"Be easy about me, dear Camille, it is some time since I ceased to watch
the invalid, for the invalid has never before been so well; but I have
always kept up the practice of rising at day-break in the summer season,
and every morning I have several hours I can devote to the work he is
kindly permitting me to share with him. Just now he is himself sleeping
a good sound sleep, for he retires at ten o'clock, and I am allowed here
to do the same, and I often have precious intervals of freedom even in
the daytime. Our proximity to the baths of Évaux and the road to Vichy
brings us visitors at the very hours when in Paris the Marchioness used
to shut herself up; she says this disturbs and wearies her, and yet, all
the while, she is delighted! The great correspondence suffers under it,
but even the correspondence itself has diminished, since the marriage of
the Marquis was projected. This scheme so absorbs Madame de Villemer,
that she cannot help confiding it or hinting something about it to all
her old friends; after which she will reflect seriously, admitting the
imprudence of saying much about it, and that she ought not to rely on
the discretion of so many people; and then we throw into the fire the
letters she has just dictated. This it is that leads her to say so
often: 'Bah! let us stop writing, I would rather say nothing at all than
not to mention things that interest me.'
"When she has visitors she makes a sign that I may go and join the
Marquis, for she knows now that I am taking notes for him. Since his
illness is over, I thought there ought to be no mystery made about so
simple a thing, and she is quite willing to have me relieve her son from
any wearisome portions of his work. She is very curious to know what
this book so carefully concealed can possibly be; but there is no
danger, of my betraying anything, for I don't know a single word in it.
I only know that just now we are deep in the history of France, and more
especially in the age of Richelieu; but what I need not mention to any
one here is, that I anticipate a great divergence in opinion between the
son and the mother on a host of grave matters.
"Do not blame me for having taken on myself a double task, and for
having gained, as you put it, two masters in the place of one. With the
Marchioness the task is sacred, and I have an affectionate pleasure in
it; with her son the task is agreeable, and I put into it that kind of
veneration of which I have often told you. I enjoy the idea of having
contributed to his recovery, of having managed to take care of him
without making him impatient, of having gently persuaded him to live a
little more as people ought to live in order to be well. I have even
taken advantage of his passion for study by telling him that his genius
will feel the effects of disease, and that I have no faith in the
intellectual clearness of fever. You have no idea how good he has been
to me, how patiently he has taken rebuke, and how he has even let
himself be scolded by this young-lady sister of yours; how he has
thanked me for my interest in him, and submitted to all my
prescriptions. It has gone so far that at table, even, he consults me
with his eyes as to what he shall eat, and when we go out for a walk he
has no more mind of his own than a child as to the little journey which
the Duke and I insist on making him take. He has a charming disposition,
and every day I discover some new trait in his character. I did think he
was a little whimsical and decidedly obstinate; but, poor fellow! it was
the crisis that was threatening his life. He has, on the contrary, a
gentleness and evenness of temper which is beyond everything; and the
charm of familiar intercourse with him resembles nothing so much as the
beauty, of the waters flowing through our valley, always limpid, always
plentiful, borne along in a strong and even current, never ruffled or
capricious. And to follow out this comparison, I might say that his mind
has also flowery banks and oases of verdure where one can pause and
dream delightfully, for he is full of poetry; and I always wonder how he
has ever subjected the warmth of his imagination to the rigid demands of
history.
"What is more, he pretends that all this is a discovery of mine, and
that he is just beginning to perceive it himself. The other day we were
looking at the beautiful pastures full of sheep and goats in a ravine
crossing that of the Char. At the farther end of this sharp cut, there
is a casing of rugged rocks, and some of their notches rise so far above
the plateau that, in comparison with the lower level, it is really a
mountain; and these beautiful rocks of lilac-gray form a crest,
sufficiently imposing to conceal the flat country that lies behind, so
you cannot see from here the upper part of the plateau, and you might
imagine yourself in some nook of Switzerland. At least, this is what M.
de Villemer tells me, to console me for the way in which the Marchioness
scouts my admiration. 'Don't worry about that,' said he, 'and don't
think it necessary to have seen many sublime things in order to have the
conception and the sensation of sublimity. There is grandeur everywhere
for those who carry this faculty within themselves; it is not an
illusion which they cherish either; it is a revelation of what really
exists in nature in a manner more or less pronounced. For dull senses,
there must be coarse signs of the power and dimensions of things. This
is why many people who go to Scotland, looking for the pictures
described by Walter Scott, cannot find them, and pretend that the poet
has overpraised his country. His pictures are there, nevertheless, I am
very sure, and if you should go there, you would find them at once.'
"I confessed to him that real immensity tempted me greatly; that I often
saw, in dreams, inaccessible mountains and giddy abysses; that, before
an engraving representing the furious waterfalls in Sweden or the bergs
that stray from Arctic seas, I have been carried away with wild
imaginations of independence, and that there is no tale of distant
explorations with enough of suffering and danger in it to take away my
regret at not having shared them.
"'And yet,' said he, 'before a charming little landscape like this you
seemed happy and really satisfied a moment ago. Do you then really feel
more in need of emotions and surprises than of tenderness and safety?
See how beautiful it is, this stillness! How this hour of reflected
lights, barred across with lengthening shadows, this water, in spray
which seems caressing the sides of the rock, this motionless leafage
looking as if it were silently drinking in the gold of the last
sunbeams, how truly indeed is all this serene and thoughtful solemnity
the expression of the beautiful and good in nature! I never used to know
all this myself. It has not impressed me strongly until lately. I have
always been living in the midst of dust and death, or among
abstractions. I used, indeed, to dream over the pictures of history, the
phantasmagoria of the past. I have sometimes seen the fleet of Cleopatra
sailing to the verge of the horizon; in the silence of the night I have
thought I heard the warlike trumpets of Roncesvalles; but it was the
dominion of a dream, and the reality did not speak to me. But when I saw
you gazing at the horizon without saying a word, with an air of content
that was like nothing else in the world, I asked myself what could be
the secret of your joy; and, if I must tell you all, your selfish
patient was a little jealous of everything that charmed you. He set
himself perturbedly to work at gazing too, when he settled the point at
once; for he felt that he loved what you loved.'
"You understand perfectly, my dear little sister, that in talking to me
thus the Marquis told an audacious falsehood, for one can but see from
all his remarks, and his manner of making them, that he has the true
artist enthusiasm for nature, as well as for all else that is lovely;
but he is so grateful to me, and so full of honest kindliness, that he
misrepresents things in perfect good faith, and imagines himself
indebted to me for something new in his intellectual life."