A CRUEL ENIGMA
BY PAUL BOURGET
AUTHOR OF "A LOVE CRIME"
TRANSLATED WITHOUT ABRIDGMENT FROM THE 18TH FRENCH EDITION
BY JULIAN CRAY
LONDON:
_VIZETELLY & CO., 42, CATHERINE ST., STRAND_
BRENTANOS: NEW YORK, WASHINGTON AND CHICAGO
1887
PAUL BOURGET.
A poet of merit, an acute, clear-sighted critic, and an accomplished and
successful novelist, M. Paul Bourget occupies an important position
among the brilliant crowd of modern French _littérateurs_, upon the
younger generation especially of whom he exercises an acknowledged and a
constantly widening influence. Nor will this influence appear other than
natural if it be borne in mind that, gifted with no mean qualifications
for the task, M. Bourget has made a deep and particular study of just
those problems which, to this self-conscious, introspective age of ours,
are possessed of an all-absorbing interest. Complex as his nature
undoubtedly is, and many-sided as its accomplishment might, to a first
and superficial view, appear, he is in all his writings primarily a
critic, while his criticism has, moreover, uniformly occupied itself
with the same objects, with the hidden movements of the mind, that is to
say, considered in their bearings upon external manifestation, with all
the varied promptings which underlie the surface of conduct.
For the prosecution of such psychological studies, M. Bourget is in
every needful particular well fitted. He possesses keen insight, and a
remarkable power of sympathetically appreciating the play and
counter-play of motives, passions, and delicate shades of feeling; while
he is also endowed with that tact, subtlety, refinement, and, above all,
exact lucidity of expression, by which a writer is enabled to convey his
divinings unimpaired to the reader. This flexibility of sympathy, with
its answering flexibility of language, enabling to the expression alike
of widely sundered and of delicately blending diversities of thought and
emotion, correspond to, and are, perhaps, partly the outcome of, a
richly varied life-experience. Just as M. Bourget has made himself
equally at home in London and in Florence, in Paris and in Morocco, so
is he equally at ease and equally successful whether he be engaged in
indicating some of the consequences wrought by cosmopolitan existence in
the characters of Stendhal, Tourgéniev, and Amiel; in analysing the
conceptions of modern love presented in the writings of Baudelaire and
M. Alexandre Dumas; in measuring the modifications produced by science
in the imaginations and diverse sensibilities of Flaubert, M. Leconte de
Lisle, and M. Taine; or, finally, in living the life of his own
fictitious characters, and portraying for us a Hubert or a Theresa de
Sauve.
It is evident that the wielder of such exceptional powers must be
obvious to peculiar dangers with which the mere dead-level narrator of
outer phenomena has little or no acquaintance. To the very fulness of
these powers, and to their supremely overmastering presence are due
faults from which less gifted writers are shielded by their mediocrity
as by a wall. It would be possible, did space and inclination serve, to
point out instances of affectation both of idea and of expression in M.
Bourget's writings. As in the case of some of our own premier
authors--George Eliot, for instance, and Mr. George Meredith--his
thought is not invariably worthy of the richness of its setting, while
his analysis is occasionally pushed so far as to be superfluous, not to
say absurd. The charge of "literary dandyism" brought against him by M.
Jules Lemaitre is not destitute of foundation. It must be acknowledged
that his subtlety borders at times on pedantry, and his refinement on
conceit. Having said this, it is only fair to add that these flaws do
not enter excessively into the texture of his work; indeed, they rather
serve, by force of sufficiently rare and sharply defined contrast, to
throw into relief its general sterling excellence. And such
imperfections should not be allowed to weigh overmuch with us in
attempting to estimate the worth of our author's achievement. It is
notorious that--_si parva licet componere magnis_--there are spots on
the sun.
Conversant as he is with the entire gamut of human feeling, M. Bourget
has in all his novels--with the single exception of the last of them,
"André Cornélis"--elected to direct exclusive attention to the passion
of love. His treatment of this theme is as characteristic as it is
fresh. It is, further, in complete harmony with what appears to be his
doctrine of life. Accuracy of vision, assisted, doubtless, by the
breadth of cosmopolitan experience, has produced in him a result not
uncommon with men of his calibre. In spite of his own protestation to
the contrary, it has, in fact, made him a pessimist. Like Flaubert, with
whom he has some affinity, and one of the most striking of whose phrases
he, in the course of the following pages, unconsciously adopts, he
discerns too clearly to be greatly pleased with what he sees. The
pessimism of the two men was, however, arrived at by somewhat different
routes. Setting aside any origins of a purely physical nature, it arose
with Flaubert mainly from the inconsistency of his external surroundings
with his inward ideals, and denoted simply that his objective world and
his subjective world were at strife. M. Bourget's dissatisfaction flows
from the unpleasing result of his analyses of the inward feelings
themselves. He probes them and penetrates them throughout their complex
ramifications and windings until he reaches some ultimate fact or some
irreducible instinct, from which he draws the moral of an unbending
necessity. And here he finds the aspirings of his imagination and the
decrees of destiny at daggers drawn.
In these considerations we have a key to the proper interpretation of
the present volume. "Love," its author has said elsewhere, "has, like
death, remained irreducible to human conventions. It is wild and free in
spite of codes and modes. The woman who disrobes to give herself to a
man, lays aside her entire social personality with her garments. For him
she again becomes what he, too, becomes again for her--the natural,
solitary creature to whom no protection can guarantee happiness, and
from whom no decree can avert woe." These lines sum in brief the
teaching of the book. Its author has, after his own fashion, made an
uncompromising analysis of the passion that he undertakes to describe,
and, stripping from it all the adventitious grace and mysticism and
sentiment with which society is wont to shroud it, has found it to
consist, in the last resort, of a single and simple fact: the physical,
fleshly desire of man for woman and woman for man. Hence it is that
Theresa, while receiving, and rejoicing exceedingly in, Hubert's loftier
and more ideal affection, betrays it at the first opportunity for the
sensual brutishness of a hard-living _roué_, and hence, too, it is that
the pure-souled Hubert, even while he scorns his mistress for her
treachery and loathes himself for his weakness, returns loveless and
despairing to her arms.
The book is a pitiless study of the inevitable. We are made to feel
that, given the particular primary conditions, the results specified
could not but follow. It would almost seem that in the modern scientific
conception of the universal reign of Law, and the comparatively remote
possibilities of modifying its operation, we are approximating to a
renewed, but far more vividly realised, enthronement of the old Greek
idea of that Necessity against which the gods themselves were believed
to strive in vain, and M. Bourget is too completely a man of his century
not to reflect faithfully one of the most striking phases of latter-day
thought. The contemplation of a fatalistic ordering of the moral world
cannot be otherwise than exceptionally painful to one who, like M.
Bourget, is as sensitive to moral and spiritual, as he is to physical
and natural beauty. His nobler nature is wounded by the hard sequence of
inevitable law, and would fain have a deeply different moulding of
circumstance, but for all that the true novelist can tell us only what
he sees, and what he believes to be true, and so it comes to pass that
in M. Bourget's novels, with, perhaps, a single exception, we find the
eternal contrast between the "might be" and the "must be" consistently
indicated. In his "L'Irréparable" and its companion tale, "Deuxième
Amour," in "Crime d'Amour" and in "Cruelle Enigme," the topic which
engrosses him is still the same. In all alike we are sensible of the
antagonism between the cherished aspirations of the moralist and the
conclusions which the psychologist finds himself unwillingly compelled
to draw. And not in them only, but throughout his other writings also,
we can trace the spirit-workings of the man to whom life in its
entirety, no less than certain sorrowful phases of it is "a cruel
enigma."
JULIAN CRAY.
DEDICATION.
TO Mr. HENRY JAMES.
Allow me, my dear Henry James, to place your name on the first page of
this book in memory of the time at which I was beginning to write it,
and which was also the time when we became acquainted. In our
conversations in England last summer, protracted sometimes at one of the
tables in the hospitable Athenæum Club, sometimes beneath the shade of
the trees in some vast park, sometimes on the Dover esplanade while it
echoed to the tumult of the waves, we often discussed the art of
novel-writing, an art which is the most modern of all because it is the
most flexible, and the most capable of adaptation to the varied
requirements of every temperament. We were agreed that the laws imposed
upon novelists by the various æsthetics resolve themselves ultimately
into this: to give a personal impression of life. Will you find this
impression in "A Cruel Enigma"? I trust so, that this work may be truly
worthy of being offered to one whose rare and subtle talent, intelligent
sympathy, and noble character, I have been able to appreciate as reader,
fellow-worker, and friend.
P.B.
_Paris, 9th February_, 1885.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
A CRUEL ENIGMA.
CHAPTER I
All men accustomed to feel through their imaginations are well
acquainted with that unique description of melancholy which is inflicted
by too complete a likeness between a mother and her daughter, when the
mother is fifty years old and the daughter twenty-five, and the one
happens thus to exhibit the looked-for spectre of the old age of the
other. How fruitful in bitterness for a lover is such a vision of the
inevitable withering reserved for the beauty that he loves! To the eye
of a disinterested observer such likenesses abound in singularly
suggestive reflections. Rarely, indeed, does the analogy between the
features of the two faces extend to identity, and still more rarely are
the expressions completely alike. There has usually been a sort of
onward march in the common temperament from one generation to the next.
The predominant quality in the physiognomy has become more predominant
still--a visible symbol of a development of character produced by
heredity. Already too refined, the face has become still more so;
sensual, it has been materialised; wilful, it has grown hard and dry.
But it is especially at the period when life has done its work, when the
mother has passed her sixtieth year and the daughter her fortieth, that
this gradation in likenesses becomes palpable to the student, and with
it the history of the moral circumstances wherein the soul of the race
of which the two beings mark two halting-places has striven. The
perception of fatalities of blood is then so clear that it sometimes
turns to pain. It is in such cases that the implacable, tragical action
of the laws of Nature is revealed even to minds which are the most
destitute of general ideas, and if this action be at all exercised
against creatures who--apart even from love--are dear to us, how it
hurts us to admit it!
Although a man who had started formerly as a private soldier and has
been retired as General of division, who is seventy-two years old, who
has a liver complaint contracted in Africa, five wounds and the
experience of fifteen campaigns, is not very prone to philosophical
dreamings, it was nevertheless to impressions of this kind that General
Count Alexander Scilly resigned himself one evening, on leaving the
drawing-room of a small house in the Rue Vaneau, where he had left his
old friend Madame Castel, and this friend's daughter, Madame Liauran,
alone together. Eleven had just struck from a clock of the purest style
of the Empire--a gift from Napoleon I. to Madame Castel's father--which
stood on the mantelpiece in this drawing-room, and, as was his custom,
the General had risen at precisely the first stroke, to go to his
carriage, which had been announced.
Truth to tell, the Count had the strongest reasons in the world to be
dimly and profoundly disquieted. After the campaign of 1870, which had
won him his last epaulets, but in which the ruin of his health had been
completed, this man had found himself at Paris with no relations but
distant cousins whom he did not like, having had grounds of complaint
against them on the occasion of the succession to a common cousin. Had
they not impugned the old lady's will, and made a charge of undue
influence against--whom? Against him, Count Scilly, own son to the
Leipsic hero! Feeling that desire, which distinguishes bachelors of all
ages, to replace, by settled habits, the tranquility of the family that
he lacked, the General had been led to create a home external to the
rooms of the resting soldier.
Circumstances had thus made him the almost daily guest of the house in
the Rue Vaneau, where the two ladies to whom he had long been attached
resided. The eldest, Madame Marie Alice Castel, was the widow of his
first protector, Captain Hubert Castel, who had been killed at his side
in Algeria, when he, Scilly, was as yet only a plain sergeant. The
second, Madame Marie Alice Liauran, was the widow of his dearest
protégé, Captain Alfred Liauran, who had been killed in Italy.
All those who have given any study to the character of an old bachelor
and old soldier--a combination of two celibacies in one--will, from the
mere announcement of these facts, understand the place occupied by the
mother and daughter in the General's existence. Whenever he left their
house, and during the whole of the time which it took his carriage to
bring him home again, his one mental occupation was to recur to all the
incidents in his visit. This interval was a long one, for the General
lived on the Quai d'Orléans on the ground floor of an old house which
had been formally bequeathed to him by his cousin. The carriage went but
slowly; it was drawn by an old army horse, very aged and very quiet,
gently driven by an old orderly soldier, faithful Bertrand, who would
not have whipped the animal for a cask of grape-skin brandy, his
favourite drink.
The carriage itself did not run easily, low and heavy as it was--a
regular dowager's chariot which the General had preserved unaltered,
with the pale green leather of its lining and the dark green shade of
its panels. Is there any need to add that Scilly had inherited this
carriage at the same time as the house? In the ignorance of an old
soldier accustomed to the roughness of a profession to which he had
taken very seriously, he ingenuously considered this lumbering vehicle
as the height of comfort, and seated with his hand in one of the slings,
on the edge of those cushions on which his cousin used once to stretch
herself voluptuously, he unceasingly saw again before him the
drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, and the two inmates of that calm
retreat--oh! so calm; with its lofty closed windows, beyond which
extended the princely garden reaching from the Rue Vaneau to the Rue de
Babylon; yes, so calm and so well known to him, Scilly, in its slightest
details!
On the walls hung three large portraits, witnessing that, since the
Revolution, all the men of the family had been soldiers. There was first
the grandfather, Colonel Hubert Castel, represented by the painter Gros
in the dark uniform of the cuirassiers of the Empire, his head bare, his
sturdy neck confined in its blue-black collar, his torso clad in its
cuirass, his arms enclosed in the dark cloth of their sleeves, and his
hands covered with their white rounded gauntlets. Napoleon had fallen
from his throne too soon to reward, as he wished, the officer who had
saved his life in the Russian campaign. Next, there was the son of this
stern cavalier, a captain in the African army, painted by Delacroix in
the blue tunic with its plaited folds, and the wide red trousers, tight
fitting at the feet; then the portrait, painted by Flandrin, of Alfred
Liauran, in the uniform of an officer of the line, such as Scilly
himself had worn. On both sides were miniatures representing Colonel
Castel again, but before he had attained to that rank, and also some men
and women of the old régime; for Madame Castel was a Mademoiselle de
Trans, of the De Transes of Provence, a very numerous and noble family
belonging to the district of Aix. Colonel Castel's father, who had been
merely the steward of Marie Alice's father, had saved the, in truth,
somewhat inconsiderable property of the family during the storm of 1792,
and when in 1829 Mademoiselle de Trans had wished to marry this wealthy
man's grandson, who happened to be the son of a celebrated soldier, she
had met with no opposition.
All Madame Castel's past, and that of her daughter, was, therefore,
spread over the walls of this drawing-room, which was at once austere
and homely, like all apartments which are much occupied, and occupied by
persons who have cherished recollections. The furniture, which was
composed of a curious mixture of objects of the First Empire, the
Restoration, and the July Monarchy, certainly had no correspondence with
the fortune of the two ladies, which had become very large owing to the
modesty of their mode of life; but of this furniture there was not a
single piece that did not speak of someone dear both to them and to
Scilly, who from childhood had found interest in everything belonging to
this family. Had not his father been made a Count on the same day that
his companion-in-arms, Castel, had been made a Colonel?
And it was just this intimate acquaintance with the life of these two
women which rendered the old man so strangely sensitive in respect of
them. He had identified himself with them to the extent of being unable
to sleep at night when he had left them visibly pre-occupied. This spare
man, sunk as it were into himself, in whom everything revealed strict
discipline from the stolidity of his look to the regularity of his gait,
and the punctilious rigour of his dress, disclosed, when his two friends
were in question, all those treasures of feeling which his mode of life
had given him little opportunity to expend; and on this evening, in the
month of February, 1880, he was in a state of agitation, like that of a
lover who has seen his mistress's eyes bathed in tears the cause of
which is unknown to him.
"What subject of grief can they have which they would not tell me?" This
question passed again and again through the General's head while his
carriage drove along, beaten by the wind and lashed by the rain. It was
"regular Prussian weather," as the Count's coachman expressed it; but
his master never thought of pulling up the open window through which
squalls were coming in every five minutes, and he constantly reverted to
his question, for his poor friends had been dreadfully dull the whole
evening, and the General could see them mentally just as his last glance
had caught them. The mother was seated in an easy-chair at the corner of
the fireplace, with her white hair, her profile which had not yet lost
its pride, and her strangely-black eyes set in a face wrinkled with
those long vertical wrinkles which tell of nobleness of life. The
extraordinary paleness of her colourless and, as it were, bloodless
complexion betrayed at all times the great sorrows of a widowhood which
had found nothing to divert or console it. But that evening this
paleness had appeared to the Count even more startling, as, too, had the
restlessness in the physiognomy of the daughter.
Although Madame Liauran was past forty, not one thread of silver mingled
as yet with the bands of black hair crowning the faded yet not withered
face, in which all her mother's features were reproduced, but with more
emaciation and pain. A nervous complaint kept her always lying on her
couch, which, that evening, was exactly opposite to Madame Castel's easy
chair, so that the General, on leaving the drawing-room had been able to
see both women at once, and to feel confusedly that on the second there
was weighing a double widowhood. No, there was nothing left in this
creature to enable her to support life without suffering. To Scilly, who
knew in what an atmosphere of tenderness and sorrow the second Marie
Alice had grown up, before herself entering an atmosphere of new
troubles, this sort of intensified widowhood afforded an easy
explanation of the existence in the daughter of a sensitiveness that was
already keen in the mother.
But then, were there not years in which the melancholy of the two widows
was enlivened or rather warded off by the presence of a child, Alexander
Hubert Liauran, who had been born a few months before the Italian war--a
charming creature, somewhat too frail to suit the taste of his
godfather, the General, who was fond of calling him "Mademoiselle
Hubert," and as graceful as all young people are who have been brought
up only by women? In the circumstances in which his mother and
grandmother found themselves, how could this boy have been anything but
the whole world to them?
"If they are so downcast, it can only be on his account," said the Count
to himself; "yet there is no question of war--" for the old soldier
recollected the promise which the young man had made to him to enlist at
once if ever a new strife should bring Germany and France into conflict.
This one condition had induced him not to dispute the frightened wish of
the two women who had been desirous of keeping the son by their side.
The young man, in fact, had at first been attracted by the military
profession; but the mere idea of seeing their child dressed in uniform
had been too stern a martyrdom for Madame Castel and Madame Liauran, and
the child had remained with them, unprovided with any career but that of
loving and of being loved.
The remembrance of his godson, Hubert, awakened a fresh train of musing
in the Count. His brougham had gone down the Rue du Bac, and was now
advancing along the quays. A rain-splash fell on the old soldier's cheek
and he closed the pane which had remained open. The sudden sensation of
cold made him shrink further into the corner of his carriage and into
his thoughts. That kind of backset which is produced by physical
annoyance often has the strange effect of heightening the power of
remembrance within us. Such was the case with the General, who suddenly
began to reflect that for several weeks his godson had rarely spent the
evening at the Rue Vaneau. He had not been disturbed by this, knowing
that Madame Liauran was very anxious that her son should go into
society. They were so much afraid lest he should weary of their narrow
life.
Scilly was now compelled by a secret instinct to connect this absence
with the inexplicable sadness overspreading the faces of the two women.
He understood so well that all the keen forces of the grandmother's and
of the mother's heart, had their supreme centre in the existence of
their child! And he pictured to himself pell-mell the thousand scenes of
passionate affection which he had witnessed since the time of Hubert's
birth. He remembered Madame Castel's recrudescent paleness, and Madame
Liauran's deadly headaches at the slightest uneasiness in the child. He
could see again the days of his education, the course of which was
followed by the mother herself. How many times had he admired the young
woman as, with her elbow resting on a little table, she employed her
evening hours in studying the page of a Latin or Greek book, which the
boy was to repeat next day?
With a touching, infatuated tenderness such as is peculiar to certain
mothers who would be pained by the slightest divorce between their own
mind and their son's, Madame Liauran had sought to associate herself
hour by hour with the development of her child's intelligence. Hubert
had not taken a lesson in the upper room in the little house at which
his mother was not present, engaged with some piece of charitable work,
such as knitting a coverlet or hemming handkerchiefs for the poor, but
listening with all her attention to what the master was saying. She had
pushed the divine susceptibility of her soul's jealousy so far as to be
unwilling to have a private tutor. Hubert had, therefore, received
instruction from different masters whom Madame Liauran had engaged on
the recommendations of her confessor, the Vicar of Sainte-Clotilde, and
none of them had been able to dispute with her an influence which she
would share only with the grandmother.
When it was necessary that the youth should learn how to ride and fence,
the poor woman, to whom an hour spent away from her son was a period of
ill-dissembled anguish, had taken months and months to make up her mind.
At last she had consented to fit up a room on the ground floor as a
fencing school. An old regimental instructor, who was settled in Paris,
and whom General Scilly had had under him in the service, used to come
three times a week. The mother did not venture to acknowledge that the
mere noise of the clashing of the swords awakened within her a dread of
some accident, and caused her almost insurmountable emotion. The Count
had likewise induced Madame Liauran to entrust her son to him to be
taken to the riding-school; but she had done so on condition that he
would not leave him for a minute, and every departure for this
horse-exercise had continued to be an occasion of secret agony.
Foreign as they might be to his own character, all these shades of
feeling, which had made the education of the young man a mysterious poem
of foolish terror, painful felicity, and continual effusiveness, had
been understood by Count Scilly, thanks to the intelligence of the most
devoted affection, and he knew that Madame Castel, though outwardly more
mistress of herself, was little better than her daughter. How many
glances from the pale woman had he not caught, wrapping Marie Alice
Liauran and Hubert in too ardent and absolute idolatry?
The days had passed away; their child was reaching his twenty-second
year, and the two widows continued to entwine and bind him with the
thousand attentions by which impassioned women, whether mothers, wives,
or lovers, know how to keep the object of their passion beside them.
With a careful minuteness that was fruitful in intimate delight, they
had taken pleasure in furnishing for Hubert the most charming bachelor's
rooms that could be imagined. They had enlarged a pavilion running out
from behind the house into a little garden which was itself contiguous
to the immense garden in the Rue de Varenne. From her own bedroom
windows Madame Liauran could see those of her son, who had thus a little
independent universe to himself. The two women had had the sense to
understand that they could keep Hubert altogether with themselves only
by anticipating the wish for a personal existence inevitable in a man of
twenty.
On the ground floor of this pavilion were two spacious rooms on a level
with the garden--one containing a billiard table, and the other every
requisite for fencing. It was here that Hubert received his friends,
consisting of some people from the Faubourg Saint-Germain; for, although
Madame Castel and Madame Liauran did not visit, they had maintained
continuous relations with all those in the Faubourg who occupied
themselves with works of charity. These formed a distinct society, very
different from the worldly clan, and united in a mode all the closer,
because its relations were very frequent, serious and personal. But
certainly none of Hubert's young friends moved in an establishment
comparable to that which the two women had organised on the first story
of the pavilion. They who lived in the simplicity of unexpectant widows,
and who would not for the world have modified anything in the antique
furniture of their house, had had modern luxury and comfort suddenly
revealed to them by their feelings towards Hubert.
The young man's bedroom was hung with prettily and coquettishly
fantastical Japanese stuffs, and all the furniture had come from
England. Madame Castel and Madame Liauran had been charmed with some
specimens which they had seen at the house of a furious Anglomaniac and
distant relation of their own, and with the caprice of love they had
proposed to give themselves the pleasure of affording this original
elegance to their child. Accordingly, the room, which looked towards the
south and always had the sun upon it, contained a charming,
triple-panelled wardrobe, a wooden wainscot and a what-not mirror over
the mantlepiece, two graceful brackets, a low square bed, and arm-chairs
that one could lounge in for ever--in short, it was really such a _home_
of refined convenience as every rich Englishman likes to obtain. A
bath-room and a smoking-room adjoined this apartment.
Although Hubert was not as yet addicted to tobacco, the two women had
anticipated even this habit, and it had afforded them a pretext for
fitting up a little room in quite an Oriental fashion, with a profusion
of Persian carpets and a broad divan draped with Algerian stuffs brought
back by the General from his campaigns, while similar stuffs adorned
ceilings and walls, upon which might be seen all the weapons which three
generations of officers had left behind them. Some Egyptian sabres
recalled the first campaign in which Hubert Castel had served in
Buonaparte's retinue. The Captain in the African Army had been the owner
of these Arab weapons, and those memorials of the Crimea bore witness to
the presence of Sub-Lieutenant Liauran beneath the walls of Sebastopol.
On leaving the smoking-room you entered the study, the windows of which
were double, those inside being of coloured glass, so that on dull days
it was possible not to notice the aspect of the hour. The two women had
endured such frightful recurrences of melancholy on gloomy afternoons,
and beneath cruel skies! A large writing-table standing in the middle of
the room had in front of it one of those revolving arm-chairs which
allows the worker to turn round towards the fireplace without so much as
rising. A little Tronchin table presented its raised desk, if the young
man took a fancy to stand as he wrote, while a couch awaited his
idleness. A cottage piano stood in the corner, and a long, low bookshelf
ran along the back part of the room.
Perhaps the books with which the shelves of the last-named piece of
furniture were provided interpreted even better than all the other
details the anxious solicitude with which Madame Castel and Madame
Liauran had made every arrangement in order to remain mistresses of the
son during those difficult years which intervene between the twentieth
and the thirtieth. Having both, as soldiers' widows, preserved a
reverence for a life of action while, at the same time, their extreme
tenderness for Hubert rendered them incapable of enduring that he should
face it, they had found a compromise for their consciences in the dream
of a studious life for him. They ingenuously cherished a wish that he
should undertake a large and long work of military history, such as one
of the De Trans family had left behind him in the eighteenth century.
Was not this the best means for ensuring that he would remain a great
deal at home--that is to say, with them? Accordingly, thanks to Scilly's
advice, they had formed a tolerable collection of books suitable for
this project. Some religious works, a small number of novels, and, alone
among modern writers, the works of Lamartine completed the equipment of
the shelves.
It is right to say that in that corner of the world where no journal was
taken in, contemporary literature was completely unknown. The ideas of
the General and of the two women were identical on this point. And the
case was nearly the same in respect of the whole contemporary world as
it was in respect of literature. Astonishing conversations might have
been heard in that drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, in the course of
which the Count would explain to his friends that France was governed by
the delegates of the secret societies, with other political theories of
similar scope. The same causes always produce the same effects.
Precisely as happens in very small country towns, monotony of habit had
resulted, with the two widows, in monotony of thought. Feelings were
very deep and ideas very narrow in that old house the entrance gate of
which was opened but rarely. On such occasions the passer-by could see,
at the end of a court, a building on the pediment of which might be read
a Latin motto, engraved in former times in honour of Marshal de Créquy,
the first owner of the house: _Marti invicto atque indefesso_--to
unconquered and indefatigable Mars. The lofty windows of the first
storey and of the ground floor, the old colour of the stone, the
appropriate silence of the court, all harmonised with the characters of
the two residents, whose prejudices were infinite.
Madame Castel and her daughter believed in presentiments, double sight,
and somnambulists. They were persuaded that the Emperor Napoleon III.
had undertaken the Italian war in fulfilment of a carbonaro oath. Never
would these divinely good women have bestowed their friendship upon a
Protestant or an Israelite. The mere idea that there might be a
conscientious Freethinker would have disconcerted them as though they
had been told of the sanctity of a criminal. In short, even the General
thought them ingenuous. But, as it sometimes happens with officers
condemned to fleeting loves by their roving life and the timid feelings
hidden beneath their martial appearance Scilly was not well enough
acquainted with women to appreciate the reality of this ingenuousness or
the depth of the ignorance of evil in which the two Marie Alices lived.
He supposed that all virtuous women were similar, and he confounded all
others under the term of "queans." When his liver troubled him
excessively he would pronounce this word in a tone which gave grounds
for suspecting some bitter deception in his past life. But who among the
few people that he met at the house of "his two saints," as he called
Madame Castel and her daughter, dreamed of troubling themselves about
whether he had been deceived by some garrison adventuress or not?
Still lulled by the rolling of his carriage, the General continued to
resign himself to the memory-crisis through which he had been passing
since his departure from the Rue Vaneau, and which had caused him to
review, in a quarter of an hour, the entire existence of his friends.
Other faces also were evoked around these two forms, those, for
instance, of Madame de Trans, Madame Castel's first cousin, who lived in
the country for part of the year, and who used to come with her three
daughters, Yolande, Yseult and Ysabeau, to spend the winter at Paris.
These four ladies used to take up their abode in apartments in the Rue
de Monsieur, and their Parisian life consisted in hearing low mass at
seven o'clock in the morning in the private chapel of a convent situated
in the Rue de La Barouillère, in visiting other convents, or in busying
themselves in workrooms during the afternoon. They went to bed at about
half-past eight, after dining at noon and supping at six.
Twice a week "those De Trans ladies," as the General called them, spent
the evening with their cousins. On these occasions they returned to the
Rue de Monsieur at ten o'clock, and their servant used to come for them
with a parcel containing their pattens and with a lantern that they
might cross the courtyard of Madame Castel's house without danger. The
Countess de Trans and her three daughters had the sunburnt and freckled
faces of peasant women, dresses home-made by seamstresses chosen for
them by the nuns, parsimonious tastes written in the meanness
of their whole existence, and--a detail revealing their native
aristocracy--charming hands and delicious feet which could not be
disgraced by the ready-made boots purchased in a pious establishment in
the Rue de Sèvres.
The most singular contrast existed between these four women and George
Liauran, another cousin on the side of the second Marie Alice. He
represented all the fashions in the drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau. He
was a man of forty-five who had been launched into wealthy society with
a fortune that had at first been a moderate one but had increased by
clever speculations on the Bourse. He had his rooms in his club, where
he used to breakfast, and every evening a cover was laid for him in one
of the houses in which he was a familiar guest. He was small, thin, and
very brown. Whether or not he maintained the youth of his pointed beard
and very short hair by the artifice of a dye, was a question that had
long been debated among the three Demoiselles de Trans, who were
stupefied at the sight of George's superior appearance, the varnished
soles of his dress-shoes, the embroidered clocks of his silk socks, the
chased gold studs in his cuffs, the single pearl in his shirt front, by
the slightest knick-knacks, in fact, belonging to this man with the
shrewd lively eyes, whose toilet represented to them a life of thrilling
prodigality. It was agreed among them that he exercised a fatal
influence over Hubert.
Such was doubtless not Madame Liauran's opinion, for she had desired
George to act as a chaperon to the young man in the life of the world,
when she wished her son to cultivate their family relations. The noble
woman rewarded her cousin's lengthened attention by this mark of
confidence. He had come to the quiet house very regularly for years,
whether it was that the security of this affection was pleasing to him
amid the falsities of Parisian society, or that he had long conceived a
secret adoration for Marie Alice Liauran, such as the purest women
sometimes unconsciously inspire in misanthropes--for George had that
shade of pessimism which is to be met with in nearly all club-livers.
The nature of the character of this man, who was always inclined to
believe the worst of everything, was the object of an astonishment on
the part of the General that custom had failed to allay; but on this
evening he omitted to reflect upon it. The recollection of George only
served to heighten that of Hubert still more.
Irresistibly the worthy man came to recognise the obviousness of the
fact that his two friends could not be so cruelly downcast except on
account of their child. Yes; but why? This point of interrogation, which
summed up the whole of his reverie, was more present than ever to the
Count's mind as his dowager equipage stopped before his house. Another
carriage was standing on the other side of the gateway, and Scilly
thought that in it he could recognise the little brougham which Madame
Liauran had given to her son.
"Is that you, John?" he cried to the coachman through the rain.
"The Count, sir? . . . ." replied a voice which Scilly was startled to
recognise.
"Hubert is waiting for me within," he said to himself; and he crossed
the threshold of the door a prey to curiosity such as he had not
experienced for years.