It was at this time, when I was never more deeply moved in my whole
being, when I lived in that soul to which I strove to send the luminous
breeze of the mornings and the hope of the crimsoned evenings, that
I met, in the salons of the Elysee-Bourbon, one of those illustrious
ladies who reign as sovereigns in society. Immensely rich, born of a
family whose blood was pure from all misalliance since the Conquest,
married to one of the most distinguished old men of the British peerage,
it was nevertheless evident that these advantages were mere accessories
heightening this lady’s beauty, graces, manners, and wit, all of which
had a brilliant quality which dazzled before it charmed. She was the
idol of the day; reigning the more securely over Parisian society
because she possessed the quality most necessary to success,--the hand
of iron in the velvet glove spoken of by Bernadotte.
You know the singular characteristics of English people, the distance
and coldness of their own Channel which they put between them and
whoever has not been presented to them in a proper manner. Humanity
seems to be an ant-hill on which they tread; they know none of their
species except the few they admit into their circle; they ignore even
the language of the rest; tongues may move and eyes may see in their
presence but neither sound nor look has reached them; to them, the
people are as if they were not. The British present an image of their
own island, where law rules everything, where all is automatic in
every station of life, where the exercise of virtue appears to be the
necessary working of a machine which goes by clockwork. Fortifications
of polished steel rise around the Englishwoman behind the golden wires
of her household cage (where the feed-box and the drinking-cup, the
perches and the food are exquisite in quality), but they make her
irresistibly attractive. No people ever trained married women so
carefully to hypocrisy by holding them rigidly between the two extremes
of death or social station; for them there is no middle path between
shame and honor; either the wrong is completed or it does not exist;
it is all or nothing,--Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” This alternative,
coupled with the scorn to which the customs of her country have trained
her, make an Englishwoman a being apart in the world. She is a helpless
creature, forced to be virtuous yet ready to yield, condemned to live
a lie in her heart, yet delightful in outward appearance--for these
English rest everything on appearances. Hence the special charms of
their women: the enthusiasm for a love which is all their life; the
minuteness of their care for their persons; the delicacy of their
passion, so charmingly rendered in the famous scene of Romeo and
Juliet in which, with one stroke, Shakespeare’s genius depicted his
country-women.
You, who envy them so many things, what can I tell you that you do not
know of these white sirens, impenetrable apparently but easily fathomed,
who believe that love suffices love, and turn enjoyments to satiety
by never varying them; whose soul has one note only, their voice one
syllable--an ocean of love in themselves, it is true, and he who has
never swum there misses part of the poetry of the senses, as he who has
never seen the sea has lost some strings of his lyre. You know the
why and wherefore of these words. My relations with the Marchioness
of Dudley had a disastrous celebrity. At an age when the senses have
dominion over our conduct, and when in my case they had been violently
repressed by circumstances, the image of the saint bearing her slow
martyrdom at Clochegourde shone so vividly before my mind that I was
able to resist all seductions. It was the lustre of this fidelity which
attracted Lady Dudley’s attention. My resistance stimulated her passion.
What she chiefly desired, like many Englishwoman, was the spice of
singularity; she wanted pepper, capsicum, with her heart’s food, just
as Englishmen need condiments to excite their appetite. The dull languor
forced into the lives of these women by the constant perfection of
everything about them, the methodical regularity of their habits, leads
them to adore the romantic and to welcome difficulty. I was wholly
unable to judge of such a character. The more I retreated to a cold
distance the more impassioned Lady Dudley became. The struggle, in
which she gloried, excited the curiosity of several persons, and this in
itself was a form of happiness which to her mind made ultimate triumph
obligatory. Ah! I might have been saved if some good friend had
then repeated to me her cruel comment on my relations with Madame de
Mortsauf.
“I am wearied to death,” she said, “of these turtle-dove sighings.”
Without seeking to justify my crime, I ask you to observe, Natalie, that
a man has fewer means of resisting a woman than she has of escaping him.
Our code of manners forbids the brutality of repressing a woman, whereas
repression with your sex is not only allurement to ours, but is imposed
upon you by conventions. With us, on the contrary, some unwritten law
of masculine self-conceit ridicules a man’s modesty; we leave you the
monopoly of that virtue, that you may have the privilege of granting us
favors; but reverse the case, and man succumbs before sarcasm.
Though protected by my love, I was not of an age to be wholly insensible
to the triple seductions of pride, devotion, and beauty. When Arabella
laid at my feet the homage of a ball-room where she reigned a queen,
when she watched by glance to know if my taste approved of her dress,
and when she trembled with pleasure on seeing that she pleased me, I was
affected by her emotion. Besides, she occupied a social position where
I could not escape her; I could not refuse invitations in the diplomatic
circle; her rank admitted her everywhere, and with the cleverness all
women display to obtain what pleases them, she often contrived that
the mistress of the house should place me beside her at dinner. On such
occasions she spoke in low tones to my ear. “If I were loved like Madame
de Mortsauf,” she said once, “I should sacrifice all.” She did submit
herself with a laugh in many humble ways; she promised me a discretion
equal to any test, and even asked that I would merely suffer her to
love me. “Your friend always, your mistress when you will,” she said. At
last, after an evening when she had made herself so beautiful that she
was certain to have excited my desires, she came to me. The scandal
resounded through England, where the aristocracy was horrified like
heaven itself at the fall of its highest angel. Lady Dudley abandoned
her place in the British empyrean, gave up her wealth, and endeavored to
eclipse by her sacrifices _her_ whose virtue had been the cause of this
great disaster. She took delight, like the devil on the pinnacle of the
temple, in showing me all the riches of her passionate kingdom.
Read me, I pray you, with indulgence. The matter concerns one of the
most interesting problems of human life,--a crisis to which most men
are subjected, and which I desire to explain, if only to place a warning
light upon the reef. This beautiful woman, so slender, so fragile, this
milk-white creature, so yielding, so submissive, so gentle, her brow so
endearing, the hair that crowns it so fair and fine, this tender woman,
whose brilliancy is phosphorescent and fugitive, has, in truth, an
iron nature. No horse, no matter how fiery he may be, can conquer her
vigorous wrist, or strive against that hand so soft in appearance, but
never tired. She has the foot of a doe, a thin, muscular little foot,
indescribably graceful in outline. She is so strong that she fears
no struggle; men cannot follow her on horseback; she would win a
steeple-chase against a centaur; she can bring down a stag without
stopping her horse. Her body never perspires; it inhales the fire of the
atmosphere, and lives in water under pain of not living at all. Her
love is African; her desires are like the whirlwinds of the desert--the
desert, whose torrid expanse is in her eyes, the azure, love-laden
desert, with its changeless skies, its cool and starry nights. What a
contrast to Clochegourde! the east and the west! the one drawing into
her every drop of moisture for her own nourishment, the other exuding
her soul, wrapping her dear ones in her luminous atmosphere; the one
quick and slender; the other slow and massive.
Have you ever reflected on the actual meaning of the manners and
customs and morals of England? Is it not the deification of matter? a
well-defined, carefully considered Epicureanism, judiciously applied?
No matter what may be said against the statement, England is
materialist,--possibly she does not know it herself. She lays claim to
religion and morality, from which, however, divine spirituality, the
catholic soul, is absent; and its fructifying grace cannot be replaced
by any counterfeit, however well presented it may be. England possesses
in the highest degree that science of existence which turns to account
every particle of materiality; the science that makes her women’s
slippers the most exquisite slippers in the world, gives to their
linen ineffable fragrance, lines their drawers with cedar, serves tea
carefully drawn, at a certain hour, banishes dust, nails the carpets
to the floors in every corner of the house, brushes the cellar walls,
polishes the knocker of the front door, oils the springs of the
carriage,--in short, makes matter a nutritive and downy pulp, clean and
shining, in the midst of which the soul expires of enjoyment and the
frightful monotony of comfort in a life without contrasts, deprived of
spontaneity, and which, to sum all in one word, makes a machine of you.
Thus I suddenly came to know, in the bosom of this British luxury, a
woman who is perhaps unique among her sex; who caught me in the nets of
a love excited by my indifference, and to the warmth of which I opposed
a stern continence,--one of those loves possessed of overwhelming charm,
an electricity of their own, which lead us to the skies through the
ivory gates of slumber, or bear us thither on their powerful pinions.
A love monstrously ungrateful, which laughs at the bodies of those it
kills; love without memory, a cruel love, resembling the policy of the
English nation; a love to which, alas, most men yield. You understand
the problem? Man is composed of matter and spirit; animality comes to
its end in him, and the angel begins in him. There lies the struggle we
all pass through, between the future destiny of which we are conscious
and the influence of anterior instincts from which we are not wholly
detached,--carnal love and divine love. One man combines them, another
abstains altogether; some there are who seek the satisfaction of their
anterior appetites from the whole sex; others idealize their love in one
woman who is to them the universe; some float irresolutely between the
delights of matter and the joys of soul, others spiritualize the body,
requiring of it that which it cannot give.
If, thinking over these leading characteristics of love, you take into
account the dislikes and the affinities which result from the diversity
of organisms, and which sooner or later break all ties between those who
have not fully tried each other; if you add to this the mistakes arising
from the hopes of those who live more particularly either by their
minds, or by their hearts, or by action, who either think, or feel, or
act, and whose tendency is misunderstood in the close association in
which two persons, equal counterparts, find themselves, you will have
great indulgence for sorrows to which the world is pitiless. Well, Lady
Dudley gratified the instincts, organs, appetites, the vices and virtues
of the subtile matter of which we are made; she was the mistress of the
body; Madame de Mortsauf was the wife of the soul. The love which
the mistress satisfies has its limits; matter is finite, its inherent
qualities have an ascertained force, it is capable of saturation; often
I felt a void even in Paris, near Lady Dudley. Infinitude is the region
of the heart, love had no limits at Clochegourde. I loved Lady Dudley
passionately; and certainly, though the animal in her was magnificent,
she was also superior in mind; her sparkling and satirical conversation
had a wide range. But I adored Henriette. At night I wept with
happiness, in the morning with remorse.
Some women have the art to hide their jealousy under a tone of angelic
kindness; they are, like Lady Dudley, over thirty years of age. Such
women know how to feel and how to calculate; they press out the juices
of to-day and think of the future also; they can stifle a moan, often a
natural one, with the will of a huntsman who pays no heed to a wound
in the ardor of the chase. Without ever speaking of Madame de Mortsauf,
Arabella endeavored to kill her in my soul, where she ever found her,
her own passion increasing with the consciousness of that invincible
love. Intending to triumph by comparisons which would turn to her
advantage, she was never suspicious, or complaining, or inquisitive, as
are most young women; but, like a lioness who has seized her prey
and carries it to her lair to devour, she watched that nothing should
disturb her feast, and guarded me like a rebellious captive. I wrote to
Henriette under her very eyes, but she never read a line of my letters;
she never sought in any way to know to whom they were addressed. I had
my liberty; she seemed to say to herself, “If I lose him it shall be my
own fault,” and she proudly relied on a love that would have given me
her life had I asked for it,--in fact she often told me that if I left
her she would kill herself. I have heard her praise the custom of Indian
widows who burn themselves upon their husband’s grave. “In India that is
a distinction reserved for the higher classes,” she said, “and is very
little understood by Europeans, who are incapable of understanding the
grandeur of the privilege; you must admit, however, that on the dead
level of our modern customs aristocracy can rise to greatness only
through unparalleled devotions. How can I prove to the middle classes
that the blood in my veins is not the same as theirs, unless I show them
that I can die as they cannot? Women of no birth can have diamonds and
satins and horses--even coats-of-arms, which ought to be sacred to us,
for any one can buy a name. But to love, with our heads up, in defiance
of law; to die for the idol we have chosen, with the sheets of our bed
for a shroud; to lay earth and heaven at his feet, robbing the Almighty
of his right to make a god, and never to betray that man, never, never,
even for virtue’s sake,--for, to refuse him anything in the name of
duty is to devote ourselves to something that is not _he_, and let that
something be a man or an idea, it is betrayal all the same,--these
are heights to which common women cannot attain; they know but two
matter-of-fact ways; the great high-road of virtue, or the muddy path of
the courtesan.”
Pride, you see, was her instrument; she flattered all vanities by
deifying them. She put me so high that she might live at my feet;
in fact, the seductions of her spirit were literally expressed by an
attitude of subserviency and her complete submission. In what words
shall I describe those first six months when I was lost in enervating
enjoyments, in the meshes of a love fertile in pleasures and knowing how
to vary them with a cleverness learned by long experience, yet hiding
that knowledge beneath the transports of passion. These pleasures, the
sudden revelation of the poetry of the senses, constitute the powerful
tie which binds young men to women older than they. It is the chain of
the galley-slave; it leaves an ineffaceable brand upon the soul, filling
it with disgust for pure and innocent love decked with flowers only,
which serves no alcohol in curiously chased cups inlaid with jewels and
sparkling with unquenchable fires.
Recalling my early dreams of pleasures I knew nothing of, expressed at
Clochegourde in my “selams,” the voice of my flowers, pleasures which
the union of souls renders all the more ardent, I found many sophistries
by which I excused to myself the delight with which I drained that
jewelled cup. Often, when, lost in infinite lassitude, my soul
disengaged itself from the body and floated far from earth, I thought
that these pleasures might be the means of abolishing matter and of
rendering to the spirit its power to soar. Sometimes Lady Dudley, like
other women, profited by the exaltation in which I was to bind me by
promises; under the lash of a desire she wrung blasphemies from my lips
against the angel at Clochegourde. Once a traitor I became a scoundrel.
I continued to write to Madame de Mortsauf, in the tone of the lad she
had first known in his strange blue coat; but, I admit it, her gift of
second-sight terrified me when I thought what ruin the indiscretion of a
word might bring to the dear castle of my hopes. Often, in the midst
of my pleasure a sudden horror seized me; I heard the name of Henriette
uttered by a voice above me, like that in the Scriptures, demanding:
“Cain, where is thy brother Abel?”
At last my letters remained unanswered. I was seized with horrible
anxiety and wished to leave for Clochegourde. Arabella did not oppose
it, but she talked of accompanying me to Touraine. Her woman’s wit told
her that the journey might be a means of finally detaching me from her
rival; while I, blind with fear and guilelessly unsuspicious, did not
see the trap she set for me. Lady Dudley herself proposed the humblest
concessions. She would stay near Tours, at a little country-place,
alone, disguised; she would refrain from going out in the day-time, and
only meet me in the evening when people were not likely to be about.
I left Tours on horseback. I had my reasons for this; my evening
excursions to meet her would require a horse, and mine was an Arab which
Lady Hester Stanhope had sent to the marchioness, and which she had
lately exchanged with me for that famous picture of Rembrandt which I
obtained in so singular a way, and which now hangs in her drawing-room
in London. I took the road I had traversed on foot six years earlier and
stopped beneath my walnut-tree. From there I saw Madame de Mortsauf in
a white dress standing at the edge of the terrace. Instantly I rode
towards her with the speed of lightning, in a straight line and across
country. She heard the stride of the swallow of the desert and when I
pulled him up suddenly at the terrace, she said to me: “Oh, you here!”
Those three words blasted me. She knew my treachery. Who had told her?
her mother, whose hateful letter she afterwards showed me. The feeble,
indifferent voice, once so full of life, the dull pallor of its tones
revealed a settled grief, exhaling the breath of flowers cut and left
to wither. The tempest of infidelity, like those freshets of the Loire
which bury the meadows for all time in sand, had torn its way through
her soul, leaving a desert where once the verdure clothed the fields.
I led my horse through the little gate; he lay down on the grass at my
command and the countess, who came forward slowly, exclaimed, “What a
fine animal!” She stood with folded arms lest I should try to take her
hand; I guessed her meaning.
“I will let Monsieur de Mortsauf know you are here,” she said, leaving
me.
I stood still, confounded, letting her go, watching her, always noble,
slow, and proud,--whiter than I had ever seen her; on her brow the
yellow imprint of bitterest melancholy, her head bent like a lily heavy
with rain.
“Henriette!” I cried in the agony of a man about to die.
She did not turn or pause; she disdained to say that she withdrew from
me that name, but she did not answer to it and continued on. I may feel
paltry and small in this dreadful vale of life where myriads of human
beings now dust make the surface of the globe, small indeed among that
crowd, hurrying beneath the luminous spaces which light them; but what
sense of humiliation could equal that with which I watched her calm
white figure inflexibly mounting with even steps the terraces of her
chateau of Clochegourde, the pride and the torture of that Christian
Dido? I cursed Arabella in a single imprecation which might have killed
her had she heard it, she who had left all for me as some leave all for
God. I remained lost in a world of thought, conscious of utter misery
on all sides. Presently I saw the whole family coming down; Jacques,
running with the eagerness of his age. Madeleine, a gazelle with
mournful eyes, walked with her mother. Monsieur de Mortsauf came to me
with open arms, pressed me to him and kissed me on both cheeks crying
out, “Felix, I know now that I owed you my life.”
Madame de Mortsauf stood with her back towards me during this little
scene, under pretext of showing the horse to Madeleine.
“Ha, the devil! that’s what women are,” cried the count; “admiring your
horse!”
Madeleine turned, came up to me, and I kissed her hand, looking at the
countess, who colored.
“Madeleine seems much better,” I said.
“Poor little girl!” said the countess, kissing her on her forehead.
“Yes, for the time being they are all well,” answered the count. “Except
me, Felix; I am as battered as an old tower about to fall.”
“The general is still depressed,” I remarked to Madame de Mortsauf.
“We all have our blue devils--is not that the English term?” she
replied.
The whole party walked on towards the vineyard with the feeling that
some serious event had happened. She had no wish to be alone with me.
Still, I was her guest.
“But about your horse? why isn’t he attended to?” said the count.
“You see I am wrong if I think of him, and wrong if I do not,” remarked
the countess.
“Well, yes,” said her husband; “there is a time to do things, and a time
not to do them.”
“I will attend to him,” I said, finding this sort of greeting
intolerable. “No one but myself can put him into his stall; my groom is
coming by the coach from Chinon; he will rub him down.”
“I suppose your groom is from England,” she said.
“That is where they all come from,” remarked the count, who grew
cheerful in proportion as his wife seemed depressed. Her coldness
gave him an opportunity to oppose her, and he overwhelmed me with
friendliness.
“My dear Felix,” he said, taking my hand, and pressing it
affectionately, “pray forgive Madame de Mortsauf; women are so
whimsical. But it is owing to their weakness; they cannot have the
evenness of temper we owe to our strength of character. She really loves
you, I know it; only--”
While the count was speaking Madame de Mortsauf gradually moved away
from us so as to leave us alone.
“Felix,” said the count, in a low voice, looking at his wife, who was
now going up to the house with her two children, “I don’t know what is
going on in Madame de Mortsauf’s mind, but for the last six weeks her
disposition has completely changed. She, so gentle, so devoted hitherto,
is now extraordinarily peevish.”
Manette told me later that the countess had fallen into a state of
depression which made her indifferent to the count’s provocations. No
longer finding a soft substance in which he could plant his arrows, the
man became as uneasy as a child when the poor insect it is tormenting
ceases to move. He now needed a confidant, as the hangman needs a
helper.
“Try to question Madame de Mortsauf,” he said after a pause, “and find
out what is the matter. A woman always has secrets from her husband;
but perhaps she will tell you what troubles her. I would sacrifice
everything to make her happy, even to half my remaining days or half my
fortune. She is necessary to my very life. If I have not that angel at
my side as I grow old I shall be the most wretched of men. I do desire
to die easy. Tell her I shall not be here long to trouble her. Yes,
Felix, my poor friend, I am going fast, I know it. I hide the fatal
truth from every one; why should I worry them beforehand? The trouble is
in the orifice of the stomach, my friend. I have at last discovered the
true cause of this disease; it is my sensibility that is killing me.
Indeed, all our feelings affect the gastric centre.”
“Then do you mean,” I said, smiling, “that the best-hearted people die
of their stomachs?”
“Don’t laugh, Felix; nothing is more absolutely true. Too keen
a sensibility increases the play of the sympathetic nerve; these
excitements of feeling keep the mucous membrane of the stomach in a
state of constant irritation. If this state continues it deranges, at
first insensibly, the digestive functions; the secretions change, the
appetite is impaired, and the digestion becomes capricious; sharp
pains are felt; they grow worse day by day, and more frequent; then
the disorder comes to a crisis, as if a slow poison were passing the
alimentary canal; the mucous membrane thickens, the valve of the pylorus
becomes indurated and forms a scirrhus, of which the patient dies. Well,
I have reached that point, my dear friend. The induration is proceeding
and nothing checks it. Just look at my yellow skin, my feverish eyes,
my excessive thinness. I am withering away. But what is to be done?
I brought the seeds of the disease home with me from the emigration;
heaven knows what I suffered then! My marriage, which might have
repaired the wrong, far from soothing my ulcerated mind increased the
wound. What did I find? ceaseless fears for the children, domestic jars,
a fortune to remake, economies which required great privations, which
I was obliged to impose upon my wife, but which I was the one to suffer
from; and then,--I can tell this to none but you, Felix,--I have a worse
trouble yet. Though Blanche is an angel, she does not understand me; she
knows nothing of my sufferings and she aggravates them; but I forgive
her. It is a dreadful thing to say, my friend, but a less virtuous woman
might have made me more happy by lending herself to consolations which
Blanche never thinks of, for she is as silly as a child. Moreover my
servants torment me; blockheads who take my French for Greek! When our
fortune was finally remade inch by inch, and I had some relief from
care, it was too late, the harm was done; I had reached the period when
the appetite is vitiated. Then came my severe illness, so ill-managed by
Origet. In short, I have not six months to live.”
I listened to the count in terror. On meeting the countess I had been
struck with her yellow skin and the feverish brilliancy of her eyes.
I led the count towards the house while seeming to listen to his
complaints and his medical dissertations; but my thoughts were all with
Henriette, and I wanted to observe her. We found her in the salon, where
she was listening to a lesson in mathematics which the Abbe Dominis
was giving Jacques, and at the same time showing Madeleine a stitch of
embroidery. Formerly she would have laid aside every occupation the day
of my arrival to be with me. But my love was so deeply real that I drove
back into my heart the grief I felt at this contrast between the past
and the present, and thought only of the fatal yellow tint on that
celestial face, which resembled the halo of divine light Italian
painters put around the faces of their saints. I felt the icy wind of
death pass over me. Then when the fire of her eyes, no longer softened
by the liquid light in which in former times they moved, fell upon me,
I shuddered; I noticed several changes, caused by grief, which I had not
seen in the open air. The slender lines which, at my last visit, were
so lightly marked upon her forehead had deepened; her temples with their
violet veins seemed burning and concave; her eyes were sunk beneath the
brows, their circles browned;--alas! she was discolored like a fruit
when decay is beginning to show upon the surface, or a worm is at the
core. I, whose whole ambition had been to pour happiness into her soul,
I it was who embittered the spring from which she had hoped to refresh
her life and renew her courage. I took a seat beside her and said in a
voice filled with tears of repentance, “Are you satisfied with your own
health?”
“Yes,” she answered, plunging her eyes into mine. “My health is there,”
she added, motioning to Jacques and Madeleine.
The latter, just fifteen, had come victoriously out of her struggle with
anaemia, and was now a woman. She had grown tall; the Bengal roses were
blooming in her once sallow cheeks. She had lost the unconcern of a
child who looks every one in the face, and now dropped her eyes; her
movements were slow and infrequent, like those of her mother; her figure
was slim, but the gracefulness of the bust was already developing;
already an instinct of coquetry had smoothed the magnificent black hair
which lay in bands upon her Spanish brow. She was like those pretty
statuettes of the Middle Ages, so delicate in outline, so slender in
form that the eye as it seizes their charm fears to break them. Health,
the fruit of untold efforts, had made her cheeks as velvety as a peach
and given to her throat the silken down which, like her mother’s,
caught the light. She was to live! God had written it, dear bud of the
loveliest of human flowers, on the long lashes of her eyelids, on the
curve of those shoulders which gave promise of a development as superb
as her mother’s! This brown young girl, erect as a poplar, contrasted
with Jacques, a fragile youth of seventeen, whose head had grown
immensely, causing anxiety by the rapid expansion of the forehead, while
his feverish, weary eyes were in keeping with a voice that was deep and
sonorous. The voice gave forth too strong a volume of tone, the eye too
many thoughts. It was Henriette’s intellect and soul and heart that were
here devouring with swift flames a body without stamina; for Jacques
had the milk-white skin and high color which characterize young English
women doomed sooner or later to the consumptive curse,--an appearance of
health that deceives the eye. Following a sign by which Henriette,
after showing me Madeleine, made me look at Jacques drawing geometrical
figures and algebraic calculations on a board before the Abbe Dominis,
I shivered at the sight of death hidden beneath the roses, and was
thankful for the self-deception of his mother.
“When I see my children thus, happiness stills my griefs--just as
those griefs are dumb, and even disappear, when I see them failing. My
friend,” she said, her eyes shining with maternal pleasure, “if other
affections fail us, the feelings rewarded here, the duties done and
crowned with success, are compensation enough for defeat elsewhere.
Jacques will be, like you, a man of the highest education, possessed of
the worthiest knowledge; he will be, like you, an honor to his country,
which he may assist in governing, helped by you, whose standing will be
so high; but I will strive to make him faithful to his first affections.
Madeleine, dear creature, has a noble heart; she is pure as the snows
on the highest Alps; she will have a woman’s devotion and a woman’s
graceful intellect. She is proud; she is worthy of being a Lenoncourt.
My motherhood, once so tried, so tortured, is happy now, happy with an
infinite happiness, unmixed with pain. Yes, my life is full, my life
is rich. You see, God makes my joy to blossom in the heart of these
sanctified affections, and turns to bitterness those that might have led
me astray--”
“Good!” cried the abbe, joyfully. “Monsieur le vicomte begins to know as
much as I--”
Just then Jacques coughed.
“Enough for to-day, my dear abbe,” said the countess, “above all, no
chemistry. Go for a ride on horseback, Jacques,” she added, letting her
son kiss her with the tender and yet dignified pleasure of a mother.
“Go, dear, but take care of yourself.”
“But,” I said, as her eyes followed Jacques with a lingering look, “you
have not answered me. Do you feel ill?”
“Oh, sometimes, in my stomach. If I were in Paris I should have the
honors of gastritis, the fashionable disease.”
“My mother suffers very much and very often,” said Madeleine.
“Ah!” she said, “does my health interest you?”
Madeleine, astonished at the irony of these words, looked from one to
the other; my eyes counted the roses on the cushion of the gray and
green sofa which was in the salon.
“This situation is intolerable,” I whispered in her ear.
“Did I create it?” she asked. “Dear child,” she said aloud, with one of
those cruel levities by which women point their vengeance, “don’t
you read history? France and England are enemies, and ever have been.
Madeleine knows that; she knows that a broad sea, and a cold and stormy
one, separates them.”
The vases on the mantelshelf had given place to candelabra, no doubt to
deprive me of the pleasure of filling them with flowers; I found them
later in my own room. When my servant arrived I went out to give him
some orders; he had brought me certain things I wished to place in my
room.
“Felix,” said the countess, “do not make a mistake. My aunt’s old room
is now Madeleine’s. Yours is over the count’s.”
Though guilty, I had a heart; those words were dagger thrusts coldly
given at its tenderest spot, for which she seemed to aim. Moral
sufferings are not fixed quantities; they depend on the sensitiveness of
souls. The countess had trod each round of the ladder of pain; but, for
that very reason, the kindest of women was now as cruel as she was once
beneficent. I looked at Henriette, but she averted her head. I went to
my new room, which was pretty, white and green. Once there I burst into
tears. Henriette heard me as she entered with a bunch of flowers in her
hand.
“Henriette,” I said, “will you never forgive a wrong that is indeed
excusable?”
“Do not call me Henriette,” she said. “She no longer exists, poor soul;
but you may feel sure of Madame de Mortsauf, a devoted friend, who will
listen to you and who will love you. Felix, we will talk of these things
later. If you have still any tenderness for me let me grow accustomed
to seeing you. Whenever words will not rend my heart, if the day should
ever come when I recover courage, I will speak to you, but not till
then. Look at the valley,” she said, pointing to the Indre, “it hurts
me, I love it still.”
“Ah, perish England and all her women! I will send my resignation to the
king; I will live and die here, pardoned.”
“No, love her; love that woman! Henriette is not. This is no play, and
you should know it.”
She left the room, betraying by the tone of her last words the extent of
her wounds. I ran after her and held her back, saying, “Do you no longer
love me?”
“You have done me more harm than all my other troubles put together.
To-day I suffer less, therefore I love you less. Be kind; do not
increase my pain; if you suffer, remember that--I--live.”
She withdrew her hand, which I held, cold, motionless, but moist, in
mine, and darted like an arrow through the corridor in which this scene
of actual tragedy took place.
At dinner, the count subjected me to a torture I had little expected.
“So the Marchioness of Dudley is not in Paris?” he said.
I blushed excessively, but answered, “No.”
“She is not in Tours,” continued the count.
“She is not divorced, and she can go back to England. Her husband would
be very glad if she would return to him,” I said, eagerly.
“Has she children?” asked Madame de Mortsauf, in a changed voice.
“Two sons,” I replied.
“Where are they?”
“In England, with their father.”
“Come, Felix,” interposed the count; “be frank; is she as handsome as
they say?”
“How can you ask him such a question?” cried the countess. “Is not the
woman you love always the handsomest of women?”
“Yes, always,” I said, firmly, with a glance which she could not
sustain.
“You are a happy fellow,” said the count; “yes, a very happy one. Ha! in
my young days, I should have gone mad over such a conquest--”
“Hush!” said Madame de Mortsauf, reminding the count of Madeleine by a
look.
“I am not a child,” he said.
When we left the table I followed the countess to the terrace. When
we were alone she exclaimed, “How is it possible that some women can
sacrifice their children to a man? Wealth, position, the world, I can
conceive of; eternity? yes, possibly; but children! deprive one’s self
of one’s children!”
“Yes, and such women would give even more if they had it; they sacrifice
everything.”
The world was suddenly reversed before her, her ideas became confused.
The grandeur of that thought struck her; a suspicion entered her mind
that sacrifice, immolation justified happiness; the echo of her own
inward cry for love came back to her; she stood dumb in presence of her
wasted life. Yes, for a moment horrible doubts possessed her; then she
rose, grand and saintly, her head erect.
“Love her well, Felix,” she said, with tears in her eyes; “she shall
be my happy sister. I will forgive her the harm she has done me if she
gives you what you could not have here. You are right; I have never told
you that I loved you, and I never have loved you as the world loves. But
if she is a mother how can she love you so?”
“Dear saint,” I answered, “I must be less moved than I am now, before I
can explain to you how it is that you soar victoriously above her. She
is a woman of earth, the daughter of decaying races; you are the child
of heaven, an angel worthy of worship; you have my heart, she my flesh
only. She knows this and it fills her with despair; she would change
parts with you even though the cruellest martyrdom were the price of the
change. But all is irremediable. To you the soul, to you the thoughts,
the love that is pure, to you youth and old age; to her the desires and
joys of passing passion; to you remembrance forever, to her oblivion--”
“Tell me, tell me that again, oh, my friend!” she turned to a bench and
sat down, bursting into tears. “If that be so, Felix, virtue, purity
of life, a mother’s love, are not mistakes. Oh, pour that balm upon
my wounds! Repeat the words which bear me back to heaven, where once
I longed to rise with you. Bless me by a look, by a sacred word,--I
forgive you for the sufferings you have caused me the last two months.”
“Henriette, there are mysteries in the life of men of which you know
nothing. I met you at an age when the feelings of the heart stifle the
desires implanted in our nature; but many scenes, the memory of which
will kindle my soul to the hour of death, must have told you that this
age was drawing to a close, and it was your constant triumph still to
prolong its mute delights. A love without possession is maintained
by the exasperation of desire; but there comes a moment when all is
suffering within us--for in this we have no resemblance to you. We
possess a power we cannot abdicate, or we cease to be men. Deprived
of the nourishment it needs, the heart feeds upon itself, feeling an
exhaustion which is not death, but which precedes it. Nature cannot long
be silenced; some trifling accident awakens it to a violence that seems
like madness. No, I have not loved, but I have thirsted in the desert.”
“The desert!” she said bitterly, pointing to the valley. “Ah!” she
exclaimed, “how he reasons! what subtle distinctions! Faithful hearts
are not so learned.”
“Henriette,” I said, “do not quarrel with me for a chance expression.
No, my soul has not vacillated, but I have not been master of my senses.
That woman is not ignorant that you are the only one I ever loved. She
plays a secondary part in my life; she knows it and is resigned. I have
the right to leave her as men leave courtesans.”
“And then?”
“She tells me that she will kill herself,” I answered, thinking that
this resolve would startle Henriette. But when she heard it a disdainful
smile, more expressive than the thoughts it conveyed, flickered on her
lips. “My dear conscience,” I continued, “if you would take into
account my resistance and the seductions that led to my fall you would
understand the fatal--”
“Yes, fatal!” she cried. “I believed in you too much. I believed you
capable of the virtue a priest practises. All is over,” she continued,
after a pause. “I owe you much, my friend; you have extinguished in me
the fires of earthly life. The worst of the way is over; age is coming
on. I am ailing now, soon I may be ill; I can never be the brilliant
fairy who showers you with favors. Be faithful to Lady Dudley.
Madeleine, whom I was training to be yours, ah! who will have her now?
Poor Madeleine, poor Madeleine!” she repeated, like the mournful burden
of a song. “I would you had heard her say to me when you came: ‘Mother,
you are not kind to Felix!’ Dear creature!”
She looked at me in the warm rays of the setting sun as they glided
through the foliage. Seized with compassion for the shipwreck of
our lives she turned back to memories of our pure past, yielding to
meditations which were mutual. We were silent, recalling past scenes;
our eyes went from the valley to the fields, from the windows of
Clochegourde to those of Frapesle, peopling the dream with my bouquets,
the fragrant language of our desires. It was her last hour of pleasure,
enjoyed with the purity of her Catholic soul. This scene, so grand to
each of us, cast its melancholy on both. She believed my words, and saw
where I placed her--in the skies.
“My friend,” she said, “I obey God, for his hand is in all this.”
I did not know until much later the deep meaning of her words. We slowly
returned up the terraces. She took my arm and leaned upon it resignedly,
bleeding still, but with a bandage on her wound.
“Human life is thus,” she said. “What had Monsieur de Mortsauf done to
deserve his fate? It proves the existence of a better world. Alas, for
those who walk in happier ways!”
She went on, estimating life so truly, considering its diverse aspects
so profoundly that these cold judgments revealed to me the disgust that
had come upon her for all things here below. When we reached the portico
she dropped my arm and said these last words: “If God has given us
the sentiment and the desire for happiness ought he not to take charge
himself of innocent souls who have found sorrow only in this low world?
Either that must be so, or God is not, and our life is no more than a
cruel jest.”
She entered and turned the house quickly; I found her on the sofa,
crouching, as though blasted by the voice which flung Saul to the
ground.
“What is the matter?” I asked.
“I no longer know what is virtue,” she replied; “I have no consciousness
of my own.”
We were silent, petrified, listening to the echo of those words which
fell like a stone cast into a gulf.
“If I am mistaken in my life _she_ is right in _hers_,” Henriette said
at last.
Thus her last struggle followed her last happiness. When the count came
in she complained of illness, she who never complained. I conjured her
to tell me exactly where she suffered; but she refused to explain and
went to bed, leaving me a prey to unending remorse. Madeleine went with
her mother, and the next day I heard that the countess had been seized
with nausea, caused, she said, by the violent excitements of that day.
Thus I, who longed to give my life for hers, I was killing her.
“Dear count,” I said to Monsieur de Mortsauf, who obliged me to play
backgammon, “I think the countess very seriously ill. There is still
time to save her; pray send for Origet, and persuade her to follow his
advice.”
“Origet, who half killed me?” cried the count. “No, no; I’ll consult
Carbonneau.”
During this week, especially the first days of it, everything was
anguish to me--the beginning of paralysis of the heart--my vanity was
mortified, my soul rent. One must needs have been the centre of all
looks and aspirations, the mainspring of the life about him, the torch
from which all others drew their light, to understand the horror of the
void that was now about me. All things were there, the same, but the
spirit that gave life to them was extinct, like a blown-out flame. I now
understood the desperate desire of lovers never to see each other again
when love has flown. To be nothing where we were once so much! To find
the chilling silence of the grave where life so lately sparkled!
Such comparisons are overwhelming. I came at last to envy the dismal
ignorance of all happiness which had darkened my youth. My despair
became so great that the countess, I thought, felt pity for it. One day
after dinner as we were walking on the meadows beside the river I made
a last effort to obtain forgiveness. I told Jacques to go on with his
sister, and leaving the count to walk alone, I took Henriette to the
punt.
“Henriette,” I said; “one word of forgiveness, or I fling myself into
the Indre! I have sinned,--yes, it is true; but am I not like a dog in
his faithful attachments? I return like him, like him ashamed. If he
does wrong he is struck, but he loves the hand that strikes him; strike
me, bruise me, but give me back your heart.”
“Poor child,” she said, “are you not always my son?”
She took my arm and silently rejoined her children, with whom she
returned to Clochegourde, leaving me to the count, who began to talk
politics apropos of his neighbors.
“Let us go in,” I said; “you are bare-headed, and the dew may do you an
injury.”
“You pity me, my dear Felix,” he answered; “you understand me, but my
wife never tries to comfort me,--on principle, perhaps.”
Never would she have left me to walk home with her husband; it was now
I who had to find excuses to join her. I found her with her children,
explaining the rules of backgammon to Jacques.
“See there,” said the count, who was always jealous of the affection she
showed for her children; “it is for them that I am neglected. Husbands,
my dear Felix, are always suppressed. The most virtuous woman in the
world has ways of satisfying her desire to rob conjugal affection.”
She said nothing and continued as before.
“Jacques,” he said, “come here.”
Jacques objected slightly.
“Your father wants you; go at once, my son,” said his mother, pushing
him.
“They love me by order,” said the old man, who sometimes perceived his
situation.
“Monsieur,” she answered, passing her hand over Madeleine’s smooth
tresses, which were dressed that day “a la belle Ferronniere”; “do not
be unjust to us poor women; life is not so easy for us to bear. Perhaps
the children are the virtues of a mother.”
“My dear,” said the count, who took it into his head to be logical,
“what you say signifies that women who have no children would have no
virtue, and would leave their husbands in the lurch.”
The countess rose hastily and took Madeleine to the portico.
“That’s marriage, my dear fellow,” remarked the count to me. “Do you
mean to imply by going off in that manner that I am talking nonsense?”
he cried to his wife, taking his son by the hand and going to the
portico after her with a furious look in his eyes.
“On the contrary, Monsieur, you frightened me. Your words hurt me
cruelly,” she added, in a hollow voice. “If virtue does not consist in
sacrificing everything to our children and our husband, what is virtue?”
“Sac-ri-ficing!” cried the count, making each syllable the blow of a
sledge-hammer on the heart of his victim. “What have you sacrificed to
your children? What do you sacrifice to me? Speak! what means all this?
Answer. What is going on here? What did you mean by what you said?”
“Monsieur,” she replied, “would you be satisfied to be loved for love of
God, or to know your wife virtuous for virtue’s sake?”
“Madame is right,” I said, interposing in a shaken voice which vibrated
in two hearts; “yes, the noblest privilege conferred by reason is to
attribute our virtues to the beings whose happiness is our work, and
whom we render happy, not from policy, nor from duty, but from an
inexhaustible and voluntary affection--”
A tear shone in Henriette’s eyes.
“And, dear count,” I continued, “if by chance a woman is involuntarily
subjected to feelings other than those society imposes on her, you must
admit that the more irresistible that feeling is, the more virtuous she
is in smothering it, in sacrificing herself to her husband and children.
This theory is not applicable to me who unfortunately show an example to
the contrary, nor to you whom it will never concern.”
“You have a noble soul, Felix,” said the count, slipping his arm, not
ungracefully, round his wife’s waist and drawing her towards him to
say: “Forgive a poor sick man, dear, who wants to be loved more than he
deserves.”
“There are some hearts that are all generosity,” she said, resting her
head upon his shoulder. The scene made her tremble to such a degree that
her comb fell, her hair rolled down, and she turned pale. The count,
holding her up, gave a sort of groan as he felt her fainting; he caught
her in his arms as he might a child, and carried her to the sofa in the
salon, where we all surrounded her. Henriette held my hand in hers as if
to tell me that we two alone knew the secret of that scene, so simple in
itself, so heart-rending to her.
“I do wrong,” she said to me in a low voice, when the count left the
room to fetch a glass of orange-flower water. “I have many wrongs to
repent of towards you; I wished to fill you with despair when I ought to
have received you mercifully. Dear, you are kindness itself, and I alone
can appreciate it. Yes, I know there is a kindness prompted by passion.
Men have various ways of being kind; some from contempt, others from
impulse, from calculation, through indolence of nature; but you, my
friend, you have been absolutely kind.”
“If that be so,” I replied, “remember that all that is good or great in
me comes through you. You know well that I am of your making.”
“That word is enough for any woman’s happiness,” she said, as the count
re-entered the room. “I feel better,” she said, rising; “I want air.”
We went down to the terrace, fragrant with the acacias which were still
in bloom. She had taken my right arm, and pressed it against her heart,
thus expressing her sad thoughts; but they were, she said, of a sadness
dear to her. No doubt she would gladly have been alone with me; but her
imagination, inexpert in women’s wiles, did not suggest to her any way
of sending her children and the count back to the house. We therefore
talked on indifferent subjects, while she pondered a means of pouring a
few last thoughts from her heart to mine.
“It is a long time since I have driven out,” she said, looking at the
beauty of the evening. “Monsieur, will you please order the carriage
that I may take a turn?”
She knew that after evening prayer she could not speak with me, for the
count was sure to want his backgammon. She might have returned to the
warm and fragrant terrace after her husband had gone to bed, but she
feared, perhaps, to trust herself beneath those shadows, or to walk by
the balustrade where our eyes could see the course of the Indre through
the dear valley. As the silent and sombre vaults of a cathedral lift
the soul to prayer, so leafy ways, lighted by the moon, perfumed with
penetrating odors, alive with the murmuring noises of the spring-tide,
stir the fibres and weaken the resolves of those who love. The country
calms the old, but excites the young. We knew it well. Two strokes of
the bell announced the hour of prayer. The countess shivered.
“Dear Henriette, are you ill?”
“There is no Henriette,” she said. “Do not bring her back. She was
capricious and exacting; now you have a friend whose courage has been
strengthened by the words which heaven itself dictated to you. We will
talk of this later. We must be punctual at prayers, for it is my day to
lead them.”
As Madame de Mortsauf said the words in which she begged the help of God
through all the adversities of life, a tone came into her voice which
struck all present. Did she use her gift of second sight to foresee the
terrible emotion she was about to endure through my forgetfulness of an
engagement made with Arabella?
“We have time to make three kings before the horses are harnessed,” said
the count, dragging me back to the salon. “You can go and drive with my
wife, and I’ll go to bed.”
The game was stormy, like all others. The countess heard the count’s
voice either from her room or from Madeleine’s.
“You show a strange hospitality,” she said, re-entering the salon.
I looked at her with amazement; I could not get accustomed to the change
in her; formerly she would have been most careful not to protect
me against the count; then it gladdened her that I should share her
sufferings and bear them with patience for love of her.
“I would give my life,” I whispered in her ear, “if I could hear you say
again, as you once said, ‘Poor dear, poor dear!’”
She lowered her eyes, remembering the moment to which I alluded, yet her
glance turned to me beneath her eyelids, expressing the joy of a
woman who finds the mere passing tones from her heart preferred to the
delights of another love. The count was losing the game; he said he was
tired, as an excuse to give it up, and we went to walk on the lawn while
waiting for the carriage. When the count left us, such pleasure shone on
my face that Madame de Mortsauf questioned me by a look of surprise and
curiosity.
“Henriette does exist,” I said. “You love me still. You wound me with an
evident intention to break my heart. I may yet be happy!”
“There was but a fragment of that poor woman left, and you have now
destroyed even that,” she said. “God be praised; he gives me strength
to bear my righteous martyrdom. Yes, I still love you, and I might have
erred; the English woman shows me the abyss.”
We got into the carriage and the coachman asked for orders.
“Take the road to Chinon by the avenue, and come back by the Charlemagne
moor and the road to Sache.”
“What day is it?” I asked, with too much eagerness.
“Saturday.”
“Then don’t go that way, madame, the road will be crowded with
poultry-men and their carts returning from Tours.”
“Do as I told you,” she said to the coachman. We knew the tones of our
voices too well to be able to hide from each other our least emotion.
Henriette understood all.
“You did not think of the poultry-men when you appointed this evening,”
she said with a tinge of irony. “Lady Dudley is at Tours, and she
is coming here to meet you; do not deny it. ‘What day is it?--the
poultry-men--their carts!’ Did you ever take notice of such things in
our old drives?”
“It only shows that at Clochegourde I forget everything,” I answered,
simply.
“She is coming to meet you?”
“Yes.”
“At what hour?”
“Half-past eleven.”
“Where?”
“On the moor.”
“Do not deceive me; is it not at the walnut-tree?”
“On the moor.”
“We will go there,” she said, “and I shall see her.”
When I heard these words I regarded my future life as settled. I at once
resolved to marry Lady Dudley and put an end to the miserable struggle
which threatened to exhaust my sensibilities and destroy by these
repeated shocks the delicate delights which had hitherto resembled the
flower of fruits. My sullen silence wounded the countess, the grandeur
of whose mind I misjudged.
“Do not be angry with me,” she said, in her golden voice. “This,
dear, is my punishment. You can never be loved as you are here,” she
continued, laying my hand upon her heart. “I now confess it; but Lady
Dudley has saved me. To her the stains,--I do not envy them,--to me the
glorious love of angels! I have traversed vast tracts of thought since
you returned here. I have judged life. Lift up the soul and you rend it;
the higher we go the less sympathy we meet; instead of suffering in the
valley, we suffer in the skies, as the soaring eagle bears in his heart
the arrow of some common herdsman. I comprehend at last that earth and
heaven are incompatible. Yes, to those who would live in the celestial
sphere God must be all in all. We must love our friends as we love our
children,--for them, not for ourselves. Self is the cause of misery and
grief. My soul is capable of soaring higher than the eagle; there is
a love which cannot fail me. But to live for this earthly life is too
debasing,--here the selfishness of the senses reigns supreme over the
spirituality of the angel that is within us. The pleasures of passion
are stormy, followed by enervating anxieties which impair the vigor of
the soul. I came to the shores of the sea where such tempests rage;
I have seen them too near; they have wrapped me in their clouds; the
billows did not break at my feet, they caught me in a rough embrace
which chilled my heart. No! I must escape to higher regions; I should
perish on the shores of this vast sea. I see in you, as in all others
who have grieved me, the guardian of my virtue. My life has been mingled
with anguish, fortunately proportioned to my strength; it has thus been
kept free from evil passions, from seductive peace, and ever near to
God. Our attachment was the mistaken attempt, the innocent effort of
two children striving to satisfy their own hearts, God, and men--folly,
Felix! Ah,” she said quickly, “what does that woman call you?”
“‘Amedee,’” I answered, “‘Felix’ is a being apart, who belongs to none
but you.”
“‘Henriette’ is slow to die,” she said, with a gentle smile, “but
die she will at the first effort of the humble Christian, the
self-respecting mother; she whose virtue tottered yesterday and is
firm to-day. What may I say to you? This. My life has been, and is,
consistent with itself in all its circumstances, great and small. The
heart to which the rootlets of my first affection should have clung, my
mother’s heart, was closed to me, in spite of my persistence in seeking
a cleft through which they might have slipped. I was a girl; I came
after the death of three boys; and I vainly strove to take their place
in the hearts of my parents; the wound I gave to the family pride was
never healed. When my gloomy childhood was over and I knew my aunt,
death took her from me all too soon. Monsieur de Mortsauf, to whom I
vowed myself, has repeatedly, nay without respite, smitten me, not being
himself aware of it, poor man! His love has the simple-minded egotism
our children show to us. He has no conception of the harm he does me,
and he is heartily forgiven for it. My children, those dear children
who are bound to my flesh through their sufferings, to my soul by their
characters, to my nature by their innocent happiness,--those children
were surely given to show me how much strength and patience a mother’s
breast contains. Yes, my children are my virtues. You know how my heart
has been harrowed for them, by them, in spite of them. To be a mother
was, for me, to buy the right to suffer. When Hagar cried in the desert
an angel came and opened a spring of living water for that poor slave;
but I, when the limpid stream to which (do you remember?) you tried to
guide me flowed past Clochegourde, its waters changed to bitterness for
me. Yes, the sufferings you have inflicted on my soul are terrible. God,
no doubt, will pardon those who know affection only through its pains.
But if the keenest of these pains has come to me through you, perhaps I
deserved them. God is not unjust. Ah, yes, Felix, a kiss furtively taken
may be a crime. Perhaps it is just that a woman should harshly expiate
the few steps taken apart from husband and children that she might walk
alone with thoughts and memories that were not of them, and so walking,
marry her soul to another. Perhaps it is the worst of crimes when the
inward being lowers itself to the region of human kisses. When a woman
bends to receive her husband’s kiss with a mask upon her face, that is
a crime! It is a crime to think of a future springing from a death, a
crime to imagine a motherhood without terrors, handsome children playing
in the evening with a beloved father before the eyes of a happy mother.
Yes, I sinned, sinned greatly. I have loved the penances inflicted by
the Church,--which did not redeem the faults, for the priest was too
indulgent. God has placed the punishment in the faults themselves,
committing the execution of his vengeance to the one for whom the faults
were committed. When I gave my hair, did I not give myself? Why did I so
often dress in white? because I seemed the more your lily; did you not
see me here, for the first time, all in white? Alas! I have loved my
children less, for all intense affection is stolen from the natural
affections. Felix, do you not see that all suffering has its meaning.
Strike me, wound me even more than Monsieur de Mortsauf and my
children’s state have wounded me. That woman is the instrument of God’s
anger; I will meet her without hatred; I will smile upon her; under pain
of being neither Christian, wife, nor mother, I ought to love her. If,
as you tell me, I contributed to keep your heart unsoiled by the world,
that Englishwoman ought not to hate me. A woman should love the mother
of the man she loves, and I am your mother. What place have I sought in
your heart? that left empty by Madame de Vandenesse. Yes, yes, you have
always complained of my coldness; yes, I am indeed your mother only.
Forgive me therefore the involuntary harshness with which I met you on
your return; a mother ought to rejoice that her son is so well loved--”
She laid her head for a moment on my breast, repeating the words,
“Forgive me! oh, forgive me!” in a voice that was neither her girlish
voice with its joyous notes, nor the woman’s voice with despotic
endings; not the sighing sound of the mother’s woe, but an agonizing new
voice for new sorrows.
“You, Felix,” she presently continued, growing animated; “you are the
friend who can do no wrong. Ah! you have lost nothing in my heart; do
not blame yourself, do not feel the least remorse. It was the height
of selfishness in me to ask you to sacrifice the joys of life to an
impossible future; impossible, because to realize it a woman must
abandon her children, abdicate her position, and renounce eternity. Many
a time I have thought you higher than I; you were great and noble, I,
petty and criminal. Well, well, it is settled now; I can be to you no
more than a light from above, sparkling and cold, but unchanging. Only,
Felix, let me not love the brother I have chosen without return. Love
me, cherish me! The love of a sister has no dangerous to-morrow, no
hours of difficulty. You will never find it necessary to deceive the
indulgent heart which will live in future within your life, grieve for
your griefs, be joyous with your joys, which will love the women who
make you happy, and resent their treachery. I never had a brother to
love in that way. Be noble enough to lay aside all self-love and turn
our attachment, hitherto so doubtful and full of trouble, into this
sweet and sacred love. In this way I shall be enabled to still live. I
will begin to-night by taking Lady Dudley’s hand.”
She did not weep as she said these words so full of bitter knowledge,
by which, casting aside the last remaining veil which hid her soul from
mine, she showed by how many ties she had linked herself to me, how many
chains I had hewn apart. Our emotions were so great that for a time we
did not notice it was raining heavily.
“Will Madame la comtesse wait here under shelter?” asked the coachman,
pointing to the chief inn of Ballan.
She made a sign of assent, and we stayed nearly half an hour under the
vaulted entrance, to the great surprise of the inn-people who wondered
what brought Madame de Mortsauf on that road at eleven o’clock at night.
Was she going to Tours? Had she come from there? When the storm ceased
and the rain turned to what is called in Touraine a “brouee,” which does
not hinder the moon from shining through the higher mists as the wind
with its upper currents whirls them away, the coachman drove from our
shelter, and, to my great delight, turned to go back the way we came.
“Follow my orders,” said the countess, gently.
We now took the road across the Charlemagne moor, where the rain began
again. Half-way across I heard the barking of Arabella’s dog; a horse
came suddenly from beneath a clump of oaks, jumped the ditch which
owners of property dig around their cleared lands when they consider
them suitable for cultivation, and carried Lady Dudley to the moor to
meet the carriage.
“What pleasure to meet a love thus if it can be done without sin,” said
Henriette.
The barking of the dog had told Lady Dudley that I was in the carriage.
She thought, no doubt, that I had brought it to meet her on account of
the rain. When we reached the spot where she was waiting, she urged her
horse to the side of the road with the equestrian dexterity for which
she was famous, and which to Henriette seemed marvellous.
“Amedee,” she said, and the name in her English pronunciation had a
fairy-like charm.
“He is here, madame,” said the countess, looking at the fantastic
creature plainly visible in the moonlight, whose impatient face was
oddly swathed in locks of hair now out of curl.
You know with what swiftness two women examine each other. The
Englishwoman recognized her rival, and was gloriously English; she gave
us a look full of insular contempt, and disappeared in the underbrush
with the rapidity of an arrow.
“Drive on quickly to Clochegourde,” cried the countess, to whom that
cutting look was like the blow of an axe upon her heart.
The coachman turned to get upon the road to Chinon which was better than
that to Sache. As the carriage again approached the moor we heard the
furious galloping of Arabella’s horse and the steps of her dog. All
three were skirting the wood behind the bushes.
“She is going; you will lose her forever,” said Henriette.
“Let her go,” I answered, “and without a regret.”
“Oh, poor woman!” cried the countess, with a sort of compassionate
horror. “Where will she go?”
“Back to La Grenadiere,--a little house near Saint-Cyr,” I said, “where
she is staying.”
Just as we were entering the avenue of Clochegourde Arabella’s dog
barked joyfully and bounded up to the carriage.
“She is here before us!” cried the countess; then after a pause she
added, “I have never seen a more beautiful woman. What a hand and what
a figure! Her complexion outdoes the lily, her eyes are literally bright
as diamonds. But she rides too well; she loves to display her strength;
I think her violent and too active,--also too bold for our conventions.
The woman who recognizes no law is apt to listen only to her caprices.
Those who seek to shine, to make a stir, have not the gift of constancy.
Love needs tranquillity; I picture it to myself like a vast lake in
which the lead can find no bottom; where tempests may be violent, but
are rare and controlled within certain limits; where two beings live on
a flowery isle far from the world whose luxury and display offend them.
Still, love must take the imprint of the character. Perhaps I am wrong.
If nature’s elements are compelled to take certain forms determined by
climate, why is it not the same with the feelings of individuals? No
doubt sentiments, feelings, which hold to the general law in the mass,
differ in expression only. Each soul has its own method. Lady Dudley is
the strong woman who can traverse distances and act with the vigor of a
man; she would rescue her lover and kill jailers and guards; while other
women can only love with their whole souls; in moments of danger they
kneel down to pray, and die. Which of the two women suits you best? That
is the question. Yes, yes, Lady Dudley must surely love; she has made
many sacrifices. Perhaps she will love you when you have ceased to love
her!”
“Dear angel,” I said, “let me ask the question you asked me; how is it
that you know these things?”
“Every sorrow teaches a lesson, and I have suffered on so many points
that my knowledge is vast.”
My servant had heard the order given, and thinking we should return by
the terraces he held my horse ready for me in the avenue. Arabella’s
dog had scented the horse, and his mistress, drawn by very natural
curiosity, had followed the animal through the woods to the avenue.
“Go and make your peace,” said Henriette, smiling without a tinge of
sadness. “Say to Lady Dudley how much she mistakes my intention; I
wished to show her the true value of the treasure which has fallen to
her; my heart holds none but kind feelings, above all neither anger nor
contempt. Explain to her that I am her sister, and not her rival.”
“I shall not go,” I said.
“Have you never discovered,” she said with lofty pride, “that certain
propitiations are insulting? Go!”
I rode towards Lady Dudley wishing to know the state of her mind. “If
she would only be angry and leave me,” I thought, “I could return to
Clochegourde.”
The dog led me to an oak, from which, as I came up, Arabella galloped
crying out to me, “Come! away! away!” All that I could do was to follow
her to Saint Cyr, which we reached about midnight.
“That lady is in perfect health,” said Arabella as she dismounted.
Those who know her can alone imagine the satire contained in that
remark, dryly said in a tone which meant, “I should have died!”
“I forbid you to utter any of your sarcasms about Madame de Mortsauf,” I
said.
“Do I displease your Grace in remarking upon the perfect health of one
so dear to your precious heart? Frenchwomen hate, so I am told, even
their lover’s dog. In England we love all that our masters love; we hate
all they hate, because we are flesh of their flesh. Permit me therefore
to love this lady as much as you yourself love her. Only, my dear
child,” she added, clasping me in her arms which were damp with rain,
“if you betray me, I shall not be found either lying down or standing
up, not in a carriage with liveried lackeys, nor on horseback on the
moors of Charlemagne, nor on any other moor beneath the skies, nor in my
own bed, nor beneath a roof of my forefathers; I shall not be anywhere,
for I will live no longer. I was born in Lancashire, a country where
women die for love. Know you, and give you up? I will yield you to none,
not even to Death, for I should die with you.”
She led me to her rooms, where comfort had already spread its charms.
“Love her, dear,” I said warmly. “She loves you sincerely, not in jest.”
“Sincerely! you poor child!” she said, unfastening her habit.
With a lover’s vanity I tried to exhibit Henriette’s noble character to
this imperious creature. While her waiting-woman, who did not understand
a word of French, arranged her hair I endeavored to picture Madame de
Mortsauf by sketching her life; I repeated many of the great thoughts
she had uttered at a crisis when nearly all women become either petty or
bad. Though Arabella appeared to be paying no attention she did not lose
a single word.
“I am delighted,” she said when we were alone, “to learn your taste
for pious conversation. There’s an old vicar on one of my estates
who understands writing sermons better than any one I know; the
country-people like him, for he suits his prosing to his hearers. I’ll
write to my father to-morrow and ask him to send the good man here by
steamboat; you can meet him in Paris, and when once you have heard him
you will never wish to listen to any one else,--all the more because his
health is perfect. His moralities won’t give you shocks that make you
weep; they flow along without tempests, like a limpid stream, and
will send you to sleep. Every evening you can if you like satisfy your
passion for sermons by digesting one with your dinner. English morality,
I do assure you, is as superior to that of Touraine as our cutlery,
our plate, and our horses are to your knives and your turf. Do me
the kindness to listen to my vicar; promise me. I am only a woman, my
dearest; I can love, I can die for you if you will; but I have never
studied at Eton, or at Oxford, or in Edinburgh. I am neither a doctor of
laws nor a reverend; I can’t preach morality; in fact, I am altogether
unfit for it, I should be awkward if I tried. I don’t blame your tastes;
you might have others more depraved, and I should still endeavor
to conform to them, for I want you to find near me all you like
best,--pleasures of love, pleasures of food, pleasures of piety, good
claret, and virtuous Christians. Shall I wear hair-cloth to-night? She
is very lucky, that woman, to suit you in morality. From what college
did she graduate? Poor I, who can only give you myself, who can only be
your slave--”
“Then why did you rush away when I wanted to bring you together?”
“Are you crazy, Amedee? I could go from Paris to Rome disguised as a
valet; I would do the most unreasonable thing for your sake; but how can
you expect me to speak to a woman on the public roads who has never
been presented to me,--and who, besides, would have preached me a sermon
under three heads? I speak to peasants, and if I am hungry I would ask a
workman to share his bread with me and pay him in guineas,--that is all
proper enough; but to stop a carriage on the highway, like the gentlemen
of the road in England, is not at all within my code of manners. You
poor child, you know only how to love; you don’t know how to live.
Besides, I am not like you as yet, dear angel; I don’t like morality.
Still, I am capable of great efforts to please you. Yes, I will go to
work; I will learn how to preach; you shall have no more kisses without
verses of the Bible interlarded.”
She used her power and abused it as soon as she saw in my eyes the
ardent expression which was always there when she began her sorceries.
She triumphed over everything, and I complacently told myself that the
woman who loses all, sacrifices the future, and makes love her only
virtue, is far above Catholic polemics.
“So she loves herself better than she loves you?” Arabella went on. “She
sets something that is not you above you. Is that love? how can we women
find anything to value in ourselves except that which you value in us?
No woman, no matter how fine a moralist she may be, is the equal of a
man. Tread upon us, kill us; never embarrass your lives on our account.
It is for us to die, for you to live, great and honored. For us the
dagger in your hand; for you our pardoning love. Does the sun think of
the gnats in his beams, that live by his light? they stay as long as
they can and when he withdraws his face they die--”
“Or fly somewhere else,” I said interrupting her.
“Yes, somewhere else,” she replied, with an indifference that would have
piqued any man into using the power with which she invested him. “Do
you really think it is worthy of womanhood to make a man eat his bread
buttered with virtue, and to persuade him that religion is incompatible
with love? Am I a reprobate? A woman either gives herself or she
refuses. But to refuse and moralize is a double wrong, and is contrary
to the rule of the right in all lands. Here, you will get only excellent
sandwiches prepared by the hand of your servant Arabella, whose sole
morality is to imagine caresses no man has yet felt and which the angels
inspire.”
I know nothing more destructive than the wit of an Englishwoman; she
gives it the eloquent gravity, the tone of pompous conviction with which
the British hide the absurdities of their life of prejudice. French wit
and humor, on the other hand, is like a lace with which our women adorn
the joys they give and the quarrels they invent; it is a mental jewelry,
as charming as their pretty dresses. English wit is an acid which
corrodes all those on whom it falls until it bares their bones, which it
scrapes and polishes. The tongue of a clever Englishwoman is like that
of a tiger tearing the flesh from the bone when he is only in play.
All-powerful weapon of a sneering devil, English satire leaves a deadly
poison in the wound it makes. Arabella chose to show her power like the
sultan who, to prove his dexterity, cut off the heads of unoffending
beings with his own scimitar.
“My angel,” she said, “I can talk morality too if I choose. I have asked
myself whether I commit a crime in loving you; whether I violate the
divine laws; and I find that my love for you is both natural and pious.
Why did God create some beings handsomer than others if not to show us
that we ought to adore them? The crime would be in not loving you. This
lady insults you by confounding you with other men; the laws of morality
are not applicable to you; for God has created you above them. Am I
not drawing nearer to divine love in loving you? will God punish a poor
woman for seeking the divine? Your great and luminous heart so resembles
the heavens that I am like the gnats which flutter about the torches
of a fete and burn themselves; are they to be punished for their error?
besides, is it an error? may it not be pure worship of the light? They
perish of too much piety,--if you call it perishing to fling one’s self
on the breast of him we love. I have the weakness to love you, whereas
that woman has the strength to remain in her Catholic shrine. Now, don’t
frown. You think I wish her ill. No, I do not. I adore the morality
which has led her to leave you free, and enables me to win you and hold
you forever--for you are mine forever, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“Forever and ever?”
“Yes.”
“Ah! I have found favor in my lord! I alone have understood his worth!
She knows how to cultivate her estate, you say. Well, I leave that to
farmers; I cultivate your heart.”
I try to recall this intoxicating babble, that I may picture to you the
woman as she is, confirm all I have said of her, and let you into
the secret of what happened later. But how shall I describe the
accompaniment of the words? She sought to annihilate by the passion of
her impetuous love the impressions left in my heart by the chaste and
dignified love of my Henriette. Lady Dudley had seen the countess as
plainly as the countess had seen her; each had judged the other. The
force of Arabella’s attack revealed to me the extent of her fear, and
her secret admiration for her rival. In the morning I found her with
tearful eyes, complaining that she had not slept.
“What troubles you?” I said.
“I fear that my excessive love will ruin me,” she answered; “I have
given all. Wiser than I, that woman possesses something that you still
desire. If you prefer her, forget me; I will not trouble you with my
sorrows, my remorse, my sufferings; no, I will go far away and die, like
a plant deprived of the life-giving sun.”
She was able to wring protestations of love from my reluctant lips,
which filled her with joy.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, drying her eyes, “I am happy. Go back to her; I do
not choose to owe you to the force of my love, but to the action of your
own will. If you return here I shall know that you love me as much as I
love you, the possibility of which I have always doubted.”
She persuaded me to return to Clochegourde. The false position in which
I thus placed myself did not strike me while still under the influence
of her wiles. Yet, had I refused to return I should have given Lady
Dudley a triumph over Henriette. Arabella would then have taken me
to Paris. To go now to Clochegourde was an open insult to Madame de
Mortsauf; in that case Arabella was sure of me. Did any woman ever
pardon such crimes against love? Unless she were an angel descended
from the skies, instead of a purified spirit ascending to them, a loving
woman would rather see her lover die than know him happy with another.
Thus, look at it as I would, my situation, after I had once left
Clochegourde for the Grenadiere, was as fatal to the love of my choice
as it was profitable to the transient love that held me. Lady Dudley had
calculated all this with consummate cleverness. She owned to me later
that if she had not met Madame de Mortsauf on the moor she had intended
to compromise me by haunting Clochegourde until she did so.
When I met the countess that morning, and found her pale and depressed
like one who has not slept all night, I was conscious of exercising the
instinctive perception given to hearts still fresh and generous to show
them the true bearing of actions little regarded by the world at large,
but judged as criminal by lofty spirits. Like a child going down a
precipice in play and gathering flowers, who sees with dread that it
can never climb that height again, feels itself alone, with night
approaching, and hears the howls of animals, so I now knew that she and
I were separated by a universe. A wail arose within our souls like an
echo of that woeful “Consummatum est” heard in the churches on Good
Friday at the hour the Saviour died,--a dreadful scene which awes young
souls whose first love is religion. All Henriette’s illusions were
killed at one blow; her heart had endured its passion. She did not look
at me; she refused me the light that for six long years had shone upon
my life. She knew well that the spring of the effulgent rays shed by our
eyes was in our souls, to which they served as pathways to reach
each other, to blend them in one, meeting, parting, playing, like two
confiding women who tell each other all. Bitterly I felt the wrong of
bringing beneath this roof, where pleasure was unknown, a face on which
the wings of pleasure had shaken their prismatic dust. If, the night
before, I had allowed Lady Dudley to depart alone, if I had then
returned to Clochegourde, where, it may be, Henriette awaited me,
perhaps--perhaps Madame de Mortsauf might not so cruelly have
resolved to be my sister. But now she paid me many ostentatious
attentions,--playing her part vehemently for the very purpose of not
changing it. During breakfast she showed me a thousand civilities,
humiliating attentions, caring for me as though I were a sick man whose
fate she pitied.
“You were out walking early,” said the count; “I hope you have brought
back a good appetite, you whose stomach is not yet destroyed.”
This remark, which brought the smile of a sister to Henriette’s lips,
completed my sense of the ridicule of my position. It was impossible to
be at Clochegourde by day and Saint-Cyr by night. During the day I felt
how difficult it was to become the friend of a woman we have long loved.
The transition, easy enough when years have brought it about, is like an
illness in youth. I was ashamed; I cursed the pleasure Lady Dudley gave
me; I wished that Henriette would demand my blood. I could not tear her
rival in pieces before her, for she avoided speaking of her; indeed,
had I spoken of Arabella, Henriette, noble and sublime to the inmost
recesses of her heart, would have despised my infamy. After five years
of delightful intercourse we now had nothing to say to each other; our
words had no connection with our thoughts; we were hiding from each
other our intolerable pain,--we, whose mutual sufferings had been our
first interpreter.
Henriette assumed a cheerful look for me as for herself, but she was
sad. She spoke of herself as my sister, and yet found no ground on
which to converse; and we remained for the greater part of the time
in constrained silence. She increased my inward misery by feigning to
believe that she was the only victim.
“I suffer more than you,” I said to her at a moment when my self-styled
sister was betrayed into a feminine sarcasm.
“How so?” she said haughtily.
“Because I am the one to blame.”
At last her manner became so cold and indifferent that I resolved to
leave Clochegourde. That evening, on the terrace, I said farewell to the
whole family, who were there assembled. They all followed me to the lawn
where my horse was waiting. The countess came to me as I took the bridle
in my hand.
“Let us walk down the avenue together, alone,” she said.
I gave her my arm, and we passed through the courtyard with slow and
measured steps, as though our rhythmic movement were consoling to us.
When we reached the grove of trees which forms a corner of the boundary
she stopped.
“Farewell, my friend,” she said, throwing her head upon my breast and
her arms around my neck, “Farewell, we shall never meet again. God has
given me the sad power to look into the future. Do you remember
the terror that seized me the day you first came back, so young, so
handsome! and I saw you turn your back on me as you do this day when
you are leaving Clochegourde and going to Saint-Cyr? Well, once again,
during the past night I have seen into the future. Friend, we are
speaking together for the last time. I can hardly now say a few words
to you, for it is but a part of me that speaks at all. Death has already
seized on something in me. You have taken the mother from her children,
I now ask you to take her place to them. You can; Jacques and Madeleine
love you--as if you had always made them suffer.”
“Death!” I cried, frightened as I looked at her and beheld the fire of
her shining eyes, of which I can give no idea to those who have never
known their dear ones struck down by her fatal malady, unless I compare
those eyes to balls of burnished silver. “Die!” I said. “Henriette, I
command you to live. You used to ask an oath of me, I now ask one
of you. Swear to me that you will send for Origet and obey him in
everything.”
“Would you oppose the mercy of God?” she said, interrupting me with a
cry of despair at being thus misunderstood.
“You do not love me enough to obey me blindly, as that miserable Lady
Dudley does?”
“Yes, yes, I will do all you ask,” she cried, goaded by jealousy.
“Then I stay,” I said, kissing her on the eyelids.
Frightened at the words, she escaped from my arms and leaned against a
tree; then she turned and walked rapidly homeward without looking back.
But I followed her; she was weeping and praying. When we reached the
lawn I took her hand and kissed it respectfully. This submission touched
her.
“I am yours--forever, and as you will,” I said; “for I love you as your
aunt loved you.”
She trembled and wrung my hand.
“One look,” I said, “one more, one last of our old looks! The woman who
gives herself wholly,” I cried, my soul illumined by the glance she gave
me, “gives less of life and soul than I have now received. Henriette,
thou art my best-beloved--my only love.”
“I shall live!” she said; “but cure yourself as well.”
That look had effaced the memory of Arabella’s sarcasms. Thus I was the
plaything of the two irreconcilable passions I have now described to
you; I was influenced by each alternately. I loved an angel and a demon;
two women equally beautiful,--one adorned with all the virtues which we
decry through hatred of our own imperfections, the other with all the
vices which we deify through selfishness. Returning along that avenue,
looking back again and again at Madame de Mortsauf, as she leaned
against a tree surrounded by her children who waved their handkerchiefs,
I detected in my soul an emotion of pride in finding myself the arbiter
of two such destinies; the glory, in ways so different, of women so
distinguished; proud of inspiring such great passions that death must
come to whichever I abandoned. Ah! believe me, that passing conceit has
been doubly punished!
I know not what demon prompted me to remain with Arabella and await
the moment when the death of the count might give me Henriette; for she
would ever love me. Her harshness, her tears, her remorse, her Christian
resignation, were so many eloquent signs of a sentiment that could no
more be effaced from her heart than from mine. Walking slowly down that
pretty avenue and making these reflections, I was no longer twenty-five,
I was fifty years old. A man passes in a moment, even more quickly than
a woman, from youth to middle age. Though long ago I drove these evil
thoughts away from me, I was then possessed by them, I must avow it.
Perhaps I owed their presence in my mind to the Tuileries, to the king’s
cabinet. Who could resist the polluting spirit of Louis XVIII.?
When I reached the end of the avenue I turned and rushed back in the
twinkling of an eye, seeing that Henriette was still there, and alone! I
went to bid her a last farewell, bathed in repentant tears, the cause
of which she never knew. Tears sincere indeed; given, although I knew it
not, to noble loves forever lost, to virgin emotions--those flowers
of our life which cannot bloom again. Later, a man gives nothing, he
receives; he loves himself in his mistress; but in youth he loves his
mistress in himself. Later, we inoculate with our tastes, perhaps our
vices, the woman who loves us; but in the dawn of life she whom we love
conveys to us her virtues, her conscience. She invites us with a
smile to the noble life; from her we learn the self-devotion which she
practises. Woe to the man who has not had his Henriette. Woe to that
other one who has never known a Lady Dudley. The latter, if he marries,
will not be able to keep his wife; the other will be abandoned by his
mistress. But joy to him who can find the two women in one woman; happy
the man, dear Natalie, whom you love.
After my return to Paris Arabella and I became more intimate than ever.
Soon we insensibly abandoned all the conventional restrictions I had
carefully imposed, the strict observance of which often makes the world
forgive the false position in which Lady Dudley had placed herself.
Society, which delights in looking behind appearances, sanctions much as
soon as it knows the secrets they conceal. Lovers who live in the great
world make a mistake in flinging down these barriers exacted by the law
of salons; they do wrong not to obey scrupulously all conventions which
the manners and customs of a community impose,--less for the sake of
others than for their own. Outward respect to be maintained, comedies to
play, concealments to be managed; all such strategy of love occupies the
life, renews desire, and protects the heart against the palsy of
habit. But all young passions, being, like youth itself, essentially
spendthrift, raze their forests to the ground instead of merely cutting
the timber. Arabella adopted none of these bourgeois ideas, and yielded
to them only to please me; she wished to exhibit me to the eyes of all
Paris as her “sposo.” She employed her powers of seduction to keep me
under her roof, for she was not content with a rumored scandal which,
for want of proof, was only whispered behind the fans. Seeing her so
happy in committing an imprudence which frankly admitted her position,
how could I help believing in her love?
But no sooner was I plunged into the comforts of illegal marriage
than despair seized upon me; I saw my life bound to a course in direct
defiance of the ideas and the advice given me by Henriette. Thenceforth
I lived in the sort of rage we find in consumptive patients who, knowing
their end is near, cannot endure that their lungs should be examined.
There was no corner in my heart where I could fly to escape suffering;
an avenging spirit filled me incessantly with thoughts on which I dared
not dwell. My letters to Henriette depicted this moral malady and did
her infinite harm. “At the cost of so many treasures lost, I wished you
to be at least happy,” she wrote in the only answer I received. But
I was not happy. Dear Natalie, happiness is absolute; it allows of
no comparisons. My first ardor over, I necessarily compared the two
women,--a contrast I had never yet studied. In fact, all great passions
press so strongly on the character that at first they check its
asperities and cover the track of habits which constitute our defects
and our better qualities. But later, when two lovers are accustomed to
each other, the features of their moral physiognomies reappear; they
mutually judge each other, and it often happens during this reaction
of the character after passion, that natural antipathies leading to
disunion (which superficial people seize upon to accuse the human heart
of instability) come to the surface. This period now began with me.
Less blinded by seductions, and dissecting, as it were, my pleasure, I
undertook, without perhaps intending to do so, a critical examination of
Lady Dudley which resulted to her injury.