ON THE TERRACE
“There must be some misunderstanding,” said the Marquis.
“I am afraid,” rejoined the Curé, “that there is something worse.”
They were pacing slowly up and down the terrace at Chantemerle among
the roses of the late June of 1792. The little river Lay, curled about
the foot of the hill, and hugged by the wooded slopes which clung
above it, caught the eye with an occasional sparkle of its shallows,
for the south façade of the house, dominating the slightly sloping
garden, owned a bolder prospect than many in the province. On the
other side, indeed, where the avenue approached it on level ground,
the topmost windows of the château showed only the characteristic
Vendean expanse of view, which gave the look of a flat country to a
region that was not really flat, but which had nothing to catch the
eye, among the innumerable stunted trees which bordered every field,
save a roof or two with its red and curving tiles. But the garden
front looked down on what was almost a ravine.
As they turned at the end of the path the Marquis glanced up at the
house, and at that moment Madame de Château-Foix emerged from the
structure in the Palladian style by which the Marquis Octavien-François
had, in the days of Louis XIV., somewhat disastrously enlarged his
semi-Renaissance dwelling-place. She stood for a moment on the level
stone space at the head of the flight of steps running down to the
terrace, then, smiling at her son, seated herself in a low chair set
in the shade of the incongruous pavilion, which was in fact her
boudoir. Gilbert and the priest continued their leisurely and absorbed
promenade.
Beside the Marquise, on a table, lay some unfinished needlework, and
in its bright folds a dingy little volume, to which her hand went out
mechanically. But she did not read it; her eyes strayed to the figure
of her son, as he passed with bent head and a puzzled expression in
the gaze which now and again met her own, but hardly saw her. She
glanced quickly at his companion. At that instant the Curé leisurely
folded up the letter which he had been reading, and handed it
back to the Marquis. In his face, at least, there was no lack of
comprehension, no hesitation. But M. des Graves would not attempt more
than the bare expression of his thoughts; he would neither urge nor
persuade. That was not his way. If it had been, Gilbert de Chantemerle
would not have been down there with him now; that his mother knew very
well.
She recognised—was rather proud of—the unyielding character of her
son, his insusceptibility to influence, his inflexible adherence to
his own standards of conduct—and these were high. She realised, though
less clearly, how little M. des Graves tried to influence him. Devout
Catholic as she was, it was only given to her in rare glimpses to see
that the priest had a settled policy of holding his hand, not from
the impossibility of accomplishing anything, but from principle. She
knew that he held strong views on the abuse of power. There was
always about this old friend of her husband’s a sensation—to her
uncomfortable—of force voluntarily withheld from exercise. Sometimes
the sensation affected her with almost physical irritation. And deep
down in her soul, beneath the occasional mild exultation at her son’s
untrammelled state, lay the regret that M. des Graves had not brought
his influence to bear on Gilbert’s spiritual life. For Gilbert’s
somewhat devout boyhood had merged into a manhood of indifference; his
preoccupation with Catholicism was ethical, his creed a joyless
allegiance to a system of morals. He had never openly broken away from
the Church as his father had done, and to her ordinances he paid the
bare outward homage that she demanded—but it was less than a minimum
payment. Not without reason, as she suspected, did he always absent
himself from Chantemerle at Easter, timing his annual visit to his
less exacting Southern tenantry to coincide with that critical
festival. The Vendean peasantry were thus free to draw the charitable
but untrue conclusion that he went to his duties at Château-Foix.
Yet in any other part of France his conduct would have passed as
exemplary, but here, in the midst of a people ardently faithful, it
had not that complexion. And this, with a priest always at hand as
counsellor!
Counsellor, indeed, M. des Graves had been, and what a good one!
Indeed, it sometimes seemed to the Marquise that almost all through
her married life he had been explaining something to some one of
them—her husband, herself, her son. Eight years ago, in that episode
of supreme joy which shone out amidst her grief, when Gilbert had
taken the resolution of living on his estates, it was to the Curé that
he had turned for help in his unfamiliar task. And the priest had
given him the most unstinted aid. But it was not difficult to see his
capacity for assistance in matters of larger import, and Gilbert had
discussed with him every political crisis of which the last three
years had been so prodigal, from the calling of the States-General in
’89, at which, as a good Liberal, he had rejoiced, to the declaration
of war against Austria in the spring of the present year, which had
not pleased him at all.
There was, indeed, in recent events material enough for many and many
a conference on the terrace walk. In the great flood which was
changing the face of France there ran a tide bearing the provinces
of the West to a destination which no man could see—a tide whose
waves threatened, with the submerging of every familiar landmark, to
engulf more particularly M. des Graves and all his caste. Since the
suppression of the religious orders, the sales of ecclesiastical
property, and the promulgation of the civil constitution of the clergy
in 1790, no part of France had suffered more severely from the
anti-clerical policy of the Government. Hundreds of parishes had been
deprived of the priest who refused the civil oath. In some the
“constitutional” curé, the “intrus,” celebrated Masses which the
faithful would not attend; in some the church had been devoted to
other uses, while the non-juror, if he were not in hiding, or in a
foreign country, was probably eating out his heart in the _chef-lieu_
of the department, cut off from his people, and forced to report
himself every morning to the authorities. For the Vendean peasant,
with his fervid piety, no more cruel persecution could have been
devised. But though hundreds of priests were interned at Angers, in
order to prevent them from preparing their flocks for the Easter
communion, Vendée proper had not suffered to such an extent as the
neighbouring departments until, in the early spring of 1792, the
authorities decreed that all non-jurors residing there for less than
a year, should leave it in a week.
It was the first step of purely local persecution. The municipality of
Chantonnay, the little town in whose district lay the village of
Chantemerle, had been very slow indeed to take any anti-clerical
action. No “constitutional” priest had ever been installed at
Chantemerle, and M. des Graves was accustomed to proceed with his
ministrations as calmly as though he were ignorant of what was hanging
over his head. But he knew well enough—and his flock, too—that he was
a favoured exception. His parish was like a little island which the
encroaching tide is bound in the end to submerge. Neither château nor
village had yet recovered from the horror with which they had heard of
Vergniaud’s proposal in the Assembly on May 27th for the deportation
of priests to foreign parts, when orders came from Fontenay that all
non-jurors not born in the department were to leave it at once. And
M. des Graves was not a Vendean born.
Yet, though the thunderbolt had fallen in the first week of June, on
this, the 25th of the same month, the Curé had said his Mass as usual
in the little church, had visited his parishioners, and was now pacing
sedately up and down with the master of the Château, who, as a noble,
was only a shade less obnoxious to the Jacobin Directory than himself.
The explanation lay in the priest’s resolution, and in the fact that
Fontenay-le-Comte, the _chef-lieu_, was a good deal further away than
Chantonnay. The municipality had not moved. Neither had M. des Graves.
On all these things did Madame de Château-Foix reflect as she watched
the two figures. She did not allow herself to dwell on what would
happen if M. des Graves were actually turned out of his cure. The
prospect was too terrible. It had naturally been discussed ere this,
and she knew that Gilbert was determined to shelter the priest, as
long as possible, in the château itself, turning the chapel into a
resort for the villagers, as had been done the previous September,
with temporary success, at Saint-Mars-la-Réorthe. To have the Curé
permanently in the house would not be so great a change after all.
From this consideration the Marquise passed to that of another
imminent change which would, on the other hand, make a vast difference
to her. Fate had preserved her son to her long unmarried. Lucienne
d’Aucourt, who had left her convent at the age of fifteen nearly four
years ago, had spent the ensuing years with her mother—transferred in
1778 to the newly-formed household of the Princess Elisabeth—in her
apartments at Versailles, and, afterwards, at the Tuileries, whither
Gilbert went twice a year to pay his respects. But the shock of the
disastrous flight to Varennes had killed Madame d’Aucourt within
three months. Her death would have seemed the signal for Gilbert to
claim his bride, but the Comtesse’s last wish was that her daughter
should not be married until she had reached the unusually late age of
nineteen. Respect for this desire and the friendship which the
Princess Elisabeth extended to the daughter of her lady-in-waiting
induced Gilbert, unwillingly, to postpone the ceremony, and Lucienne
remained at Court under the technical chaperonage of an old cousin of
her mother’s, Madame de Fontenelle. But her nineteenth birthday was
advancing; by the autumn the château would know a new mistress. It was
the plain duty of the present châtelaine to school herself to the
thought; repugnance, as she recognised, was insensate, for she was
genuinely fond of Lucienne, who was, moreover, the bride of her own
choosing. She took up again the little book of devotions as if to find
there a corrective for her own rather jealous thoughts.
A moment later the volume was again in her lap. Gilbert was reading to
the priest a portion of the letter which he held in his hand. He was
too far away for Madame de Château-Foix to hear the words, yet a frown
of impatience creased her brow, for she knew from whom the letter
came. For perhaps the hundredth time she was submerged in the
bewildering rush of affection and annoyance, familiar enough in the
years that had passed since Louis de Saint-Ermay had come to amaze
them with his naughtiness and hold them captive with his audacious
joy. She was as sure as if she had read it that his letter was the
harbinger of annoyance. And Gilbert would give him his time and his
advice, just as in old days he had given up to him his toys. Life, it
seemed, was consistently unfair—always ready to heap fresh gifts on
the spoilt child. Louis had always had what he wanted, and there were
always to be found persons holding that ridiculous opinion enunciated
years ago by M. des Graves—that it was good for him to be happy. And
what sort of happiness was his? The Marquise had never closely
enquired into the manner of the Vicomte’s life in Paris, but she had
every reason to believe that he amused himself somewhat over-well. His
modest estate near Poitiers was hopelessly mortgaged; she suspected
Gilbert of having more than once paid his debts for him. Now that the
King’s constitutional guard, the successor of the bodyguard, had been
disbanded also, she might have wondered what kept him still in Paris,
had she not known his fervid loyalty—and that, too, of a type rather
rare when almost every extreme Royalist conceived it to be his duty to
emigrate. This devotion Madame de Château-Foix considered to be the
best thing she knew about her nephew; she set it over against his
unconquerable levity and extravagance. It was not, in her eyes, a
count against him that his reckless temper sometimes got the better
of the nonchalant frivolity beneath which it was buried, for she
infinitely preferred the volcanic to the surface stratum. He had, for
instance, as a _garde-du-corps_, been at Versailles on the great night
of the 5th of October 1789, and, so far as his family had been able to
elicit, had had on that occasion a narrow escape of sharing the fate
of his massacred comrades, MM. de Varicourt and Deshuttes. The Marquis
de Lafayette told Gilbert that his cousin was only saved from the
effects of an entirely useless defiance of the mob, as the whole
cortège started the next day for Paris, by a fishwife from the Halles,
who threw her arms round him and declared that no one should touch
_un si bel enfant_. The Vicomte always denied this tale, which was
galling to his dignity—for what youth of twenty-three (as he then was)
is pleased to be termed a child?—and doubly so because, in common with
most of the extreme Royalists, he hated and distrusted the narrator.
When Château-Foix first asked him about it, he replied that the
incident was undoubtedly one of the dreams which came to Lafayette in
that inopportune and much-derided slumber on which the opposite party
laid so much of the blame for that night’s events.
But Louis’ scrapes were not always political.
It was no mitigation of the Marquise’s annoyance—rather it was an
addition of fresh fuel—to know that if Louis had come himself instead
of writing she would have denied him nothing; there was no resisting
his personal charm. But her principles, her prejudices, and her
maternal jealousy, all of which the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay could
vanquish when he was present, were apt, in his absence, to clamour
the louder for their temporary extinction. It was so this evening.