This scene took place on a Tuesday. I waited until Sunday and did not
cross the river. During those five days great events were happening at
Clochegourde. The count received his brevet as general of brigade, the
cross of Saint Louis, and a pension of four thousand francs. The Duc
de Lenoncourt-Givry, made peer of France, recovered possession of two
forests, resumed his place at court, and his wife regained all her
unsold property, which had been made part of the imperial crown lands.
The Comtesse de Mortsauf thus became an heiress. Her mother had arrived
at Clochegourde, bringing her a hundred thousand francs economized at
Givry, the amount of her dowry, still unpaid and never asked for by the
count in spite of his poverty. In all such matters of external life the
conduct of this man was proudly disinterested. Adding to this sum his
own few savings he was able to buy two neighboring estates, which would
yield him some nine thousand francs a year. His son would of course
succeed to the grandfather’s peerage, and the count now saw his way to
entail the estate upon him without injury to Madeleine, for whom the Duc
de Lenoncourt would no doubt assist in promoting a good marriage.
These arrangements and this new happiness shed some balm upon the
count’s sore mind. The presence of the Duchesse de Lenoncourt at
Clochegourde was a great event to the neighborhood. I reflected gloomily
that she was a great lady, and the thought made me conscious of the
spirit of caste in the daughter which the nobility of her sentiments
had hitherto hidden from me. Who was I--poor, insignificant, and with
no future but my courage and my faculties? I did not then think of the
consequences of the Restoration either for me or for others. On Sunday
morning, from the private chapel where I sat with Monsieur and Madame
de Chessel and the Abbe de Quelus, I cast an eager glance at another
lateral chapel occupied by the duchess and her daughter, the count and
his children. The large straw hat which hid my idol from me did not
tremble, and this unconsciousness of my presence seemed to bind me
to her more than all the past. This noble Henriette de Lenoncourt, my
Henriette, whose life I longed to garland, was praying earnestly; faith
gave to her figure an abandonment, a prosternation, the attitude of some
religious statue, which moved me to the soul.
According to village custom, vespers were said soon after mass. Coming
out of church Madame de Chessel naturally proposed to her neighbors to
pass the intermediate time at Frapesle instead of crossing the Indre and
the meadows twice in the great heat. The offer was accepted. Monsieur de
Chessel gave his arm to the duchess, Madame de Chessel took that of the
count. I offered mine to the countess, and felt, for the first time,
that beautiful arm against my side. As we walked from the church to
Frapesle by the woods of Sache, where the light, filtering down through
the foliage, made those pretty patterns on the path which seem like
painted silk, such sensations of pride, such ideas took possession of me
that my heart beat violently.
“What is the matter?” she said, after walking a little way in a silence
I dared not break. “Your heart beats too fast--”
“I have heard of your good fortune,” I replied, “and, like all others
who love truly, I am beset with vague fears. Will your new dignities
change you and lessen your friendship?”
“Change me!” she said; “oh, fie! Another such idea and I shall--not
despise you, but forget you forever.”
I looked at her with an ecstasy which should have been contagious.
“We profit by the new laws which we have neither brought about nor
demanded,” she said; “but we are neither place-hunters nor beggars;
besides, as you know very well, neither Monsieur de Mortsauf nor I can
leave Clochegourde. By my advice he has declined the command to which
his rank entitled him at the Maison Rouge. We are quite content that my
father should have the place. This forced modesty,” she added with some
bitterness, “has already been of service to our son. The king, to whose
household my father is appointed, said very graciously that he
would show Jacques the favor we were not willing to accept. Jacques’
education, which must now be thought of, is already being discussed.
He will be the representative of two houses, the Lenoncourt and the
Mortsauf families. I can have no ambition except for him, and therefore
my anxieties seem to have increased. Not only must Jacques live, but
he must be made worthy of his name; two necessities which, as you know,
conflict. And then, later, what friend will keep him safe for me in
Paris, where all things are pitfalls for the soul and dangers for the
body? My friend,” she said, in a broken voice, “who could not see upon
your brow and in your eyes that you are one who will inhabit heights?
Be some day the guardian and sponsor of our boy. Go to Paris; if your
father and brother will not second you, our family, above all my mother,
who has a genius for the management of life, will help you. Profit by
our influence; you will never be without support in whatever career you
choose; put the strength of your desires into a noble ambition--”
“I understand you,” I said, interrupting her; “ambition is to be my
mistress. I have no need of that to be wholly yours. No, I will not be
rewarded for my obedience here by receiving favors there. I will go;
I will make my own way; I will rise alone. From you I would accept
everything, from others nothing.”
“Child!” she murmured, ill-concealing a smile of pleasure.
“Besides, I have taken my vows,” I went on. “Thinking over our situation
I am resolved to bind myself to you by ties that never can be broken.”
She trembled slightly and stopped short to look at me.
“What do you mean?” she asked, letting the couples who preceded us walk
on, and keeping the children at her side.
“This,” I said; “but first tell me frankly how you wish me to love you.”
“Love me as my aunt loved me; I gave you her rights when I permitted you
to call me by the name which she chose for her own among my others.”
“Then I am to love without hope and with an absolute devotion. Well,
yes; I will do for you what some men do for God. I shall feel that you
have asked it. I will enter a seminary and make myself a priest, and
then I will educate your son. Jacques shall be myself in his own form;
political conceptions, thoughts, energy, patience, I will give him all.
In that way I shall live near to you, and my love, enclosed in religion
as a silver image in a crystal shrine, can never be suspected of evil.
You will not have to fear the undisciplined passions which grasp a man
and by which already I have allowed myself to be vanquished. I will
consume my own being in the flame, and I will love you with a purified
love.”
She turned pale and said, hurrying her words: “Felix, do not put
yourself in bonds that might prove an obstacle to our happiness. I
should die of grief for having caused a suicide like that. Child, do you
think despairing love a life’s vocation? Wait for life’s trials before
you judge of life; I command it. Marry neither the Church nor a woman;
marry not at all,--I forbid it. Remain free. You are twenty-one years
old--My God! can I have mistaken him? I thought two months sufficed to
know some souls.”
“What hope have you?” I cried, with fire in my eyes.
“My friend, accept our help, rise in life, make your way and your
fortune and you shall know my hope. And,” she added, as if she were
whispering a secret, “never release the hand you are holding at this
moment.”
She bent to my ear as she said these words which proved her deep
solicitude for my future.
“Madeleine!” I exclaimed “never!”
We were close to a wooden gate which opened into the park of Frapesle;
I still seem to see its ruined posts overgrown with climbing plants and
briers and mosses. Suddenly an idea, that of the count’s death, flashed
through my brain, and I said, “I understand you.”
“I am glad of it,” she answered in a tone which made me know I had
supposed her capable of a thought that could never be hers.
Her purity drew tears of admiration from my eyes which the selfishness
of passion made bitter indeed. My mind reacted and I felt that she did
not love me enough even to wish for liberty. So long as love recoils
from a crime it seems to have its limits, and love should be infinite. A
spasm shook my heart.
“She does not love me,” I thought.
To hide what was in my soul I stooped over Madeleine and kissed her
hair.
“I am afraid of your mother,” I said to the countess presently, to renew
the conversation.
“So am I,” she answered with a gesture full of childlike gaiety. “Don’t
forget to call her Madame la duchesse, and to speak to her in the third
person. The young people of the present day have lost these polite
manners; you must learn them; do that for my sake. Besides, it is such
good taste to respect women, no matter what their age may be, and to
recognize social distinctions without disputing them. The respect shown
to established superiority is guarantee for that which is due to you.
Solidarity is the basis of society. Cardinal Della Rovere and Raffaelle
were two powers equally revered. You have sucked the milk of the
Revolution in your academy and your political ideas may be influenced by
it; but as you advance in life you will find that crude and ill-defined
principles of liberty are powerless to create the happiness of the
people. Before considering, as a Lenoncourt, what an aristocracy ought
to be, my common-sense as a woman of the people tells me that societies
can exist only through a hierarchy. You are now at a turning-point in
your life, when you must choose wisely. Be on our side,--especially
now,” she added, laughing, “when it triumphs.”
I was keenly touched by these words, in which the depth of her political
feeling mingled with the warmth of affection,--a combination which gives
to women so great a power of persuasion; they know how to give to the
keenest arguments a tone of feeling. In her desire to justify all her
husband’s actions Henriette had foreseen the criticisms that would rise
in my mind as soon as I saw the servile effects of a courtier’s life
upon him. Monsieur de Mortsauf, king in his own castle and surrounded
by an historic halo, had, to my eyes, a certain grandiose dignity. I
was therefore greatly astonished at the distance he placed between the
duchess and himself by manners that were nothing less than obsequious. A
slave has his pride and will only serve the greatest despots. I confess
I was humiliated at the degradation of one before whom I trembled as the
power that ruled my love. This inward repulsion made me understand the
martyrdom of women of generous souls yoked to men whose meannesses they
bury daily. Respect is a safeguard which protects both great and small
alike; each side can hold its own. I was respectful to the duchess
because of my youth; but where others saw only a duchess I saw the
mother of my Henriette, and that gave sanctity to my homage.
We reached the great court-yard of Frapesle, where we found the others.
The Comte de Mortsauf presented me very gracefully to the duchess, who
examined me with a cold and reserved air. Madame de Lenoncourt was then
a woman fifty-six years of age, wonderfully well preserved and with
grand manners. When I saw the hard blue eyes, the hollow temples, the
thin emaciated face, the erect, imposing figure slow of movement, and
the yellow whiteness of the skin (reproduced with such brilliancy in the
daughter), I recognized the cold type to which my own mother belonged,
as quickly as a mineralogist recognizes Swedish iron. Her language was
that of the old court; she pronounced the “oit” like “ait,” and said
“frait” for “froid,” “porteux” for “porteurs.” I was not a courtier,
neither was I stiff-backed in my manner to her; in fact I behaved so
well that as I passed the countess she said in a low voice, “You are
perfect.”
The count came to me and took my hand, saying: “You are not angry with
me, Felix, are you? If I was hasty you will pardon an old soldier? We
shall probably stay here to dinner, and I invite you to dine with us
on Thursday, the evening before the duchess leaves. I must go to Tours
to-morrow to settle some business. Don’t neglect Clochegourde. My
mother-in-law is an acquaintance I advise you to cultivate. Her
salon will set the tone for the faubourg St. Germain. She has all the
traditions of the great world, and possesses an immense amount of social
knowledge; she knows the blazon of the oldest as well as the newest
family in Europe.”
The count’s good taste, or perhaps the advice of his domestic genius,
appeared under his altered circumstances. He was neither arrogant nor
offensively polite, nor pompous in any way, and the duchess was not
patronizing. Monsieur and Madame de Chessel gratefully accepted the
invitation to dinner on the following Thursday. I pleased the duchess,
and by her glance I knew she was examining a man of whom her daughter
had spoken to her. As we returned from vespers she questioned me about
my family, and asked if the Vandenesse now in diplomacy was my relative.
“He is my brother,” I replied. On that she became almost affectionate.
She told me that my great-aunt, the old Marquise de Listomere, was a
Grandlieu. Her manners were as cordial as those of Monsieur de Mortsauf
the day he saw me for the first time; the haughty glance with which
these sovereigns of the earth make you measure the distance that lies
between you and them disappeared. I knew almost nothing of my family.
The duchess told me that my great-uncle, an old abbe whose very name I
did not know, was to be member of the privy council, that my brother was
already promoted, and also that by a provision of the Charter, of which
I had not yet heard, my father became once more Marquis de Vandenesse.
“I am but one thing, the serf of Clochegourde,” I said in a low voice to
the countess.
The transformation scene of the Restoration was carried through with a
rapidity which bewildered the generation brought up under the imperial
regime. To me this revolution meant nothing. The least word or gesture
from Madame de Mortsauf were the sole events to which I attached
importance. I was ignorant of what the privy council was, and knew
as little of politics as of social life; my sole ambition was to love
Henriette better than Petrarch loved Laura. This indifference made the
duchess take me for a child. A large company assembled at Frapesle and
we were thirty at table. What intoxication it is for a young man unused
to the world to see the woman he loves more beautiful than all others
around her, the centre of admiring looks; to know that for him alone is
reserved the chaste fire of those eyes, that none but he can discern in
the tones of that voice, in the words it utters, however gay or jesting
they may be, the proofs of unremitting thought. The count, delighted
with the attentions paid to him, seemed almost young; his wife looked
hopeful of a change; I amused myself with Madeleine, who, like all
children with bodies weaker than their minds, made others laugh with her
clever observations, full of sarcasm, though never malicious, and
which spared no one. It was a happy day. A word, a hope awakened in the
morning illumined nature. Seeing me so joyous, Henriette was joyful too.
“This happiness smiling on my gray and cloudy life seems good,” she said
to me the next day.
That day I naturally spent at Clochegourde. I had been banished for five
days, I was athirst for life. The count left at six in the morning for
Tours. A serious disagreement had arisen between mother and daughter.
The duchess wanted the countess to move to Paris, where she promised her
a place at court, and where the count, reconsidering his refusal, might
obtain some high position. Henriette, who was thought happy in
her married life, would not reveal, even to her mother, her tragic
sufferings and the fatal incapacity of her husband. It was to hide his
condition from the duchess that she persuaded him to go to Tours and
transact business with his notaries. I alone, as she had truly said,
knew the dark secret of Clochegourde. Having learned by experience
how the pure air and the blue sky of the lovely valley calmed the
excitements and soothed the morbid griefs of the diseased mind, and what
beneficial effect the life at Clochegourde had upon the health of her
children, she opposed her mother’s desire that she should leave it with
reasons which the overbearing woman, who was less grieved than mortified
by her daughter’s bad marriage, vigorously combated.
Henriette saw that the duchess cared little for Jacques and
Madeleine,--a terrible discovery! Like all domineering mothers who
expect to continue the same authority over their married daughters that
they maintained when they were girls, the duchess brooked no opposition;
sometimes she affected a crafty sweetness to force her daughter to
compliance, at other times a cold severity, intending to obtain by fear
what gentleness had failed to win; then, when all means failed, she
displayed the same native sarcasm which I had often observed in my own
mother. In those ten days Henriette passed through all the contentions a
young woman must endure to establish her independence. You, who for your
happiness have the best of mothers, can scarcely comprehend such trials.
To gain a true idea of the struggle between that cold, calculating,
ambitious woman and a daughter abounding in the tender natural kindness
that never faileth, you must imagine a lily, to which my heart has
always compared her, bruised beneath the polished wheels of a steel car.
That mother had nothing in common with her daughter; she was unable
even to imagine the real difficulties which hindered her from taking
advantage of the Restoration and forced her to continue a life of
solitude. Though families bury their internal dissensions with the
utmost care, enter behind the scenes, and you will find in nearly all
of them deep, incurable wounds, which lessen the natural affections.
Sometimes these wounds are given by passions real and most affecting,
rendered eternal by the dignity of those who feel them; sometimes by
latent hatreds which slowly freeze the heart and dry all tears when the
hour of parting comes. Tortured yesterday and to-day, wounded by all,
even by the suffering children who were guiltless of the ills they
endured, how could that poor soul fail to love the one human being who
did not strike her, who would fain have built a wall of defence around
her to guard her from storms, from harsh contacts and cruel blows?
Though I suffered from a knowledge of these debates, there were moments
when I was happy in the sense that she rested upon my heart; for she
told me of these new troubles. Day by day I learned more fully the
meaning of her words,--“Love me as my aunt loved me.”
“Have you no ambition?” the duchess said to me at dinner, with a stern
air.
“Madame,” I replied, giving her a serious look, “I have enough in me to
conquer the world; but I am only twenty-one, and I am all alone.”
She looked at her daughter with some astonishment. Evidently she
believed that Henriette had crushed my ambition in order to keep me
near her. The visit of Madame de Lenoncourt was a period of unrelieved
constraint. The countess begged me to be cautious; she was frightened
by the least kind word; to please her I wore the harness of deceit. The
great Thursday came; it was a day of wearisome ceremonial,--one of
those stiff days which lovers hate, when their chair is no longer in
its place, and the mistress of the house cannot be with them. Love has a
horror of all that does not concern itself. But the duchess returned at
last to the pomps and vanities of the court, and Clochegourde recovered
its accustomed order.
My little quarrel with the count resulted in making me more at home in
the house than ever; I could go there at all times without hindrance;
and the antecedents of my life inclined me to cling like a climbing
plant to the beautiful soul which had opened to me the enchanting world
of shared emotions. Every hour, every minute, our fraternal marriage,
founded on trust, became a surer thing; each of us settled firmly into
our own position; the countess enfolded me with her nurturing care, with
the white draperies of a love that was wholly maternal; while my love
for her, seraphic in her presence, seared me as with hot irons when
away from her. I loved her with a double love which shot its arrows of
desire, and then lost them in the sky, where they faded out of sight in
the impermeable ether. If you ask me why, young and ardent, I continued
in the deluding dreams of Platonic love, I must own to you that I was
not yet man enough to torture that woman, who was always in dread of
some catastrophe to her children, always fearing some outburst of her
husband’s stormy temper, martyrized by him when not afflicted by the
illness of Jacques or Madeleine, and sitting beside one or the other of
them when her husband allowed her a little rest. The mere sound of too
warm a word shook her whole being; a desire shocked her; what she needed
was a veiled love, support mingled with tenderness,--that, in short,
which she gave to others. Then, need I tell you, who are so truly
feminine? this situation brought with it hours of delightful languor,
moments of divine sweetness and content which followed by secret
immolation. Her conscience was, if I may call it so, contagious; her
self-devotion without earthly recompense awed me by its persistence; the
living, inward piety which was the bond of her other virtues filled
the air about her with spiritual incense. Besides, I was young,--young
enough to concentrate my whole being on the kiss she allowed me too
seldom to lay upon her hand, of which she gave me only the back, and
never the palm, as though she drew the line of sensual emotions there.
No two souls ever clasped each other with so much ardor, no bodies were
ever more victoriously annihilated. Later I understood the cause of this
sufficing joy. At my age no worldly interests distracted my heart; no
ambitions blocked the stream of a love which flowed like a torrent,
bearing all things on its bosom. Later, we love the woman in a woman;
but the first woman we love is the whole of womanhood; her children are
ours, her interests are our interests, her sorrows our greatest sorrow;
we love her gown, the familiar things about her; we are more grieved by
a trifling loss of hers than if we knew we had lost everything. This
is the sacred love that makes us live in the being of another; whereas
later, alas! we draw another life into ours, and require a woman to
enrich our pauper spirit with her young soul.
I was now one of the household, and I knew for the first time an
infinite sweetness, which to a nature bruised as mine was like a bath
to a weary body; the soul is refreshed in every fibre, comforted to its
very depths. You will hardly understand me, for you are a woman, and
I am speaking now of a happiness women give but do not receive. A man
alone knows the choice happiness of being, in the midst of a strange
household, the privileged friend of its mistress, the secret centre
of her affections. No dog barks at you; the servants, like the dogs,
recognize your rights; the children (who are never misled, and know that
their power cannot be lessened, and that you cherish the light of their
life), the children possess the gift of divination, they play with you
like kittens and assume the friendly tyranny they show only to those
they love; they are full of intelligent discretion and come and go on
tiptoe without noise. Every one hastens to do you service; all like you,
and smile upon you. True passions are like beautiful flowers all the
more charming to the eye when they grow in a barren soil.
But if I enjoyed the delightful benefits of naturalization in a family
where I found relations after my own heart, I had also to pay some costs
for it. Until then Monsieur de Mortsauf had more or less restrained
himself before me. I had only seen his failings in the mass; I was
now to see the full extent of their application and discover how nobly
charitable the countess had been in the account she had given me of
these daily struggles. I learned now all the angles of her husband’s
intolerable nature; I heard his perpetual scolding about nothing,
complaints of evils of which not a sign existed; I saw the inward
dissatisfaction which poisoned his life, and the incessant need of his
tyrannical spirit for new victims. When we went to walk in the evenings
he selected the way; but whichever direction we took he was always
bored; when we reached home he blamed others; his wife had insisted on
going where she wanted; why was he governed by her in all the trifling
things of life? was he to have no will, no thought of his own? must
he consent to be a cipher in his own house? If his harshness was to be
received in patient silence he was angry because he felt a limit to his
power; he asked sharply if religion did not require a wife to please
her husband, and whether it was proper to despise the father of her
children? He always ended by touching some sensitive chord in his wife’s
mind; and he seemed to find a domineering pleasure in making it sound.
Sometimes he tried gloomy silence and a morbid depression, which always
alarmed his wife and made her pay him the most tender attentions.
Like petted children, who exercise their power without thinking of the
distress of their mother, he would let her wait upon him as upon Jacques
and Madeleine, of whom he was jealous.
I discovered at last that in small things as well as in great ones the
count acted towards his servants, his children, his wife, precisely as
he had acted to me about the backgammon. The day when I understood,
root and branch, these difficulties, which like a rampant overgrowth
repressed the actions and stifled the breathing of the whole family,
hindered the management of the household and retarded the improvement of
the estate by complicating the most necessary acts, I felt an admiring
awe which rose higher than my love and drove it back into my heart. Good
God! what was I? Those tears that I had taken on my lips solemnized
my spirit; I found happiness in wedding the sufferings of that woman.
Hitherto I had yielded to the count’s despotism as the smuggler pays his
fine; henceforth I was a voluntary victim that I might come the nearer
to her. The countess understood me, allowed me a place beside her, and
gave me permission to share her sorrows; like the repentant apostate,
eager to rise to heaven with his brethren, I obtained the favor of dying
in the arena.
“Were it not for you I must have succumbed under this life,” Henriette
said to me one evening when the count had been, like the flies on a hot
day, more stinging, venomous, and persistent than usual.
He had gone to bed. Henriette and I remained under the acacias; the
children were playing about us, bathed in the setting sun. Our few
exclamatory words revealed the mutuality of the thoughts in which we
rested from our common sufferings. When language failed silence as
faithfully served our souls, which seemed to enter one another without
hindrance; together they luxuriated in the charms of pensive languor,
they met in the undulations of the same dream, they plunged as one into
the river and came out refreshed like two nymphs as closely united as
their souls could wish, but with no earthly tie to bind them. We entered
the unfathomable gulf, we returned to the surface with empty hands,
asking each other by a look, “Among all our days on earth will there be
one for us?”
In spite of the tranquil poetry of evening which gave to the bricks of
the balustrade their orange tones, so soothing and so pure; in spite of
the religious atmosphere of the hour, which softened the voices of the
children and wafted them towards us, desire crept through my veins like
the match to the bonfire. After three months of repression I was unable
to content myself with the fate assigned me. I took Henriette’s hand and
softly caressed it, trying to convey to her the ardor that invaded me.
She became at once Madame de Mortsauf, and withdrew her hand; tears
rolled from my eyes, she saw them and gave me a chilling look, as she
offered her hand to my lips.
“You must know,” she said, “that this will cause me grief. A friendship
that asks so great a favor is dangerous.”
Then I lost my self-control; I reproached her, I spoke of my sufferings,
and the slight alleviation that I asked for them. I dared to tell her
that at my age, if the senses were all soul still the soul had a sex;
that I could meet death, but not with closed lips. She forced me to
silence with her proud glance, in which I seemed to read the cry of the
Mexican: “And I, am I on a bed of roses?” Ever since that day by the
gate of Frapesle, when I attributed to her the hope that our happiness
might spring from a grave, I had turned with shame from the thought of
staining her soul with the desires of a brutal passion. She now spoke
with honeyed lip, and told me that she never could be wholly mine, and
that I ought to know it. As she said the words I know that in obeying
her I dug an abyss between us. I bowed my head. She went on, saying she
had an inward religious certainty that she might love me as a brother
without offending God or man; such love was a living image of the divine
love, which her good Saint-Martin told her was the life of the world.
If I could not be to her somewhat as her old confessor was, less than a
lover yet more than a brother, I must never see her again. She could
die and take to God her sheaf of sufferings, borne not without tears and
anguish.
“I gave you,” she said in conclusion, “more than I ought to have given,
so that nothing might be left to take, and I am punished.”
I was forced to calm her, to promise never to cause her pain, and to
love her at twenty-one years of age as old men love their youngest
child.
The next day I went early. There were no flowers in the vases of her
gray salon. I rushed into the fields and vineyards to make her two
bouquets; but as I gathered the flowers, one by one, cutting their long
stalks and admiring their beauty, the thought occurred to me that the
colors and foliage had a poetry, a harmony, which meant something to
the understanding while they charmed the eye; just as musical melodies
awaken memories in hearts that are loving and beloved. If color is light
organized, must it not have a meaning of its own, as the combinations
of the air have theirs? I called in the assistance of Jacques and
Madeleine, and all three of us conspired to surprise our dear one. I
arranged, on the lower steps of the portico, where we established
our floral headquarters, two bouquets by which I tried to convey a
sentiment. Picture to yourself a fountain of flowers gushing from the
vases and falling back in curving waves; my message springing from its
bosom in white roses and lilies with their silver cups. All the blue
flowers, harebells, forget-me-nots, and ox-tongues, whose tines, caught
from the skies, blended so well with the whiteness of the lilies,
sparkled on this dewy texture; were they not the type of two purities,
the one that knows nothing, the other that knows all; an image of the
child, an image of the martyr? Love has its blazon, and the countess
discerned it inwardly. She gave me a poignant glance which was like
the cry of a soldier when his wound is touched; she was humbled but
enraptured too. My reward was in that glance; to refresh her heart, to
have given her comfort, what encouragement for me! Then it was that
I pressed the theories of Pere Castel into the service of love, and
recovered a science lost to Europe, where written pages have supplanted
the flowery missives of the Orient with their balmy tints. What charm in
expressing our sensations through these daughters of the sun, sisters to
the flowers that bloom beneath the rays of love! Before long I communed
with the flora of the fields, as a man whom I met in after days at
Grandlieu communed with his bees.
Twice a week during the remainder of my stay at Frapesle I continued the
slow labor of this poetic enterprise, for the ultimate accomplishment of
which I needed all varieties of herbaceous plants; into these I made a
deep research, less as a botanist than as a poet, studying their spirit
rather than their form. To find a flower in its native haunts I walked
enormous distances, beside the brooklets, through the valleys, to the
summit of the cliffs, across the moorland, garnering thoughts even from
the heather. During these rambles I initiated myself into pleasures
unthought of by the man of science who lives in meditation, unknown to
the horticulturist busy with specialities, to the artisan fettered to
a city, to the merchant fastened to his desk, but known to a few
foresters, to a few woodsmen, and to some dreamers. Nature can show
effects the significations of which are limitless; they rise to the
grandeur of the highest moral conceptions--be it the heather in bloom,
covered with the diamonds of the dew on which the sunlight dances;
infinitude decked for the single glance that may chance to fall upon
it:--be it a corner of the forest hemmed in with time-worn rocks
crumbling to gravel and clothed with mosses overgrown with juniper,
which grasps our minds as something savage, aggressive, terrifying as
the cry of the kestrel issuing from it:--be it a hot and barren moor
without vegetation, stony, rigid, its horizon like those of the desert,
where once I gathered a sublime and solitary flower, the anemone
pulsatilla, with its violet petals opening for the golden stamens;
affecting image of my pure idol alone in her valley:--be it great sheets
of water, where nature casts those spots of greenery, a species of
transition between the plant and animal, where life makes haste to come
in flowers and insects, floating there like worlds in ether:--be it
a cottage with its garden of cabbages, its vineyards, its hedges
overhanging a bog, surrounded by a few sparse fields of rye; true image
of many humble existences:--be it a forest path like some cathedral
nave, where the trees are columns and their branches arch the roof, at
the far end of which a light breaks through, mingled with shadows or
tinted with sunset reds athwart the leaves which gleam like the colored
windows of a chancel:--then, leaving these woods so cool and branchy,
behold a chalk-land lying fallow, where among the warm and cavernous
mosses adders glide to their lairs, or lift their proud slim heads. Cast
upon all these pictures torrents of sunlight like beneficent waters,
or the shadow of gray clouds drawn in lines like the wrinkles of an old
man’s brow, or the cool tones of a sky faintly orange and streaked with
lines of a paler tint; then listen--you will hear indefinable harmonies
amid a silence which blends them all.
During the months of September and October I did not make a single
bouquet which cost me less than three hours search; so much did I
admire, with the real sympathy of a poet, these fugitive allegories of
human life, that vast theatre I was about to enter, the scenes of which
my memory must presently recall. Often do I now compare those splendid
scenes with memories of my soul thus expending itself on nature; again I
walk that valley with my sovereign, whose white robe brushed the coppice
and floated on the green sward, whose spirit rose, like a promised
fruit, from each calyx filled with amorous stamens.
No declaration of love, no vows of uncontrollable passion ever conveyed
more than these symphonies of flowers; my baffled desires impelled me to
efforts of expression through them like those of Beethoven through his
notes, to the same bitter reactions, to the same mighty bounds towards
heaven. In their presence Madame de Mortsauf was my Henriette. She
looked at them constantly; they fed her spirit, she gathered all the
thoughts I had given them, saying, as she raised her head from the
embroidery frame to receive my gift, “Ah, how beautiful!”
Natalie, you will understand this delightful intercourse through the
details of a bouquet, just as you would comprehend Saadi from a fragment
of his verse. Have you ever smelt in the fields in the month of May the
perfume that communicates to all created beings the intoxicating sense
of a new creation; the sense that makes you trail your hand in the water
from a boat, and loosen your hair to the breeze while your mind revives
with the springtide greenery of the trees? A little plant, a species of
vernal grass, is a powerful element in this veiled harmony; it cannot be
worn with impunity; take into your hand its shining blade, striped green
and white like a silken robe, and mysterious emotions will stir the
rosebuds your modesty keeps hidden in the depths of your heart. Round
the neck of a porcelain vase imagine a broad margin of the gray-white
tufts peculiar to the sedum of the vineyards of Touraine, vague image
of submissive forms; from this foundation come tendrils of the bind-weed
with its silver bells, sprays of pink rest-barrow mingled with a few
young shoots of oak-leaves, lustrous and magnificently colored;
these creep forth prostrate, humble as the weeping-willow, timid and
supplicating as prayer. Above, see those delicate threads of the purple
amoret, with its flood of anthers that are nearly yellow; the snowy
pyramids of the meadow-sweet, the green tresses of the wild oats, the
slender plumes of the agrostis, which we call wind-ear; roseate hopes,
decking love’s earliest dream and standing forth against the gray
surroundings. But higher still, remark the Bengal roses, sparsely
scattered among the laces of the daucus, the plumes of the linaria, the
marabouts of the meadow-queen; see the umbels of the myrrh, the spun
glass of the clematis in seed, the dainty petals of the cross-wort,
white as milk, the corymbs of the yarrow, the spreading stems of the
fumitory with their black and rosy blossoms, the tendrils of the grape,
the twisted shoots of the honeysuckle; in short, all the innocent
creatures have that is most tangled, wayward, wild,--flames and triple
darts, leaves lanceolated or jagged, stalks convoluted like passionate
desires writhing in the soul. From the bosom of this torrent of love
rises the scarlet poppy, its tassels about to open, spreading its
flaming flakes above the starry jessamine, dominating the rain of
pollen--that soft mist fluttering in the air and reflecting the light in
its myriad particles. What woman intoxicated with the odor of the vernal
grasses would fail to understand this wealth of offered thoughts, these
ardent desires of a love demanding the happiness refused in a hundred
struggles which passion still renews, continuous, unwearying, eternal!
Put this speech of the flowers in the light of a window to show its
crisp details, its delicate contrasts, its arabesques of color, and
allow the sovereign lady to see a tear upon some petal more expanded
than the rest. What do we give to God? perfumes, light, and song, the
purest expression of our nature. Well, these offerings to God, are they
not likewise offered to love in this poem of luminous flowers murmuring
their sadness to the heart, cherishing its hidden transports, its
unuttered hopes, its illusions which gleam and fall to fragments like
the gossamer of a summer’s night?
Such neutral pleasures help to soothe a nature irritated by long
contemplation of the person beloved. They were to me, I dare not say to
her, like those fissures in a dam through which the water finds a vent
and avoids disaster. Abstinence brings deadly exhaustion, which a
few crumbs falling from heaven like manna in the desert, suffices to
relieve. Sometimes I found my Henriette standing before these bouquets
with pendant arms, lost in agitated reverie, thoughts swelling her
bosom, illumining her brow as they surged in waves and sank again,
leaving lassitude and languor behind them. Never again have I made a
bouquet for any one. When she and I had created this language and formed
it to our uses, a satisfaction filled our souls like that of a slave who
escapes his masters.
During the rest of this month as I came from the meadows through the
gardens I often saw her face at the window, and when I reached the salon
she was ready at her embroidery frame. If I did not arrive at the hour
expected (though never appointed), I saw a white form wandering on the
terrace, and when I joined her she would say, “I came to meet you; I
must show a few attentions to my youngest child.”
The miserable games of backgammon had come to end. The count’s late
purchases took all his time in going hither and thither about the
property, surveying, examining, and marking the boundaries of his new
possessions. He had orders to give, rural works to overlook which needed
a master’s eye,--all of them planned and decided on by his wife and
himself. We often went to meet him, the countess and I, with the
children, who amused themselves on the way by running after insects,
stag-beetles, darning-needles, they too making their bouquets, or to
speak more truly, their bundles of flowers. To walk beside the woman we
love, to take her on our arm, to guide her steps,--these are illimitable
joys that suffice a lifetime. Confidence is then complete. We went
alone, we returned with the “general,” a title given to the count when
he was good-humored. These two ways of taking the same path gave light
and shade to our pleasure, a secret known only to hearts debarred from
union. Our talk, so free as we went, had hidden significations as
we returned, when either of us gave an answer to some furtive
interrogation, or continued a subject, already begun, in the enigmatic
phrases to which our language lends itself, and which women are so
ingenious in composing. Who has not known the pleasure of such secret
understandings in a sphere apart from those about us, a sphere where
spirits meet outside of social laws?
One day a wild hope, quickly dispelled, took possession of me, when the
count, wishing to know what we were talking of, put the inquiry,
and Henriette answered in words that allowed another meaning, which
satisfied him. This amused Madeleine, who laughed; after a moment her
mother blushed and gave me a forbidding look, as if to say she might
still withdraw from me her soul as she had once withdrawn her hand. But
our purely spiritual union had far too many charms, and on the morrow it
continued as before.
The hours, days, and weeks fled by, filled with renascent joys. Grape
harvest, the festal season in Touraine, began. Toward the end of
September the sun, less hot than during the wheat harvest, allows of our
staying in the vineyards without danger of becoming overheated. It is
easier to gather grapes than to mow wheat. Fruits of all kinds are ripe,
harvests are garnered, bread is less dear; the sense of plenty makes the
country people happy. Fears as to the results of rural toil, in which
more money than sweat is often spent, vanish before a full granary and
cellars about to overflow. The vintage is then like a gay dessert after
the dinner is eaten; the skies of Touraine, where the autumns are always
magnificent, smile upon it. In this hospitable land the vintagers
are fed and lodged in the master’s house. The meals are the only
ones throughout the year when these poor people taste substantial,
well-cooked food; and they cling to the custom as the children of
patriarchal families cling to anniversaries. As the time approaches they
flock in crowds to those houses where the masters are known to treat the
laborers liberally. The house is full of people and of provisions. The
presses are open. The country is alive with the coming and going of
itinerant coopers, of carts filled with laughing girls and joyous
husbandmen, who earn better wages than at any other time during
the year, and who sing as they go. There is also another cause of
pleasurable content: classes and ranks are equal; women, children,
masters, and men, all that little world, share in the garnering of
the divine hoard. These various elements of satisfaction explain the
hilarity of the vintage, transmitted from age to age in these last
glorious days of autumn, the remembrance of which inspired Rabelais with
the bacchic form of his great work.
The children, Jacques and Madeleine, had never seen a vintage; I was
like them, and they were full of infantine delight at finding a sharer
of their pleasure; their mother, too, promised to accompany us. We went
to Villaines, where baskets are manufactured, in quest of the prettiest
that could be bought; for we four were to cut certain rows reserved for
our scissors; it was, however, agreed that none of us were to eat too
many grapes. To eat the fat bunches of Touraine in a vineyard seemed
so delicious that we all refused the finest grapes on the dinner-table.
Jacques made me swear I would go to no other vineyard, but stay closely
at Clochegourde. Never were these frail little beings, usually pallid
and smiling, so fresh and rosy and active as they were this morning.
They chattered for chatter’s sake, and trotted about without apparent
object; they suddenly seemed, like other children, to have more life
than they needed; neither Monsieur nor Madame de Mortsauf had ever seen
them so before. I became a child again with them, more of a child than
either of them, perhaps; I, too, was hoping for my harvest. It was
glorious weather when we went to the vineyard, and we stayed there half
the day. How we disputed as to who had the finest grapes and who could
fill his basket quickest! The little human shoots ran to and fro from
the vines to their mother; not a bunch could be cut without showing it
to her. She laughed with the good, gay laugh of her girlhood when I,
running up with my basket after Madeleine, cried out, “Mine too! See
mine, mamma!” To which she answered: “Don’t get overheated, dear child.”
Then passing her hand round my neck and through my hair, she added,
giving me a little tap on the cheek, “You are melting away.” It was
the only caress she ever gave me. I looked at the pretty line of purple
clusters, the hedges full of haws and blackberries; I heard the voices
of the children; I watched the trooping girls, the cart loaded with
barrels, the men with the panniers. Ah, it is all engraved on my memory,
even to the almond-tree beside which she stood, girlish, rosy, smiling,
beneath the sunshade held open in her hand. Then I busied myself in
cutting the bunches and filling my basket, going forward to empty it
in the vat, silently, with measured bodily movement and slow steps that
left my spirit free. I discovered then the ineffable pleasure of an
external labor which carries life along, and thus regulates the rush of
passion, often so near, but for this mechanical motion, to kindle
into flame. I learned how much wisdom is contained in uniform labor; I
understood monastic discipline.
For the first time in many days the count was neither surly nor cruel.
His son was so well; the future Duc de Lenoncourt-Mortsauf, fair and
rosy and stained with grape-juice, rejoiced his heart. This day
being the last of the vintage, he had promised a dance in front of
Clochegourde in honor of the return of the Bourbons, so that our
festival gratified everybody. As we returned to the house, the countess
took my arm and leaned upon it, as if to let my heart feel the weight of
hers,--the instinctive movement of a mother who seeks to convey her joy.
Then she whispered in my ear, “You bring us happiness.”
Ah, to me, who knew her sleepless nights, her cares, her fears, her
former existence, in which, although the hand of God sustained her, all
was barren and wearisome, those words uttered by that rich voice brought
pleasures no other woman in the world could give me.
“The terrible monotony of my life is broken, all things are radiant with
hope,” she said after a pause. “Oh, never leave me! Do not despise my
harmless superstitions; be the elder son, the protector of the younger.”
In this, Natalie, there is nothing romantic. To know the infinite of our
deepest feelings, we must in youth cast our lead into those great
lakes upon whose shores we live. Though to many souls passions are lava
torrents flowing among arid rocks, other souls there be in whom passion,
restrained by insurmountable obstacles, fills with purest water the
crater of the volcano.
We had still another fete. Madame de Mortsauf, wishing to accustom
her children to the practical things of life, and to give them some
experience of the toil by which men earn their living, had provided
each of them with a source of income, depending on the chances of
agriculture. To Jacques she gave the produce of the walnut-trees, to
Madeleine that of the chestnuts. The gathering of the nuts began soon
after the vintage,--first the chestnuts, then the walnuts. To beat
Madeleine’s trees with a long pole and hear the nuts fall and rebound on
the dry, matted earth of a chestnut-grove; to see the serious gravity of
the little girl as she examined the heaps and estimated their probable
value, which to her represented many pleasures on which she counted;
the congratulations of Manette, the trusted servant who alone supplied
Madame de Mortsauf’s place with the children; the explanations of the
mother, showing the necessity of labor to obtain all crops, so often
imperilled by the uncertainties of climate,--all these things made up a
charming scene of innocent, childlike happiness amid the fading colors
of the late autumn.
Madeleine had a little granary of her own, in which I was to see her
brown treasure garnered and share her delight. Well, I quiver still when
I recall the sound of each basketful of nuts as it was emptied on the
mass of yellow husks, mixed with earth, which made the floor of the
granary. The count bought what was needed for the household; the farmers
and tenants, indeed, every one around Clochegourde, sent buyers to the
Mignonne, a pet name which the peasantry give even to strangers, but
which in this case belonged exclusively to Madeleine.
Jacques was less fortunate in gathering his walnuts. It rained for
several days; but I consoled him with the advice to hold back his nuts
and sell them a little later. Monsieur de Chessel had told me that the
walnut-trees in the Brehemont, also those about Amboise and Vouvray,
were not bearing. Walnut oil is in great demand in Touraine. Jacques
might get at least forty sous for the product of each tree, and as he
had two hundred the amount was considerable; he intended to spend it on
the equipment of a pony. This wish led to a discussion with his father,
who bade him think of the uncertainty of such returns, and the wisdom of
creating a reserve fund for the years when the trees might not bear,
and so equalizing his resources. I felt what was passing through the
mother’s mind as she sat by in silence; she rejoiced in the way Jacques
listened to his father, the father seeming to recover the paternal
dignity that was lacking to him, thanks to the ideas which she herself
had prompted in him. Did I not tell you truly that in picturing this
woman earthly language was insufficient to render either her character
or her spirit. When such scenes occurred my soul drank in their delights
without analyzing them; but now, with what vigor they detach themselves
on the dark background of my troubled life! Like diamonds they shine
against the settling of thoughts degraded by alloy, of bitter regrets
for a lost happiness. Why do the names of the two estates purchased
after the Restoration, and in which Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf both
took the deepest interest, the Cassine and the Rhetoriere, move me more
than the sacred names of the Holy Land or of Greece? “Who loves, knows!”
cried La Fontaine. Those names possess the talismanic power of words
uttered under certain constellations by seers; they explain magic to me;
they awaken sleeping forms which arise and speak to me; they lead me to
the happy valley; they recreate skies and landscape. But such evocations
are in the regions of the spiritual world; they pass in the silence of
my own soul. Be not surprised, therefore, if I dwell on all these homely
scenes; the smallest details of that simple, almost common life are
ties which, frail as they may seem, bound me in closest union to the
countess.
The interests of her children gave Madame de Mortsauf almost as much
anxiety as their health. I soon saw the truth of what she had told me as
to her secret share in the management of the family affairs, into which
I became slowly initiated. After ten years’ steady effort Madame de
Mortsauf had changed the method of cultivating the estate. She had “put
it in fours,” as the saying is in those parts, meaning the new system
under which wheat is sown every four years only, so as to make the soil
produce a different crop yearly. To evade the obstinate unwillingness of
the peasantry it was found necessary to cancel the old leases and give
new ones, to divide the estate into four great farms and let them
on equal shares, the sort of lease that prevails in Touraine and its
neighborhood. The owner of the estate gives the house, farm-buildings,
and seed-grain to tenants-at-will, with whom he divides the costs of
cultivation and the crops. This division is superintended by an agent or
bailiff, whose business it is to take the share belonging to the owner;
a costly system, complicated by the market changes of values, which
alter the character of the shares constantly. The countess had induced
Monsieur de Mortsauf to cultivate a fifth farm, made up of the reserved
lands about Clochegourde, as much to occupy his mind as to show other
farmers the excellence of the new method by the evidence of facts. Being
thus, in a hidden way, the mistress of the estate, she had slowly
and with a woman’s persistency rebuilt two of the farm-houses on the
principle of those in Artois and Flanders. It is easy to see her motive.
She wished, after the expiration of the leases on shares, to relet to
intelligent and capable persons for rental in money, and thus simplify
the revenues of Clochegourde. Fearing to die before her husband, she
was anxious to secure for him a regular income, and to her children a
property which no incapacity could jeopardize. At the present time the
fruit-trees planted during the last ten years were in full bearing; the
hedges, which secured the boundaries from dispute, were in good order;
the elms and poplars were growing well. With the new purchases and the
new farming system well under way, the estate of Clochegourde, divided
into four great farms, two of which still needed new houses, was capable
of bringing in forty thousand francs a year, ten thousand for each farm,
not counting the yield of the vineyards, and the two hundred acres of
woodland which adjoined them, nor the profits of the model home-farm.
The roads to the great farms all opened on an avenue which followed a
straight line from Clochegourde to the main road leading to Chinon.
The distance from the entrance of this avenue to Tours was only fifteen
miles; tenants would never be wanting, especially now that everybody was
talking of the count’s improvements and the excellent condition of his
land.
The countess wished to put some fifteen thousand francs into each of
the estates lately purchased, and to turn the present dwellings into two
large farm-houses and buildings, in order that the property might bring
in a better rent after the ground had been cultivated for a year or two.
These ideas, so simple in themselves, but complicated with the thirty
odd thousand francs it was necessary to expend upon them, were just now
the topic of many discussions between herself and the count, sometimes
amounting to bitter quarrels, in which she was sustained by the thought
of her children’s interests. The fear, “If I die to-morrow what will
become of them?” made her heart beat. The gentle, peaceful hearts to
whom anger is an impossibility, and whose sole desire is to shed on
those about them their own inward peace, alone know what strength is
needed for such struggles, what demands upon the spirit must be made
before beginning the contest, what weariness ensues when the fight is
over and nothing has been won. At this moment, just as her children
seemed less anemic, less frail, more active (for the fruit season had
had its effect on them), and her moist eyes followed them as they played
about her with a sense of contentment which renewed her strength and
refreshed her heart, the poor woman was called upon to bear the sharp
sarcasms and attacks of an angry opposition. The count, alarmed at the
plans she proposed, denied with stolid obstinacy the advantages of all
she had done and the possibility of doing more. He replied to conclusive
reasoning with the folly of a child who denies the influence of the
sun in summer. The countess, however, carried the day. The victory
of commonsense over insanity so healed her wounds that she forgot the
battle. That day we all went to the Cassine and the Rhetoriere, to
decide upon the buildings. The count walked alone in front, the children
went next, and we ourselves followed slowly, for she was speaking in a
low, gentle tone, which made her words like the murmur of the sea as it
ripples on a smooth beach.
She was, she said, certain of success. A new line of communication
between Tours and Chinon was to be opened by an active man, a carrier,
a cousin of Manette’s, who wanted a large farm on the route. His family
was numerous; the eldest son would drive the carts, the second could
attend to the business, the father living half-way along the road, at
Rabelaye, one of the farms then to let, would look after the relays and
enrich his land with the manure of the stables. As to the other farm, la
Baude, the nearest to Clochegourde, one of their own people, a worthy,
intelligent, and industrious man, who saw the advantages of the new
system of agriculture, was ready to take a lease on it. The Cassine and
the Rhetoriere need give no anxiety; their soil was the very best in the
neighborhood; the farm-houses once built, and the ground brought into
cultivation, it would be quite enough to advertise them at Tours;
tenants would soon apply for them. In two years’ time Clochegourde would
be worth at least twenty-four thousand francs a year. Gravelotte,
the farm in Maine, which Monsieur de Mortsauf had recovered after the
emigration, was rented for seven thousand francs a year for nine years;
his pension was four thousand. This income might not be a fortune, but
it was certainly a competence. Later, other additions to it might enable
her to go to Paris and attend to Jacques’ education; in two years, she
thought, his health would be established.
With what feeling she uttered the word “Paris!” I knew her thought; she
wished to be as little separated as possible from her friend. On that I
broke forth; I told her that she did not know me; that without talking
of it, I had resolved to finish my education by working day and night so
as to fit myself to be Jacques’ tutor. She looked grave.
“No, Felix,” she said, “that cannot be, any more than your priesthood.
I thank you from my heart as a mother, but as a woman who loves you
sincerely I can never allow you to be the victim of your attachment to
me. Such a position would be a social discredit to you, and I could not
allow it. No! I cannot be an injury to you in any way. You, Vicomte
de Vandenesse, a tutor! You, whose motto is ‘Ne se vend!’ Were you
Richelieu himself it would bar your way in life; it would give the
utmost pain to your family. My friend, you do not know what insult women
of the world, like my mother, can put into a patronizing glance, what
degradation into a word, what contempt into a bow.”
“But if you love me, what is the world to me?”
She pretended not to hear, and went on:--
“Though my father is most kind and desirous of doing all I ask, he would
never forgive your taking so humble a position; he would refuse you his
protection. I could not consent to your becoming tutor to the Dauphin
even. You must accept society as it is; never commit the fault of flying
in the face of it. My friend, this rash proposal of--”
“Love,” I whispered.
“No, charity,” she said, controlling her tears, “this wild idea
enlightens me as to your character; your heart will be your bane. I
shall claim from this moment the right to teach you certain things.
Let my woman’s eye see for you sometimes. Yes, from the solitudes of
Clochegourde I mean to share, silently, contentedly, in your successes.
As to a tutor, do not fear; we shall find some good old abbe, some
learned Jesuit, and my father will gladly devote a handsome sum to the
education of the boy who is to bear his name. Jacques is my pride. He
is, however, eleven years old,” she added after a pause. “But it is with
him as with you; when I first saw you I took you to be about thirteen.”
We now reached the Cassine, where Jacques, Madeleine, and I followed her
about as children follow a mother; but we were in her way; I left her
presently and went into the orchard where Martineau the elder, keeper
of the place, was discussing with Martineau the younger, the bailiff,
whether certain trees ought or ought not to be taken down; they were
arguing the matter as if it concerned their own property. I then saw
how much the countess was beloved. I spoke of it to a poor laborer, who,
with one foot on his spade and an elbow on its handle, stood listening
to the two doctors of pomology.
“Ah, yes, monsieur,” he answered, “she is a good woman, and not haughty
like those hussies at Azay, who would see us die like dogs sooner than
yield us one penny of the price of a grave! The day when that woman
leaves these parts the Blessed Virgin will weep, and we too. She knows
what is due to her, but she knows our hardships, too, and she puts them
into the account.”
With what pleasure I gave that man all the money I had.
A few days later a pony arrived for Jacques, his father, an excellent
horseman, wishing to accustom the child by degrees to the fatigues
of such exercise. The boy had a pretty riding-dress, bought with
the product of the nuts. The morning when he took his first lesson
accompanied by his father and by Madeleine, who jumped and shouted about
the lawn round which Jacques was riding, was a great maternal festival
for the countess. The boy wore a blue collar embroidered by her, a
little sky-blue overcoat fastened by a polished leather belt, a pair of
white trousers pleated at the waist, and a Scotch cap, from which his
fair hair flowed in heavy locks. He was charming to behold. All the
servants clustered round to share the domestic joy. The little heir
smiled at his mother as he passed her, sitting erect, and quite
fearless. This first manly act of a child to whom death had often seemed
so near, the promise of a sound future warranted by this ride which
showed him so handsome, so fresh, so rosy,--what a reward for all her
cares! Then too the joy of the father, who seemed to renew his youth,
and who smiled for the first time in many long months; the pleasure
shown on all faces, the shout of an old huntsman of the Lenoncourts, who
had just arrived from Tours, and who, seeing how the boy held the reins,
shouted to him, “Bravo, monsieur le vicomte!”--all this was too much for
the poor mother, and she burst into tears; she, so calm in her griefs,
was too weak to bear the joy of admiring her boy as he bounded over the
gravel, where so often she had led him in the sunshine inwardly weeping
his expected death. She leaned upon my arm unreservedly, and said: “I
think I have never suffered. Do not leave us to-day.”
The lesson over, Jacques jumped into his mother’s arms; she caught
him and held him tightly to her, kissing him passionately. I went with
Madeleine to arrange two magnificent bouquets for the dinner-table
in honor of the young equestrian. When we returned to the salon the
countess said: “The fifteenth of October is certainly a great day with
me. Jacques has taken his first riding lesson, and I have just set the
last stitch in my furniture cover.”
“Then, Blanche,” said the count, laughing, “I must pay you for it.”
He offered her his arm and took her to the first courtyard, where stood
an open carriage which her father had sent her, and for which the count
had purchased two English horses. The old huntsman had prepared the
surprise while Jacques was taking his lesson. We got into the carriage,
and went to see where the new avenue entered the main road towards
Chinon. As we returned, the countess said to me in an anxious tone, “I
am too happy; to me happiness is like an illness,--it overwhelms me; I
fear it may vanish like a dream.”
I loved her too passionately not to feel jealous,--I who could give her
nothing! In my rage against myself I longed for some means of dying for
her. She asked me to tell her the thoughts that filled my eyes, and I
told her honestly. She was more touched than by all her presents; then
taking me to the portico, she poured comfort into my heart. “Love me as
my aunt loved me,” she said, “and that will be giving me your life; and
if I take it, must I not ever be grateful to you?
“It was time I finished my tapestry,” she added as we re-entered the
salon, where I kissed her hand as if to renew my vows. “Perhaps you do
not know, Felix, why I began so formidable a piece of work. Men find the
occupations of life a great resource against troubles; the management of
affairs distracts their mind; but we poor women have no support within
ourselves against our sorrows. To be able to smile before my children
and my husband when my heart was heavy I felt the need of controlling my
inward sufferings by some physical exercise. In this way I escaped
the depression which is apt to follow a great strain upon the moral
strength, and likewise all outbursts of excitement. The mere action of
lifting my arm regularly as I drew the stitches rocked my thoughts and
gave to my spirit when the tempest raged a monotonous ebb and flow
which seemed to regulate its emotions. To every stitch I confided my
secrets,--you understand me, do you not? Well, while doing my last chair
I have thought much, too much, of you, dear friend. What you have put
into your bouquets I have said in my embroidery.”
The dinner was lovely. Jacques, like all children when you take notice
of them, jumped into my arms when he saw the flowers I had arranged for
him as a garland. His mother pretended to be jealous; ah, Natalie, you
should have seen the charming grace with which the dear child offered
them to her. In the afternoon we played a game of backgammon, I alone
against Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf, and the count was charming.
They accompanied me along the road to Frapesle in the twilight of a
tranquil evening, one of those harmonious evenings when our feelings
gain in depth what they lose in vivacity. It was a day of days in
this poor woman’s life; a spot of brightness which often comforted her
thoughts in painful hours.
Soon, however, the riding lessons became a subject of contention. The
countess justly feared the count’s harsh reprimands to his son. Jacques
grew thin, dark circles surrounded his sweet blue eyes; rather than
trouble his mother, he suffered in silence. I advised him to tell
his father he was tired when the count’s temper was violent; but that
expedient proved unavailing, and it became necessary to substitute
the old huntsman as a teacher in place of the father, who could
with difficulty be induced to resign his pupil. Angry reproaches and
contentions began once more; the count found a text for his continual
complaints in the base ingratitude of women; he flung the carriage,
horses, and liveries in his wife’s face twenty times a day. At last a
circumstance occurred on which a man with his nature and his disease
naturally fastened eagerly. The cost of the buildings at the Cassine
and the Rhetoriere proved to be half as much again as the estimate.
This news was unfortunately given in the first instance to Monsieur de
Mortsauf instead of to his wife. It was the ground of a quarrel, which
began mildly but grew more and more embittered until it seemed as
though the count’s madness, lulled for a short time, was demanding its
arrearages from the poor wife.
That day I had started from Frapesle at half-past ten to search for
flowers with Madeleine. The child had brought the two vases to the
portico, and I was wandering about the gardens and adjoining meadows
gathering the autumn flowers, so beautiful, but too rare. Returning from
my final quest, I could not find my little lieutenant with her white
cape and broad pink sash; but I heard cries within the house, and
Madeleine presently came running out.
“The general,” she said, crying (the term with her was an expression of
dislike), “the general is scolding mamma; go and defend her.”
I sprang up the steps of the portico and reached the salon without being
seen by either the count or his wife. Hearing the madman’s sharp cries
I first shut all the doors, then I returned and found Henriette as white
as her dress.
“Never marry, Felix,” said the count as soon as he saw me; “a woman is
led by the devil; the most virtuous of them would invent evil if it did
not exist; they are all vile.”
Then followed arguments without beginning or end. Harking back to
the old troubles, Monsieur de Mortsauf repeated the nonsense of the
peasantry against the new system of farming. He declared that if he had
had the management of Clochegourde he should be twice as rich as he now
was. He shouted these complaints and insults, he swore, he sprang around
the room knocking against the furniture and displacing it; then in the
middle of a sentence he stopped short, complained that his very marrow
was on fire, his brains melting away like his money, his wife had ruined
him! The countess smiled and looked upward.
“Yes, Blanche,” he cried, “you are my executioner; you are killing me; I
am in your way; you want to get rid of me; you are monster of hypocrisy.
She is smiling! Do you know why she smiles, Felix?”
I kept silence and looked down.
“That woman,” he continued, answering his own question, “denies me all
happiness; she is no more to me than she is to you, and yet she pretends
to be my wife! She bears my name and fulfils none of the duties which
all laws, human and divine, impose upon her; she lies to God and man.
She obliges me to go long distances, hoping to wear me out and make me
leave her to herself; I am displeasing to her, she hates me; she puts
all her art into keeping me away from her; she has made me mad through
the privations she imposes on me--for everything flies to my poor head;
she is killing me by degrees, and she thinks herself a saint and takes
the sacrament every month!”
The countess was weeping bitterly, humiliated by the degradation of
the man, to whom she kept saying for all answer, “Monsieur! monsieur!
monsieur!”
Though the count’s words made me blush, more for him than for Henriette,
they stirred my heart violently, for they appealed to the sense of
chastity and delicacy which is indeed the very warp and woof of first
love.
“She is virgin at my expense,” cried the count.
At these words the countess cried out, “Monsieur!”
“What do you mean with your imperious ‘Monsieur!’” he shouted. “Am I not
your master? Must I teach you that I am?”
He came towards her, thrusting forward his white wolf’s head, now
hideous, for his yellow eyes had a savage expression which made him look
like a wild beast rushing out of a wood. Henriette slid from her chair
to the ground to avoid a blow, which however was not given; she lay at
full length on the floor and lost consciousness, completely exhausted.
The count was like a murderer who feels the blood of his victim spurting
in his face; he stopped short, bewildered. I took the poor woman in my
arms, and the count let me take her, as though he felt unworthy to touch
her; but he went before me to open the door of her bedroom next the
salon,--a sacred room I had never entered. I put the countess on her
feet and held her for a moment in one arm, passing the other round her
waist, while Monsieur de Mortsauf took the eider-down coverlet from the
bed; then together we lifted her and laid her, still dressed, on the
bed. When she came to herself she motioned to us to unfasten her belt.
Monsieur de Mortsauf found a pair of scissors, and cut through it; I
made her breathe salts, and she opened her eyes. The count left the
room, more ashamed than sorry. Two hours passed in perfect silence.
Henriette’s hand lay in mine; she pressed it to mine, but could not
speak. From time to time she opened her eyes as if to tell me by a look
that she wished to be still and silent; then suddenly, for an instant,
there seemed a change; she rose on her elbow and whispered, “Unhappy
man!--ah! if you did but know--”
She fell back upon the pillow. The remembrance of her past sufferings,
joined to the present shock, threw her again into the nervous
convulsions I had just calmed by the magnetism of love,--a power then
unknown to me, but which I used instinctively. I held her with gentle
force, and she gave me a look which made me weep. When the nervous
motions ceased I smoothed her disordered hair, the first and only time
that I ever touched it; then I again took her hand and sat looking
at the room, all brown and gray, at the bed with its simple chintz
curtains, at the toilet table draped in a fashion now discarded, at the
commonplace sofa with its quilted mattress. What poetry I could read
in that room! What renunciations of luxury for herself; the only luxury
being its spotless cleanliness. Sacred cell of a married nun, filled
with holy resignation; its sole adornments were the crucifix of her bed,
and above it the portrait of her aunt; then, on each side of the holy
water basin, two drawings of the children made by herself, with locks
of their hair when they were little. What a retreat for a woman whose
appearance in the great world of fashion would have made the handsomest
of her sex jealous! Such was the chamber where the daughter of an
illustrious family wept out her days, sunken at this moment in anguish,
and denying herself the love that might have comforted her. Hidden,
irreparable woe! Tears of the victim for her slayer, tears of the slayer
for his victim! When the children and waiting-woman came at length into
the room I left it. The count was waiting for me; he seemed to seek me
as a mediating power between himself and his wife. He caught my hands,
exclaiming, “Stay, stay with us, Felix!”
“Unfortunately,” I said, “Monsieur de Chessel has a party, and my
absence would cause remark. But after dinner I will return.”
He left the house when I did, and took me to the lower gate without
speaking; then he accompanied me to Frapesle, seeming not to know what
he was doing. At last I said to him, “For heaven’s sake, Monsieur le
comte, let her manage your affairs if it pleases her, and don’t torment
her.”
“I have not long to live,” he said gravely; “she will not suffer long
through me; my head is giving way.”
He left me in a spasm of involuntary self-pity. After dinner I returned
for news of Madame de Mortsauf, who was already better. If such were the
joys of marriage, if such scenes were frequent, how could she survive
them long? What slow, unpunished murder was this? During that day I
understood the tortures by which the count was wearing out his wife.
Before what tribunal can we arraign such crimes? These thoughts stunned
me; I could say nothing to Henriette by word of mouth, but I spent the
night in writing to her. Of the three or four letters that I wrote I
have kept only the beginning of one, with which I was not satisfied.
Here it is, for though it seems to me to express nothing, and to speak
too much of myself when I ought only to have thought of her, it will
serve to show you the state my soul was in:--
To Madame de Mortsauf:
How many things I had to say to you when I reached the house! I
thought of them on the way, but I forgot them in your presence.
Yes, when I see you, dear Henriette, I find my thoughts no longer
in keeping with the light from your soul which heightens your
beauty; then, too, the happiness of being near you is so ineffable
as to efface all other feelings. Each time we meet I am born into
a broader life; I am like the traveller who climbs a rock and sees
before him a new horizon. Each time you talk with me I add new
treasures to my treasury. There lies, I think, the secret of long
and inexhaustible affections. I can only speak to you of yourself
when away from you. In your presence I am too dazzled to see, too
happy to question my happiness, too full of you to be myself, too
eloquent through you to speak, too eager in seizing the present
moment to remember the past. You must think of this state of
intoxication and forgive me its consequent mistakes.
When near you I can only feel. Yet, I have courage to say, dear
Henriette, that never, in all the many joys you have given me,
never did I taste such joy as filled my soul when, after that
dreadful storm through which you struggled with superhuman
courage, you came to yourself alone with me, in the twilight of
your chamber where that unhappy scene had brought me. I alone
know the light that shines from a woman when through the portals
of death she re-enters life with the dawn of a rebirth tinting her
brow. What harmonies were in your voice! How words, even your
words, seemed paltry when the sound of that adored voice--in
itself the echo of past pains mingled with divine consolations
--blessed me with the gift of your first thought. I knew you were
brilliant with all human splendor, but yesterday I found a new
Henriette, who might be mine if God so willed; I beheld a spirit
freed from the bodily trammels which repress the ardors of the
soul. Ah! thou wert beautiful indeed in thy weakness, majestic in
thy prostration. Yesterday I found something more beautiful than
thy beauty, sweeter than thy voice; lights more sparkling than the
light of thine eyes, perfumes for which there are no words
--yesterday thy soul was visible and palpable. Would I could have
opened my heart and made thee live there! Yesterday I lost the
respectful timidity with which thy presence inspires me; thy
weakness brought us nearer together. Then, when the crisis passed
and thou couldst bear our atmosphere once more, I knew what it was
to breathe in unison with thy breath. How many prayers rose up to
heaven in that moment! Since I did not die as I rushed through
space to ask of God that he would leave thee with me, no human
creature can die of joy nor yet of sorrow. That moment has left
memories buried in my soul which never again will reappear upon
its surface and leave me tearless. Yes, the fears with which my
soul was tortured yesterday are incomparably greater than all
sorrows that the future can bring upon me, just as the joys which
thou hast given me, dear eternal thought of my life! will be
forever greater than any future joy God may be pleased to grant
me. Thou hast made me comprehend the love divine, that sure love,
sure in strength and in duration, that knows no doubt or jealousy.
Deepest melancholy gnawed my soul; the glimpse into that hidden life was
agonizing to a young heart new to social emotions; it was an awful thing
to find this abyss at the opening of life,--a bottomless abyss, a Dead
Sea. This dreadful aggregation of misfortunes suggested many thoughts;
at my first step into social life I found a standard of comparison by
which all other events and circumstances must seem petty.
The next day when I entered the salon she was there alone. She looked at
me for a moment, held out her hand, and said, “My friend is always too
tender.” Her eyes grew moist; she rose, and then she added, in a tone of
desperate entreaty, “Never write thus to me again.”
Monsieur de Mortsauf was very kind. The countess had recovered her
courage and serenity; but her pallor betrayed the sufferings of the
previous night, which were calmed, but not extinguished. That evening
she said to me, as she paced among the autumn leaves which rustled
beneath our footsteps, “Sorrow is infinite; joys are limited,”--words
which betrayed her sufferings by the comparison she made with the
fleeting delights of the previous week.
“Do not slander life,” I said to her. “You are ignorant of love; love
gives happiness which shines in heaven.”
“Hush!” she said. “I wish to know nothing of it. The Icelander would
die in Italy. I am calm and happy beside you; I can tell you all my
thoughts; do not destroy my confidence. Why will you not combine the
virtue of the priest with the charm of a free man.”
“You make me drink the hemlock!” I cried, taking her hand and laying it
on my heart, which was beating fast.
“Again!” she said, withdrawing her hand as if it pained her. “Are you
determined to deny me the sad comfort of letting my wounds be stanched
by a friendly hand? Do not add to my sufferings; you do not know them
all; those that are hidden are the worst to bear. If you were a woman
you would know the melancholy disgust that fills her soul when she
sees herself the object of attentions which atone for nothing, but are
thought to atone for all. For the next few days I shall be courted and
caressed, that I may pardon the wrong that has been done. I could
then obtain consent to any wish of mine, however unreasonable. I am
humiliated by his humility, by caresses which will cease as soon as
he imagines that I have forgotten that scene. To owe our master’s good
graces to his faults--”
“His crimes!” I interrupted quickly.
“Is not that a frightful condition of existence?” she continued, with a
sad smile. “I cannot use this transient power. At such times I am like
the knights who could not strike a fallen adversary. To see in the dust
a man whom we ought to honor, to raise him only to enable him to
deal other blows, to suffer from his degradation more than he suffers
himself, to feel ourselves degraded if we profit by such influence for
even a useful end, to spend our strength, to waste the vigor of our
souls in struggles that have no grandeur, to have no power except for a
moment when a fatal crisis comes--ah, better death! If I had no children
I would let myself drift on the wretched current of this life; but if I
lose my courage, what will become of them? I must live for them, however
cruel this life may be. You talk to me of love. Ah! my dear friend,
think of the hell into which I should fling myself if I gave that
pitiless being, pitiless like all weak creatures, the right to despise
me. The purity of my conduct is my strength. Virtue, dear friend, is
holy water in which we gain fresh strength, from which we issue renewed
in the love of God.”
“Listen to me, dear Henriette; I have only another week to stay here,
and I wish--”
“Ah, you mean to leave us!” she exclaimed.
“You must know what my father intends to do with me,” I replied. “It is
now three months--”
“I have not counted the days,” she said, with momentary
self-abandonment. Then she checked herself and cried, “Come, let us go
to Frapesle.”
She called the count and the children, sent for a shawl, and when all
were ready she, usually so calm and slow in all her movements, became
as active as a Parisian, and we started in a body to pay a visit at
Frapesle which the countess did not owe. She forced herself to talk to
Madame de Chessel, who was fortunately discursive in her answers. The
count and Monsieur de Chessel conversed on business. I was afraid the
former might boast of his carriage and horses; but he committed no such
solecisms. His neighbor questioned him about his projected improvements
at the Cassine and the Rhetoriere. I looked at the count, wondering if
he would avoid a subject of conversation so full of painful memories
to all, so cruelly mortifying to him. On the contrary, he explained how
urgent a duty it was to better the agricultural condition of the canton,
to build good houses and make the premises salubrious; in short, he
glorified himself with his wife’s ideas. I blushed as I looked at
her. Such want of scruple in a man who, on certain occasions, could be
scrupulous enough, this oblivion of the dreadful scene, this adoption of
ideas against which he had fought so violently, this confident belief in
himself, petrified me.
When Monsieur de Chessel said to him, “Do you expect to recover your
outlay?”
“More than recover it!” he exclaimed, with a confident gesture.
Such contradictions can be explained only by the word “insanity.”
Henriette, celestial creature, was radiant. The count was appearing
to be a man of intelligence, a good administrator, an excellent
agriculturist; she played with her boy’s curly head, joyous for him,
happy for herself. What a comedy of pain, what mockery in this drama;
I was horrified by it. Later in life, when the curtain of the world’s
stage was lifted before me, how many other Mortsaufs I saw without the
loyalty and the religious faith of this man. What strange, relentless
power is it that perpetually awards an angel to a madman; to a man of
heart, of true poetic passion, a base woman; to the petty, grandeur;
to this demented brain, a beautiful, sublime being; to Juana, Captain
Diard, whose history at Bordeaux I have told you; to Madame de
Beauseant, an Ajuda; to Madame d’Aiglemont, her husband; to the Marquis
d’Espard, his wife! Long have I sought the meaning of this enigma. I
have ransacked many mysteries, I have discovered the reason of many
natural laws, the purport of some divine hieroglyphics; of the meaning
of this dark secret I know nothing. I study it as I would the form of an
Indian weapon, the symbolic construction of which is known only to the
Brahmans. In this dread mystery the spirit of Evil is too visibly the
master; I dare not lay the blame to God. Anguish irremediable, what
power finds amusement in weaving you? Can Henriette and her mysterious
philosopher be right? Does their mysticism contain the explanation of
humanity?
The autumn leaves were falling during the last few days which I passed
in the valley, days of lowering clouds, which do sometimes obscure the
heaven of Touraine, so pure, so warm at that fine season. The evening
before my departure Madame de Mortsauf took me to the terrace before
dinner.
“My dear Felix,” she said, after we had taken a turn in silence under
the leafless trees, “you are about to enter the world, and I wish to go
with you in thought. Those who have suffered much have lived and known
much. Do not think that solitary souls know nothing of the world; on the
contrary, they are able to judge it. Hear me: If I am to live in and
for my friend I must do what I can for his heart and for his conscience.
When the conflict rages it is hard to remember rules; therefore let me
give you a few instructions, the warnings of a mother to her son. The
day you leave us I shall give you a letter, a long letter, in which you
will find my woman’s thoughts on the world, on society, on men, on
the right methods of meeting difficulty in this great clash of human
interests. Promise me not to read this letter till you reach Paris. I
ask it from a fanciful sentiment, one of those secrets of womanhood not
impossible to understand, but which we grieve to find deciphered; leave
me this covert way where as a woman I wish to walk alone.”
“Yes, I promise it,” I said, kissing her hand.
“Ah,” she added, “I have one more promise to ask of you; but grant it
first.”
“Yes, yes!” I cried, thinking it was surely a promise of fidelity.
“It does not concern myself,” she said smiling, with some bitterness.
“Felix, do not gamble in any house, no matter whose it be; I except
none.”
“I will never play at all,” I replied.
“Good,” she said. “I have found a better use for your time than to waste
it on cards. The end will be that where others must sooner or later be
losers you will invariably win.”
“How so?”
“The letter will tell you,” she said, with a playful smile, which took
from her advice the serious tone which might certainly have been that of
a grandfather.
The countess talked to me for an hour, and proved the depth of her
affection by the study she had made of my nature during the last three
months. She penetrated the recesses of my heart, entering it with her
own; the tones of her voice were changeful and convincing; the words
fell from maternal lips, showing by their tone as well as by their
meaning how many ties already bound us to each other.
“If you knew,” she said in conclusion, “with what anxiety I shall follow
your course, what joy I shall feel if you walk straight, what tears I
must shed if you strike against the angles! Believe that my affection
has no equal; it is involuntary and yet deliberate. Ah, I would that I
might see you happy, powerful, respected,--you who are to me a living
dream.”
She made me weep, so tender and so terrible was she. Her feelings came
boldly to the surface, yet they were too pure to give the slightest hope
even to a young man thirsting for pleasure. Ignoring my tortured flesh,
she shed the rays, undeviating, incorruptible, of the divine love,
which satisfies the soul only. She rose to heights whither the prismatic
pinions of a love like mine were powerless to bear me. To reach her a
man must needs have won the white wings of the seraphim.
“In all that happens to me I will ask myself,” I said, “‘What would my
Henriette say?’”
“Yes, I will be the star and the sanctuary both,” she said, alluding to
the dreams of my childhood.
“You are my light and my religion,” I cried; “you shall be my all.”
“No,” she answered; “I can never be the source of your pleasures.”
She sighed; the smile of secret pain was on her lips, the smile of the
slave who momentarily revolts. From that day forth she was to me, not
merely my beloved, but my only love; she was not IN my heart as a
woman who takes a place, who makes it hers by devotion or by excess
of pleasure given; but she was my heart itself,--it was all hers, a
something necessary to the play of my muscles. She became to me as
Beatrice to the Florentine, as the spotless Laura to the Venetian, the
mother of great thoughts, the secret cause of resolutions which saved
me, the support of my future, the light shining in the darkness like a
lily in a wood. Yes, she inspired those high resolves which pass through
flames, which save the thing in peril; she gave me a constancy like
Coligny’s to vanquish conquerors, to rise above defeat, to weary the
strongest wrestler.
The next day, having breakfasted at Frapesle and bade adieu to my kind
hosts, I went to Clochegourde. Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf had
arranged to drive with me to Tours, whence I was to start the same night
for Paris. During the drive the countess was silent; she pretended
at first to have a headache; then she blushed at the falsehood, and
expiated it by saying that she could not see me go without regret.
The count invited me to stay with them whenever, in the absence of the
Chessels, I might long to see the valley of the Indre once more. We
parted heroically, without apparent tears, but Jacques, who like other
delicate children was quickly touched, began to cry, while Madeleine,
already a woman, pressed her mother’s hand.
“Dear little one!” said the countess, kissing Jacques passionately.
When I was alone at Tours after dinner a wild, inexplicable desire known
only to young blood possessed me. I hired a horse and rode from Tours
to Pont-de-Ruan in an hour and a quarter. There, ashamed of my folly, I
dismounted, and went on foot along the road, stepping cautiously like
a spy till I reached the terrace. The countess was not there, and I
imagined her ill; I had kept the key of the little gate, by which I
now entered; she was coming down the steps of the portico with the two
children to breathe in sadly and slowly the tender melancholy of the
landscape, bathed at that moment in the setting sun.
“Mother, here is Felix,” said Madeleine.
“Yes,” I whispered; “it is I. I asked myself why I should stay at Tours
while I still could see you; why not indulge a desire that in a few days
more I could not gratify.”
“He won’t leave us again, mother,” cried Jacques, jumping round me.
“Hush!” said Madeleine; “if you make such a noise the general will
come.”
“It is not right,” she said. “What folly!”
The tears in her voice were the payment of what must be called a
usurious speculation of love.
“I had forgotten to return this key,” I said smiling.
“Then you will never return,” she said.
“Can we ever be really parted?” I asked, with a look which made her drop
her eyelids for all answer.
I left her after a few moments passed in that happy stupor of the spirit
where exaltation ends and ecstasy begins. I went with lagging step,
looking back at every minute. When, from the summit of the hill, I saw
the valley for the last time I was struck with the contrast it presented
to what it was when I first came there. Then it was verdant, then it
glowed, glowed and blossomed like my hopes and my desires. Initiated now
into the gloomy secrets of a family, sharing the anguish of a Christian
Niobe, sad with her sadness, my soul darkened, I saw the valley in the
tone of my own thoughts. The fields were bare, the leaves of the poplars
falling, the few that remained were rusty, the vine-stalks were burned,
the tops of the trees were tan-colored, like the robes in which royalty
once clothed itself as if to hide the purple of its power beneath the
brown of grief. Still in harmony with my thoughts, the valley, where the
yellow rays of the setting sun were coldly dying, seemed to me a living
image of my heart.
To leave a beloved woman is terrible or natural, according as the mind
takes it. For my part, I found myself suddenly in a strange land of
which I knew not the language. I was unable to lay hold of things to
which my soul no longer felt attachment. Then it was that the height
and the breadth of my love came before me; my Henriette rose in all her
majesty in this desert where I existed only through thoughts of her.
That form so worshipped made me vow to keep myself spotless before my
soul’s divinity, to wear ideally the white robe of the Levite, like
Petrarch, who never entered Laura’s presence unless clothed in white.
With what impatience I awaited the first night of my return to my
father’s roof, when I could read the letter which I felt of during the
journey as a miser fingers the bank-bills he carries about him. During
the night I kissed the paper on which my Henriette had manifested her
will; I sought to gather the mysterious emanations of her hand, to
recover the intonations of her voice in the hush of my being. Since then
I have never read her letters except as I read that first letter; in
bed, amid total silence. I cannot understand how the letters of our
beloved can be read in any other way; yet there are men, unworthy to
be loved, who read such letters in the turmoil of the day, laying them
aside and taking them up again with odious composure.
Here, Natalie, is the voice which echoed through the silence of that
night. Behold the noble figure which stood before me and pointed to the
right path among the cross-ways at which I stood.
To Monsieur le Vicomte Felix de Vandenesse:
What happiness for me, dear friend, to gather the scattered
elements of my experience that I may arm you against the dangers
of the world, through which I pray that you pass scatheless. I
have felt the highest pleasures of maternal love as night after
night I have thought of these things. While writing this letter,
sentence by sentence, projecting my thoughts into the life you are
about to lead, I went often to my window. Looking at the towers of
Frapesle, visible in the moonlight, I said to myself, “He sleeps,
I wake for him.” Delightful feelings! which recall the happiest of
my life, when I watched Jacques sleeping in his cradle and waited
till he wakened, to feed him with my milk. You are the man-child
whose soul must now be strengthened by precepts never taught in
schools, but which we women have the privilege of inculcating.
These precepts will influence your success; they prepare the way
for it, they will secure it. Am I not exercising a spiritual
motherhood in giving you a standard by which to judge the actions
of your life; a motherhood comprehended, is it not, by the child?
Dear Felix, let me, even though I may make a few mistakes, let me
give to our friendship a proof of the disinterestedness which
sanctifies it.
In yielding you to the world I am renouncing you; but I love you
too well not to sacrifice my happiness to your welfare. For the
last four months you have made me reflect deeply on the laws and
customs which regulate our epoch. The conversations I have had
with my aunt, well-known to you who have replaced her, the events
of Monsieur de Mortsauf’s life, which he has told me, the tales
related by my father, to whom society and the court are familiar
in their greatest as well as in their smallest aspects, all these
have risen in my memory for the benefit of my adopted child at the
moment when he is about to be launched, well-nigh alone, among
men; about to act without adviser in a world where many are
wrecked by their own best qualities thoughtlessly displayed, while
others succeed through a judicious use of their worst.
I ask you to ponder this statement of my opinion of society as a
whole; it is concise, for to you a few words are sufficient.
I do not know whether societies are of divine origin or whether
they were invented by man. I am equally ignorant of the direction
in which they tend. What I do know certainly is the fact of their
existence. No sooner therefore do you enter society, instead of
living a life apart, than you are bound to consider its conditions
binding; a contract is signed between you. Does society in these
days gain more from a man than it returns to him? I think so; but
as to whether the individual man finds more cost than profit, or
buys too dear the advantages he obtains, concerns the legislator
only; I have nothing to say to that. In my judgment you are bound
to obey in all things the general law, without discussion, whether
it injures or benefits your personal interests. This principle may
seem to you a very simple one, but it is difficult of application;
it is like sap, which must infiltrate the smallest of the
capillary tubes to stir the tree, renew its verdure, develop its
flowers, and ripen fruit. Dear, the laws of society are not all
written in a book; manners and customs create laws, the more
important of which are often the least known. Believe me, there
are neither teachers, nor schools, nor text-books for the laws
that are now to regulate your actions, your language, your visible
life, the manner of your presentation to the world, and your quest
of fortune. Neglect those secret laws or fail to understand them,
and you stay at the foot of the social system instead of looking
down upon it. Even though this letter may seem to you diffuse,
telling you much that you have already thought, let me confide to
you a woman’s ethics.
To explain society on the theory of individual happiness adroitly
won at the cost of the greater number is a monstrous doctrine,
which in its strict application leads men to believe that all they
can secretly lay hold of before the law or society or other
individuals condemn it as a wrong is honestly and fairly theirs.
Once admit that claim and the clever thief goes free; the woman
who violates her marriage vow without the knowledge of the world
is virtuous and happy; kill a man, leaving no proof for justice,
and if, like Macbeth, you win a crown you have done wisely; your
selfish interests become the higher law; the only question then is
how to evade, without witnesses or proof, the obstacles which law
and morality place between you and your self-indulgence. To those
who hold this view of society, the problem of making their
fortune, my dear friend, resolves itself into playing a game where
the stakes are millions or the galleys, political triumphs or
dishonor. Still, the green cloth is not long enough for all the
players, and a certain kind of genius is required to play the
game. I say nothing of religious beliefs, nor yet of feelings;
what concerns us now is the running-gear of the great machine of
gold and iron, and its practical results with which men’s lives
are occupied. Dear child of my heart, if you share my horror at
this criminal theory of the world, society will present to your
mind, as it does to all sane minds, the opposite theory of duty.
Yes, you will see that man owes himself to man in a thousand
differing ways. To my mind, the duke and peer owe far more to the
workman and the pauper than the pauper and the workman owe to the
duke. The obligations of duty enlarge in proportion to the
benefits which society bestows on men; in accordance with the
maxim, as true in social politics as in business, that the burden
of care and vigilance is everywhere in proportion to profits. Each
man pays his debt in his own way. When our poor toiler at the
Rhetoriere comes home weary with his day’s work has he not done
his duty? Assuredly he has done it better than many in the ranks
above him.
If you take this view of society, in which you are about to seek a
place in keeping with your intellect and your faculties, you must
set before you as a generating principle and mainspring, this
maxim: never permit yourself to act against either your own
conscience or the public conscience. Though my entreaty may seem
to you superfluous, yet I entreat, yes, your Henriette implores
you to ponder the meaning of that rule. It seems simple but, dear,
it means that integrity, loyalty, honor, and courtesy are the
safest and surest instruments for your success. In this selfish
world you will find many to tell you that a man cannot make his
way by sentiments, that too much respect for moral considerations
will hinder his advance. It is not so; you will see men
ill-trained, ill-taught, incapable of measuring the future, who are
rough to a child, rude to an old woman, unwilling to be irked by
some worthy old man on the ground that they can do nothing for
him; later, you will find the same men caught by the thorns which
they might have rendered pointless, and missing their triumph for
some trivial reason; whereas the man who is early trained to a
sense of duty does not meet the same obstacles; he may attain
success less rapidly, but when attained it is solid and does not
crumble like that of others.
When I show you that the application of this doctrine demands in
the first place a mastery of the science of manners, you may think
my jurisprudence has a flavor of the court and of the training I
received as a Lenoncourt. My dear friend, I do attach great
importance to that training, trifling as it seems. You will find
that the habits of the great world are as important to you as the
wide and varied knowledge that you possess. Often they take the
place of such knowledge; for some really ignorant men, born with
natural gifts and accustomed to give connection to their ideas,
have been known to attain a grandeur never reached by others far
more worthy of it. I have studied you thoroughly, Felix, wishing
to know if your education, derived wholly from schools, has
injured your nature. God knows the joy with which I find you fit
for that further education of which I speak.
The manners of many who are brought up in the traditions of the
great world are purely external; true politeness, perfect manners,
come from the heart, and from a deep sense of personal dignity.
This is why some men of noble birth are, in spite of their
training, ill-mannered, while others, among the middle classes,
have instinctive good taste and only need a few lessons to give
them excellent manners without any signs of awkward imitation.
Believe a poor woman who no longer leaves her valley when she
tells you that this dignity of tone, this courteous simplicity in
words, in gesture, in bearing, and even in the character of the
home, is a living and material poem, the charm of which is
irresistible; imagine therefore what it is when it takes its
inspiration from the heart. Politeness, dear, consists in seeming
to forget ourselves for others; with many it is social cant, laid
aside when personal self-interest shows its cloven-foot; a noble
then becomes ignoble. But--and this is what I want you to
practise, Felix--true politeness involves a Christian principle;
it is the flower of Love, it requires that we forget ourselves
really. In memory of your Henriette, for her sake, be not a
fountain without water, have the essence and the form of true
courtesy. Never fear to be the dupe and victim of this social
virtue; you will some day gather the fruit of seeds scattered
apparently to the winds.
My father used to say that one of the great offences of sham
politeness was the neglect of promises. When anything is demanded
of you that you cannot do, refuse positively and leave no
loopholes for false hopes; on the other hand, grant at once
whatever you are willing to bestow. Your prompt refusal will make
you friends as well as your prompt benefit, and your character
will stand the higher; for it is hard to say whether a promise
forgotten, a hope deceived does not make us more enemies than a
favor granted brings us friends.
Dear friend, there are certain little matters on which I may
dwell, for I know them, and it comes within my province to impart
them. Be not too confiding, nor frivolous, nor over enthusiastic,
--three rocks on which youth often strikes. Too confiding a nature
loses respect, frivolity brings contempt, and others take
advantage of excessive enthusiasm. In the first place, Felix, you
will never have more than two or three friends in the course of
your life. Your entire confidence is their right; to give it to
many is to betray your real friends. If you are more intimate with
some men than with others keep guard over yourself; be as cautious
as though you knew they would one day be your rivals, or your
enemies; the chances and changes of life require this. Maintain an
attitude which is neither cold nor hot; find the medium point at
which a man can safely hold intercourse with others without
compromising himself. Yes, believe me, the honest man is as far
from the base cowardice of Philinte as he is from the harsh virtue
of Alceste. The genius of the poet is displayed in the mind of
this true medium; certainly all minds do enjoy more the ridicule
of virtue than the sovereign contempt of easy-going selfishness
which underlies that picture of it; but all, nevertheless, are
prompted to keep themselves from either extreme.
As to frivolity, if it causes fools to proclaim you a charming
man, others who are accustomed to judge of men’s capacities and
fathom character, will winnow out your tare and bring you to
disrepute, for frivolity is the resource of weak natures, and
weakness is soon appraised in a society which regards its members
as nothing more than organs--and perhaps justly, for nature
herself puts to death imperfect beings. A woman’s protecting
instincts may be roused by the pleasure she feels in supporting
the weak against the strong, and in leading the intelligence of
the heart to victory over the brutality of matter; but society,
less a mother than a stepmother, adores only the children who
flatter her vanity.
As to ardent enthusiasm, that first sublime mistake of youth,
which finds true happiness in using its powers, and begins by
being its own dupe before it is the dupe of others, keep it within
the region of the heart’s communion, keep it for woman and for
God. Do not hawk its treasures in the bazaars of society or of
politics, where trumpery will be offered in exchange for them.
Believe the voice which commands you to be noble in all things
when it also prays you not to expend your forces uselessly.
Unhappily, men will rate you according to your usefulness, and not
according to your worth. To use an image which I think will strike
your poetic mind, let a cipher be what it may, immeasurable in
size, written in gold, or written in pencil, it is only a cipher
after all. A man of our times has said, “No zeal, above all, no
zeal!” The lesson may be sad, but it is true, and it saves the
soul from wasting its bloom. Hide your pure sentiments, or put
them in regions inaccessible, where their blossoms may be
passionately admired, where the artist may dream amorously of his
master-piece. But duties, my friend, are not sentiments. To do
what we ought is by no means to do what we like. A man who would
give his life enthusiastically for a woman must be ready to die
coldly for his country.
One of the most important rules in the science of manners is that
of almost absolute silence about ourselves. Play a little comedy
for your own instruction; talk of yourself to acquaintances, tell
them about your sufferings, your pleasures, your business, and you
will see how indifference succeeds pretended interest; then
annoyance follows, and if the mistress of the house does not find
some civil way of stopping you the company will disappear under
various pretexts adroitly seized. Would you, on the other hand,
gather sympathies about you and be spoken of as amiable and witty,
and a true friend? talk to others of themselves, find a way to
bring them forward, and brows will clear, lips will smile, and
after you leave the room all present will praise you. Your
conscience and the voice of your own heart will show you the line
where the cowardice of flattery begins and the courtesy of
intercourse ceases.
One word more about a young man’s demeanor in public. My dear
friend, youth is always inclined to a rapidity of judgment which
does it honor, but also injury. This was why the old system of
education obliged young people to keep silence and study life in a
probationary period beside their elders. Formerly, as you know,
nobility, like art, had its apprentices, its pages, devoted body
and soul to the masters who maintained them. To-day youth is
forced in a hot-house; it is trained to judge of thoughts,
actions, and writings with biting severity; it slashes with a
blade that has not been fleshed. Do not make this mistake. Such
judgments will seem like censures to many about you, who would
sooner pardon an open rebuke than a secret wound. Young people are
pitiless because they know nothing of life and its difficulties.
The old critic is kind and considerate, the young critic is
implacable; the one knows nothing, the other knows all. Moreover,
at the bottom of all human actions there is a labyrinth of
determining reasons on which God reserves for himself the final
judgment. Be severe therefore to none but yourself.