I was, however, often recalled harshly from my dreamy region by the
cruel penury of my home, which was partly attributable to the
unavailing expense incurred for me. Crops had failed during successive
years, and reverses of fortune had changed the humble mediocrity of my
parents into comparative want. When on Sundays I went to see my mother,
she spoke of her distress, and before me shed tears that she concealed
from my father and my sisters. I, too, was reduced to extreme
destitution. I lived at the little farm on brown bread, milk, and eggs,
and had in secret sold successively in the neighboring town all the
books and clothes I had brought from Paris, to procure wherewithal to
pay the postage of Julie's letters, for which I would have sold my
life's blood.
The month of September was drawing to a close. Julie wrote me that her
anxiety on the score of her husband's daily declining health (O pious
fraud of love to conceal her own sufferings and lighten my cares) would
detain her longer in Paris than she had expected. She pressed me to
start at once, and await her in Savoy, where she would join me without
fail towards the end of October. The letter was one of tender advice,
as that of a sister to a beloved brother. She implored and ordered me,
with the sovereign authority of love, to beware of that insidious
disease which lurks beneath the flowery surface of youth, and often
withers and consumes us at the very moment we think that we have
overcome its power. Enclosed, she sent a consultation and a
prescription from good Dr. Alain, ordering me in the most imperative
terms, and with most alarming threats, to remain during a long season
at the baths of Aix. I showed this prescription to my mother, to
account for my departure, and she was so disquieted by it that she
added her entreaties to the injunctions of the doctor to induce me to
go. Alas! I had in vain applied to a few friends as poor as myself, and
to some pitiless usurers, to obtain the trifling sum of twelve louis
required for my journey. My father had been absent six months, and my
mother would on no account have aggravated his distress and anxiety by
asking him for money. In borrowing he would have exposed his poverty,
by which he was already too much humbled. I had made up my mind to
start with two or three louis only in my purse, in the hope of
borrowing the remainder from my friend L----, at Chambéry; when, a few
days before my departure, my mother, during a sleepless night, had
found in her heart a resource that a mother's heart could alone have
furnished.