It was she! There could be no mistake. Parisienne now as eve

Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer

THE DUCHESSE OF LANGEAIS

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Ellen Marriage

Preparer’s Note:

The Duchesse of Langeais is the second part of a trilogy. Part

one is entitled Ferragus and part three is The Girl with the

Golden Eyes. The three stories are frequently combined under the

title The Thirteen.

To Franz Liszt

THE DUCHESSE OF LANGEAIS

In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands a

convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule instituted

by St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first rigor of the

reformation brought about by that illustrious woman. Extraordinary as

this may seem, it is none the less true. Almost every religious house

in the Peninsula, or in Europe for that matter, was either destroyed or

disorganized by the outbreak of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic

wars; but as this island was protected through those times by the

English fleet, its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure

from the general trouble and spoliation. The storms of many kinds which

shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century spent their

force before they reached those cliffs at so short a distance from the

coast of Andalusia.

If the rumour of the Emperor’s name so much as reached the shore of the

island, it is doubtful whether the holy women kneeling in the cloisters

grasped the reality of his dream-like progress of glory, or the majesty

that blazed in flame across kingdom after kingdom during his meteor

life.

In the minds of the Roman Catholic world, the convent stood out

pre-eminent for a stern discipline which nothing had changed; the purity

of its rule had attracted unhappy women from the furthest parts of

Europe, women deprived of all human ties, sighing after the long suicide

accomplished in the breast of God. No convent, indeed, was so well

fitted for that complete detachment of the soul from all earthly things,

which is demanded by the religious life, albeit on the continent of

Europe there are many convents magnificently adapted to the purpose

of their existence. Buried away in the loneliest valleys, hanging

in mid-air on the steepest mountainsides, set down on the brink

of precipices, in every place man has sought for the poetry of the

Infinite, the solemn awe of Silence; in every place man has striven to

draw closer to God, seeking Him on mountain peaks, in the depths below

the crags, at the cliff’s edge; and everywhere man has found God. But

nowhere, save on this half-European, half-African ledge of rock could

you find so many different harmonies, combining so to raise the soul,

that the sharpest pain comes to be like other memories; the strongest

impressions are dulled, till the sorrows of life are laid to rest in the

depths.

The convent stands on the highest point of the crags at the uttermost

end of the island. On the side towards the sea the rock was once rent

sheer away in some globe-cataclysm; it rises up a straight wall from

the base where the waves gnaw at the stone below high-water mark. Any

assault is made impossible by the dangerous reefs that stretch far out

to sea, with the sparkling waves of the Mediterranean playing over them.

So, only from the sea can you discern the square mass of the convent

built conformably to the minute rules laid down as to the shape, height,

doors, and windows of monastic buildings. From the side of the town, the

church completely hides the solid structure of the cloisters and their

roofs, covered with broad slabs of stone impervious to sun or storm or

gales of wind.

The church itself, built by the munificence of a Spanish family, is the

crowning edifice of the town. Its fine, bold front gives an imposing

and picturesque look to the little city in the sea. The sight of such

a city, with its close-huddled roofs, arranged for the most part

amphitheatre-wise above a picturesque harbour, and crowned by a glorious

cathedral front with triple-arched Gothic doorways, belfry towers, and

filigree spires, is a spectacle surely in every way the sublimest on

earth. Religion towering above daily life, to put men continually

in mind of the End and the way, is in truth a thoroughly Spanish

conception. But now surround this picture by the Mediterranean, and a

burning sky, imagine a few palms here and there, a few stunted evergreen

trees mingling their waving leaves with the motionless flowers and

foliage of carved stone; look out over the reef with its white fringes

of foam in contrast to the sapphire sea; and then turn to the city, with

its galleries and terraces whither the townsfolk come to take the air

among their flowers of an evening, above the houses and the tops of the

trees in their little gardens; add a few sails down in the harbour; and

lastly, in the stillness of falling night, listen to the organ music,

the chanting of the services, the wonderful sound of bells pealing out

over the open sea. There is sound and silence everywhere; oftener still

there is silence over all.

The church is divided within into a sombre mysterious nave and narrow

aisles. For some reason, probably because the winds are so high, the

architect was unable to build the flying buttresses and intervening

chapels which adorn almost all cathedrals, nor are there openings of any

kind in the walls which support the weight of the roof. Outside there

is simply the heavy wall structure, a solid mass of grey stone further

strengthened by huge piers placed at intervals. Inside, the nave and its

little side galleries are lighted entirely by the great stained-glass

rose-window suspended by a miracle of art above the centre doorway; for

upon that side the exposure permits of the display of lacework in stone

and of other beauties peculiar to the style improperly called Gothic.

The larger part of the nave and aisles was left for the townsfolk, who

came and went and heard mass there. The choir was shut off from the

rest of the church by a grating and thick folds of brown curtain, left

slightly apart in the middle in such a way that nothing of the choir

could be seen from the church except the high altar and the officiating

priest. The grating itself was divided up by the pillars which supported

the organ loft; and this part of the structure, with its carved wooden

columns, completed the line of the arcading in the gallery carried by

the shafts in the nave. If any inquisitive person, therefore, had been

bold enough to climb upon the narrow balustrade in the gallery to look

down into the choir, he could have seen nothing but the tall eight-sided

windows of stained glass beyond the high altar.

At the time of the French expedition into Spain to establish Ferdinand

VII once more on the throne, a French general came to the island after

the taking of Cadiz, ostensibly to require the recognition of the King’s

Government, really to see the convent and to find some means of

entering it. The undertaking was certainly a delicate one; but a man of

passionate temper, whose life had been, as it were, but one series of

poems in action, a man who all his life long had lived romances instead

of writing them, a man pre-eminently a Doer, was sure to be tempted by a

deed which seemed to be impossible.

To open the doors of a convent of nuns by lawful means! The metropolitan

or the Pope would scarcely have permitted it! And as for force or

stratagem--might not any indiscretion cost him his position, his whole

career as a soldier, and the end in view to boot? The Duc d’Angouleme

was still in Spain; and of all the crimes which a man in favour with the

Commander-in-Chief might commit, this one alone was certain to find him

inexorable. The General had asked for the mission to gratify private

motives of curiosity, though never was curiosity more hopeless. This

final attempt was a matter of conscience. The Carmelite convent on the

island was the only nunnery in Spain which had baffled his search.

As he crossed from the mainland, scarcely an hour’s distance, he felt a

presentiment that his hopes were to be fulfilled; and afterwards, when

as yet he had seen nothing of the convent but its walls, and of the nuns

not so much as their robes; while he had merely heard the chanting of

the service, there were dim auguries under the walls and in the sound of

the voices to justify his frail hope. And, indeed, however faint those

so unaccountable presentiments might be, never was human passion more

vehemently excited than the General’s curiosity at that moment. There

are no small events for the heart; the heart exaggerates everything; the

heart weighs the fall of a fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of

a woman’s glove in the same scales, and the glove is nearly always

the heavier of the two. So here are the facts in all their prosaic

simplicity. The facts first, the emotions will follow.

An hour after the General landed on the island, the royal authority was

re-established there. Some few Constitutional Spaniards who had found

their way thither after the fall of Cadiz were allowed to charter

a vessel and sail for London. So there was neither resistance nor

reaction. But the change of government could not be effected in the

little town without a mass, at which the two divisions under the

General’s command were obliged to be present. Now, it was upon this mass

that the General had built his hopes of gaining some information as

to the sisters in the convent; he was quite unaware how absolutely the

Carmelites were cut off from the world; but he knew that there might be

among them one whom he held dearer than life, dearer than honour.

His hopes were cruelly dashed at once. Mass, it is true, was celebrated

in state. In honour of such a solemnity, the curtains which always hid

the choir were drawn back to display its riches, its valuable paintings

and shrines so bright with gems that they eclipsed the glories of

the ex-votos of gold and silver hung up by sailors of the port on

the columns in the nave. But all the nuns had taken refuge in the

organ-loft. And yet, in spite of this first check, during this very mass

of thanksgiving, the most intimately thrilling drama that ever set a

man’s heart beating opened out widely before him.

The sister who played the organ aroused such intense enthusiasm, that

not a single man regretted that he had come to the service. Even the men

in the ranks were delighted, and the officers were in ecstasy. As for

the General, he was seemingly calm and indifferent. The sensations

stirred in him as the sister played one piece after another belong to

the small number of things which it is not lawful to utter; words are

powerless to express them; like death, God, eternity, they can only be

realised through their one point of contact with humanity. Strangely

enough, the organ music seemed to belong to the school of Rossini, the

musician who brings most human passion into his art.

Some day his works, by their number and extent, will receive the

reverence due to the Homer of music. From among all the scores that we

owe to his great genius, the nun seemed to have chosen _Moses in Egypt_

for special study, doubtless because the spirit of sacred music finds

therein its supreme expression. Perhaps the soul of the great musician,

so gloriously known to Europe, and the soul of this unknown executant

had met in the intuitive apprehension of the same poetry. So at least

thought two dilettanti officers who must have missed the Theatre Favart

in Spain.

At last in the _Te Deum_ no one could fail to discern a French soul in

the sudden change that came over the music. Joy for the victory of the

Most Christian King evidently stirred this nun’s heart to the depths.

She was a Frenchwoman beyond mistake. Soon the love of country shone

out, breaking forth like shafts of light from the fugue, as the sister

introduced variations with all a Parisienne’s fastidious taste, and

blended vague suggestions of our grandest national airs with her music.

A Spaniard’s fingers would not have brought this warmth into a

graceful tribute paid to the victorious arms of France. The musician’s

nationality was revealed.

“We find France everywhere, it seems,” said one of the men.

The General had left the church during the _Te Deum_; he could not

listen any longer. The nun’s music had been a revelation of a woman

loved to frenzy; a woman so carefully hidden from the world’s eyes,

so deeply buried in the bosom of the Church, that hitherto the most

ingenious and persistent efforts made by men who brought great influence

and unusual powers to bear upon the search had failed to find her. The

suspicion aroused in the General’s heart became all but a certainty with

the vague reminiscence of a sad, delicious melody, the air of _Fleuve

du Tage_. The woman he loved had played the prelude to the ballad in

a boudoir in Paris, how often! and now this nun had chosen the song

to express an exile’s longing, amid the joy of those that triumphed.

Terrible sensation! To hope for the resurrection of a lost love, to find

her only to know that she was lost, to catch a mysterious glimpse of her

after five years--five years, in which the pent-up passion, chafing

in an empty life, had grown the mightier for every fruitless effort to

satisfy it!

Who has not known, at least once in his life, what it is to lose some

precious thing; and after hunting through his papers, ransacking his

memory, and turning his house upside down; after one or two days spent

in vain search, and hope, and despair; after a prodigious expenditure

of the liveliest irritation of soul, who has not known the ineffable

pleasure of finding that all-important nothing which had come to be a

king of monomania? Very good. Now, spread that fury of search over five

years; put a woman, put a heart, put love in the place of the trifle;

transpose the monomania into the key of high passion; and, furthermore,

let the seeker be a man of ardent temper, with a lion’s heart and a

leonine head and mane, a man to inspire awe and fear in those who come

in contact with him--realise this, and you may, perhaps, understand why

the General walked abruptly out of the church when the first notes of

a ballad, which he used to hear with a rapture of delight in a

gilt-paneled boudoir, began to vibrate along the aisles of the church in

the sea.

The General walked away down the steep street which led to the port, and

only stopped when he could not hear the deep notes of the organ. Unable

to think of anything but the love which broke out in volcanic eruption,

filling his heart with fire, he only knew that the _Te Deum_ was over

when the Spanish congregation came pouring out of the church. Feeling

that his behaviour and attitude might seem ridiculous, he went back to

head the procession, telling the alcalde and the governor that, feeling

suddenly faint, he had gone out into the air. Casting about for a plea

for prolonging his stay, it at once occurred to him to make the most of

this excuse, framed on the spur of the moment. He declined, on a plea of

increasing indisposition, to preside at the banquet given by the town

to the French officers, betook himself to his bed, and sent a message to

the Major-General, to the effect that temporary illness obliged him

to leave the Colonel in command of the troops for the time being.

This commonplace but very plausible stratagem relieved him of all

responsibility for the time necessary to carry out his plans. The

General, nothing if not “catholic and monarchical,” took occasion to

inform himself of the hours of the services, and manifested the greatest

zeal for the performance of his religious duties, piety which caused no

remark in Spain.

The very next day, while the division was marching out of the town, the

General went to the convent to be present at vespers. He found an empty

church. The townsfolk, devout though they were, had all gone down to the

quay to watch the embarkation of the troops. He felt glad to be the only

man there. He tramped noisily up the nave, clanking his spurs till the

vaulted roof rang with the sound; he coughed, he talked aloud to himself

to let the nuns know, and more particularly to let the organist know

that if the troops were gone, one Frenchman was left behind. Was this

singular warning heard and understood? He thought so. It seemed to him

that in the _Magnificat_ the organ made response which was borne to him

on the vibrating air. The nun’s spirit found wings in music and fled

towards him, throbbing with the rhythmical pulse of the sounds. Then, in

all its might, the music burst forth and filled the church with warmth.

The Song of Joy set apart in the sublime liturgy of Latin Christianity

to express the exaltation of the soul in the presence of the glory of

the ever-living God, became the utterance of a heart almost terrified by

its gladness in the presence of the glory of a mortal love; a love that

yet lived, a love that had risen to trouble her even beyond the grave in

which the nun is laid, that she may rise again as the bride of Christ.

The organ is in truth the grandest, the most daring, the most

magnificent of all instruments invented by human genius. It is a whole

orchestra in itself. It can express anything in response to a skilled

touch. Surely it is in some sort a pedestal on which the soul poises for

a flight forth into space, essaying on her course to draw picture after

picture in an endless series, to paint human life, to cross the Infinite

that separates heaven from earth? And the longer a dreamer listens to

those giant harmonies, the better he realizes that nothing save this

hundred-voiced choir on earth can fill all the space between kneeling

men, and a God hidden by the blinding light of the Sanctuary. The music

is the one interpreter strong enough to bear up the prayers of humanity

to heaven, prayer in its omnipotent moods, prayer tinged by the

melancholy of many different natures, coloured by meditative ecstasy,

upspringing with the impulse of repentance--blended with the myriad

fancies of every creed. Yes. In those long vaulted aisles the melodies

inspired by the sense of things divine are blended with a grandeur

unknown before, are decked with new glory and might. Out of the dim

daylight, and the deep silence broken by the chanting of the choir in

response to the thunder of the organ, a veil is woven for God, and the

brightness of His attributes shines through it.

And this wealth of holy things seemed to be flung down like a grain of

incense upon the fragile altar raised to Love beneath the eternal throne

of a jealous and avenging God. Indeed, in the joy of the nun there

was little of that awe and gravity which should harmonize with the

solemnities of the _Magnificat_. She had enriched the music with

graceful variations, earthly gladness throbbing through the rhythm of

each. In such brilliant quivering notes some great singer might strive

to find a voice for her love, her melodies fluttered as a bird flutters

about her mate. There were moments when she seemed to leap back into

the past, to dally there now with laughter, now with tears. Her changing

moods, as it were, ran riot. She was like a woman excited and happy over

her lover’s return.

But at length, after the swaying fugues of delirium, after the

marvellous rendering of a vision of the past, a revulsion swept over the

soul that thus found utterance for itself. With a swift transition from

the major to the minor, the organist told her hearer of her present lot.

She gave the story of long melancholy broodings, of the slow course

of her moral malady. How day by day she deadened the senses, how every

night cut off one more thought, how her heart was slowly reduced

to ashes. The sadness deepened shade after shade through languid

modulations, and in a little while the echoes were pouring out a torrent

of grief. Then on a sudden, high notes rang out like the voices of

angels singing together, as if to tell the lost but not forgotten lover

that their spirits now could only meet in heaven. Pathetic hope! Then

followed the _Amen_. No more joy, no more tears in the air, no sadness,

no regrets. The _Amen_ was the return to God. The final chord was deep,

solemn, even terrible; for the last rumblings of the bass sent a shiver

through the audience that raised the hair on their heads; the nun shook

out her veiling of crepe, and seemed to sink again into the grave from

which she had risen for a moment. Slowly the reverberations died away;

it seemed as if the church, but now so full of light, had returned to

thick darkness.

The General had been caught up and borne swiftly away by this

strong-winged spirit; he had followed the course of its flight from

beginning to end. He understood to the fullest extent the imagery of

that burning symphony; for him the chords reached deep and far. For

him, as for the sister, the poem meant future, present, and past. Is

not music, and even opera music, a sort of text, which a susceptible

or poetic temper, or a sore and stricken heart, may expand as memories

shall determine? If a musician must needs have the heart of a poet, must

not the listener too be in a manner a poet and a lover to hear all that

lies in great music? Religion, love, and music--what are they but a

threefold expression of the same fact, of that craving for expansion

which stirs in every noble soul. And these three forms of poetry ascend

to God, in whom all passion on earth finds its end. Wherefore the holy

human trinity finds a place amid the infinite glories of God; of God,

whom we always represent surrounded with the fires of love and seistrons

of gold--music and light and harmony. Is not He the Cause and the End of

all our strivings?

The French General guessed rightly that here in the desert, on this bare

rock in the sea, the nun had seized upon music as an outpouring of the

passion that still consumed her. Was this her manner of offering up her

love as a sacrifice to God? Or was it Love exultant in triumph over God?

The questions were hard to answer. But one thing at least the General

could not mistake--in this heart, dead to the world, the fire of passion

burned as fiercely as in his own.

Vespers over, he went back to the alcalde with whom he was staying.

In the all-absorbing joy which comes in such full measure when a

satisfaction sought long and painfully is attained at last, he could see

nothing beyond this--he was still loved! In her heart love had grown

in loneliness, even as his love had grown stronger as he surmounted one

barrier after another which this woman had set between them! The glow of

soul came to its natural end. There followed a longing to see her again,

to contend with God for her, to snatch her away--a rash scheme, which

appealed to a daring nature. He went to bed, when the meal was over, to

avoid questions; to be alone and think at his ease; and he lay absorbed

by deep thought till day broke.

He rose only to go to mass. He went to the church and knelt close to

the screen, with his forehead touching the curtain; he would have torn

a hole in it if he had been alone, but his host had come with him out of

politeness, and the least imprudence might compromise the whole future

of his love, and ruin the new hopes.

The organ sounded, but it was another player, and not the nun of the

last two days whose hands touched the keys. It was all colorless and

cold for the General. Was the woman he loved prostrated by emotion which

well-nigh overcame a strong man’s heart? Had she so fully realised and

shared an unchanged, longed-for love, that now she lay dying on her bed

in her cell? While innumerable thoughts of this kind perplexed his mind,

the voice of the woman he worshipped rang out close beside him; he knew

its clear resonant soprano. It was her voice, with that faint tremor in

it which gave it all the charm that shyness and diffidence gives to a

young girl; her voice, distinct from the mass of singing as a _prima

donna’s_ in the chorus of a finale. It was like a golden or silver

thread in dark frieze.

It was she! There could be no mistake. Parisienne now as ever, she had

not laid coquetry aside when she threw off worldly adornments for the

veil and the Carmelite’s coarse serge. She who had affirmed her love

last evening in the praise sent up to God, seemed now to say to her

lover, “Yes, it is I. I am here. My love is unchanged, but I am beyond

the reach of love. You will hear my voice, my soul shall enfold you,

and I shall abide here under the brown shroud in the choir from which no

power on earth can tear me. You shall never see me more!”

“It is she indeed!” the General said to himself, raising his head. He

had leant his face on his hands, unable at first to bear the intolerable

emotion that surged like a whirlpool in his heart, when that well-known

voice vibrated under the arcading, with the sound of the sea for

accompaniment.

Storm was without, and calm within the sanctuary. Still that rich voice

poured out all its caressing notes; it fell like balm on the lover’s

burning heart; it blossomed upon the air--the air that a man would fain

breathe more deeply to receive the effluence of a soul breathed forth

with love in the words of the prayer. The alcalde coming to join

his guest found him in tears during the elevation, while the nun was

singing, and brought him back to his house. Surprised to find so much

piety in a French military man, the worthy magistrate invited the

confessor of the convent to meet his guest. Never had news given the

General more pleasure; he paid the ecclesiastic a good deal of attention

at supper, and confirmed his Spanish hosts in the high opinion they had

formed of his piety by a not wholly disinterested respect.

He inquired with gravity how many sisters there were in the convent, and

asked for particulars of its endowment and revenues, as if from

courtesy he wished to hear the good priest discourse on the subject most

interesting to him. He informed himself as to the manner of life led by

the holy women. Were they allowed to go out of the convent, or to see

visitors?

“Senor,” replied the venerable churchman, “the rule is strict. A woman

cannot enter a monastery of the order of St. Bruno without a special

permission from His Holiness, and the rule here is equally stringent.

No man may enter a convent of Barefoot Carmelites unless he is a priest

specially attached to the services of the house by the Archbishop. None

of the nuns may leave the convent; though the great Saint, St. Theresa,

often left her cell. The Visitor or the Mothers Superior can alone give

permission, subject to an authorization from the Archbishop, for a nun

to see a visitor, and then especially in a case of illness. Now we are

one of the principal houses, and consequently we have a Mother Superior

here. Among other foreign sisters there is one Frenchwoman, Sister

Theresa; she it is who directs the music in the chapel.”

“Oh!” said the General, with feigned surprise. “She must have rejoiced

over the victory of the House of Bourbon.”

“I told them the reason of the mass; they are always a little bit

inquisitive.”

“But Sister Theresa may have interests in France. Perhaps she would like

to send some message or to hear news.”

“I do not think so. She would have come to ask me.”

“As a fellow-countryman, I should be quite curious to see her,” said the

General. “If it is possible, if the Lady Superior consents, if----”

“Even at the grating and in the Reverend Mother’s presence, an interview

would be quite impossible for anybody whatsoever; but, strict as the

Mother is, for a deliverer of our holy religion and the throne of his

Catholic Majesty, the rule might be relaxed for a moment,” said the

confessor, blinking. “I will speak about it.”

“How old is Sister Theresa?” inquired the lover. He dared not ask any

questions of the priest as to the nun’s beauty.

“She does not reckon years now,” the good man answered, with a

simplicity that made the General shudder.

Next day before siesta, the confessor came to inform the French General

that Sister Theresa and the Mother consented to receive him at the

grating in the parlour before vespers. The General spent the siesta in

pacing to and fro along the quay in the noonday heat. Thither the priest

came to find him, and brought him to the convent by way of the gallery

round the cemetery. Fountains, green trees, and rows of arcading

maintained a cool freshness in keeping with the place.

At the further end of the long gallery the priest led the way into a

large room divided in two by a grating covered with a brown curtain. In

the first, and in some sort of public half of the apartment, where the

confessor left the newcomer, a wooden bench ran round the wall, and two

or three chairs, also of wood, were placed near the grating. The ceiling

consisted of bare unornamented joists and cross-beams of ilex wood. As

the two windows were both on the inner side of the grating, and the dark

surface of the wood was a bad reflector, the light in the place was so

dim that you could scarcely see the great black crucifix, the portrait

of Saint Theresa, and a picture of the Madonna which adorned the grey

parlour walls. Tumultuous as the General’s feelings were, they took

something of the melancholy of the place. He grew calm in that homely

quiet. A sense of something vast as the tomb took possession of him

beneath the chill unceiled roof. Here, as in the grave, was there not

eternal silence, deep peace--the sense of the Infinite? And besides this

there was the quiet and the fixed thought of the cloister--a thought

which you felt like a subtle presence in the air, and in the dim dusk

of the room; an all-pervasive thought nowhere definitely expressed, and

looming the larger in the imagination; for in the cloister the great

saying, “Peace in the Lord,” enters the least religious soul as a living

force.

The monk’s life is scarcely comprehensible. A man seems confessed a

weakling in a monastery; he was born to act, to live out a life of work;

he is evading a man’s destiny in his cell. But what man’s strength,

blended with pathetic weakness, is implied by a woman’s choice of the

convent life! A man may have any number of motives for burying himself

in a monastery; for him it is the leap over the precipice. A woman

has but one motive--she is a woman still; she betrothes herself to a

Heavenly Bridegroom. Of the monk you may ask, “Why did you not fight

your battle?” But if a woman immures herself in the cloister, is there

not always a sublime battle fought first?

At length it seemed to the General that that still room, and the lonely

convent in the sea, were full of thoughts of him. Love seldom attains

to solemnity; yet surely a love still faithful in the breast of God was

something solemn, something more than a man had a right to look for

as things are in this nineteenth century? The infinite grandeur of the

situation might well produce an effect upon the General’s mind; he had

precisely enough elevation of soul to forget politics, honours, Spain,

and society in Paris, and to rise to the height of this lofty climax.

And what in truth could be more tragic? How much must pass in the souls

of these two lovers, brought together in a place of strangers, on

a ledge of granite in the sea; yet held apart by an intangible,

unsurmountable barrier! Try to imagine the man saying within himself,

“Shall I triumph over God in her heart?” when a faint rustling sound

made him quiver, and the curtain was drawn aside.

Between him and the light stood a woman. Her face was hidden by the veil

that drooped from the folds upon her head; she was dressed according

to the rule of the order in a gown of the colour become proverbial. Her

bare feet were hidden; if the General could have seen them, he would

have known how appallingly thin she had grown; and yet in spite of the

thick folds of her coarse gown, a mere covering and no ornament, he

could guess how tears, and prayer, and passion, and loneliness had

wasted the woman before him.

An ice-cold hand, belonging, no doubt, to the Mother Superior, held back

the curtain. The General gave the enforced witness of their interview a

searching glance, and met the dark, inscrutable gaze of an aged recluse.

The Mother might have been a century old, but the bright, youthful eyes

belied the wrinkles that furrowed her pale face.

“Mme la Duchesse,” he began, his voice shaken with emotion, “does your

companion understand French?” The veiled figure bowed her head at the

sound of his voice.

“There is no duchess here,” she replied. “It is Sister Theresa whom you

see before you. She whom you call my companion is my mother in God, my

superior here on earth.”

The words were so meekly spoken by the voice that sounded in other years

amid harmonious surroundings of refined luxury, the voice of a queen of

fashion in Paris. Such words from the lips that once spoke so lightly

and flippantly struck the General dumb with amazement.

“The Holy Mother only speaks Latin and Spanish,” she added.

“I understand neither. Dear Antoinette, make my excuses to her.”

The light fell full upon the nun’s figure; a thrill of deep emotion

betrayed itself in a faint quiver of her veil as she heard her name

softly spoken by the man who had been so hard in the past.

“My brother,” she said, drawing her sleeve under her veil, perhaps to

brush tears away, “I am Sister Theresa.”

Then, turning to the Superior, she spoke in Spanish; the General knew

enough of the language to understand what she said perfectly well;

possibly he could have spoken it had he chosen to do so.

“Dear Mother, the gentleman presents his respects to you, and begs you

to pardon him if he cannot pay them himself, but he knows neither of the

languages which you speak----”

The aged nun bent her head slowly, with an expression of angelic

sweetness, enhanced at the same time by the consciousness of her power

and dignity.

“Do you know this gentleman?” she asked, with a keen glance.

“Yes, Mother.”

“Go back to your cell, my daughter!” said the Mother imperiously.

The General slipped aside behind the curtain lest the dreadful tumult

within him should appear in his face; even in the shadow it seemed to

him that he could still see the Superior’s piercing eyes. He was afraid

of her; she held his little, frail, hardly-won happiness in her hands;

and he, who had never quailed under a triple row of guns, now trembled

before this nun. The Duchess went towards the door, but she turned back.

“Mother,” she said, with dreadful calmness, “the Frenchman is one of my

brothers.”

“Then stay, my daughter,” said the Superior, after a pause.

The piece of admirable Jesuitry told of such love and regret, that a man

less strongly constituted might have broken down under the keen delight

in the midst of a great and, for him, an entirely novel peril. Oh! how

precious words, looks, and gestures became when love must baffle lynx

eyes and tiger’s claws! Sister Theresa came back.

“You see, my brother, what I have dared to do only to speak to you for

a moment of your salvation and of the prayers that my soul puts up for

your soul daily. I am committing mortal sin. I have told a lie. How many

days of penance must expiate that lie! But I shall endure it for your

sake. My brother, you do not know what happiness it is to love in

heaven; to feel that you can confess love purified by religion, love

transported into the highest heights of all, so that we are permitted

to lose sight of all but the soul. If the doctrine and the spirit of

the Saint to whom we owe this refuge had not raised me above earth’s

anguish, and caught me up and set me, far indeed beneath the Sphere

wherein she dwells, yet truly above this world, I should not have

seen you again. But now I can see you, and hear your voice, and remain

calm----”

The General broke in, “But, Antoinette, let me see you, you whom I love

passionately, desperately, as you could have wished me to love you.”

“Do not call me Antoinette, I implore you. Memories of the past hurt me.

You must see no one here but Sister Theresa, a creature who trusts in

the Divine mercy.” She paused for a little, and then added, “You must

control yourself, my brother. Our Mother would separate us without pity

if there is any worldly passion in your face, or if you allow the tears

to fall from your eyes.”

The General bowed his head to regain self-control; when he looked up

again he saw her face beyond the grating--the thin, white, but still

impassioned face of the nun. All the magic charm of youth that once

bloomed there, all the fair contrast of velvet whiteness and the colour

of the Bengal rose, had given place to a burning glow, as of a porcelain

jar with a faint light shining through it. The wonderful hair in which

she took such pride had been shaven; there was a bandage round her

forehead and about her face. An ascetic life had left dark traces about

the eyes, which still sometimes shot out fevered glances; their ordinary

calm expression was but a veil. In a few words, she was but the ghost of

her former self.

“Ah! you that have come to be my life, you must come out of this tomb!

You were mine; you had no right to give yourself, even to God. Did you

not promise me to give up all at the least command from me? You may

perhaps think me worthy of that promise now when you hear what I have

done for you. I have sought you all through the world. You have been in

my thoughts at every moment for five years; my life has been given to

you. My friends, very powerful friends, as you know, have helped with

all their might to search every convent in France, Italy, Spain, Sicily,

and America. Love burned more brightly for every vain search. Again and

again I made long journeys with a false hope; I have wasted my life and

the heaviest throbbings of my heart in vain under many a dark convent

wall. I am not speaking of a faithfulness that knows no bounds, for what

is it?--nothing compared with the infinite longings of my love. If your

remorse long ago was sincere, you ought not to hesitate to follow me

today.”

“You forget that I am not free.”

“The Duke is dead,” he answered quickly.

Sister Theresa flushed red.

“May heaven be open to him!” she cried with a quick rush of feeling. “He

was generous to me.--But I did not mean such ties; it was one of my sins

that I was ready to break them all without scruple--for you.”

“Are you speaking of your vows?” the General asked, frowning. “I did not

think that anything weighed heavier with your heart than love. But do

not think twice of it, Antoinette; the Holy Father himself shall absolve

you of your oath. I will surely go to Rome, I will entreat all the

powers of earth; if God could come down from heaven, I would----”

“Do not blaspheme.”

“So do not fear the anger of God. Ah! I would far rather hear that

you would leave your prison for me; that this very night you would let

yourself down into a boat at the foot of the cliffs. And we would go

away to be happy somewhere at the world’s end, I know not where. And

with me at your side, you should come back to life and health under the

wings of love.”

“You must not talk like this,” said Sister Theresa; “you do not know

what you are to me now. I love you far better than I ever loved you

before. Every day I pray for you; I see you with other eyes. Armand, if

you but knew the happiness of giving yourself up, without shame, to a

pure friendship which God watches over! You do not know what joy it is

to me to pray for heaven’s blessing on you. I never pray for myself: God

will do with me according to His will; but, at the price of my soul, I

wish I could be sure that you are happy here on earth, and that you

will be happy hereafter throughout all ages. My eternal life is all that

trouble has left me to offer up to you. I am old now with weeping; I am

neither young nor fair; and in any case, you could not respect the

nun who became a wife; no love, not even motherhood, could give me

absolution.... What can you say to outweigh the uncounted thoughts that

have gathered in my heart during the past five years, thoughts that have

changed, and worn, and blighted it? I ought to have given a heart less

sorrowful to God.”

“What can I say? Dear Antoinette, I will say this, that I love you; that

affection, love, a great love, the joy of living in another heart that

is ours, utterly and wholly ours, is so rare a thing and so hard to

find, that I doubted you, and put you to sharp proof; but now, today, I

love you, Antoinette, with all my soul’s strength.... If you will follow

me into solitude, I will hear no voice but yours, I will see no other

face.”

“Hush, Armand! You are shortening the little time that we may be

together here on earth.”

“Antoinette, will you come with me?”

“I am never away from you. My life is in your heart, not through the

selfish ties of earthly happiness, or vanity, or enjoyment; pale and

withered as I am, I live here for you, in the breast of God. As God is

just, you shall be happy----”

“Words, words all of it! Pale and withered? How if I want you? How if I

cannot be happy without you? Do you still think of nothing but duty with

your lover before you? Is he never to come first and above all things

else in your heart? In time past you put social success, yourself,

heaven knows what, before him; now it is God, it is the welfare of my

soul! In Sister Theresa I find the Duchess over again, ignorant of

the happiness of love, insensible as ever, beneath the semblance of

sensibility. You do not love me; you have never loved me----”

“Oh, my brother----!”

“You do not wish to leave this tomb. You love my soul, do you say?

Very well, through you it will be lost forever. I shall make away with

myself----”

“Mother!” Sister Theresa called aloud in Spanish, “I have lied to you;

this man is my lover!”

The curtain fell at once. The General, in his stupor, scarcely heard the

doors within as they clanged.

“Ah! she loves me still!” he cried, understanding all the sublimity of

that cry of hers. “She loves me still. She must be carried off....”

The General left the island, returned to headquarters, pleaded

ill-health, asked for leave of absence, and forthwith took his departure

for France.

And now for the incidents which brought the two personages in this Scene

into their present relation to each other.

The thing known in France as the Faubourg Saint-Germain is neither a

Quarter, nor a sect, nor an institution, nor anything else that admits

of a precise definition. There are great houses in the Place Royale, the

Faubourg Saint-Honore, and the Chaussee d’Antin, in any one of which you

may breathe the same atmosphere of Faubourg Saint-Germain. So, to begin

with, the whole Faubourg is not within the Faubourg. There are men and

women born far enough away from its influences who respond to them and

take their place in the circle; and again there are others, born within

its limits, who may yet be driven forth forever. For the last forty

years the manners, and customs, and speech, in a word, the tradition of

the Faubourg Saint-Germain, has been to Paris what the Court used to be

in other times; it is what the Hotel Saint-Paul was to the fourteenth

century; the Louvre to the fifteenth; the Palais, the Hotel Rambouillet,

and the Place Royale to the sixteenth; and lastly, as Versailles was to

the seventeenth and the eighteenth.

Just as the ordinary workaday Paris will always centre about some point;

so, through all periods of history, the Paris of the nobles and

the upper classes converges towards some particular spot. It is a

periodically recurrent phenomenon which presents ample matter for

reflection to those who are fain to observe or describe the various

social zones; and possibly an enquiry into the causes that bring about

this centralization may do more than merely justify the probability of

this episode; it may be of service to serious interests which some

day will be more deeply rooted in the commonwealth, unless, indeed,

experience is as meaningless for political parties as it is for youth.

In every age the great nobles, and the rich who always ape the great

nobles, build their houses as far as possible from crowded streets. When

the Duc d’Uzes built his splendid hotel in the Rue Montmartre in

the reign of Louis XIV, and set the fountain at his gates--for which

beneficent action, to say nothing of his other virtues, he was held in

such veneration that the whole quarter turned out in a body to follow

his funeral--when the Duke, I say, chose this site for his house, he

did so because that part of Paris was almost deserted in those days. But

when the fortifications were pulled down, and the market gardens beyond

the line of the boulevards began to fill with houses, then the d’Uzes

family left their fine mansion, and in our time it was occupied by a

banker. Later still, the noblesse began to find themselves out of their

element among shopkeepers, left the Place Royale and the centre of

Paris for good, and crossed the river to breathe freely in the Faubourg

Saint-Germain, where palaces were reared already about the great

hotel built by Louis XIV for the Duc de Maine--the Benjamin among his

legitimated offspring. And indeed, for people accustomed to a stately

life, can there be more unseemly surroundings than the bustle, the mud,

the street cries, the bad smells, and narrow thoroughfares of a populous

quarter? The very habits of life in a mercantile or manufacturing

district are completely at variance with the lives of nobles. The

shopkeeper and artisan are just going to bed when the great world is

thinking of dinner; and the noisy stir of life begins among the former

when the latter have gone to rest. Their day’s calculations never

coincide; the one class represents the expenditure, the other the

receipts. Consequently their manners and customs are diametrically

opposed.

Nothing contemptuous is intended by this statement. An aristocracy is in

a manner the intellect of the social system, as the middle classes and

the proletariat may be said to be its organizing and working power. It

naturally follows that these forces are differently situated; and of

their antagonism there is bred a seeming antipathy produced by the

performance of different functions, all of them, however, existing for

one common end.