natural disposition.
Everything has been said about the _House of the Legion of Honour_, about
its curious system of education with regard to young girls, nearly all of
them poor, and brought up as if, when they left school, they would find an
income of £2,000 a year.
It is known that in this establishment intended for the daughters of
officers _with no fortune_, everything is taught except that which is most
necessary for a woman to know. They leave having a barren, superficial
education, principally composed of words, and in which consequently, to the
exclusion of the intelligence and the heart, the memory plays the principal
part; none of the childish rules of ceremonial are spared them, none of the
frivolous accomplishments indispensable for access to a world which, for
the greater part, they will never be invited to see; and they return to
their father's humble roof, dreaming of balls, fêtes, equipages, hotels,
drawing-rooms, the only surroundings in which they could profitably display
the useless accomplishments with which they have been endowed, but also
perfectly incapable of darning their stockings or of boiling an egg.
And so they soon blush at their father's obscure condition and evince a
mortal disgust of the modest joys of the poor fire-side.
"Heavens! how little it all is!" Such was the first word which escaped her
when she returned to her father's house.
She had grown, and everything she saw on her return had shrank; her father
like the rest, perhaps more than the rest. She loved him all the same, but
she could not help finding him common.
She, the dainty young lady, brought up with the daughters of
country-gentlemen and generals, she said to herself that she was only the
daughter of an obscure captain, and it humiliated her. Ah! if her haughty
friends with whom she had exchanged confidences and dreams, had seen her
coming down the sumptuous stairs of her castles in Spain to go and live in
a poor village, while her father perspired over his cabbage-planting.
Her dreams! You know them well, and have also told them in quiet at the age
when you know how to form them:
At the age when you cease to be called a little girl, when the dress-maker
has just lengthened your dress, when your father's friends are no longer
familiar, but say with a smile: _Mademoiselle_.
At the age, when you feel the attraction of the unknown redouble its power,
when for the first time you feel a conscious blush at the look of a man.
At the age when the likeness of the young cousin you saw yesterday, appears
all at once on the page of your history or grammar, and strange to say,
pursues you at your games; when the noisy games of your companions weary
you, and you betake yourself to solitude in order to screen your thoughts.
And solitude, a bad adviser, takes possession of your thoughts, isolates
them from the rest of the real world, in order to immerse them in imaginary
worlds, and then agitates, reflects, whirls, polishes all that marvellous
enchanted universe in which the daughters of Eve wander with each wild
license, whom the base-born sons of Adam approach only a single step.
But when that step is taken, the enchanted world vanishes. The scaffolding
cracks and falls down. Palaces, geail, heroes and bounteous fairies
disappear pell-mell into the lowest depth. The old farce of humanity, the
comedy of love is played out.
Ah! how ugly it all is then! Under the smoky lamp of reality you vaguely
distinguish the battered grotesque shapes, rising in the ruins.
Suzanne therefore, like all her young friends, like you, Mademoiselle, and
also like you formerly, Madame, had commenced her little romance, had
sketched her little plot. She had loved, oh truly loved, with a love
necessarily confined to the platonic state, the handsome young men with
tasty cravats, whom she had seen on days when she walked out. What
delightful chapters were sketched upon their brown or fair heads! Oh! when
would she be free? When would she cease to have the ever-open eye of an
inquisitive under-mistress upon her slightest gesture?
And then the day of liberty had come, and under the breath of that liberty,
so eagerly and impatiently expected, the chapters she had begun were
blotted out, and so was the handsome head of a cherub or an Amadis in a
sublieutenant's cap or in a chimney-pot.
Fallen from these enervating heights of fictitious passions and
hair-dressers' scents into the prosaic but generous and brave arms of
paternal lore, on the breast of true and mighty nature, she had forgotten
for a moment her dreams.
She lavished on her father all the treasures of affection which her heart
contained, and treated him with all manner of solicitude and caresses; and
the old soldier before this youthful future which shone before him, himself
forgot his dreams of the past.
XXVIII.
THE SHADOW.
"Troubled by a vague emotion, I said
to myself, I wanted to be loved, and
I looked around me; I saw no one
who inspired me with love, no one
who appeared to me capable of feeling it."
BENJAMIN CONSTANT (_Adolphe_).
But what is the liberty that a well-behaved girl can enjoy? She had run
like a wild thing in the meadows, letting her hair fly in the wind, and
elated by the kisses of the breeze. She had relished the long mornings of
idleness in bed, recollecting, in order to double her enjoyment, that at
that very moment the friends she had left at school, were turning pale
beneath the smoky lamps of the school-room; and in the evening she read the
delightful novels of Droz by her lamp, and thought with pleasure that her
same friends had been in bed for a long while. Then she closed her book,
and reflected again and said with a yawn: "They are asleep, poor little
things, and I am awake, I am free to be awake."
And she wrote long letters to them in which she told them, how happy she
was, assuming a charming air of superiority, treating them as children who
knew nothing yet of life. But she thought that she knew nothing more of it
herself, and yearned to be instructed.
She felt that there was something wanting, and that her father's affection
was not enough to fill her heart.
She had looked well about her, but she had found only what was commonplace.
No more young clerks with curled hair, who darted inflammatory looks at the
women from behind the shop-windows, no Saint-Cyrion with delicate
moustache, no doctors of twenty-five or poets of eighteen. Besides her
father and the notabilities of the village, middle-aged dignitaries,
nothing but peasants only.
She held the belief which all girls hold; a nice little belief very
convenient and very simple: the sweet Jesus, the Paschal Lamb, and the
Immaculate Conception. Around this trio gravitated all the rest, but
graceful and light as the mists which float at sun-rise.
Therefore the Captain had not thought it his duty to disappoint his
daughter, when she said to him one Sunday morning, "My darling papa, I am
going to Mass." He let her go, grumbling; and she noticed Marcel.
The fine figure of the priest struck her; she was touched by the sound of
his voice, and while she fixed her gaze upon him, she encountered his, and
their eyes fell.
In the days when she took her walks at Saint-Denis, and saw for the first
time that she was admired by some handsome young men, she had not
experienced a more delicious emotion.
She was astonished and almost ashamed at it, and nevertheless she returned
for Vespers on purpose to see the Curé. She soon gained the certainty that
she had attracted his attention, and she was flattered at it. What! she, a
little school-girl, was she distracting from his prayers, at the very foot
of the altar, a minister of the altar? She felt herself rise in importance.
But her natural modesty made her reflect directly: "Has he looked at me
because I am a stranger, or because I am pretty?"
She was almost afraid that it was not this latter reason; Marcel's eyes
reassured her.
Nevertheless, the first impulse of self-love satisfied, what did it concern
her? How did this priest's admiration affect her? Is a priest a man? It
must be no more thought of. But she could not prevent herself from thinking
of him, being pleased at his finding her pretty. Others, doubtless, had
found her pretty before he did; perhaps had told her so in a whisper, but
was that the same thing?
The silent admiration of this grave personage, clothed in a sacred
character, raised her all at once in her own eyes more than a thousand warm
glances or timid declarations from insignificant and common-place youths.
Besides, he was young, he was handsome, and his position, his studies
placed him far above the ignorant and common people, whom she elbowed since
her return.
At night, the pale fine countenance of the Curé of Althausen crossed her
dreams several times; she was not disturbed at it, but she said to herself
that she would like to have a closer acquaintance with this shepherd of
men, who had made so deep an impression on her.
She was affected by his grave voice, soft and sad, more than by his look,
and, with a school-girl's simplicity, she asked herself, if a heart could
not beat beneath that black robe.
The visit of Marcel filled her with a strange trouble, and she hesitated a
long time before showing herself to him. Then the bitter raillery of her
father tortured her heart and wounded her in her delicate maidenly
sentiments. She suffered more than he from the insults which he received,
and she vowed to herself to have them forgiven.
XXIX.
OTHER MEETINGS.
"There was no seduction on her part
or on mine: love simply came, and I
was her lover before I had even thought
that I could become so."
MAXIME DU CAMP (_Mémoires d'un suicidé_).
They saw one another again very soon: sometimes on the road which leads to
the little chapel of Saint Anne, sometimes behind the village gardens,
other times on the high-road lined with poplars. From the furthest point at
which he caught sight of her dress or her large straw-hat, trimmed with red
ribbon, he trembled and became pale.
The first time he quickened his pace as he passed her, as though he were
afraid of being retained by a force stronger than his own will, or perhaps
from fear of ridicule, and he bowed to her as one bows to a queen.
She returned his bow graciously, and that was all. He had his sum of
happiness for the rest of the day.
The second time they met, they had both thought so much of one another that
they accosted one another like old acquaintances. The heart of each had
broken the ice and made all the advances before they had taken the first
steps. The young girl had read in the priest's eyes the wish to accost her,
and he saw that he would be welcome.
Was anything more necessary? Therefore, mutually content, when they
separated, they each had the desire to see the other again.
It was very often then that they saw one another; but especially at the
morning Masses; then, when he turned towards the nave, and raising his look
towards the gallery encountered hers, he asked no other joy from heaven.
XXX.
SERAPHIC LOVE.
"How many times does it not occur
to me to blush at my tastes? to hide
them from myself? to feign with myself
that I have them not? to find some
covering for them beneath which I
conceal them, in order to play a part
a little less foolish in my own conscience?"
JULES SIMON (_Le Devoir_).
But one day the Curé awoke full of dismay. The first intoxication had
slightly dissipated, he had taken time to look closely within himself, and
when he sought to analyze in cool blood this new and ravishing sensation,
he saw the abyss beneath his feet.
"What! he said to himself, whither am I going? What am I doing? I, a
priest, a minister of the altar, I should be at that point a slave of sin;
I shall continue to cast myself from darkness to darkness until the
definite and final fall. Oh! Lord, stop me, come to my aid; suffer not this
shame and this crime."
But he altered his mind. When the devil has succeeded in bringing a soul to
sin, there is no artifice he does not use to blind him beforehand, and to
turn away his thought from everything capable of making him see the unhappy
state in which he is. That is what the Church teaches.
Soon he viewed this passion under a new aspect, and he asked himself why he
had not the right to love. Had not all the saints loved? Had not St. Jerome
loved St. Paula? Had not Francis de Sales loved Madame de Chantal? Had not
Fénélon loved Madame Guyon? St. Theresa, her spiritual director, and
Venillot, his cook?
Were there not two kinds of love? The ethereal, ideal, chaste, seraphic
love, the love of the creature grateful for the perfect work of the
creator; platonic love, free from all impurity, allowed to the virtuous
confessor for his virtuous penitent, the love of the wise man in fact;
or--the other. Then with that art of the rhetorician which sacred
scholasticism teaches to every Levite, he said to himself, "Yes, I can
love, for it is the spotless love of the angels."
But his conscience protested and cried to him: "It is the other!"
XXXI.
THE VIRGIN.
"In whatever place I was, whatever
occupation I imposed on myself, I
could not think of women, the sight
of a woman made me tremble. How
many times have I risen at night,
bathed in sweat, to fasten my mouth
on our ramparts, feeling myself ready
to suffocate."
A. DE MUSSET (_Confession d'un enfant du Siècle_).
It was the other. He was soon obliged to confess this to himself; for
slumber abandoned his couch.
In vain in the day-time he wearied his body under the labour which kills
thought. He sought to fly from the seductive image. He did not go out, for
fear of seeing her. He rushed upon every hard and unfruitful labour that he
could find. He rooted up his trees in order to re-plant them elsewhere; dug
useless banks in his garden; changed his library from its place, and
carried one after another his enormous folios to the upper story. He would
have liked to go upon the road, sit at the bottom of some ditch, and take
the stone-breaker's hammer.
But the thought which he silenced by day, took its revenge by night. How
many times, during the long silent hours, his servant heard him get up all
at once and march with long steps in his room, as if he had to accomplish
some terrible vow.
It was the devil, whispering low mysterious words in his ear, while his
impetuous desires constrained him with all the power of his vitality. He
walked like a madman from his bed to his window, which he dared not open.
He had often formerly, leant his elbows there during the hours of
sleeplessness, and breathed with delight the keen freshness of the valley.
But now he dared no longer; warm vapours rose up to him and completed the
conflagration of his senses. Nature was re-awakening from the long slumber
of winter, and already setting to work, was accomplishing from every
quarter the mysterious work of love. And within and without he felt its
formidable power growing and enveloping him.
Nameless thoughts tumultuously invaded his sick brain and ruled there as
despots. They attached themselves to him like an implacable furious old
woman, who attaches herself the more closely to her young lover, the more
she feels he is going to escape her.
He saw again in continual hallucinations, sometimes the lascivious player
as she had appeared to him near her little white bed, sometimes the fresh
face of the religious school-girl who smiled to him from the height of the
gallery. At other times he saw them both together, and each of them called
him and said to him: Come, come.
Oh! why all these obstacles, these doors, these walls, these prejudices and
that formidable barrier which he dared not pass, duty.
It seemed to him that a burning lava was escaping from his heart, running
into his veins and devouring him. His limbs were heavy and bruised; his
head was on fire like his heart, and his thoughts were enveloped in mire.
Often with his eye fixed on space, he contemplated some phantom visible to
himself alone; then big tears rolled slowly on his cheeks and fell one by
one on his bare chest, and he felt that they relieved him.
He had placed a statue of the Virgin at the foot of his bed: the one which
has a heart in flames and open arms. He looked on it as he went to sleep
and prayed the Mother, eternally chaste, to watch over his dreams.
But many times in his delirium he saw the Virgin come to life and take the
well-known face of her from whom he sought to flee, and come and find him
in his couch. And he woke with a start full of terror of himself at the
moment when, in his impious sacrilege, he felt the chaste bosom of the
Mother of God quiver beneath his kisses.
Then he opened his scared eyes and perceived before him the sweet form
which stretched its plaster arms to him in the shadow, and full of agony he
cried:
"_Mater inviolata, ora pro nobis_!"
But once he thought he heard a voice which answered:
"_Christe, audi nos_."
XXXII.
THE DEATH'S-HEAD.
"God is my witness that I did then
everything in the world to divert myself
and to heal myself."
A. DE MUSSET (_Confession d'un enfant du Siècle_).
One night he went out by stealth, crossed the market-place, and descended
the hill. He had the look of a man who was hiding himself, and he went back
several times, as if he was afraid of being followed. He reached the
cemetery, took a key from his pocket, cautiously opened the gate and closed
it behind him. At the bottom of the principal path there was a little
chapel which served for an ossuary. In it was a hideous accumulation of the
remains of several generations. The cemetery was becoming too full and it
had been necessary to make room. Here as elsewhere the cry was: "Room for
the young." And it is only justice. What would become of as if all the old
remained? There is overcrowding under ground as there is above. "Keep off!
Keep off!" Therefore their ancestors' bones were in the way, and they had
cast them into this retreat to wait for the common grave. But the common
grave is again a place which must be taken, and the recent gluttonous dead
want everything. "Keep off! Keep off!" Let us not say anything ourselves,
perhaps they will dispute with us the corner of ground which should shelter
our bones!
Marcel went into the gloomy chapel; he lighted a dark lantern and began to
search among the pile.
Then he returned to the parsonage like a thief, afraid of being caught, and
shut himself up in his room.
He had a parcel under his arm; he opened it and, carefully placing its
contents on the table, he sat down in front of it and contemplated it for a
long time.
XXXIII.
FRENZY.
"Abstinence has its deadly exhaustions."
BALZAC (_Le Lys dans la Vallée_).
A few days before, the gravedigger, while digging up the whitened bones of
the ancient dead, had broken up with his pick-axe a mouldering coffin, and
a head rolled to his feet It was of later date, for the lower jaw was still
fastened to it and it had not the calcareous colour of bones buried long
ago. It was the more horrible.
The gravedigger threw it into his wheel-barrow with its neighbour's
shin-bones, and carried it to the common heap. It was this _thing_ that the
Curé of Althausen had coveted and stolen.
He had then placed it on his table and contemplated it in silence. The top
of the skull was polished and blunt, the front narrow, the bones small and
apparently not having attained their full development. It was therefore a
youthful head, the head of an adolescent cut down at the moment, when life
completely unfolds itself to hope; while the elliptical shape of the lower
maxillary, the small and similarly-shaped teeth, the slight separation of
the nasal bones, a few long hairs still adhering to the occiput, clearly
indicated its feminine origin.
"A young girl!" murmured Marcel, "a young girl! beautiful perhaps; loved
without doubt ... and there is what remains. Ah! if he who was pleased to
kiss your lips, could see your dreadful laugh."
And, after he had meditated a long while, he went to his bed, took the
plaster virgin from its pedestal, and taking in his two hands the skull, he
put it in its place between the serge curtains.
And when the fever seized him, when he was burning with all the flames
which the fiery _simoom_ of passion breathed on him, and he felt the frenzy
taking possession of his pillow, he turned towards the wall and looked at
this new companion. Sometimes a moon-beam came and lighted up the hideous
skull and played in the gloomy cavities of its sightless eyes. The head
then seemed to become animate and its bare teeth gave an infernal grin.
This was his remedy for love.
But we grow used to everything. Custom destroys sensations. Death and its
mysteries, the horrible, and all its threatening shapes soon present
nothing to our eyes but worn-out pictures. He accustomed himself to
contemplate without emotion this lugubrious ruin. As before, the frenzy
seized him and shook him before the skull. It did more. It clothed it again
with flesh. It planted long hairs upon that shining, yellow forehead. It
placed in the hollow orbits large eyes full of love; it hid the wasted
cartillages under quivering nostrils, and upon that horrible jaw it laid
rosy lips and a sweet mouth, like a maiden's first kiss. And it is thus
that it appeared to him in the shadow, wrapped in the curtains of his bed,
like a modest girl who hides herself from sight.
"Oh! sweet phantom, return to life," he said. "Take again thy body adorned
with its graces and with its charms; come, clothed in thy sixteen years."
And he stretched his arms towards the enchanting vision, while the
death's-head, with its bare jaw, gave its eternal grin.
He woke and found himself kneeling near his bed, facing the wreck of
humanity.
Horror soiled him. His empty room was filled with spectres. He saw
hell-hags with death's-heads sporting and swarming on his bed. At the same
time, little sharp, hasty, shrill knocks shook his window.
Fall of terror he ran to open it. A gust of wind, mingled with rain and
hail, heat against his face. He was ashamed of his fears and leant his head
out to catch the beneficent shower. His brain cooled and his blood grew
calm.
He was there for a few minutes, when all at once, under the trees in the
market-place, he thought he distinguished two motionless shadows. He
thought for an instant that his hallucination lasted still, but soon the
shadows drew near. They seemed to walk carefully under the young foliage of
the limes in order to avoid the rain, and in one of them he recognized
distinctly Suzanne.
XXXIV.
THE PROHIBITION.
"Do you know any means of making
a woman do that which she has decided
that she will not do?"
ERNEST FEYDEAU (_La Comtesse de Chalis_).
That same day, after supper, the Captain had entered the drawing-room where
Suzanne was playing the _Requiem_ of Mozart.
--So you are playing Church airs now? he said to her.
--Don't you like this piece, father?
--Not at all.
--Perhaps, said Suzanne smiling, because it is a Mass.
--My dear child, do you want me to tell you what you are with all your
Masses?
--What?
--Where did you go this morning?
--At what time?
--At the time when you went out.
--I only went out to go to Mass.
--And the day before yesterday?
--Why this questioning, dearest papa?
--Ah! dearest papa, dearest papa. There is no dearest papa here, I want to
know the truth.
--But what truth? I have nothing wrong to hide from you. I went to Mass. Is
that forbidden?
--To Mass! Good Heavens! To Mass! That is most decidedly making up your
mind to disobey me!
--But papa, you have not forbidden it to me.
--Not in so many words, it is true; because I counted on your reason and
good sense. Have I not spoken loudly enough my way of thinking on this
subject?
--But, papa, your way of thinking is completely contrary to that which I
have been taught. You ought to have said when you sent me to Saint-Denis:
"You are not to teach my daughter any religion." They have taught me
religion, what is more natural than for me to follow it.
--And what has your religion in common with your Mass? If you want to pray
to God, can you not pray to him at home?
--Am I not a Catholic before all?
It was the first time that Suzanne had spoken to her father in this firm
and decided tone. Nothing more was wanted to irritate the irascible
soldier: