WE get forwards in the world, not so much by doing services, as receiving
them; you take a withering twig, and put it in the ground; and then you
water it, because you have planted it.
Monsieur le Count de B—, merely because he had done me one kindness in
the affair of my passport, would go on and do me another, the few days he
was at Paris, in making me known to a few people of rank; and they were
to present me to others, and so on.
I had got master of my _secret_ just in time to turn these honours to
some little account; otherwise, as is commonly the case, I should have
dined or supp’d a single time or two round, and then, by _translating_
French looks and attitudes into plain English, I should presently have
seen, that I had hold of the _couvert_ {652} of some more entertaining
guest; and in course should have resigned all my places one after
another, merely upon the principle that I could not keep them.—As it was,
things did not go much amiss.
I had the honour of being introduced to the old Marquis de B—: in days of
yore he had signalized himself by some small feats of chivalry in the
_Cour d’Amour_, and had dress’d himself out to the idea of tilts and
tournaments ever since.—The Marquis de B— wish’d to have it thought the
affair was somewhere else than in his brain. “He could like to take a
trip to England,” and asked much of the English ladies.—Stay where you
are, I beseech you, Monsieur le Marquis, said I.—_Les Messieurs Anglois_
can scarce get a kind look from them as it is.—The Marquis invited me to
supper.
Monsieur P—, the farmer-general, was just as inquisitive about our taxes.
They were very considerable, he heard.—If we knew but how to collect
them, said I, making him a low bow.
I could never have been invited to Mons. P—’s concerts upon any other
terms.
I had been misrepresented to Madame de Q— as an _esprit_.—Madame de Q—
was an _esprit_ herself: she burnt with impatience to see me, and hear me
talk. I had not taken my seat, before I saw she did not care a sous
whether I had any wit or no;—I was let in, to be convinced she had. I
call heaven to witness I never once opened the door of my lips.
Madame de V— vow’d to every creature she met—“She had never had a more
improving conversation with a man in her life.”
There are three epochas in the empire of a French woman.—She is
coquette,—then deist,—then _dévote_: the empire during these is never
lost,—she only changes her subjects when thirty-five years and more have
unpeopled her dominion of the slaves of love, she re-peoples it with
slaves of infidelity,—and then with the slaves of the church.
Madame de V— was vibrating betwixt the first of those epochas: the colour
of the rose was fading fast away;—she ought to have been a deist five
years before the time I had the honour to pay my first visit.
She placed me upon the same sofa with her, for the sake of disputing the
point of religion more closely.—In short Madame de V— told me she
believed nothing.—I told Madame de V— it might be her principle, but I
was sure it could not be her interest to level the outworks, without
which I could not conceive how such a citadel as hers could be
defended;—that there was not a more dangerous thing in the world than for
a beauty to be a deist;—that it was a debt I owed my creed not to conceal
it from her;—that I had not been five minutes sat upon the sofa beside
her, but I had begun to form designs;—and what is it, but the sentiments
of religion, and the persuasion they had excited in her breast, which
could have check’d them as they rose up?
We are not adamant, said I, taking hold of her hand;—and there is need of
all restraints, till age in her own time steals in and lays them on
us.—But my dear lady, said I, kissing her hand,—’tis too—too soon.
I declare I had the credit all over Paris of unperverting Madame de
V—.—She affirmed to Monsieur D— and the Abbé M—, that in one half hour I
had said more for revealed religion, than all their Encyclopædia had said
against it.—I was listed directly into Madame de V—’s _coterie_;—and she
put off the epocha of deism for two years.
I remember it was in this _coterie_, in the middle of a discourse, in
which I was showing the necessity of a _first_ cause, when the young
Count de Faineant took me by the hand to the farthest corner of the room,
to tell me my _solitaire_ was pinn’d too straight about my neck.—It
should be _plus badinant_, said the Count, looking down upon his own;—but
a word, Monsieur Yorick, _to the wise_—
And _from the wise_, Monsieur le Count, replied I, making him a bow,—_is
enough_.
The Count de Faineant embraced me with more ardour than ever I was
embraced by mortal man.
For three weeks together I was of every man’s opinion I met.—_Pardi_! _ce
Monsieur Yorick a autant d’esprit que nous autres_.—_Il raisonne bien_,
said another.—_C’est un bon enfant_, said a third.—And at this price I
could have eaten and drank and been merry all the days of my life at
Paris; but ’twas a dishonest _reckoning_;—I grew ashamed of it.—It was
the gain of a slave;—every sentiment of honour revolted against it;—the
higher I got, the more was I forced upon my _beggarly system_;—the better
the _coterie_,—the more children of Art;—I languish’d for those of
Nature: and one night, after a most vile prostitution of myself to half a
dozen different people, I grew sick,—went to bed;—order’d La Fleur to get
me horses in the morning to set out for Italy.
MARIA.
MOULINES.
I NEVER felt what the distress of plenty was in any one shape till
now,—to travel it through the Bourbonnois, the sweetest part of
France,—in the heyday of the vintage, when Nature is pouring her
abundance into every one’s lap, and every eye is lifted up,—a journey,
through each step of which Music beats time to _Labour_, and all her
children are rejoicing as they carry in their clusters: to pass through
this with my affections flying out, and kindling at every group before
me,—and every one of them was pregnant with adventures.—
Just heaven!—it would fill up twenty volumes;—and alas! I have but a few
small pages left of this to crowd it into,—and half of these must be
taken up with the poor Maria my friend, Mr. Shandy, met with near
Moulines.
The story he had told of that disordered maid affected me not a little in
the reading; but when I got within the neighbourhood where she lived, it
returned so strong into the mind, that I could not resist an impulse
which prompted me to go half a league out of the road, to the village
where her parents dwelt, to enquire after her.
’Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance in quest of
melancholy adventures. But I know not how it is, but I am never so
perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am
entangled in them.
The old mother came to the door; her looks told me the story before she
open’d her mouth.—She had lost her husband; he had died, she said, of
anguish, for the loss of Maria’s senses, about a month before.—She had
feared at first, she added, that it would have plunder’d her poor girl of
what little understanding was left;—but, on the contrary, it had brought
her more to herself:—still, she could not rest.—Her poor daughter, she
said, crying, was wandering somewhere about the road.
Why does my pulse beat languid as I write this? and what made La Fleur,
whose heart seem’d only to be tuned to joy, to pass the back of his hand
twice across his eyes, as the woman stood and told it? I beckoned to the
postilion to turn back into the road.
When we had got within half a league of Moulines, at a little opening in
the road leading to a thicket, I discovered poor Maria sitting under a
poplar. She was sitting with her elbow in her lap, and her head leaning
on one side within her hand:—a small brook ran at the foot of the tree.
I bid the postilion go on with the chaise to Moulines—and La Fleur to
bespeak my supper;—and that I would walk after him.
She was dress’d in white, and much as my friend described her, except
that her hair hung loose, which before was twisted within a silk net.—She
had superadded likewise to her jacket, a pale green riband, which fell
across her shoulder to the waist; at the end of which hung her pipe.—Her
goat had been as faithless as her lover; and she had got a little dog in
lieu of him, which she had kept tied by a string to her girdle: as I
looked at her dog, she drew him towards her with the string.—“Thou shalt
not leave me, Sylvio,” said she. I look’d in Maria’s eyes and saw she
was thinking more of her father than of her lover, or her little goat;
for, as she utter’d them, the tears trickled down her cheeks.
I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell,
with my handkerchief.—I then steep’d it in my own,—and then in hers,—and
then in mine,—and then I wip’d hers again;—and as I did it, I felt such
undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for
from any combinations of matter and motion.
I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which
materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me to the contrary.