LETTER FROM MADAME DELMARE TO MONSIEUR
DE RAMIÈRE
"Ile Bourbon, June 3d, 18--
"I had determined to weary you no more with reminders of me; but, after
reading on my arrival here the letter you sent me just before I left
Paris, I feel that I owe you a reply because, in the agitation caused by
horrible suffering, I went too far. I was mistaken with regard to you,
and I owe you an apology, not as a _lover_ but as a _man._
"Forgive me, Raymon, for in the most ghastly moment of my life I took
you for a monster. A single word, a single glance from you banished all
confidence and all hope from my heart forever. I know that I can never
be happy again; but I still hope that I may not be driven to despise
you; that would be the last blow.
"Yes, I took you for a dastard, for the worst of all human creatures, an
_egotist._ I conceived a horror of you. I regretted that Bourbon was not
so far away as I longed to fly from you, and indignation gave me
strength to drain the cup to the dregs.
"But since I have read your letter I feel better. I do not regret you,
but I no longer hate you, and I do not wish to leave your life a prey to
remorse for having ruined mine. Be happy, be free from care; forget me.
I am still alive and I may live a long while.
It is a fact that you are not to blame; I was the one who was mad. Your
heart was not dry, but it was closed to me. You did not lie to me, but I
deceived myself. You were neither perjured nor cold; you simply did not
love me.
"Oh! _mon Dieu!_ you did not love me! In heaven's name how must you be
loved? But I will not stoop to complaints; I am not writing to you for
the purpose of poisoning with hateful memories the repose of your
present life; nor do I propose to implore your compassion for sorrows
which I am strong enough to bear alone. On the contrary, knowing better
the rôle for which you are suited, I absolve you and forgive you.
"I will not amuse myself by refuting the charges in your letter; it
would be too easy a matter; I will not reply to your observations with
regard to my duties. Never fear, Raymon; I am familiar with them and I
did not love you little enough to disregard them without due reflection.
It is not necessary to tell me that the scorn of mankind would have been
the reward of my downfall; I was well aware of it. I knew too that the
stain would be deep, indelible and painful beyond words; that I should
be spurned on all sides, cursed, covered with shame, and that I should
not find a single friend to pity me and comfort me. The only mistake I
had made was the feeling confident that you would open your arms to me,
and that you would assist me to forget the scorn, the misery and the
desertion of my friends. The only thing I had not anticipated was that
you might refuse to accept my sacrifice after I had consummated it. I
had imagined that that was impossible. I went to your house with the
expectation that you would repel me at first from principle and a sense
of duty, but firmly convinced that when you learned the inevitable
consequences of what I had done, you would feel bound to assist me to
endure them. No, upon my word I would never have believed that you would
abandon me undefended to the consequences of such a dangerous
resolution, and that you would leave me to gather its bitter fruits
instead of taking me to your bosom and making a rampart of your love.
"In that case how gladly I would have defied the distant mutterings of a
world that was powerless to injure me! how I would have defied hatred,
being strong in your love! how feeble my remorse would have been, and
how easily the passion you would have inspired would have stifled its
voice! Engrossed by you alone, I would have forgotten myself; proud in
the possession of your heart, I should have had no time to blush for my
own. A word from you, a glance, a kiss would have sufficed to absolve
me, and the memory of men and laws could have found no place in such a
life. You see I was mad; according to your cynical expression I had
acquired my knowledge of life from novels written for lady's-maids, from
those gay, childish works of fiction in which the heart is interested in
the success of wild enterprises and in impossible felicities. What you
said, Raymon, was horribly true! The thing that terrifies and crushes me
is that you are right.
"One thing that I cannot understand so well is that the impossibility
was not the same for both of us; that I, a weak woman, derived from the
exaltation of my feelings sufficient strength to place myself alone in a
romantic, improbable situation, and that you, a brave man, could not
find in your will-power, sufficient courage to follow me. And yet you
had shared my dreams of the future, you had assented to my illusions,
you had nourished in me that hope impossible of realization. For a long
while you had listened to my childish plans, my pygmy-like aspirations,
with a smile on your lips and joy in your eyes, and your words were all
love and gratitude. You too were blind, short-sighted, boastful. How did
it happen that your reason did not return until the danger was in sight?
Why, I thought that danger charmed the eyes, strengthened the
resolution, put fear to flight; and yet you trembled like a leaf when
the crisis came! Have you men no courage except the physical courage
that defies death? are you not capable of the moral courage that
welcomes misfortune? Do you, who explain everything so admirably,
explain that to me, I beg.
"It may be that your dream was not like mine; in my case, you see,
courage was love. You had fancied that you loved me, and you had
awakened, surprised to find that you had made such a mistake, on the day
that I went forward trusting in the shelter of my mistake. Great God!
what an extraordinary delusion it was of yours, since you did not then
foresee all the obstacles that struck you when the time for action came!
since you did not mention them to me until it was too late!
"But why should I reproach you now? Are we responsible for the impulses
of our hearts? was it in your power to say that you would always love
me? No, of course not. My misfortune consists in my inability to make
myself agreeable to you longer and more really. I look about for the
cause of it and find none in my heart; but it apparently exists, none
the less. Perhaps I loved you too well, perhaps my affection was
annoying and tiresome. You were a man, you loved liberty and pleasure. I
was a burden to you. Sometimes I tried to put fetters on your life.
Alas! those were very paltry offences to plead in justification of such
a cruel desertion!
"Enjoy, therefore, the liberty you have purchased at the expense of my
whole life; I will interfere with it no more. Why did you not give me
this lesson sooner? My wound would have been less deep, and yours also,
perhaps.
"Be happy! that is the last wish my broken heart will ever form! Do not
exhort me to think of God, leave that for the priests, who have to
soften the hard hearts of the guilty. For my part, I have more faith
than you; I do not serve the same God, but I serve Him more loyally and
with a purer heart. Yours is the God of men, the king, the founder and
the upholder of your race; mine is the God of the universe, the creator,
the preserver and the hope of all creatures. Yours made everything for
you alone; mine made all created things for one another. You deem
yourselves the masters of the world; I deem you only its tyrants. You
think that God protects you and authorizes you to possess the empire of
the earth; I think that He permits that for a little time, and that the
day will come when His breath will scatter you like grains of sand. No,
Raymon, you do not know God; or rather let me repeat what Ralph said to
you one day at Lagny: you believe in nothing. Your education and your
craving for an irresistible power to oppose to the brute force of the
people, have led you to adopt without scrutiny the beliefs of your
fathers; but the conviction of God's existence has never reached your
heart--I doubt if you have ever prayed to Him. For my part, I have but
one belief, the only one probably that you have not: I believe in Him;
but the religion you have devised I will have nothing to do with; all
your morality, all your principles, are simply the interests of your
social order which you have raised to the dignity of laws and which you
claim to trace back to God himself, just as your priests instituted the
rites and ceremonies of the church to establish their power over the
nations and amass wealth. But it is all falsehood and impiety. I, who
invoke God and understand Him, know that there is nothing in common
between Him and you, and that by clinging to Him with all my strength I
separate myself from you, whose constant aim it is to overthrow His
works and sully His gifts. I tell you, it ill becomes you to invoke His
name to crush the resistance of a poor, weak woman, to stifle the
lamentations of a broken heart. God does not choose that the creations
of His hands shall be oppressed and trodden under foot. If He vouchsafed
to descend so far as to intervene in our paltry quarrels, He would crush
the strong and raise the weak; He would pass His mighty hand over our
uneven heads and level them like the surface of the sea; He would say to
the slave: 'Cast off thy chains and fly to the mountains where I have
placed water and flowers and sunshine for thee.' He would say to the
kings: 'Throw your purple robes to the beggars to sit upon, and go to
sleep in the valleys where I have spread for you carpets of moss and
heather.' To the powerful He would say: 'Bend your knees and bear the
burdens of your weaker brethren; for henceforth you will need them and I
will give them strength and courage.' Yes, those are my dreams; they are
all of another life, of another world, where the laws of the brutal will
not have passed over the heads of the peaceably inclined; where
resistance and flight will not be crimes; where man can escape man as
the gazelle escapes the panther; where the chain of the law will not be
stretched about him to force him to throw himself under his enemy's
feet; and where the voice of prejudice will not be raised in his
distress to insult his sufferings and to say to him: 'You shall be
deemed cowardly and base because you did not bend the knee and crawl.'
"No, do not talk to me about God, you of all men, Raymon; do not invoke
His name to send me into exile and reduce me to silence. In submitting
as I do I yield to the power of men. If I listened to the voice which
God has placed in the depths of my heart, and to the noble instinct of a
bold and strong nature, which perhaps is the genuine conscience, I
should fly to the desert, I should learn to do without help, protection
and love: I should go and live for myself in the heart of our beautiful
mountains: I should forget the tyrants, the unjust and the ungrateful.
But alas! man cannot do without his fellowman, and even Ralph cannot
live alone.
"Adieu, Raymon! may you be happy without me! I forgive you for the harm
you have done me. Talk of me sometimes to your mother, the best woman I
have ever known. Understand that there is neither anger nor vengeance in
my heart against you; my grief is worthy of the love I had for you.
"INDIANA."
The unfortunate creature was over-boastful. This profound and calm
sorrow was due simply to a sense of what her own dignity demanded when
she addressed Raymon; but, when she was alone, she gave way freely to
its consuming violence. Sometimes, however, a vague gleam of hope shone
in her troubled eyes. Perhaps she never lost the last vestige of
confidence in Raymon's love, despite the cruel lessons of experience,
despite the distressing thoughts which placed before her mind every day
his indifference and indolence when his interests or his pleasures were
not concerned. It is my belief that, if Indiana could have persuaded
herself to face the bald truth, she would not have dragged out her
hopeless, ruined life so long.
Woman is naturally foolish; it is as if Heaven, to counterbalance the
eminent superiority over us men which she owes to her delicacy of
perception, had implanted a blind vanity, an idiotic credulity in her
heart. It may be that one need only be an adept in the art of bestowing
praise and flattering the self-esteem, to obtain dominion over that
subtle, supple and perspicacious being. Sometimes the men who are most
incapable of obtaining any sort of ascendancy over other men, obtain an
unbounded ascendancy over the minds of women. Flattery is the yoke that
bends those ardent but frivolous heads so low. Woe to him who undertakes
to be frank and outspoken in love! he will have Ralph's fate.
This is what I should reply if you should tell me that Indiana is an
exceptional character, and that the ordinary woman displays neither her
stoical coolness nor her exasperating patience in resistance to conjugal
despotism. I should tell you to look at the reverse of the medal, and
see the miserable weakness, the stupid blindness she displays in her
relations with Raymon. I should ask you where you ever found a woman who
was not as ready to deceive as to be deceived; who had not the art to
confine for ten years in the depths of her heart the secret of a hope
sacrificed so thoughtlessly in a day of frenzied excitement, and who
would not become, in one man's arms, as pitiably weak as she could be
strong and invincible in another man's.