Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
The Works of G.P.R. James, Esq.--Volume 16
https://books.google.com/books?id=dTYoAQAAIAAJ
(University of California, Davis)
2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
[Illustration: frontispiece]
THE WORKS
OF
G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.
REVISED AND CORRECTED BY THE AUTHOR.
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY PREFACE.
"D'autres auteurs l'ont encore plus avili, (le roman,) en y mêlant les
tableaux dégoutant du vice; et tandis que le premier avantage des
fictions est de rassembler autour de l'homme tout ce qui, dans la
nature, peut lui servir de leçon ou de modèle, on a imaginé qu'on
tirerait une utilité quelconque des peintures odieuses de mauvaises
moeurs; comme si elles pouvaient jamais; laisser le c[oe]ur qui les
repousse, dans une situation aussi pure que le c[oe]ur qui les aurait
toujours Ignorées. Mais un roman tel qu'on peut le concevoir, tel que
nous en avons quelques modèles, est une des plus belles productions de
l'esprit humain, une des plus influentes sur la morale des individus,
qui doit former ensuite les m[oe]urs publiques."--MADAME DE STAËL.
_Essai sur les Fictions_.
"Poca favilla gran flamma seconda:
Forse diretro a me, con miglior voci
Si pregherà, perchè Cirra risonda."
DANTE. _Paradiso_, Canto I.
VOL. XVI.
DE L'ORME.
LONDON:
PARRY AND CO., LEADENHALL STREET.
M DCCCXLVIII.
DE L'ORME.
BY
G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.
AUTHOR OF
"MARGARET GRAHAM,"
"THE LAST OF THE FAIRIES," ETC.
-------------------------------
LONDON:
PARRY AND CO., LEADENHALL STREET.
M DCCCXLVIII.
PREFACE
TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Romance writing, when rightly viewed and rightly treated, is of the
same nature as the teaching by parables of the eastern nations; and I
believe, when high objects are steadily kept in view and good
principles carefully inculcated, it may prove far more generally
beneficial than more severe forms of instruction.
The man who is already virtuous and wise, or who, at least, seeks
eagerly to be so, takes up the Essay or the Lecture, and reads therein
the sentiments ever present in his own heart. But while the same man
may find equal pleasure in the work of fiction addressed to the same
great ends, how many thousands are there who will open the pages of
the Novel or the Romance, but who would avoid anything less amusing to
their fancy? If, then, while we excite their imagination with pleasant
images, we can cause the latent seeds of virtue to germinate in their
hearts; if we can point out the consequences of errors, follies, and
crimes; if we can recall good feelings fleeting away, or crush bad
ones rising up under temptation,--and that we can do so with great
effect, may be safely asserted,--we can benefit, in the most essential
particular, a large body of our fellow-men; a much larger body, I
fear, than that which can be attracted by anything that does not wear
the form of amusement.
Such has been my conviction ever since I entered upon a career in
which the public has shown me such undeserved encouragement; and with
such a purpose, and for such an object, have I always written. In some
works I have striven alone to impress those general principles of
honour and virtue, and those high and elevated feelings, which do not
seem to me to be increasing in the world. In others, I have
endeavoured to advocate, without seeming too much to do so, some
particular principle, or to warn against some particular error. In the
following pages my purpose was to expose the evil consequences of an
ill-regulated spirit of enterprise and a love of adventure, and to
deter from errors, the magnitude of which I may have felt by sharing
in them.
To do so, it was necessary to choose as my subject the life of a young
man placed in circumstances of difficulty and temptation; and no
writer can ever hope to produce a good effect by painting man
otherwise than man is.
At the same time I have ever been convinced that no benefit can ensue
from drawing the mind of the reader through long scenes of vice and
guilt, for the sake of a short moral at the end; and in writing the
history of the Count de l'Orme, I determined to show, as was
absolutely necessary, that he was led by the love of adventure into
error nearly approaching to guilt: but to dwell upon his errors no
longer than was absolutely required; to point out, even while I
related them, that their consequences were terrible; and to make the
great bulk of the book display a life of regret, pain and difficulty,
consequent upon the fault I sought to reprehend. This I have done to
the best of my judgment, restricting all details of the error into
which the principal character of the book fell, to some ten or twelve
pages. Having read those pages again, after a lapse of many years,
with the deepest attention and consideration, I send them forth with
scarcely an alteration; being firmly convinced, that the mind which
can contract any evil from the terrible scene which they depict--a
scene which, I have every reason to believe, really occurred--must be
foul and corrupt ere it sits down to the perusal. One thing I
certainly know, that those pages were written in the spirit of purity,
and with the purpose of good; and I will never believe that such
feelings can generate, in the breast of others, likewise pure, aught
but their own likeness.
De l'Orme was first published in 1830, and was written while I was
residing in France. The incidents, however, had been collected and
arranged long before, and only required form and compression. For some
curious details regarding the battle of Sedan I was indebted to a
gentleman of that city, and I believe the facts of the famous revolt
of the Count of Soissons will be found historically correct, even to
very minute particulars.
DE L'ORME.
CHAPTER I.
I was born in the heart of Bearn, in the year 1619; and if the scenery
amongst which we first open our eyes, and from which we receive our
earliest impressions, could communicate its own peculiar character to
our minds, I should certainly have possessed a thousand great and
noble qualities, that might have taught me to play a very different
part from that which I have done, in the great tragic farce of human
life. Nevertheless, in contemplating the strange contrasts of scenery,
the gay, the sparkling, the grand, the gloomy, the sublime, wherein my
infant years were passed, I have often thought I saw a sort of picture
of my own fate, with its abrupt and rapid changes; and even in some
degree of my own character, or rather of my own mood, varying
continually through all the different shades of disposition, from the
lightest mirth to the most profound gloom, from the idlest
heedlessness to the most anxious thought.
However, it is not my own peculiar character that I sit down to
depict--that will be sufficiently displayed in the detail of my
adventures: but it is rather those strange and singular events which,
contrary to all probability, mingled me with great men, and with great
actions, and which, continually counteracting my own will, impelled me
ever on the very opposite course from that which I straggled to
pursue.
For many reasons, it is necessary to commence this narrative with
those early years, wherein the mind of man receives its first bias,
when the seeds of all future actions are sown in the heart, and when
causes, in themselves so trifling as almost to be imperceptible, chain
us to good or evil, to fortune or misfortune, for ever. The character
of man is like a piece of potter's clay, which, when fresh and new, is
easily fashioned according to the will of those into whose hands it
falls; but its form once given, and hardened, either by the slow
drying of time, or by its passage through the ardent furnace of the
world, men may break it to atoms, but never bend it again to another
mould.
Our parents, our teachers, our companions, all serve to modify our
dispositions. The very proximity of their faults, their failings, or
their virtues, leaves, as it were, an impress on the flexible mind of
infancy, which the steadiest reason can hardly do more than modify,
and years themselves can never erase. To the events of those early
years I owe many of my errors in life; and my faults and their
consequences are not without their moral: for in my history, as in
that of every other man, it will be found that punishment of some kind
never failed to tread fast upon the heels of each wrong action; and in
one instance, a few hours of indiscretion mingled a dark and fearful
current with the course of many an after year.
To begin, then, with the beginning:--I was, as I have said, born in
the heart of the little mountainous principality of Bearn, which,
stretching along the northern side of the Pyrenees, contains within
itself some of the most fertile and some of the most picturesque, some
of the sweetest and some of the grandest scenes that any part of
Europe can boast. The chain of my native mountains, interposing
between France and Spain, forms a gigantic wall whereby the unerring
hand of nature has marked the limits of either land; and although this
immense bulwark is, in itself, scarcely broken by any but very narrow
and difficult passes, yet the mountainous ridges which it sends off,
like enormous buttresses, into the plain country on each side, are
intersected by a number of wide and beautiful valleys, rich with all
the gifts of summer, and glowing with all the loveliness of bright
fertility.
One of the most striking, though perhaps not one of the most
extensive, of these valleys, is that which, running from east to west,
lies in a direct line between Bagneres de Bigorre and the little town
and castle of Lourdes.[1] Never have I seen, and certainly never shall
I now see, any other valley so sweet, so fair, so tranquil;--never,
one so bright in itself, or so surrounded by objects of grandeur and
magnificence. I need not say after this, that it was my native place.
The dwelling of my father, Roger De l'Orme, Count de Bigorre, was
perched up high upon the hill-side, about two miles from Lourdes, and
looked far over all the splendid scene below. The wide valley, with
its rich carpet of verdure, the river dashing in liquid diamonds
amidst the rocks and over the precipices; the long far windings of the
deep purple mountains, filling the mind with vague, but grand
imaginings; the dark majestic shadows of the pine forest that every
here and there were cast like a black mantle round the enormous limbs
of each giant hill; the long wavy perspective, of the passes towards
Cauteretz, and the Pont d'Espagne, with the icy Vigne Malle raising up
his frozen head, as if to dare the full power of the summer sun
beyond,--all was spread out to the eye, offering in one grand view a
thousand various sorts of loveliness.
I must be pardoned for dilating upon those sweet scenes of my early
childhood, whose very memory bestows a calm and placid joy, which I
have never found in any other spot, or in any other feeling; neither
in the gaiety and splendour of a court, the gratification of passion,
the hurry and energy of political intrigue, the excitement and triumph
of the battle field, the struggle of conflicting hosts, or the
maddening thrill of victory.--But for a moment, let me indulge, and
then I quit such memories for things and circumstances whose interest
is more easily communicable to the minds of others.
The château in which my eyes first opened to the light was little
inferior in size to the castle of Lourdes, and infinitely too large
for the small establishment of servants and retainers which my
father's reduced finances enabled him to maintain. Our diminished
household looked, within its enormous walls, like the shrunken form of
some careful old miser, insinuated into the wide and hanging garments
of his youth; and yet my excellent parent fondly insisted upon as much
pomp and ceremony as his own father had kept up with a hundred and
fifty retainers waiting in his hall. Still the trumpet sounded at the
hour of dinner, though the weak lungs of the broken-winded old _maître
d'hôtel_ produced but a cacophonous sound from the hollow brass: still
all the servants, who amounted to five, including the gardener, the
shepherd, and the cook, were drawn up at the foot of the staircase, in
unstarched ruffs and tarnished liveries of green and gold, while my
father, with slow and solemn pace, handed down to dinner Madame la
Comtesse; still would he talk of his vassals, and his seigneurial
rights, though his domain scarce covered five hundred acres of wood
and mountain, and vassals, God knows, he had but few. However, the
banners still hung in the hall; and it was impossible to gaze upon the
walls, the pinnacles, the towers, and the battlements of the old
castle, without attaching the idea of power and influence to the lord
of such a hold; so that it was not extraordinary he himself should, in
some particulars forget the decay of his house, and fancy himself as
great as his ancestors.
A thousand excellent qualities of the heart covered any little foibles
in my father's character. He was liberal to a fault; kind, with that
minute and discriminating benevolence which weighs every word ere it
be spoken, lest it should hurt the feelings of another; brave, to that
degree that scarcely believes in fear, yet at the same time so humane,
that his sympathy with others often proved the torture of his own
heart; but----
Oh! that in this world there should still be a _but_, to qualify
everything that is good and excellent!--but, still he had one fault
that served greatly to counteract all the high qualities which he
possessed. He was invincibly lazy in mind. He could endure nothing
that gave him trouble; and, though the natural quickness of his
disposition would lead him to purpose a thousand great undertakings,
yet long ere the time came for executing them, various little
obstacles and impediments had gradually worn down his resolution; or
else the trouble of thinking about one thing for long was too much for
him, and the enterprise dropped by its own weight. Had fortune brought
him great opportunities, no one would have seized them more willingly,
or used them to better or to nobler purposes; but fortune was to
seek--and he did nothing.
The wars of the League, in which his father had taken a considerable
part, had gradually lopped away branch after branch of our estates,
and even hewn deeply into the trunk; and my father was not a man,
either by active enterprise or by court intrigue, to mend the failing
fortunes of his family. On the contrary, after having served in two
campaigns, and distinguished himself in several battles, out of pure
weariness, he retired to our château of De l'Orme, where, being once
fixed in quiet, he passed the rest of his days, never having courage
to undertake a longer journey than to Pau or to Tarbes; and forming in
his solitude a multitude of fine and glorious schemes, which fell to
nothing almost in the same moment that they were erected: as we may
see a child build up, with a pack of cards, many a high and ingenious
structure, which the least breath of air will instantly reduce to the
same flat nonentities from which they were reared at the first.
My mother's character is soon told. It was all excellence; or if there
was, indeed, in its composition, one drop of that evil from which
human nature is probably never entirely free, it consisted in a touch
of family pride--and yet, while I write it, my heart reproaches me,
and says that it was not so. However, the reader shall judge by the
sequel; but if she had this fault, it was her only one, and all the
rest was virtue and gentleness. Restricted as were her means of
charity, still every one that came within the sphere of her influence
experienced her kindness, or partook of her bounty. Nor was her
charity alone the charity that gives; it was the charity that feels,
that excuses, that forgives.
A willing aid in all that was amiable and benevolent was to be found
in good Father Francis of Allurdi, the chaplain of the château. In his
young days they said he had been a soldier; and on some slight,
received from a world for which he was too good, he threw away the
corslet and took the gown, not with the feeling of a misanthrope, but
of a philanthropist. For many years he remained as cure at the little
village of Allurdi, in the Val d'Ossau; but his sight and his strength
both failing him, and the cure being an arduous one, he resigned it to
a younger man, (who, he thought, might better perform the duties of
the station,) and brought as gentle a heart and as pure a spirit as
ever rested in a mortal frame, to dwell with the two others I have
described in the Château de l'Orme.
It may be asked, if he too had his foible? Believe me, dear reader,
whoever thou art, that every one on this earth has some; nor was he
without one: and, strange as it may appear, his was superstition--I
say, strange as it may appear, for he was a man of a strong and
vigorous mind, calm, reflective, rational, without any of that hurried
and perturbed indistinctness of judgment which suffers imagination to
usurp the place of reason. But still he was superstitious to a great
degree, affording a striking instance of that union of opposite
qualities, which every one who takes the trouble of examining his own
bosom will find more or less exemplified in himself. His superstition,
however, grew in a mild and benevolent soil, and was, indeed, but as
one of those tender climbing plants which hang upon the ruined tower
or the shattered oak, and clothe them with a verdure not their own:
thus he fondly adhered to the imaginative tenets of ancient days fast
falling into decay. He peopled the air with spirits, and in his fancy
gave them visible shapes, and in some degree even corporeal qualities.
However, on an ardent and youthful mind like mine, such picturesque
superstitions were most likely to have effect; and so far, indeed, did
they influence me, that though reason in after-life exerted her power
to sweep them all away, imagination often rebelled, and clung fondly
to the delusion still.
Such as I have described them were the denizens of the Château de
l'Orme at the time of my birth, which was unmarked by any other
peculiarity than that of my mother having been married, and yet
childless, for more than eight years. The joy which the unexpected
birth of an heir produced, may easily be imagined, though little
indeed was the inheritance which I came to claim. All with one consent
gave themselves up to hope and to gladness; and more substantial signs
of rejoicing were displayed in the hall than the château had known for
many a day.
My father declared that I should infallibly retrieve the fortunes of
my house. Father Francis, with tears in his eyes, exclaimed that it
was evidently a blessing from Heaven; and even my mother discovered
that, though futurity was still misty and indistinct, there was now a
landmark to guide on hope across the wide ocean of the years to come.