the height of three feet, was hung with a varnished paper divided into
wide panels by wreaths of flowers and fruit; the windows had cambric
curtains trimmed with red, the buffets were old pieces by Boulle
himself, and the woodwork of the chairs, which were covered by hand-made
tapestry, was carved oak. The dinner, plentifully supplied, was not
luxurious; family silver without uniformity, Dresden china which was
not then in fashion, octagonal decanters, knives with agate handles, and
lacquered trays beneath the wine-bottles, were the chief features of the
table, but flowers adorned the porcelain vases and overhung the gilding
of their fluted edges. I delighted in these quaint old things. I thought
the Reveillon paper with its flowery garlands beautiful. The sweet
content that filled my sails hindered me from perceiving the obstacles
which a life so uniform, so unvarying in solitude of the country placed
between her and me. I was near her, sitting at her right hand, serving
her with wine. Yes, unhoped-for joy! I touched her dress, I ate her
bread. At the end of three hours my life had mingled with her life! That
terrible kiss had bound us to each other in a secret which inspired us
with mutual shame. A glorious self-abasement took possession of me. I
studied to please the count, I fondled the dogs, I would gladly have
gratified every desire of the children, I would have brought them hoops
and marbles and played horse with them; I was even provoked that
they did not already fasten upon me as a thing of their own. Love has
intuitions like those of genius; and I dimly perceived that gloom,
discontent, hostility would destroy my footing in that household.
The dinner passed with inward happiness on my part. Feeling that I was
there, under her roof, I gave no heed to her obvious coldness, nor to
the count’s indifference masked by his politeness. Love, like life,
has an adolescence during which period it suffices unto itself. I made
several stupid replies induced by the tumults of passion, but no one
perceived their cause, not even SHE, who knew nothing of love. The rest
of my visit was a dream, a dream which did not cease until by moonlight
on that warm and balmy night I recrossed the Indre, watching the white
visions that embellished meadows, shores, and hills, and listening to
the clear song, the matchless note, full of deep melancholy and uttered
only in still weather, of a tree-frog whose scientific name is unknown
to me. Since that solemn evening I have never heard it without infinite
delight. A sense came to me then of the marble wall against which
my feelings had hitherto dashed themselves. Would it be always so? I
fancied myself under some fatal spell; the unhappy events of my past
life rose up and struggled with the purely personal pleasure I had just
enjoyed. Before reaching Frapesle I turned to look at Clochegourde
and saw beneath its windows a little boat, called in Touraine a punt,
fastened to an ash-tree and swaying on the water. This punt belonged to
Monsieur de Mortsauf, who used it for fishing.
“Well,” said Monsieur de Chessel, when we were out of ear-shot. “I
needn’t ask if you found those shoulders; I must, however, congratulate
you on the reception Monsieur de Mortsauf gave you. The devil! you
stepped into his heart at once.”
These words followed by those I have already quoted to you raised my
spirits. I had not as yet said a word, and Monsieur de Chessel may have
attributed my silence to happiness.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“He never, to my knowledge, received any one so well.”
“I will admit that I am rather surprised myself,” I said, conscious of a
certain bitterness underlying my companion’s speech.
Though I was too inexpert in social matters to understand its cause, I
was much struck by the feeling Monsieur de Chessel betrayed. His real
name was Durand, but he had had the weakness to discard the name of
a worthy father, a merchant who had made a large fortune under
the Revolution. His wife was sole heiress of the Chessels, an old
parliamentary family under Henry IV., belonging to the middle classes,
as did most of the Parisian magistrates. Ambitious of higher flights
Monsieur de Chessel endeavored to smother the original Durand. He first
called himself Durand de Chessel, then D. de Chessel, and that made him
Monsieur de Chessel. Under the Restoration he entailed an estate with
the title of count in virtue of letters-patent from Louis XVIII. His
children reaped the fruits of his audacity without knowing what it cost
him in sarcastic comments. Parvenus are like monkeys, whose cleverness
they possess; we watch them climbing, we admire their agility, but
once at the summit we see only their absurd and contemptible parts. The
reverse side of my host’s character was made up of pettiness with the
addition of envy. The peerage and he were on diverging lines. To have an
ambition and gratify it shows merely the insolence of strength, but to
live below one’s avowed ambition is a constant source of ridicule
to petty minds. Monsieur de Chessel did not advance with the
straightforward step of a strong man. Twice elected deputy, twice
defeated; yesterday director-general, to-day nothing at all, not even
prefect, his successes and his defeats had injured his nature, and given
him the sourness of invalided ambition. Though a brave man and a witty
one and capable of great things, envy, which is the root of existence
in Touraine, the inhabitants of which employ their native genius in
jealousy of all things, injured him in upper social circles, where a
dissatisfied man, frowning at the success of others, slow at compliments
and ready at epigram, seldom succeeds. Had he sought less he might
perhaps have obtained more; but unhappily he had enough genuine
superiority to make him wish to advance in his own way.
At this particular time Monsieur de Chessel’s ambition had a second
dawn. Royalty smiled upon him, and he was now affecting the grand
manner. Still he was, I must say, most kind to me, and he pleased me for
the very simple reason that with him I had found peace and rest for the
first time. The interest, possibly very slight, which he showed in
my affairs, seemed to me, lonely and rejected as I was, an image of
paternal love. His hospitable care contrasted so strongly with the
neglect to which I was accustomed, that I felt a childlike gratitude
to the home where no fetters bound me and where I was welcomed and even
courted.
The owners of Frapesle are so associated with the dawn of my life’s
happiness that I mingle them in all those memories I love to revive.
Later, and more especially in connection with his letters-patent, I had
the pleasure of doing my host some service. Monsieur de Chessel enjoyed
his wealth with an ostentation that gave umbrage to certain of his
neighbors. He was able to vary and renew his fine horses and elegant
equipages; his wife dressed exquisitely; he received on a grand scale;
his servants were more numerous than his neighbors approved; for all of
which he was said to be aping princes. The Frapesle estate is immense.
Before such luxury as this the Comte de Mortsauf, with one family
cariole,--which in Touraine is something between a coach without springs
and a post-chaise,--forced by limited means to let or farm Clochegourde,
was Tourangean up to the time when royal favor restored the family to a
distinction possibly unlooked for. His greeting to me, the younger son
of a ruined family whose escutcheon dated back to the Crusades, was
intended to show contempt for the large fortune and to belittle the
possessions, the woods, the arable lands, the meadows, of a neighbor who
was not of noble birth. Monsieur de Chessel fully understood this. They
always met politely; but there was none of that daily intercourse or
that agreeable intimacy which ought to have existed between Clochegourde
and Frapesle, two estates separated only by the Indre, and whose
mistresses could have beckoned to each other from their windows.
Jealousy, however, was not the sole reason for the solitude in which the
Count de Mortsauf lived. His early education was that of the children
of great families,--an incomplete and superficial instruction as to
knowledge, but supplemented by the training of society, the habits of a
court life, and the exercise of important duties under the crown or in
eminent offices. Monsieur de Mortsauf had emigrated at the very
moment when the second stage of his education was about to begin, and
accordingly that training was lacking to him. He was one of those
who believed in the immediate restoration of the monarchy; with that
conviction in his mind, his exile was a long and miserable period of
idleness. When the army of Conde, which his courage led him to join with
the utmost devotion, was disbanded, he expected to find some other post
under the white flag, and never sought, like other emigrants, to take up
an industry. Perhaps he had not the sort of courage that could lay aside
his name and earn his living in the sweat of a toil he despised. His
hopes, daily postponed to the morrow, and possibly a scruple of honor,
kept him from offering his services to foreign powers. Trials undermined
his courage. Long tramps afoot on insufficient nourishment, and above
all, on hopes betrayed, injured his health and discouraged his mind. By
degrees he became utterly destitute. If to some men misery is a tonic,
on others it acts as a dissolvent; and the count was of the latter.
Reflecting on the life of this poor Touraine gentleman, tramping and
sleeping along the highroads of Hungary, sharing the mutton of Prince
Esterhazy’s shepherds, from whom the foot-worn traveller begged the food
he would not, as a gentleman, have accepted at the table of the master,
and refusing again and again to do service to the enemies of France, I
never found it in my heart to feel bitterness against him, even when I
saw him at his worst in after days. The natural gaiety of a Frenchman
and a Tourangean soon deserted him; he became morose, fell ill, and
was charitably cared for in some German hospital. His disease was an
inflammation of the mesenteric membrane, which is often fatal, and
is liable, even if cured, to change the constitution and produce
hypochondria. His love affairs, carefully buried out of sight and which
I alone discovered, were low-lived, and not only destroyed his health
but ruined his future.
After twelve years of great misery he made his way to France, under the
decree of the Emperor which permitted the return of the emigrants. As
the wretched wayfarer crossed the Rhine and saw the tower of Strasburg
against the evening sky, his strength gave way. “‘France! France!’ I
cried. ‘I see France!’” (he said to me) “as a child cries ‘Mother!’ when
it is hurt.” Born to wealth, he was now poor; made to command a regiment
or govern a province, he was now without authority and without a future;
constitutionally healthy and robust, he returned infirm and utterly worn
out. Without enough education to take part among men and affairs, now
broadened and enlarged by the march of events, necessarily without
influence of any kind, he lived despoiled of everything, of his moral
strength as well as his physical. Want of money made his name a burden.
His unalterable opinions, his antecedents with the army of Conde, his
trials, his recollections, his wasted health, gave him susceptibilities
which are but little spared in France, that land of jest and sarcasm.
Half dead he reached Maine, where, by some accident of the civil war,
the revolutionary government had forgotten to sell one of his farms of
considerable extent, which his farmer had held for him by giving out
that he himself was the owner of it.
When the Lenoncourt family, living at Givry, an estate not far from
this farm, heard of the arrival of the Comte de Mortsauf, the Duc de
Lenoncourt invited him to stay at Givry while a house was being prepared
for him. The Lenoncourt family were nobly generous to him, and with them
he remained some months, struggling to hide his sufferings during that
first period of rest. The Lenoncourts had themselves lost an immense
property. By birth Monsieur de Mortsauf was a suitable husband for their
daughter. Mademoiselle de Lenoncourt, instead of rejecting a marriage
with a feeble and worn-out man of thirty-five, seemed satisfied to
accept it. It gave her the opportunity of living with her aunt, the
Duchesse de Verneuil, sister of the Prince de Blamont-Chauvry, who was
like a mother to her.
Madame de Verneuil, the intimate friend of the Duchesse de Bourbon, was
a member of the devout society of which Monsieur Saint-Martin (born
in Touraine and called the Philosopher of Mystery) was the soul. The
disciples of this philosopher practised the virtues taught them by the
lofty doctrines of mystical illumination. These doctrines hold the key
to worlds divine; they explain existence by reincarnations through which
the human spirit rises to its sublime destiny; they liberate duty from
its legal degradation, enable the soul to meet the trials of life
with the unalterable serenity of the Quaker, ordain contempt for the
sufferings of this life, and inspire a fostering care of that angel
within us who allies us to the divine. It is stoicism with an immortal
future. Active prayer and pure love are the elements of this faith,
which is born of the Roman Church but returns to the Christianity of the
primitive faith. Mademoiselle de Lenoncourt remained, however, in the
Catholic communion, to which her aunt was equally bound. Cruelly tried
by revolutionary horrors, the Duchesse de Verneuil acquired in the
last years of her life a halo of passionate piety, which, to use the
phraseology of Saint-Martin, shed the light of celestial love and the
chrism of inward joy upon the soul of her cherished niece.
After the death of her aunt, Madame de Mortsauf received several visits
at Clochegourde from Saint-Martin, a man of peace and of virtuous
wisdom. It was at Clochegourde that he corrected his last books, printed
at Tours by Letourmy. Madame de Verneuil, wise with the wisdom of an old
woman who has known the stormy straits of life, gave Clochegourde to
the young wife for her married home; and with the grace of old age, so
perfect where it exists, the duchess yielded everything to her niece,
reserving for herself only one room above the one she had always
occupied, and which she now fitted up for the countess. Her sudden
death threw a gloom over the early days of the marriage, and connected
Clochegourde with ideas of sadness in the sensitive mind of the
bride. The first period of her settlement in Touraine was to Madame de
Mortsauf, I cannot say the happiest, but the least troubled of her life.
After the many trials of his exile, Monsieur de Mortsauf, taking comfort
in the thought of a secure future, had a certain recovery of mind; he
breathed anew in this sweet valley the intoxicating essence of revived
hope. Compelled to husband his means, he threw himself into agricultural
pursuits and began to find some happiness in life. But the birth of his
first child, Jacques, was a thunderbolt which ruined both the past and
the future. The doctor declared the child had not vitality enough to
live. The count concealed this sentence from the mother; but he sought
other advice, and received the same fatal answer, the truth of which
was confirmed at the subsequent birth of Madeleine. These events and a
certain inward consciousness of the cause of this disaster increased the
diseased tendencies of the man himself. His name doomed to extinction, a
pure and irreproachable young woman made miserable beside him and doomed
to the anguish of maternity without its joys--this uprising of his
former into his present life, with its growth of new sufferings, crushed
his spirit and completed its destruction.
The countess guessed the past from the present, and read the future.
Though nothing is so difficult as to make a man happy when he knows
himself to blame, she set herself to that task, which is worthy of an
angel. She became stoical. Descending into an abyss, whence she still
could see the sky, she devoted herself to the care of one man as
the sister of charity devotes herself to many. To reconcile him with
himself, she forgave him that for which he had no forgiveness. The count
grew miserly; she accepted the privations he imposed. Like all who have
known the world only to acquire its suspiciousness, he feared betrayal;
she lived in solitude and yielded without a murmur to his mistrust. With
a woman’s tact she made him will to do that which was right, till he
fancied the ideas were his own, and thus enjoyed in his own person the
honors of a superiority that was never his. After due experience of
married life, she came to the resolution of never leaving Clochegourde;
for she saw the hysterical tendencies of the count’s nature, and feared
the outbreaks which might be talked of in that gossipping and jealous
neighborhood to the injury of her children. Thus, thanks to her, no one
suspected Monsieur de Mortsauf’s real incapacity, for she wrapped
his ruins in a mantle of ivy. The fickle, not merely discontented but
embittered nature of the man found rest and ease in his wife; his secret
anguish was lessened by the balm she shed upon it.
This brief history is in part a summary of that forced from Monsieur de
Chessel by his inward vexation. His knowledge of the world enabled
him to penetrate several of the mysteries of Clochegourde. But the
prescience of love could not be misled by the sublime attitude with
which Madame de Mortsauf deceived the world. When alone in my little
bedroom, a sense of the full truth made me spring from my bed; I
could not bear to stay at Frapesle when I saw the lighted windows of
Clochegourde. I dressed, went softly down, and left the chateau by the
door of a tower at the foot of a winding stairway. The coolness of the
night calmed me. I crossed the Indre by the bridge at the Red Mill,
took the ever-blessed punt, and rowed in front of Clochegourde, where a
brilliant light was streaming from a window looking towards Azay.
Again I plunged into my old meditations; but they were now peaceful,
intermingled with the love-note of the nightingale and the solitary cry
of the sedge-warbler. Ideas glided like fairies through my mind, lifting
the black veil which had hidden till then the glorious future. Soul and
senses were alike charmed. With what passion my thoughts rose to her!
Again and again I cried, with the repetition of a madman, “Will she be
mine?” During the preceding days the universe had enlarged to me, but
now in a single night I found its centre. On her my will and my ambition
henceforth fastened; I desired to be all in all to her, that I might
heal and fill her lacerated heart.
Beautiful was that night beneath her windows, amid the murmur of waters
rippling through the sluices, broken only by a voice that told the hours
from the clock-tower of Sache. During those hours of darkness bathed in
light, when this sidereal flower illumined my existence, I betrothed to
her my soul with the faith of the poor Castilian knight whom we laugh at
in the pages of Cervantes,--a faith, nevertheless, with which all love
begins.
At the first gleam of day, the first note of the waking birds, I fled
back among the trees of Frapesle and reached the house; no one had seen
me, no one suspected by absence, and I slept soundly until the bell rang
for breakfast. When the meal was over I went down, in spite of the heat,
to the meadow-lands for another sight of the Indre and its isles, the
valley and its slopes, of which I seemed so passionate an admirer. But
once there, thanks to a swiftness of foot like that of a loose horse, I
returned to my punt, the willows, and Clochegourde. All was silent and
palpitating, as a landscape is at midday in summer. The still foliage
lay sharply defined on the blue of the sky; the insects that live by
light, the dragon-flies, the cantharides, were flying among the reeds
and the ash-trees; cattle chewed the cud in the shade, the ruddy earth
of the vineyards glowed, the adders glided up and down the banks. What a
change in the sparkling and coquettish landscape while I slept! I sprang
suddenly from the boat and ran up the road which went round Clochegourde
for I fancied that I saw the count coming out. I was not mistaken; he
was walking beside the hedge, evidently making for a gate on the road to
Azay which followed the bank of the river.
“How are you this morning, Monsieur le comte?”
He looked at me pleasantly, not being used to hear himself thus
addressed.
“Quite well,” he answered. “You must love the country, to be rambling
about in this heat!”
“I was sent here to live in the open air.”
“Then what do you say to coming with me to see them cut my rye?”
“Gladly,” I replied. “I’ll own to you that my ignorance is past belief;
I don’t know rye from wheat, nor a poplar from an aspen; I know nothing
of farming, nor of the various methods of cultivating the soil.”
“Well, come and learn,” he cried gaily, returning upon his steps. “Come
in by the little gate above.”
The count walked back along the hedge, he being within it and I without.
“You will learn nothing from Monsieur de Chessel,” he remarked; “he is
altogether too fine a gentleman to do more than receive the reports of
his bailiff.”
The count then showed me his yards and the farm buildings, the
pleasure-grounds, orchards, vineyards, and kitchen garden, until we
finally came to the long alley of acacias and ailanthus beside the
river, at the end of which I saw Madame de Mortsauf sitting on a bench,
with her children. A woman is very lovely under the light and quivering
shade of such foliage. Surprised, perhaps, at my prompt visit, she did
not move, knowing very well that we should go to her. The count made me
admire the view of the valley, which at this point is totally different
from that seen from the heights above. Here I might have thought myself
in a corner of Switzerland. The meadows, furrowed with little brooks
which flow into the Indre, can be seen to their full extent till lost in
the misty distance. Towards Montbazon the eye ranges over a vast green
plain; in all other directions it is stopped by hills, by masses of
trees, and rocks. We quickened our steps as we approached Madame de
Mortsauf, who suddenly dropped the book in which Madeleine was reading
to her and took Jacques upon her knees, in the paroxysms of a violent
cough.
“What’s the matter?” cried the count, turning livid.
“A sore throat,” answered the mother, who seemed not to see me; “but it
is nothing serious.”
She was holding the child by the head and body, and her eyes seemed to
shed two rays of life into the poor frail creature.
“You are so extraordinarily imprudent,” said the count, sharply; “you
expose him to the river damps and let him sit on a stone bench.”
“Why, papa, the stone is burning hot,” cried Madeleine.
“They were suffocating higher up,” said the countess.
“Women always want to prove they are right,” said the count, turning to
me.
To avoid agreeing or disagreeing with him by word or look I watched
Jacques, who complained of his throat. His mother carried him away, but
as she did so she heard her husband say:--
“When they have brought such sickly children into the world they ought
to learn how to take care of them.”
Words that were cruelly unjust; but his self-love drove him to defend
himself at the expense of his wife. The countess hurried up the steps
and across the portico, and I saw her disappear through the glass door.
Monsieur de Mortsauf seated himself on the bench, his head bowed in
gloomy silence. My position became annoying; he neither spoke nor looked
at me. Farewell to the walk he had proposed, in the course of which I
had hoped to fathom him. I hardly remember a more unpleasant moment.
Ought I to go away, or should I not go? How many painful thoughts must
have arisen in his mind, to make him forget to follow Jacques and learn
how he was! At last however he rose abruptly and came towards me. We
both turned and looked at the smiling valley.
“We will put off our walk to another day, Monsieur le comte,” I said
gently.
“No, let us go,” he replied. “Unfortunately, I am accustomed to such
scenes--I, who would give my life without the slightest regret to save
that of the child.”
“Jacques is better, my dear; he has gone to sleep,” said a golden voice.
Madame de Mortsauf suddenly appeared at the end of the path. She came
forward, without bitterness or ill-will, and bowed to me.
“I am glad to see that you like Clochegourde,” she said.
“My dear, should you like me to ride over and fetch Monsieur Deslandes?”
said the count, as if wishing her to forgive his injustice.
“Don’t be worried,” she said. “Jacques did not sleep last night, that’s
all. The child is very nervous; he had a bad dream, and I told him
stories all night to keep him quiet. His cough is purely nervous; I have
stilled it with a lozenge, and he has gone to sleep.”
“Poor woman!” said her husband, taking her hand in his and giving her a
tearful look, “I knew nothing of it.”
“Why should you be troubled when there is no occasion?” she replied.
“Now go and attend to the rye. You know if you are not there the men
will let the gleaners of the other villages get into the field before
the sheaves are carried away.”
“I am going to take a first lesson in agriculture, madame,” I said to
her.
“You have a very good master,” she replied, motioning towards the count,
whose mouth screwed itself into that smile of satisfaction which is
vulgarly termed a “bouche en coeur.”
Two months later I learned she had passed that night in great anxiety,
fearing that her son had the croup; while I was in the boat, rocked by
thoughts of love, imagined that she might see me from her window adoring
the gleam of the candle which was then lighting a forehead furrowed by
fears! The croup prevailed at Tours, and was often fatal. When we were
outside the gate, the count said in a voice of emotion, “Madame de
Mortsauf is an angel!” The words staggered me. As yet I knew but little
of the family, and the natural conscience of a young soul made me
exclaim inwardly: “What right have I to trouble this perfect peace?”
Glad to find a listener in a young man over whom he could lord it so
easily, the count talked to me of the future which the return of the
Bourbons would secure to France. We had a desultory conversation, in
which I listened to much childish nonsense which positively amazed
me. He was ignorant of facts susceptible of proof that might be called
geometric; he feared persons of education; he rejected superiority,
and scoffed, perhaps with some reason, at progress. I discovered in his
nature a number of sensitive fibres which it required the utmost caution
not to wound; so that a conversation with him of any length was a
positive strain upon the mind. When I had, as it were, felt of his
defects, I conformed to them with the same suppleness that his wife
showed in soothing him. Later in life I should certainly have made him
angry, but now, humble as a child, supposing that I knew nothing and
believing that men in their prime knew all, I was genuinely amazed at
the results obtained at Clochegourde by this patient agriculturist. I
listened admiringly to his plans; and with an involuntary flattery
which won his good-will, I envied him the estate and its outlook--a
terrestrial paradise, I called it, far superior to Frapesle.
“Frapesle,” I said, “is a massive piece of plate, but Clochegourde is a
jewel-case of gems,”--a speech which he often quoted, giving credit to
its author.
“Before we came here,” he said, “it was desolation itself.”
I was all ears when he told of his seed-fields and nurseries. New to
country life, I besieged him with questions about prices, means of
preparing and working the soil, etc., and he seemed glad to answer all
in detail.
“What in the world do they teach you in your colleges?” he exclaimed at
last in astonishment.
On this first day the count said to his wife when he reached home,
“Monsieur Felix is a charming young man.”
That evening I wrote to my mother and asked her to send my clothes and
linen, saying that I should remain at Frapesle. Ignorant of the great
revolution which was just taking place, and not perceiving the influence
it was to have upon my fate, I expected to return to Paris to resume
my legal studies. The Law School did not open till the first week in
November; meantime I had two months and a half before me.
The first part of my stay, while I studied to understand the count,
was a period of painful impressions to me. I found him a man of extreme
irascibility without adequate cause; hasty in action in hazardous cases
to a degree that alarmed me. Sometimes he showed glimpses of the brave
gentleman of Conde’s army, parabolic flashes of will such as may, in
times of emergency, tear through politics like bomb-shells, and may
also, by virtue of honesty and courage, make a man condemned to live
buried on his property an Elbee, a Bonchamp, or a Charette. In presence
of certain ideas his nostril contracted, his forehead cleared, and his
eyes shot lightnings, which were soon quenched. Sometimes I feared he
might detect the language of my eyes and kill me. I was young then
and merely tender. Will, that force that alters men so strangely,
had scarcely dawned within me. My passionate desires shook me with an
emotion that was like the throes of fear. Death I feared not, but I
would not die until I knew the happiness of mutual love--But how tell
of what I felt! I was a prey to perplexity; I hoped for some fortunate
chance; I watched; I made the children love me; I tried to identify
myself with the family.
Little by little the count restrained himself less in my presence. I
came to know his sudden outbreaks of temper, his deep and ceaseless
melancholy, his flashes of brutality, his bitter, cutting complaints,
his cold hatreds, his impulses of latent madness, his childish moans,
his cries of a man’s despair, his unexpected fury. The moral nature
differs from the physical nature inasmuch as nothing is absolute in it.
The force of effects is in direct proportion to the characters or the
ideas which are grouped around some fact. My position at Clochegourde,
my future life, depended on this one eccentric will.
I cannot describe to you the distress that filled my soul (as quick in
those days to expand as to contract), whenever I entered Clochegourde,
and asked myself, “How will he receive me?” With what anxiety of heart
I saw the clouds collecting on that stormy brow. I lived in a perpetual
“qui-vive.” I fell under the dominion of that man; and the sufferings I
endured taught me to understand those of Madame de Mortsauf. We began
by exchanging looks of comprehension; tried by the same fire, how many
discoveries I made during those first forty days!--of actual bitterness,
of tacit joys, of hopes alternately submerged and buoyant. One evening I
found her pensively watching a sunset which reddened the summits with so
ravishing a glow that it was impossible not to listen to that voice of
the eternal Song of Songs by which Nature herself bids all her creatures
love. Did the lost illusions of her girlhood return to her? Did
the woman suffer from an inward comparison? I fancied I perceived a
desolation in her attitude that was favorable to my first appeal, and I
said, “Some days are hard to bear.”
“You read my soul,” she answered; “but how have you done so?”
“We touch at many points,” I replied. “Surely we belong to the small
number of human beings born to the highest joys and the deepest sorrows;
whose feeling qualities vibrate in unison and echo each other inwardly;
whose sensitive natures are in harmony with the principle of things.
Put such beings among surroundings where all is discord and they suffer
horribly, just as their happiness mounts to exaltation when they meet
ideas, or feelings, or other beings who are congenial to them. But
there is still a third condition, where sorrows are known only to souls
affected by the same distress; in this alone is the highest fraternal
comprehension. It may happen that such souls find no outlet either
for good or evil. Then the organ within us endowed with expression and
motion is exercised in a void, expends its passion without an
object, utters sounds without melody, and cries that are lost in
solitude,--terrible defeat of a soul which revolts against the inutility
of nothingness. These are struggles in which our strength oozes away
without restraint, as blood from an inward wound. The sensibilities
flow to waste and the result is a horrible weakening of the soul; an
indescribable melancholy for which the confessional itself has no ears.
Have I not expressed our mutual sufferings?”
She shuddered, and then without removing her eyes from the setting sun,
she said, “How is it that, young as you are, you know these things? Were
you once a woman?”
“Ah!” I replied, “my childhood was like a long illness--”
“I hear Madeleine coughing,” she cried, leaving me abruptly.
The countess showed no displeasure at my constant visits, and for two
reasons. In the first place she was pure as a child, and her thoughts
wandered into no forbidden regions; in the next I amused the count and
made a sop for that lion without claws or mane. I found an excuse for
my visits which seemed plausible to every one. Monsieur de Mortsauf
proposed to teach me backgammon, and I accepted; as I did so the
countess was betrayed into a look of compassion, which seemed to say,
“You are flinging yourself into the jaws of the lion.” If I did not
understand this at the time, three days had not passed before I knew
what I had undertaken. My patience, which nothing exhausts, the fruit
of my miserable childhood, ripened under this last trial. The count
was delighted when he could jeer at me for not putting in practice the
principles or the rules he had explained; if I reflected before I played
he complained of my slowness; if I played fast he was angry because
I hurried him; if I forgot to mark my points he declared, making his
profit out of the mistake, that I was always too rapid. It was like
the tyranny of a schoolmaster, the despotism of the rod, of which I can
really give you no idea unless I compare myself to Epictetus under the
yoke of a malicious child. When we played for money his winnings gave
him the meanest and most abject delight.
A word from his wife was enough to console me, and it frequently
recalled him to a sense of politeness and good-breeding. But before
long I fell into the furnace of an unexpected misery. My money was
disappearing under these losses. Though the count was always present
during my visits until I left the house, which was sometimes very late,
I cherished the hope of finding some moment when I might say a word
that would reach my idol’s heart; but to obtain that moment, for which
I watched and waited with a hunter’s painful patience, I was forced to
continue these weary games, during which my feelings were lacerated and
my money lost. Still, there were moments when we were silent, she and
I, looking at the sunlight on the meadows, the clouds in a gray sky, the
misty hills, or the quivering of the moon on the sandbanks of the river;
saying only, “Night is beautiful!”
“Night is woman, madame.”
“What tranquillity!”
“Yes, no one can be absolutely wretched here.”
Then she would return to her embroidery frame. I came at last to hear
the inward beatings of an affection which sought its object. But the
fact remained--without money, farewell to these evenings. I wrote to my
mother to send me some. She scolded me and sent only enough to last a
week. Where could I get more? My life depended on it. Thus it happened
that in the dawn of my first great happiness I found the same sufferings
that assailed me elsewhere; but in Paris, at college, at school I evaded
them by abstinence; there my privations were negative, at Frapesle they
were active; so active that I was possessed by the impulse to theft, by
visions of crime, furious desperations which rend the soul and must
be subdued under pain of losing our self-respect. The memory of what
I suffered through my mother’s parsimony taught me that indulgence
for young men which one who has stood upon the brink of the abyss and
measured its depths, without falling into them, must inevitably feel.
Though my own rectitude was strengthened by those moments when life
opened and let me see the rocks and quicksands beneath the surface, I
have never known that terrible thing called human justice draw its blade
through the throat of a criminal without saying to myself: “Penal laws
are made by men who have never known misery.”
At this crisis I happened to find a treatise on backgammon in Monsieur
de Chessel’s library, and I studied it. My host was kind enough to give
me a few lessons; less harshly taught by the count I made good progress
and applied the rules and calculations I knew by heart. Within a few
days I was able to beat Monsieur de Mortsauf; but no sooner had I
done so and won his money for the first time than his temper became
intolerable; his eyes glittered like those of tigers, his face
shrivelled, his brows knit as I never saw brows knit before or since.
His complainings were those of a fretful child. Sometimes he flung
down the dice, quivered with rage, bit the dice-box, and said insulting
things to me. Such violence, however, came to an end. When I had
acquired enough mastery of the game I played it to suit me; I so managed
that we were nearly equal up to the last moment; I allowed him to win
the first half and made matters even during the last half. The end of
the world would have surprised him less than the rapid superiority of
his pupil; but he never admitted it. The unvarying result of our games
was a topic of discourse on which he fastened.
“My poor head,” he would say, “is fatigued; you manage to win the last
of the game because by that time I lose my skill.”
The countess, who knew backgammon, understood my manoeuvres from the
first, and gave me those mute thanks which swell the heart of a young
man; she granted me the same look she gave to her children. From that
ever-blessed evening she always looked at me when she spoke. I cannot
explain to you the condition I was in when I left her. My soul had
annihilated my body; it weighed nothing; I did not walk, I flew. That
look I carried within me; it bathed me with light just as her last
words, “Adieu, monsieur,” still sounded in my soul with the harmonies of
“O filii, o filioe” in the paschal choir. I was born into a new life,
I was something to her! I slept on purple and fine linen. Flames darted
before my closed eyelids, chasing each other in the darkness like
threads of fire in the ashes of burned paper. In my dreams her voice
became, though I cannot describe it, palpable, an atmosphere of light
and fragrance wrapping me, a melody enfolding my spirit. On the morrow
her greeting expressed the fulness of feelings that remained unuttered,
and from that moment I was initiated into the secrets of her voice.
That day was to be one of the most decisive of my life. After dinner we
walked on the heights across a barren plain where no herbage grew;
the ground was stony, arid, and without vegetable soil of any kind;
nevertheless a few scrub oaks and thorny bushes straggled there, and in
place of grass, a carpet of crimped mosses, illuminated by the setting
sun and so dry that our feet slipped upon it. I held Madeleine by the
hand to keep her up. Madame de Mortsauf was leading Jacques. The count,
who was in front, suddenly turned round and striking the earth with his
cane said to me in a dreadful tone: “Such is my life!--but before I knew
you,” he added with a look of penitence at his wife. The reparation
was tardy, for the countess had turned pale; what woman would not have
staggered as she did under the blow?
“But what delightful scenes are wafted here, and what a view of the
sunset!” I cried. “For my part I should like to own this barren moor; I
fancy there may be treasures if we dig for them. But its greatest wealth
is that of being near you. Who would not pay a great cost for such a
view?--all harmony to the eye, with that winding river where the soul
may bathe among the ash-trees and the alders. See the difference
of taste! To you this spot of earth is a barren waste; to me, it is
paradise.”
She thanked me with a look.
“Bucolics!” exclaimed the count, with a bitter look. “This is no life
for a man who bears your name.” Then he suddenly changed his tone--“The
bells!” he cried, “don’t you hear the bells of Azay? I hear them
ringing.”
Madame de Mortsauf gave me a frightened look. Madeleine clung to my
hand.
“Suppose we play a game of backgammon?” I said. “Let us go back; the
rattle of the dice will drown the sound of the bells.”
We returned to Clochegourde, conversing by fits and starts. Once in the
salon an indefinable uncertainty and dread took possession of us. The
count flung himself into an armchair, absorbed in reverie, which his
wife, who knew the symptoms of his malady and could foresee an outbreak,
was careful not to interrupt. I also kept silence. As she gave me no
hint to leave, perhaps she thought backgammon might divert the count’s
mind and quiet those fatal nervous susceptibilities, the excitements of
which were killing him. Nothing was ever harder than to make him play
that game, which, however, he had a great desire to play. Like a pretty
woman, he always required to be coaxed, entreated, forced, so that he
might not seem the obliged person. If by chance, being interested in the
conversation, I forgot to propose it, he grew sulky, bitter, insulting,
and spoiled the talk by contradicting everything. If, warned by his
ill-humor, I suggested a game, he would dally and demur. “In the first
place, it is too late,” he would say; “besides, I don’t care for it.”
Then followed a series of affectations like those of women, which often
leave you in ignorance of their real wishes.
On this occasion I pretended a wild gaiety to induce him to play. He
complained of giddiness which hindered him from calculating; his brain,
he said, was squeezed into a vice; he heard noises, he was choking; and
thereupon he sighed heavily. At last, however, he consented to the
game. Madame de Mortsauf left us to put the children to bed and lead the
household in family prayers. All went well during her absence; I allowed
Monsieur de Mortsauf to win, and his delight seemed to put him beside
himself. This sudden change from a gloom that led him to make the
darkest predictions to the wild joy of a drunken man, expressed in a
crazy laugh and without any adequate motive, distressed and alarmed me.
I had never seen him in quite so marked a paroxysm. Our intimacy had
borne fruits in the fact that he no longer restrained himself before me.
Day by day he had endeavored to bring me under his tyranny, and obtain
fresh food, as it were, for his evil temper; for it really seems as
though moral diseases were creatures with appetites and instincts,
seeking to enlarge the boundaries of their empire as a landowner seeks
to increase his domain.
Presently the countess came down, and sat close to the backgammon table,
apparently for better light on her embroidery, though the anxiety which
led her to place her frame was ill-concealed. A piece of fatal ill-luck
which I could not prevent changed the count’s face; from gaiety it
fell to gloom, from purple it became yellow, and his eyes rolled.
Then followed worse ill-luck, which I could neither avert nor repair.
Monsieur de Mortsauf made a fatal throw which decided the game.
Instantly he sprang up, flung the table at me and the lamp on the floor,
struck the chimney-piece with his fist and jumped, for I cannot say
he walked, about the room. The torrent of insults, imprecations, and
incoherent words which rushed from his lips would have made an observer
think of the old tales of satanic possession in the Middle Ages. Imagine
my position!
“Go into the garden,” said the countess, pressing my hand.
I left the room before the count could notice my disappearance. On the
terrace, where I slowly walked about, I heard his shouts and then his
moans from the bedroom which adjoined the dining-room. Also I heard at
intervals through that tempest of sound the voice of an angel, which
rose like the song of a nightingale as the rain ceases. I walked about
under the acacias in the loveliest night of the month of August, waiting
for the countess to join me. I knew she would come; her gesture promised
it. For several days an explanation seemed to float between us; a word
would suffice to send it gushing from the spring, overfull, in our
souls. What timidity had thus far delayed a perfect understanding
between us? Perhaps she loved, as I did, these quiverings of the spirit
which resembled emotions of fear and numbed the sensibilities while we
held our life unuttered within us, hesitating to unveil its secrets
with the modesty of the young girl before the husband she loves. An
hour passed. I was sitting on the brick balustrade when the sound of
her footsteps blending with the undulating ripple of her flowing gown
stirred the calm air of the night. These are sensations to which the
heart suffices not.
“Monsieur de Mortsauf is sleeping,” she said. “When he is thus I give
him an infusion of poppies, a cup of water in which a few poppies have
been steeped; the attacks are so infrequent that this simple remedy
never loses its effect--Monsieur,” she continued, changing her tone and
using the most persuasive inflexion of her voice, “this most unfortunate
accident has revealed to you a secret which has hitherto been sedulously
kept; promise me to bury the recollection of that scene. Do this for my
sake, I beg of you. I don’t ask you to swear it; give me your word of
honor and I shall be content.”
“Need I give it to you?” I said. “Do we not understand each other?”
“You must not judge unfavorably of Monsieur de Mortsauf; you see the
effects of his many sufferings under the emigration,” she went on.
“To-morrow he will entirely forget all that he has said and done; you
will find him kind and excellent as ever.”
“Do not seek to excuse him, madame,” I replied. “I will do all you wish.
I would fling myself into the Indre at this moment if I could restore
Monsieur de Mortsauf’s health and ensure you a happy life. The only
thing I cannot change is my opinion. I can give you my life, but not
my convictions; I can pay no heed to what he says, but can I hinder him
from saying it? No, in my opinion Monsieur de Mortsauf is--”
“I understand you,” she said, hastily interrupting me; “you are right.
The count is as nervous as a fashionable woman,” she added, as if to
conceal the idea of madness by softening the word. “But he is only so
at intervals, once a year, when the weather is very hot. Ah, what evils
have resulted from the emigration! How many fine lives ruined! He would
have been, I am sure of it, a great soldier, an honor to his country--”
“I know,” I said, interrupting in my turn to let her see that it was
useless to attempt to deceive me.
She stopped, laid one hand lightly on my brow, and looked at me. “Who
has sent you here,” she said, “into this home? Has God sent me help, a
true friendship to support me?” She paused, then added, as she laid her
hand firmly upon mine, “For you are good and generous--” She raised her
eyes to heaven, as if to invoke some invisible testimony to confirm her
thought, and then let them rest upon me. Electrified by the look, which
cast a soul into my soul, I was guilty, judging by social laws, of a
want of tact, though in certain natures such indelicacy really means a
brave desire to meet danger, to avert a blow, to arrest an evil before
it happens; oftener still, an abrupt call upon a heart, a blow given to
learn if it resounds in unison with ours. Many thoughts rose like gleams
within my mind and bade me wash out the stain that blotted my conscience
at this moment when I was seeking a complete understanding.
“Before we say more,” I said in a voice shaken by the throbbings of
my heart, which could be heard in the deep silence that surrounded us,
“suffer me to purify one memory of the past.”
“Hush!” she said quickly, touching my lips with a finger which she
instantly removed. She looked at me haughtily, with the glance of a
woman who knows herself too exalted for insult to reach her. “Be silent;
I know of what you are about to speak,--the first, the last, the only
outrage ever offered to me. Never speak to me of that ball. If as a
Christian I have forgiven you, as a woman I still suffer from your act.”
“You are more pitiless than God himself,” I said, forcing back the tears
that came into my eyes.
“I ought to be so, I am more feeble,” she replied.
“But,” I continued with the persistence of a child, “listen to me now if
only for the first, the last, the only time in your life.”
“Speak, then,” she said; “speak, or you will think I dare not hear you.”
Feeling that this was the turning moment of our lives, I spoke to her in
the tone that commands attention; I told her that all women whom I had
ever seen were nothing to me; but when I met her, I, whose life was
studious, whose nature was not bold, I had been, as it were, possessed
by a frenzy that no one who once felt it could condemn; that never heart
of man had been so filled with the passion which no being can resist,
which conquers all things, even death--
“And contempt?” she asked, stopping me.
“Did you despise me?” I exclaimed.
“Let us say no more on this subject,” she replied.
“No, let me say all!” I replied, in the excitement of my intolerable
pain. “It concerns my life, my whole being, my inward self; it contains
a secret you must know or I must die in despair. It also concerns you,
who, unawares, are the lady in whose hand is the crown promised to the
victor in the tournament!”
Then I related to her my childhood and youth, not as I have told it to
you, judged from a distance, but in the language of a young man whose
wounds are still bleeding. My voice was like the axe of a woodsman
in the forest. At every word the dead years fell with echoing sound,
bristling with their anguish like branches robbed of their foliage. I
described to her in feverish language many cruel details which I have
here spared you. I spread before her the treasure of my radiant hopes,
the virgin gold of my desires, the whole of a burning heart kept alive
beneath the snow of these Alps, piled higher and higher by perpetual
winter. When, bowed down by the weight of these remembered sufferings,
related as with the live coal of Isaiah, I awaited the reply of the
woman who listened with a bowed head, she illumined the darkness with
a look, she quickened the worlds terrestrial and divine with a single
sentence.
“We have had the same childhood!” she said, turning to me a face on
which the halo of the martyrs shone.
After a pause, in which our souls were wedded in the one consoling
thought, “I am not alone in suffering,” the countess told me, in the
voice she kept for her little ones, how unwelcome she was as a girl when
sons were wanted. She showed me how her troubles as a daughter bound to
her mother’s side differed from those of a boy cast out upon the world
of school and college life. My desolate neglect seemed to me a paradise
compared to that contact with a millstone under which her soul was
ground until the day when her good aunt, her true mother, had saved her
from this misery, the ever-recurring pain of which she now related
to me; misery caused sometimes by incessant faultfinding, always
intolerable to high-strung natures which do not shrink before death
itself but die beneath the sword of Damocles; sometimes by the crushing
of generous impulses beneath an icy hand, by the cold rebuffal of her
kisses, by a stern command of silence, first imposed and then as often
blamed; by inward tears that dared not flow but stayed within the heart;
in short, by all the bitterness and tyranny of convent rule, hidden
to the eyes of the world under the appearance of an exalted motherly
devotion. She gratified her mother’s vanity before strangers, but
she dearly paid in private for this homage. When, believing that by
obedience and gentleness she had softened her mother’s heart, she opened
hers, the tyrant only armed herself with the girl’s confidence. No spy
was ever more traitorous and base. All the pleasures of girlhood, even
her fete days, were dearly purchased, for she was scolded for her gaiety
as much as for her faults. No teaching and no training for her position
had been given in love, always with sarcastic irony. She was not angry
against her mother; in fact she blamed herself for feeling more terror
than love for her. “Perhaps,” she said, dear angel, “these severities
were needful; they had certainly prepared her for her present life.” As
I listened it seemed to me that the harp of Job, from which I had drawn
such savage sounds, now touched by the Christian fingers gave forth the
litanies of the Virgin at the foot of the cross.
“We lived in the same sphere before we met in this,” I said; “you coming
from the east, I from the west.”
She shook her head with a gesture of despair.
“To you the east, to me the west,” she replied. “You will live happy, I
must die of pain. Life is what we make of it, and mine is made forever.
No power can break the heavy chain to which a woman is fastened by this
ring of gold--the emblem of a wife’s purity.”
We knew we were twins of one womb; she never dreamed of a
half-confidence between brothers of the same blood. After a short sigh,
natural to pure hearts when they first open to each other, she told me
of her first married life, her deceptions and disillusions, the rebirth
of her childhood’s misery. Like me, she had suffered under trifles;
mighty to souls whose limpid substance quivers to the least shock, as
a lake quivers on the surface and to its utmost depths when a stone is
flung into it. When she married she possessed some girlish savings; a
little gold, the fruit of happy hours and repressed fancies. These, in
a moment when they were needed, she gave to her husband, not telling him
they were gifts and savings of her own. He took no account of them, and
never regarded himself her debtor. She did not even obtain the glance
of thanks that would have paid for all. Ah! how she went from trial to
trial! Monsieur de Mortsauf habitually neglected to give her money for
the household. When, after a struggle with her timidity, she asked him
for it, he seemed surprised and never once spared her the mortification
of petitioning for necessities. What terror filled her mind when the
real nature of the ruined man’s disease was revealed to her, and
she quailed under the first outbreak of his mad anger! What bitter
reflections she had made before she brought herself to admit that her
husband was a wreck! What horrible calamities had come of her bearing
children! What anguish she felt at the sight of those infants born
almost dead! With what courage had she said in her heart: “I will
breathe the breath of life into them; I will bear them anew day by day!”
Then conceive the bitterness of finding her greatest obstacle in the
heart and hand from which a wife should draw her greatest succor! She
saw the untold disaster that threatened him. As each difficulty was
conquered, new deserts opened before her, until the day when she
thoroughly understood her husband’s condition, the constitution of her
children, and the character of the neighborhood in which she lived;
a day when (like the child taken by Napoleon from a tender home) she
taught her feet to trample through mud and snow, she trained her nerves
to bullets and all her being to the passive obedience of a soldier.
These things, of which I here make a summary, she told me in all their
dark extent, with every piteous detail of conjugal battles lost and
fruitless struggles.
“You would have to live here many months,” she said, in conclusion, “to
understand what difficulties I have met with in improving Clochegourde;
what persuasions I have had to use to make him do a thing which was most
important to his interests. You cannot imagine the childish glee he has
shown when anything that I advised was not at once successful. All that
turned out well he claimed for himself. Yes, I need an infinite patience
to bear his complaints when I am half-exhausted in the effort to amuse
his weary hours, to sweeten his life and smooth the paths which he
himself has strewn with stones. The reward he gives me is that awful
cry: ‘Let me die, life is a burden to me!’ When visitors are here and he
enjoys them, he forgets his gloom and is courteous and polite. You ask
me why he cannot be so to his family. I cannot explain that want of
loyalty in a man who is truly chivalrous. He is quite capable of riding
at full speed to Paris to buy me a set of ornaments, as he did the other
day before the ball. Miserly in his household, he would be lavish upon
me if I wished it. I would it were reversed; I need nothing for myself,
but the wants of the household are many. In my strong desire to make him
happy, and not reflecting that I might be a mother, I began my married
life by letting him treat me as a victim, I, who at that time by using a
few caresses could have led him like a child--but I was unable to play a
part I should have thought disgraceful. Now, however, the welfare of my
family requires me to be as calm and stern as the figure of Justice--and
yet, I too have a heart that overflows with tenderness.”
“But why,” I said, “do you not use this great influence to master him
and govern him?”
“If it concerned myself only I should not attempt either to overcome the
dogged silence with which for days together he meets my arguments,
nor to answer his irrational remarks, his childish reasons. I have no
courage against weakness, any more than I have against childhood;
they may strike me as they will, I cannot resist. Perhaps I might meet
strength with strength, but I am powerless against those I pity. If I
were required to coerce Madeleine in some matter that would save her
life, I should die with her. Pity relaxes all my fibres and unstrings
my nerves. So it is that the violent shocks of the last ten years have
broken me down; my feelings, so often battered, are numb at times;
nothing can revive them; even the courage with which I once faced my
troubles begins to fail me. Yes, sometimes I am beaten. For want of
rest--I mean repose--and sea-baths by which to recover my nervous
strength, I shall perish. Monsieur de Mortsauf will have killed me, and
he will die of my death.”
“Why not leave Clochegourde for a few months? Surely you could take your
children and go to the seashore.”
“In the first place, Monsieur de Mortsauf would think he were lost if I
left him. Though he will not admit his condition he is well aware of it.
He is both sane and mad, two natures in one man, a contradiction which
explains many an irrational action. Besides this, he would have good
reason for objecting. Nothing would go right here if I were absent. You
may have seen in me the mother of a family watchful to protect her young
from the hawk that is hovering over them; a weighty task, indeed, but
harder still are the cares imposed upon me by Monsieur de Mortsauf,
whose constant cry, as he follows me about is, ‘Where is Madame?’ I
am Jacques’ tutor and Madeleine’s governess; but that is not all, I am
bailiff and steward too. You will understand what that means when you
come to see, as you will, that the working of an estate in these parts
is the most fatiguing of all employments. We get small returns in money;
the farms are cultivated on shares, a system which needs the closest
supervision. We are obliged ourselves to sell our own produce, our
cattle and harvests of all kinds. Our competitors in the markets are our
own farmers, who meet consumers in the wine-shops and determine
prices by selling first. I should weary you if I explained the many
difficulties of agriculture in this region. No matter what care I give
to it, I cannot always prevent our tenants from putting our manure upon
their ground, I cannot be ever on the watch lest they take advantage
of us in the division of the crops; neither can I always know the
exact moment when sales should be made. So, if you think of Monsieur de
Mortsauf’s defective memory, and the difficulty you have seen me have in
persuading him to attend to business, you can understand the burden that
is on my shoulders, and the impossibility of my laying it down for a
single day. If I were absent we should be ruined. No one would obey
Monsieur de Mortsauf. In the first place his orders are conflicting;
then no one likes him; he finds incessant fault, and he is very
domineering. Moreover, like all men of feeble mind, he listens too
readily to his inferiors. If I left the house not a servant would be in
it in a week’s time. So you see I am attached to Clochegourde as those
leaden finals are to our roof. I have no reserves with you. The whole
country-side is still ignorant of the secrets of this house, but
you know them, you have seen them. Say nothing but what is kind and
friendly, and you shall have my esteem--my gratitude,” she added in a
softer voice. “On those terms you are welcome at Clochegourde, where you
will find friends.”
“Ah!” I exclaimed, “I see that I have never really suffered, while
you--”
“No, no!” she exclaimed, with a smile, that smile of all resigned women
which might melt a granite rock. “Do not be astonished at my frank
confidence; it shows you life as it is, not as your imagination pictures
it. We all have our defects and our good qualities. If I had married a
spendthrift he would have ruined me. If I had given myself to an ardent
and pleasure-loving young man, perhaps I could not have retained him;
he might have left me, and I should have died of jealousy. For I
am jealous!” she said, in a tone of excitement, which was like the
thunderclap of a passing storm. “But Monsieur de Mortsauf loves me
as much as he is capable of loving; all that his heart contains of
affection he pours at my feet, like the Magdalen’s cup of ointment.
Believe me, a life of love is an exception to the laws of this earth;
all flowers fade; great joys and emotions have a morrow of evil--if
a morrow at all. Real life is a life of anguish; its image is in that
nettle growing there at the foot of the wall,--no sun can reach it and
it keeps green. Yet, here, as in parts of the North, there are smiles in
the sky, few to be sure, but they compensate for many a grief.
Moreover, women who are naturally mothers live and love far more through
sacrifices than through pleasures. Here I draw upon myself the storms I
fear may break upon my children or my people; and in doing so I feel
a something I cannot explain, which gives me secret courage. The
resignation of the night carries me through the day that follows.
God does not leave me comfortless. Time was when the condition of my
children filled me with despair; to-day as they advance in life they
grow healthier and stronger. And then, after all, our home is improved
and beautified, our means are improving also. Who knows but Monsieur de
Mortsauf’s old age may be a blessing to me? Ah, believe me! those
who stand before the Great Judge with palms in their hands, leading
comforted to Him the beings who cursed their lives, they, they have
turned their sorrows into joy. If my sufferings bring about the
happiness of my family, are they sufferings at all?”
“Yes,” I said, “they are; but they were necessary, as mine have been, to
make us understand the true flavor of the fruit that has ripened on our
rocks. Now, surely, we shall taste it together; surely we may admire its
wonders, the sweetness of affection it has poured into our souls,
that inward sap which revives the searing leaves--Good God! do you not
understand me?” I cried, falling into the mystical language to which our
religious training had accustomed us. “See the paths by which we
have approached each other; what magnet led us through that ocean of
bitterness to these springs of running water, flowing at the foot of
those hills above the shining sands and between their green and flowery
meadows? Have we not followed the same star? We stand before the cradle
of a divine child whose joyous carol will renew the world for us, teach
us through happiness a love of life, give to our nights their long-lost
sleep, and to the days their gladness. What hand is this that year by
year has tied new cords between us? Are we not more than brother and
sister? That which heaven has joined we must not keep asunder. The
sufferings you reveal are the seeds scattered by the sower for the
harvest already ripening in the sunshine. Shall we not gather it sheaf
by sheaf? What strength is in me that I dare address you thus! Answer,
or I will never again recross that river!”
“You have spared me the word _love_,” she said, in a stern voice, “but
you have spoken of a sentiment of which I know nothing and which is not
permitted to me. You are a child; and again I pardon you, but for the
last time. Endeavor to understand, Monsieur, that my heart is, as it
were, intoxicated with motherhood. I love Monsieur de Mortsauf neither
from social duty nor from a calculated desire to win eternal blessings,
but from an irresistible feeling which fastens all the fibres of my
heart upon him. Was my marriage a mistake? My sympathy for misfortune
led to it. It is the part of women to heal the woes caused by the march
of events, to comfort those who rush into the breach and return wounded.
How shall I make you understand me? I have felt a selfish pleasure in
seeing that you amused him; is not that pure motherhood? Did I not make
you see by what I owned just now, the _three_ children to whom I am
bound, to whom I shall never fail, on whom I strive to shed a healing
dew and the light of my own soul without withdrawing or adulterating a
single particle? Do not embitter the mother’s milk! though as a wife I
am invulnerable, you must never again speak thus to me. If you do not
respect this command, simple as it is, the door of this house will
be closed to you. I believed in pure friendship, in a voluntary
brotherhood, more real, I thought, than the brotherhood of blood. I
was mistaken. I wanted a friend who was not a judge, a friend who would
listen to me in those moments of weakness when reproof is killing, a
sacred friend from whom I should have nothing to fear. Youth is noble,
truthful, capable of sacrifice, disinterested; seeing your persistency
in coming to us, I believed, yes, I will admit that I believed in some
divine purpose; I thought I should find a soul that would be mine, as
the priest is the soul of all; a heart in which to pour my troubles
when they deluged mine, a friend to hear my cries when if I continued
to smother them they would strangle me. Could I but have this friend,
my life, so precious to these children, might be prolonged until Jacques
had grown to manhood. But that is selfish! The Laura of Petrarch cannot
be lived again. I must die at my post, like a soldier, friendless. My
confessor is harsh, austere, and--my aunt is dead.”
Two large tears filled her eyes, gleamed in the moonlight, and rolled
down her cheeks; but I stretched my hand in time to catch them, and I
drank them with an avidity excited by her words, by the thought of
those ten years of secret woe, of wasted feelings, of constant care, of
ceaseless dread--years of the lofty heroism of her sex. She looked at me
with gentle stupefaction.
“It is the first communion of love,” I said. “Yes, I am now a sharer of
your sorrows. I am united to your soul as our souls are united to Christ
in the sacrament. To love, even without hope, is happiness. Ah! what
woman on earth could give me a joy equal to that of receiving your
tears! I accept the contract which must end in suffering to myself. I
give myself to you with no ulterior thought. I will be to you that which
you will me to be--”
She stopped me with a motion of her hand, and said in her deep voice, “I
consent to this agreement if you will promise never to tighten the bonds
which bind us together.”
“Yes,” I said; “but the less you grant the more evidence of possession I
ought to have.”
“You begin by distrusting me,” she replied, with an expression of
melancholy doubt.
“No, I speak from pure happiness. Listen; give me a name by which no one
calls you; a name to be ours only, like the feeling which unites us.”
“That is much to ask,” she said, “but I will show you that I am not
petty. Monsieur de Mortsauf calls me Blanche. One only person, the one I
have most loved, my dear aunt, called me Henriette. I will be Henriette
once more, to you.”
I took her hand and kissed it. She left it in mine with the trustfulness
that makes a woman so far superior to men; a trustfulness that shames
us. She was leaning on the brick balustrade and gazing at the river.
“Are you not unwise, my friend, to rush at a bound to the extremes of
friendship? You have drained the cup, offered in all sincerity, at a
draught. It is true that a real feeling is never piecemeal; it must be
whole, or it does not exist. Monsieur de Mortsauf,” she added after a
short silence, “is above all things loyal and brave. Perhaps for my
sake you will forget what he said to you to-day; if he has forgotten
it to-morrow, I will myself tell him what occurred. Do not come to
Clochegourde for a few days; he will respect you more if you do not.
On Sunday, after church, he will go to you. I know him; he will wish to
undo the wrong he did, and he will like you all the better for treating
him as a man who is responsible for his words and actions.”
“Five days without seeing you, without hearing your voice!”
“Do not put such warmth into your manner of speaking to me,” she said.
We walked twice round the terrace in silence. Then she said, in a tone
of command which proved to me that she had taken possession of my soul,
“It is late; we will part.”
I wished to kiss her hand; she hesitated, then gave it to me, and said
in a voice of entreaty: “Never take it unless I give it to you; leave me
my freedom; if not, I shall be simply a thing of yours, and that ought
not to be.”
“Adieu,” I said.
I went out by the little gate of the lower terrace, which she opened for
me. Just as she was about to close it she opened it again and offered me
her hand, saying: “You have been truly good to me this evening; you have
comforted my whole future; take it, my friend, take it.”
I kissed her hand again and again, and when I raised my eyes I saw the
tears in hers. She returned to the upper terrace and I watched her for
a moment from the meadow. When I was on the road to Frapesle I again saw
her white robe shimmering in a moonbeam; then, a few moments later, a
light was in her bedroom.
“Oh, my Henriette!” I cried, “to you I pledge the purest love that ever
shone upon this earth.”
I turned at every step as I regained Frapesle. Ineffable contentment
filled my mind. A way was open for the devotion that swells in all
youthful hearts and which in mine had been so long inert. Like the
priest who by one solemn step enters a new life, my vows were taken; I
was consecrated. A simple “Yes” had bound me to keep my love within my
soul and never to abuse our friendship by leading this woman step by
step to love. All noble feelings were awakened within me, and I heard
the murmur of their voices. Before confining myself within the narrow
walls of a room, I stopped beneath the azure heavens sown with stars,
I listened to the ring-dove plaints of my own heart, I heard again the
simple tones of that ingenuous confidence, I gathered in the air the
emanations of that soul which henceforth must ever seek me. How grand
that woman seemed to me, with her absolute forgetfulness of self, her
religion of mercy to wounded hearts, feeble or suffering, her declared
allegiance to her legal yoke. She was there, serene upon her pyre of
saint and martyr. I adored her face as it shone to me in the darkness.
Suddenly I fancied I perceived a meaning in her words, a mysterious
significance which made her to my eyes sublime. Perhaps she longed that
I should be to her what she was to the little world around her. Perhaps
she sought to draw from me her strength and consolation, putting me thus
within her sphere, her equal, or perhaps above her. The stars, say
some bold builders of the universe, communicate to each other light and
motion. This thought lifted me to ethereal regions. I entered once more
the heaven of my former visions; I found a meaning for the miseries of
my childhood in the illimitable happiness to which they had led me.
Spirits quenched by tears, hearts misunderstood, saintly Clarissa
Harlowes forgotten or ignored, children neglected, exiles innocent of
wrong, all ye who enter life through barren ways, on whom men’s faces
everywhere look coldly, to whom ears close and hearts are shut, cease
your complaints! You alone can know the infinitude of joy held in that
moment when one heart opens to you, one ear listens, one look answers
yours. A single day effaces all past evil. Sorrow, despondency, despair,
and melancholy, passed but not forgotten, are links by which the soul
then fastens to its mate. Woman falls heir to all our past, our sighs,
our lost illusions, and gives them back to us ennobled; she explains
those former griefs as payment claimed by destiny for joys eternal,
which she brings to us on the day our souls are wedded. The angels alone
can utter the new name by which that sacred love is called, and none but
women, dear martyrs, truly know what Madame de Mortsauf now became to
me--to me, poor and desolate.