From the moment of my last interview with the stranger I was another
creature. My thoughts incessantly rolled upon his communications. They
filled me with astonishment and joy, almost to bursting. I was unable
to contain myself; I was unable to remain in any posture or any place.
I could scarcely command myself sufficiently to perform the last duties
to his body in the manner he had directed. I paced with eager step the
sands of the lake; I climbed the neighbouring hills, and then descended
with inconceivable rapidity to the vales below; I traced with fierce
impatience the endless mazes of the wood in which I so hardly recovered
my bewildered guest. The uninterruptedness and celerity of bodily
motion seemed to communicate some ease to my swelling heart.
Yet there was one thing I wanted. I wanted some friendly bosom into
which to pour out my feelings, and thus by participation to render my
transports balsamic and tolerable. But this was for ever denied me. No
human ear must ever be astonished with the story of my endowments and
my privileges. I may whisper it to the woods and the waters, but not
in the face of man. Not only am I bound to suppress the knowledge of
the important secret I possess, but even the feelings, the ruminations,
the visions, that are for ever floating in my soul. It is but a vain
and frivolous distinction upon which I act, when I commit to this
paper my history, and not the science which is its corner-stone. The
reason why the science may not be divulged is obvious. Exhaustless
wealth, if communicated to all men, would be but an exhaustless heap
of pebbles and dust; and nature will not admit her everlasting laws
to be so abrogated, as they would be by rendering the whole race of
sublunary man immortal. But I am bound, as far as possible, not only
to hide my secrets, but to conceal that I have any to hide. Senseless
paper! be thou at least my confidant! To thee I may impart what my soul
spurns the task to suppress. The human mind insatiably thirsts for a
confidant and a friend. It is no matter that these pages shall never he
surveyed by other eyes than mine. They afford at least the semblance of
communication and the unburthening of the mind; and I will press the
illusion fondly and for ever to my heart.
To return to the explanation of my feelings immediately after receiving
possession of my grand acquisition; for, without that explanation,
the spirit and meaning of my subsequent narrative will scarcely be
sufficiently apprehended.
“Happy, happy, happy man!” exclaimed I, in the midst of my wanderings
and reveries. “Wealth! thy power Is unbounded and inconceivable. All
men bow down to thee; the most stubborn will is by thee rendered pliant
as wax; all obstacles are melted down and dissolved by the ardour of
thy beams! The man that possesses thee, finds every path level before
him, and every creature burning to anticipate his wishes: but if these
are the advantages that wealth imparts to such as possess only those
scanty portions which states and nations allow to the richest, how
enviable must his condition be, whose wealth is literally exhaustless
and infinite! He possesses really the blessing, which priestcraft and
superstition have lyingly pronounced upon the charitable: he may give
away the revenues of princes, and not be the poorer. He possesses the
attribute which we are accustomed to ascribe to the Creator of the
universe: he may say to a man, ‘Be rich,’ and he is rich. He can bestow
with equal facility the smallest gifts and the greatest. Palaces, as
if they were the native exhalations of the soil, rise out of the earth
at his bidding. He holds the fate of nations and of the world in his
hand. He can remove forests, and level mountains, drain marshes, extend
canals, turn the course of rivers, and shut up the sea with doors. He
can assign to every individual in a nation the task he pleases, can
improve agriculture, and establish manufactures, can found schools,
and hospitals, and infirmaries, and universities. He can study the
genius of every man, and enable every man to pursue the bent of his
mind. Poets and philosophers will be fostered, the sublimest flights of
genius be produced, and the most admirable discoveries effected, under
his auspicious patronage. The whole world are his servants, and he,
if his temper be noble and upright, will be the servant of the whole
world. Nay, it cannot happen otherwise. He has as few temptations to
obliquity as omnipotence itself. Weakness and want are the parents of
vice. But he possesses every thing; he cannot better his situation; no
man can come into rivalship or competition with him. I thank God, I
have known the extremes of poverty, and therefore am properly qualified
to enjoy my present happiness. I have felt a reverse of fortune,
driving me in one instance to insanity, in another instance threatening
to destroy me, my wife, and children together, with the plague of
hunger. My heart has been racked with never-dying remorse; because, by
my guilt and folly, my children have been deprived of the distinction
and rank to which they were born, and plunged in remediless obscurity.
Heaven has seen my sufferings, and at length has graciously said, ‘It
is enough.’ Because I have endured more than man ever endured from
the privation of fortune, God in his justice has reserved for me this
secret of the transmutation of metals. I can never again fall into that
wretchedness, by which my understanding was subverted, and my heart was
broken.”
From this part of the legacy of the stranger, my mind reverted to the
other. I surveyed my limbs, all the joints and articulations of my
frame, with curiosity and astonishment. “What!” exclaimed I, “these
limbs, this complicated but brittle frame, shall last for ever! No
disease shall attack it; no pain shall seize it; death shall withhold
from it for ever his abhorred grasp! Perpetual vigour, perpetual
activity, perpetual youth, shall take up their abode with me! Time
shall generate in me no decay, shall not add a wrinkle to my brow,
or convert a hair of my head to grey! This body was formed to die;
this edifice to crumble into dust; the principles of corruption and
mortality are mixed up in every atom of my frame. But for me the laws
of nature are suspended; the eternal wheels of the universe roll
backward; I am destined to be triumphant over fate and time!
“Months, years, cycles, centuries! To me all these are but as
indivisible moments. I shall never become old; I shall always be,
as it were, in the porch and infancy of existence; no lapse of years
shall subtract any thing from my future duration. I was born under
Louis the Twelfth; the life of Francis the First now threatens a speedy
termination; he will be gathered to his fathers, and Henry his son will
succeed him. But what are princes and kings and generations of men to
me? I shall become familiar with the rise and fall of empires; in a
little while the very name of France, my country, will perish from the
face of the earth, and men will dispute about the situation of Paris,
as they dispute about the site of ancient Nineveh and Babylon and Troy.
Yet I shall still be young. I shall take my most distant posterity
by the hand; I shall accompany them in their career; and, when they
are worn out and exhausted, shall shut up the tomb over them, and set
forward.”
There was something however in this part of my speculation that
did not entirely please me. Methought the race of mankind looked
too insignificant in my eyes. I felt a degree of uneasiness at the
immeasurable distance that was put between me and the rest of my
species. I found myself alone in the world. Must I for ever live
without a companion, a friend, any one with whom I can associate upon
equal terms, with whom I can have a community of sensations, and
feelings, and hopes, and desires, and fears? I experienced something,
less than a wish, yet a something very capable of damping my joy, that
I also were subject to mortality. I could have been well content to be
partaker with a race of immortals, but I was not satisfied to be single
in this respect. I was not pleased to recollect how trivial would
appear to me those concerns of a few years, about which the passions of
men are so eagerly occupied. I did not like the deadness of heart that
seemed to threaten me. I began to be afraid of vacancy and torpor, and
that my life would become too uniformly quiet. Nor did it sufficiently
console me to recollect that, as one set of friends died off the stage,
another race would arise to be substituted in their stead. I felt that
human affections and passions are not made of this transferable stuff,
and that we can love nothing truly, unless, we devote ourselves to it
heart and soul, and our life is, as it, were, bound up in the object of
our attachment.
It was worse when I recollected my wife and my children. When I
considered for the first time that they were now in a manner nothing to
me, I felt a sensation that might be said to mount to anguish. How can
a man attach himself to any thing, when he comes to consider it as the
mere plaything and amusement of the moment! In this statement however I
am not accurate. Habit is more potent than any theoretical speculation.
Past times had attached me deeply, irrevocably, to all the members of
my family. But I felt that I should survive them all. They would die
one by one, and leave me alone. I should drop into their graves the
still renewing tear of anguish. In that tomb would my heart be buried.
Never, never, through the countless ages of eternity, should I form
another attachment. In the happy age of delusion, happy and auspicious
at least to the cultivation of the passions, when I felt that I also
was a mortal, I was capable of a community of sentiments and a going
forth of the heart. But how could I, an immortal, hope ever hereafter
to feel a serious, an elevating and expansive passion for the ephemeron
of an hour!
As the first tumult of my thoughts subsided, I began, as is usual
with persons whose minds are turned loose in the search of visionary
happiness, to picture to myself, more steadily and with greater
minuteness, the objects I would resolve early to accomplish. I would in
the first place return to France, my adored country, the residence of
my ancestors, whose annals they had adorned, whose plains had witnessed
their heroic feats, and whose earth enclosed their ashes. To France I
was endeared by every tie that binds the human heart; her language had
been the prattle of my infancy; her national manners and temper were
twined with the fibres of my constitution, and could not be rooted
out; I felt that every Frenchman that lived was my brother. Banishment
had only caused these prejudices to strike their tendrils deeper in my
heart. I knew not that I should finally limit my abode to France. A
man who, like Melchisedec, is “without end of life,” may well consider
himself as being also, like him, “without father, without mother, and
without descent.” But at all events I would first fix my children, who
did not participate in my privileges, in their native soil. I would
reside there myself, at least till they were fully disposed of, and
till the admirable partner of the last seventeen years of my life had
resigned her breath. I would immediately repurchase the property of my
ancestors, which had been so distressfully resigned. The exile should
return from his seven years’ banishment in triumph and splendour. I
would return to the court of my old patron and friend, the gallant
Francis, and present to him my boy, the future representative of my
family, now one year older than I had been at the field of the Cloth of
Gold. Though an exile from my country, I had not been an inattentive
witness of her fortunes. The year fifteen hundred and forty-four
was a remarkable and interesting year in the history of France. The
endless animosities of Francis and the emperor had broken out with
new fury about two years before. In the spring of the present year,
the count d’Anguien had won a battle in Piedmont[8], in which ten
thousand imperialists were left dead upon the field, and which might
be considered as having at length effaced the defeat of Pavia, in the
same part of the world nineteen years before. The moment it had been
announced that a battle was resolved on, the young nobility of France,
with their characteristic ardour, had hurried to the scene, and the
court of Paris was, in an instant as it were, turned into a desert.
On the other hand, the emperor and the king of England had concerted
for the same season a formidable plan of attack against our northern
frontier. With an army of twenty-five thousand men respectively, the
one on the side of Champagne, and the other of Picardy, they agreed
to advance directly into the heart of the kingdom, and to unite their
forces in the neighbourhood of Paris. The last intelligence that had
reached me was, that Château Thierry, about twenty leagues from the
metropolis, was in the hands of the emperor, and that the inhabitants
of the capital, filled with consternation, were seeking their safety
by flight in every direction. These circumstances had passed idly by
me, and left little impression, so long as I considered myself as an
obscure peasant cut off for ever from the bosom of my country. But,
vested with the extraordinary powers now intrusted to me, the case was
altered. I felt even a greater interest in my sovereign, now pressed
down with disease and calamity, yet retaining the original alacrity
and confidence of his soul, than I had done, when I saw him in all the
pride of youth, and all the splendour of prosperity. I was anxious that
Charles should now enter into his service; and I determined once again
to assume the cuirass and the falchion, that I might be the instructor
of his youth, and his pattern in feats of war. I resolved that my
shepherd-boy, bred in obscurity among woods and mountains, should burst
with sudden splendour upon his countrymen, and prove in the field
his noble blood and generous strain. I also proposed to myself, both
out of sympathy for my king, and to give greater éclat to my son’s
entrance into life, to replenish with my treasures the empty coffers of
France, and thus to furnish what at this period seemed to be the main
spring upon which the fortune of war depended. With the advantages I
could afford him, the career of Charles could not fail to be rapid and
illustrious, and he would undoubtedly obtain the staff of constable
of France, the possessor of which, Montmorency, was now in disgrace.
I would marry my daughters to such of the young nobility as I should
find most distinguished in talents and spotless in character. When, by
the death of her I most loved, my affections should be weaned from my
country, and the scenes to which I had been accustomed were rendered
painful and distressing, I would then set out upon my travels. I would
travel with such splendour and profusion of expense (for this, though
mortified in me by a reverse of many years’ duration, continued to be
the foible of my heart) as should supersede the necessity of letters
of recommendation, and secure me a favourable reception wherever I
appeared. I might spend a life, in a manner, in every country that was
fortunate enough to allure my stay, spreading improvements, dispensing
blessings, and causing all distress and calamity to vanish from before
me.