Massarenes, who reside in a luxurious villa in Nice, France. The family, consisting of a mother, daughter, and son, live a life of leisure, indulging in their extravagant lifestyle while ignoring the world outside their gates. They come into contact with a poor and struggling young artist named Pierre, who falls in love with the daughter of the family. As their lives become intertwined, the Massarenes are forced to confront the reality of their privileged existence and the consequences of their actions. The novel explores themes of love, wealth, power, and morality.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ouida

Leseproben

CHAPTER II.
It was four o’clock on a misty and dark afternoon of the month of March in London. The reception-rooms of a fine house facing Grosvenor Gate were all lighted by the last modern perfection of rose-shaded electricity. They were rooms of unusually admirable proportions and size for the city in which they were situated, and were decorated and filled with all that modern resources, both in art and in wealth, can obtain. Harrenden House, as it was called, had been designed for a rich and eccentric duke of that name, and occupied by him for a few years, at the end of which time he had tired of it, had carried all its treasures elsewhere, and put it up for sale; it had remained unsold and unlet for a very long period, the price asked being too large even for millionaires. At last, in the autumn of the previous year, it had been taken by a person who was much more than a millionaire, though he had been born in a workhouse and had begun life as a cow-boy. The great mansion had nothing whatever of the parvenu about it except its new owner. Its interior had been arranged in perfect taste by an unerring master’s hand. The square hall had ancient Italian tapestries, Italian marbles, Italian mosaics, all of genuine age and extreme beauty, whilst from its domed cupola a mellowed light streamed down through painted glass of the fifteenth century, taken from the private chapel of a Flemish castle. The two-winged staircase, broad and massive, had balustrades of oak which had once been the choir railings of a cathedral in Karinthia, the silver lamps which hung above these stairs had once illumined religious services in the Kremlin, and above the central balustrade leaned, lovely as adolescence, a nude youth with a hawk on his wrist—the work of Clodion. The rest of the mansion was in the same proportions and perfection. No false note jarred on its harmonies, no doubtful thing intruded a coarse or common chord. The household were not pushed away into dark cell-like corners, but had comfortable and airy sleeping-chambers. It was a palace fit for a Queen of Loves; it was a home made for a young Cæsar in the first flush of his dreams of Cleopatra. And it belonged actually to William Massarene, late of Kerosene City, North Dakota, U. S. A., miner, miller, meat salesman, cattle exporter, railway contractor, owner of gambling-saloons, and opium dens for the heathen Chinee, and one of the richest and hardiest-headed men in either hemisphere. Nothing was wanting which money could buy—tapestries, ivories, marbles, bronzes, porcelains, potteries, orchids, palms, roses, silks, satins, and velvets, were all there in profusion. Powdered lackeys lolled in the anteroom, dignified men in black stole noiselessly over carpets soft and elastic as moss; in the tea-room the china was Sèvres of 1770, and the water boiled in what had once been a gold water-vase of Leo X.; in the delicious little oval boudoir the walls were entirely covered with old Saxe plates, and Saxe shepherds and shepherdesses made groups in all the corners, while a Watteau formed the ceiling; and yet, amidst these gay and smiling porcelain people of Meissen, who were a century and a half old, and yet kept the roses on their cheeks and the laugh on their lips, Margaret Massarene, the mistress of it all, sat in solitary state and melancholy meditation; a heavy hopelessness staring in her pale grey eyes, a dreary dejection expressed in the loose clasp of her fat hands folded on her knee, the fingers now and then beating a nervous tattoo. What use was it to have the most beautiful dwelling-house in all London if no one ever beheld its beauties from one week’s end to another? What use was it to have a regiment of polished and disdainful servants if there were no visitors of rank for them to receive? Many things are hard in this world; but nothing is harder than to be ready to prostrate yourself, and be forbidden to do it; to be ready to eat the bitter pastry which is called humble pie, and yet find no table at which so much even as this will be offered you. The great world did not affront them; it did worse, it did not seem to know they existed. “Take a big town-house; buy a big country place; ask people; the rest will all follow of itself,” had said their counsellor and confidant at the baths of Homburg. They had bought the town-house, and the country place, but as yet they had found no people to invite to either of them; and not a soul had as yet called at the magnificent mansion by Gloucester Gate, although for fifteen days and more its porter had sat behind open gates; gates of bronze and gold with the Massarene arms, which the Herald’s College had lately furnished, emblazoned above on their scroll-work awaiting the coronet which a grateful nation and a benign Sovereign would, no doubt, ere many years should have passed, add to them. People of course there were by hundreds and thousands, who would have been only too glad to be bidden to their doors; but they were people of that common clay with which the Massarenes had finished for ever and aye. There were many families, rich, if not as rich as themselves, and living in splendor on Clapham Common, near Epping Forest, or out by Sydenham and Dulwich, who would have willingly been intimate with Mrs. Massarene as their husbands were with hers in the city. She would have been content with their fine houses, their good dinners, their solid wealth, their cordial company. She would have been much more at ease in their suburban villas amidst their homelier comforts, hearing and sharing their candid boastfulness of their rise in life. But these were not the acquaintances which her husband desired. He did not want commerce, however enriched; he wanted the great world, or what now represents it, the smart world; and he intended to have that or none. And Lady Kenilworth, their Homburg friend, had written a tiny three-cornered note ten days before, with a mouse in silver on its paper, which said: “I am in town and am coming to see you. Jack and Boo send love,” and on this familiar epistle they had built up an Eiffel Tower of prodigious hope and expectation. But ten days and more had passed and their correspondent had not yet fulfilled her promise. Therefore, amidst all the beauty and splendor of it, the mistress of the house sat, pale, sullen, despondent, melancholy. She had sat thus for fifteen days—ever since Parliament had met—and it was all in vain, in vain. The gold urn bubbled, the shepherds smiled, the orchids bloomed, the men in black and the men in powder waited in vain, and the splendid and spacious mansion warmed itself, lighted itself, perfumed itself in vain. Nobody came. She had dropped all her old friends and the new ones were faithless and few. She had been forced by her lord and master to cease her acquaintance with the wives of aldermen and city magnates and magistrates; good-natured wealthy women, who had been willing to make her one of themselves; and the desired successors, the women of the world, were only conspicuous by their absence. She was dressed admirably by a great authority on clothes; but the dull Venetian red, embroidered with gold thread and slashed with tawny color, was suited to a Vittoria Accrombona, to a Lucrezia Borgia, and did not suit at all the large loose form and the pallid insignificant features of their present wearer. When the head cutter of the great Paris house which had turned out that magnificent gown had ventured to suggest to its chief that such attire was thrown away on such a face and figure as these, that Oracle had answered with withering contempt, “Rien ne va aux gens de leur espèce, excepté leur tablier d’ouvrière. Et le tablier on ne veut plus porter!” His scorn was unutterable for all “gens de leur espèce,” but he did what he could for them; he let them have exquisite attire and sent them very long bills. It was not his fault if they never knew how to wear their clothes; he could not teach them that secret, which only comes by the magic of nature and breeding. The present wearer of his beautiful Venetian red and gold gown was laced in until she could scarcely breathe; her fat hands were covered with beautiful rings; her grey hair had been washed with gold-colored dye; her broad big feet, which had stood so many years before cooking stoves and washtubs, were encased in Venetian red hose of silk and black satin shoes with gold buckles; her maid had assured her that she looked like a picture but she felt like a guy, and was made nervous by the Medusa-like gaze of the men in black who occasionally flitted across her boudoir to attend to a lamp, contract the valve of the calorifère, or lay the afternoon papers cut and aired by her chair. “If only they wouldn’t look at me so!” she thought, piteously. What must they think of her, sitting alone like this, day after day, week after week, when the dreary two hours’ drive in the Park was over, behind the high-stepping horses, which were the envy of all beholders, but to their owners seemed strange, terrible and dangerous creatures. London was full, not with the suffocating fullness indeed of July, but with the comparative animation which comes into the street with the meeting of Parliament. But not a soul had passed those gates as yet, at least not one as human souls had of late become classified in the estimation of the dwellers within them. The beautiful rooms seemed to yawn like persons whose mind and whose time are vacant. The men in black and the men in powder yawned also, and bore upon their faces the visible expression of that depression and discontent which were in their...