is waiting for her, for it was she who brought me home; she is at the
Decaisne’s. Juliette will now be always tossed about between us; it is
she who will be the shipwrecked one. Besides, I do not want her! Her
grandmother has taken her, brought her up according to her ideas; let
her keep her, marry her, arrange her happiness according to her will;
it is not our place to meddle with it. The responsibility of it all
remains with you, who forgot your fatherly duty years ago.”
And my mother took me away, vanquished, feeling myself reduced to
powerlessness. And I was again wrapped up in the same shawl and
returned to Chauny, this time in a closed carriage, for the night was
dark and the rain fell in torrents.
My father wrote me a letter, which I had the misfortune to keep, and
which later occasioned one of the most sorrowful crises in my life,
which had already begun to number a good many.
“My beloved daughter,” wrote my father, “do not allow yourself to
be doomed to unhappiness. The man whom they wish you to marry is a
sceptic; he desires to unite the attraction of your person to his
own, to advance him in society, and to better a position to which he
aspires. He is not a man to love you, or whom you will ever love. They
cannot marry you without my consent, do not forget it. Should I be
obliged to lose forever what tranquillity remains to me, on account
of this, I will not sacrifice you. If you should let yourself be led
astray, and should ask my consent to this marriage, I should only have
to add the despair of my private experience to the hopelessness of my
public life.”
How shall I relate my struggles, which lasted for long months? They
can be imagined. My grandmother and my mother desired this marriage
for different, but equally selfish motives, which blinded their eyes.
The former wished not to lose me entirely, Monsieur Lamessine having
promised her that she should live with us during the winter, in Paris,
so soon as we should be settled there; my mother desired the match in
order to remove me from my father.
Poor father! He was often a prey to his wild fits of anger, and threw
himself again headlong into politics, making himself conspicuous,
compromising himself, thinking only of falling on some enemy, no matter
whom it might be, of giving battle, of fighting, and of escaping from
his present sufferings by other sufferings.
He succeeded, and his name soon figured at the head of a new list
of convicts to be sent from the Aisne department. When they came to
arrest him, in 1852, he was so seriously ill in bed that he could
not be removed. This delay gave my grandmother time to write to my
friend Charles, who, after having left Flocon, to rally himself to
Bonapartism, had become an influential man. He succeeded in having
my father’s name erased from the list of convicts, but implored my
grandmother to make him keep quiet, for he would not be able to save
him a second time, he wrote, “if his democratic-socialistic follies
pointed him out again as dangerous.”
Alas! when this letter reached grandmother my father had brain fever,
which endangered his life for a week. As soon as my grandfather heard
the news of his illness he hurried to Blérancourt, installed himself by
his son-in-law’s bedside, and by devoted care snatched him from death.
When my father was out of danger my mother and my grandmother dared not
refuse the poor convalescent his desire to see me again.
I went, but how sad we both were, and in what suspicion did we feel
ourselves held! Grandmother accompanied me there, and neither she nor
my mother would leave me alone with my father for a moment.
I said to him, before my two stern guardians: “Dear father, I think it
would be better, after all, for me to consent to this marriage, because
when I am married I shall be at liberty to ask you to come to me, and
to talk with you a little alone, heart to heart.”
“No, no!” he replied; “I would rather see you dead than delivered over
to certain unhappiness!”
And yet it was he who delivered me over to the unhappiness he foresaw.
In a moment of violent anger, which my mother had finally succeeded in
provoking, he signed a paper, which until then she had endeavoured in
vain to make him sign.
I felt myself abandoned even by my aunts, who, at the idea of having
me live for three years at Soissons, near to them, and then at Paris,
whence I should be glad to come to pass some months in the country,
told me that after having seen Monsieur Lamessine again, who had gone
several times to make them a visit, they approved of the marriage.
“Besides,” said aunt Constance, with her customary banter, “if you
should be unhappy and abandoned, my dear Juliette, Chivres is here to
give you asylum. If you should have a numerous family, Roussot alone
would become insufficient, and, to compensate you for your husband’s
absence, we would buy another donkey!”
XLI
MY MARRIAGE AND ITS RESULTS
I married Monsieur Lamessine. My father was not present at my wedding.
He confessed to me later that he was so unhappy on that day that he
wished to blow out his brains; but he thought, perhaps, I might have
need of his protection some day, and he resigned himself to living.
Alas! I ought to have claimed his protection from the very first hours
of my marriage, but I felt that if I spoke a word it would be a new
anguish for my father, whose fears it would have confirmed; to my
grandmother, whose scaffoldings of dreams it would have cast down, and
to my dear aunts, whose peace it would have disturbed. I did not say
a word until after my confinement, for which I went to Blérancourt,
and where I was, so to speak, forced to confidences by my father, who
divined all that I must have suffered.
When she knew herself a great-grandmother and that she could embrace
her granddaughter’s child, my grandmother hoped to extend the
agreement of living with me every winter at Paris to the house at
Soissons, which we were to inhabit for eighteen months longer.
One day, when she had come to see me, to complete the secret dowry, the
last installment of which she had engaged herself to pay only so soon
as we should be settled in Paris, but which she anticipated, she said
to my husband when breakfast was over:
“Do you know why I have brought such a large trunk?”
“Why, no, madame.”
“It is because I expect to pass the winter with you and Juliette.”
“Impossible, my dear madame.”
“What do you mean by impossible?”
“I made a mistake; I meant to say, you will never come.”
“Never, do you say?”
“You will never live in my house with your grandchild.”
“You are joking, monsieur.”
“No, I am speaking most seriously. You think Juliette is happy, she is
not; we agree in nothing, nor about anything. If you should be a third
party in our household, what would our unhappiness be then?”
“Is it true, my Juliette, that you are unhappy?” asked my grandmother.
“Yes,” I answered, choking with sobs, “I am as unhappy as one can
possibly be.”
My grandmother rose from her seat suddenly, but she was obliged to lean
against a chair to keep from falling. She tottered like a tree that is
being uprooted.
“But your promises?” she said to my husband.
“They were necessary, my dear madame,” he replied, “only until you had
finished keeping yours integrally.”
My grandmother opened the dining-room door without saying a word, took
her cloak from the hall, and left our house. I went up to my room to
put on my bonnet, and followed her. I did not know where to look for
her. A man had come to get her trunk, which I saw put on the diligence.
I learned later that a lady had taken a place for herself in it; that
she had left the village in a carriage and was to take the diligence
outside of the town. She had done likewise when she carried me off from
Verberie.
I could not leave my daughter, whom I was nursing. I returned, and
implored my husband to take the diligence, to rejoin my grandmother,
and bring her back to me.
“Ah! no, indeed!” he said to me; “it has gone off too well! No drama,
no quarrel. I am delighted.”
I could do nothing but give the driver of the diligence a letter for
my poor grandmother, in which I told her all my sorrow. I added: “I am
‘tied’ in my turn, and I ‘browse’; but I shall untie myself as soon as
I possibly can.”
And so my grandmother’s last and dearest romance ended cruelly. On
returning to Chauny she starved herself to death. Knowing she had but a
few days more to live, she sent for my father and asked him to pardon
her for the harm she had done to him and to me, in marrying me against
his wishes and mine.
My father forgave her, and implored her to do all that she could to
live (alas! had she wished it, there was no longer time!), saying that
I had need of all those who loved me, more than ever now.
Knowing I was nursing my child, she had not let me suspect anything
about her tragical determination; on the contrary, in each one of her
letters she reassured me, saying she did not take my husband’s words
seriously. I did not even imagine that she was ill.
One night, about ten o’clock, I had just put my daughter in her crib,
had returned to bed, and was about to go to sleep, when, by the light
of a night lamp that was always burning, I saw my grandmother come into
my room.
“Ah! grandmother, is it you?” I cried.
With a slow gesture, she put her hand up to her eyes. The sockets were
empty! I jumped out of bed and went toward her--she had disappeared!
I rushed into my husband’s study, where he was writing.
“My grandmother, my grandmother, where is she? I have just seen her,
with empty eyes, in my room!”
“You are crazy,” Monsieur Lamessine said; “your grandmother cannot be
here. Your mother writes me that she is ill, and begs me, on account of
your nursing, not to inform you of it.”
The next day I heard that my grandmother had died at the very hour she
had appeared to me.
* * * * *
When I began to believe in religion again, this apparition of my
grandmother was to me one of the strongest proofs of a hereafter.
The movement of her hand carried up to her eyes, whose sockets were
empty, seemed to me to signify: “Blindness is death!”
I had remained blind too long, and always in my dreams I saw my
grandmother again with the frightful gesture of her hand raised to her
empty eyes.
I have never seen her again with this gesture since I wrote my _Rêve
sur le Divin_, which, with my reborn soul, I dedicated to the newly
born soul of my granddaughter, Juliette. It was a book written with
deep feeling, the inspiration of which I believe to have come from my
beloved grandmother.
* * * * *
The day after this strange apparition I left for Chauny with my
daughter.
My mother, profoundly moved by her mother’s death and by the causes
which had determined it, received me with tenderness and with tears of
repentance. When my grandmother was dying, and when she implored my
father’s forgiveness, she had exacted from her daughter a promise that
she would at the same time ask her husband’s pardon for the harm she
had done by her jealousy.
I passed some sad but peaceful weeks with my parents. My grandfather
obtained my father’s and mother’s consent to come and live with them.
“It will not be for long,” he said to them; “for I can never live
without my dear scolder, and you will bury me before this year is
over.” He died eleven months after my grandmother.
From the day my grandmother left us, my father’s one thought was to
replace her in my life, and he bestowed a double affection upon me. He
encouraged me to work, aided me with his advice, and said to me:
“When your married life becomes even more intolerable to you than it is
now, your mother and I will dedicate our lives to you. We will follow
wherever you may lead us. Work, work, and become known. There is no
other way by which a woman can gain her liberty than by affirming her
personality.”
I worked while nursing and bringing up my daughter. I completed my
education, very much developed in certain matters, very insufficient in
others.
Then, one day, after some insignificant literary attempts, revolted at
the insults Proudhon had thrown at Daniel Stern and George Sand in his
book, _La Justice dans la Révolution_, I wrote my _Anti-Proudhonian
Ideas_, and my real literary life began, with the record of which I
shall some day continue these memoirs.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] This friend Charles was a professor in the boys’ boarding-school
opposite my grandparents’ house.
[B] My three aunts all lived till past eighty years of age. Anastasie,
the youngest, said to me in her last illness: “My niece, pray do not
defend me from death. I do not like your epoch.”
[C] The final syllable only is correct.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.