It is a year ago to-day since I fell in with that little girl in front
of a toyshop in the Champs-Elysées, the child of her who first awakened
in me the sense of beauty.
I was happy before I saw her; but the poetry of the wide world was
unknown to me, nor had I had experience of the dolorous joys of love.
The first time I saw Marie was one Good Friday at a classical concert
to which her father, an old diplomat with a passion for music, who had
heard the finest orchestras of every Court in Europe, had conducted her
attired in stately weeds of solemn black. Her mourning garb only
served to accentuate her radiant beauty. The sight of her aroused in
me feelings which bore, I think, a close resemblance to religious
exaltation. I was no longer very young. The uncertainty of my worldly
position, dependent as it then was upon the vicissitudes of a political
party, combined with my natural timidity to deprive me of all hope of
figuring as a successful suitor. I often saw her at her father’s and she
treated me with an air of open friendliness that did not encourage me to
foster higher ambitions. It was clear I did not impress her as the sort
of man with whom she could fall in love. As for me, the sight of her
and the sound of her voice produced in me such a state of delicious
agitation that the mere memory of it, mingled though it be with grief,
still avails to make me in love with life.
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Nevertheless, shall I avow it? I longed to hear her and to see her
always; I would have died in rapture at her side, but I was never fain
to wed her. No, some instinct of harmony held desire remote from my
heart. “It was not love then,” some one will say. I know not what it
was, but I know that it filled my soul.
Clearly, however, the feelings I experienced cannot have been strange
to the heart of man, since I have found them expressed with power and
sweetness in the works of the poets, in Virgil, in Racine and Lamartine.
They have given utterance to the emotions which I but felt. I could not
break silence. The miracles wrought in my soul by this young girl will
remain for ever unrevealed. For two years I lived an enchanted life;
then, one day, she told me she was going to be married. My feelings, as
I have said, bear a strong resemblance to religious emotion. They
are sad, but in their sadness they still preserve their charm. Grief
corrupts them not. From suffering they derive a wholesome bitterness
that lends them strength. I listened to her with that gentle courage
which comes with renunciation. She was marrying a man senior to myself,
a widower, almost an old man, whose birth and fortune had marked him
out for the public career in which he had displayed a haughtiness of
disposition and much misplaced courage. Although I moved in a lower
sphere, I came in contact with him on several important occasions. I
belonged to a political group with views very similar to his own, but we
had never been able to meet without considerable friction and, although
the newspapers treated us with the same approval or, as was more often
the case, with the same hostility, we were not friends, far from it, and
we avoided each other with sedulous care.
I was present at the wedding. I saw, and I shall ever see Marie, wearing
her white dress and lace veil. She was a little pale and very lovely. I
was struck, without apparent reason, by the impression of fragility with
which this girl who was animated by so poetic a soul seemed to give one.
This impression, which I think occurred to no one but myself, was only
too well founded. I never saw Marie again.
She died after three years of married life, leaving a little girl ten
months old. An indescribable feeling of tender affection has always
drawn me to this child, to Marie’s Marguerite. An unconquerable desire
to see her took possession of me.
She was being brought up at ------ near Melun, where her father had a
château standing in the midst of a magnificent park. One day I went to
------ and wandered for hours, like a thief, about the park bound-aries.
At last, through a gap in the trees, I caught sight of Marguerite in the
arms of her nurse, who was dressed in black. She was wearing a hat with
white plumes and an embroidered pelisse. I cannot say in what respect
she differed from any other child, but I thought she was the fairest
in the world. It was autumn. The wind that was sighing in the trees
was whirling the dead leaves about in little eddies as they floated
to earth. Dead leaves covered all the long avenue in which the little
white-robed child was being carried up and down. An immense sadness
took possession of me. At the edge of a bed of flowers as white as the
raiment of Marguerite, an old gardener who was gathering up the fallen
leaves saluted his little mistress with a smile and, with his hand on
his rake and hat in hand, spoke to her with the gentle gaiety of old men
who are not overburdened with their thoughts. But she paid no heed to
him. With her little hand like to a star she sought her nurse’s breast.
As I hurried away with grief in my heart, the nurse resumed her walk
and I heard the sound of the dead leaves sighing sorrowfully beneath her
steps.
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