so deep a craving for love, that, even in a youthful bigot, the ideas of
salvation and a future existence must give way to the happiness of early
married life. And, in fact, from the month of April, when they were
married, till the beginning of winter, the husband and wife lived
in perfect union. Love and hard work have the grace of making a man
tolerably indifferent to external matters. Being obliged to spend half
the day in court fighting for the gravest interests of men’s lives
or fortunes, Granville was less alive than another might have been to
certain facts in his household.
If, on a Friday, he found none but Lenten fare, and by chance asked for
a dish of meat without getting it, his wife, forbidden by the Gospel to
tell a lie, could still, by such subterfuges as are permissible in the
interests of religion, cloak what was premeditated purpose under some
pretext of her own carelessness or the scarcity in the market. She would
often exculpate herself at the expense of the cook, and even go so far
as to scold him. At that time young lawyers did not, as they do now,
keep the fasts of the Church, the four rogation seasons, and the
vigils of festivals; so Granville was not at first aware of the regular
recurrence of these Lenten meals, which his wife took care should be
made dainty by the addition of teal, moor-hen, and fish-pies, that their
amphibious meat or high seasoning might cheat his palate. Thus the
young man unconsciously lived in strict orthodoxy, and worked out his
salvation without knowing it.
On week-days he did not know whether his wife went to Mass or no. On
Sundays, with very natural amiability, he accompanied her to church to
make up to her, as it were, for sometimes giving up vespers in favor of
his company; he could not at first fully enter into the strictness of
his wife’s religious views. The theatres being impossible in summer by
reason of the heat, Granville had not even the opportunity of the great
success of a piece to give rise to the serious question of play-going.
And, in short, at the early stage of a union to which a man has been
led by a young girl’s beauty, he can hardly be exacting as to his
amusements. Youth is greedy rather than dainty, and possession has a
charm in itself. How should he be keen to note coldness, dignity, and
reserve in the woman to whom he ascribes the excitement he himself
feels, and lends the glow of the fire that burns within him? He must
have attained a certain conjugal calm before he discovers that a bigot
sits waiting for love with her arms folded.
Granville, therefore, believed himself happy till a fatal event brought
its influence to bear on his married life. In the month of November 1808
the Canon of Bayeux Cathedral who had been the keeper of Madame Bontems’
conscience and her daughter’s, came to Paris, spurred by the ambition to
be at the head of a church in the capital--a position which he regarded
perhaps as the stepping-stone to a bishopric. On resuming his former
control of this wandering lamb, he was horrified to find her already so
much deteriorated by the air of Paris, and strove to reclaim her to his
chilly fold. Frightened by the exhortations of this priest, a man of
about eight-and-thirty, who brought with him, into the circle of the
enlightened and tolerant Paris clergy, the bitter provincial catholicism
and the inflexible bigotry which fetter timid souls with endless
exactions, Madame de Granville did penance and returned from her
Jansenist errors.
It would be tiresome to describe minutely all the circumstances which
insensibly brought disaster on this household; it will be enough to
relate the simple facts without giving them in strict order of time.
The first misunderstanding between the young couple was, however, a
serious one.
When Granville took his wife into society she never declined solemn
functions, such as dinners, concerts, or parties given by the Judges
superior to her husband in the legal profession; but for a long time she
constantly excused herself on the plea of a sick headache when they were
invited to a ball. One day Granville, out of patience with these assumed
indispositions, destroyed a note of invitation to a ball at the house of
a Councillor of State, and gave his wife only a verbal invitation. Then,
on the evening, her health being quite above suspicion, he took her to a
magnificent entertainment.
“My dear,” said he, on their return home, seeing her wear an offensive
air of depression, “your position as a wife, the rank you hold in
society, and the fortune you enjoy, impose on you certain duties of
which no divine law can relieve you. Are you not your husband’s pride?
You are required to go to balls when I go, and to appear in a becoming
manner.”
“And what is there, my dear, so disastrous in my dress?”
“It is your manner, my dear. When a young man comes up to speak to you,
you look so serious that a spiteful person might believe you doubtful
of your own virtue. You seem to fear lest a smile should undo you. You
really look as if you were asking forgiveness of God for the sins
that may be committed around you. The world, my dearest, is not a
convent.--But, as you mentioned your dress, I may confess to you that it
is no less a duty to conform to the customs and fashions of Society.”
“Do you wish that I should display my shape like those indecent women
who wear gowns so low that impudent eyes can stare at their bare
shoulders and their--”
“There is a difference, my dear,” said her husband, interrupting her,
“between uncovering your whole bust and giving some grace to your dress.
You wear three rows of net frills that cover your throat up to your
chin. You look as if you had desired your dressmaker to destroy the
graceful line of your shoulders and bosom with as much care as a
coquette would devote to obtaining from hers a bodice that might
emphasize her covered form. Your bust is wrapped in so many folds that
every one was laughing at your affectation of prudery. You would be
really grieved if I were to repeat the ill-natured remarks made on your
appearance.”
“Those who admire such obscenity will not have to bear the burthen if we
sin,” said the lady tartly.
“And you did not dance?” asked Granville.
“I shall never dance,” she replied.
“If I tell you that you ought to dance!” said her husband sharply. “Yes,
you ought to follow the fashions, to wear flowers in your hair, and
diamonds. Remember, my dear, that rich people--and we are rich--are
obliged to keep up luxury in the State. Is it not far better to
encourage manufacturers than to distribute money in the form of alms
through the medium of the clergy?”
“You talk as a statesman!” said Angelique.
“And you as a priest,” he retorted.
The discussion was bitter. Madame de Granville’s answers, though
spoken very sweetly and in a voice as clear as a church bell, showed
an obstinacy that betrayed priestly influence. When she appealed to
the rights secured to her by Granville’s promise, she added that her
director specially forbade her going to balls; then her husband pointed
out to her that the priest was overstepping the regulations of the
Church.
This odious theological dispute was renewed with great violence and
acerbity on both sides when Granville proposed to take his wife to the
play. Finally, the lawyer, whose sole aim was to defeat the pernicious
influence exerted over his wife by her old confessor, placed the
question on such a footing that Madame de Granville, in a spirit of
defiance, referred it by writing to the Court of Rome, asking in so many
words whether a woman could wear low gowns and go to the play and to
balls without compromising her salvation.
The reply of the venerable Pope Pius VII. came at once, strongly
condemning the wife’s recalcitrancy and blaming the priest. This letter,
a chapter on conjugal duties, might have been dictated by the spirit of
Fenelon, whose grace and tenderness pervaded every line.
“A wife is right to go wherever her husband may take her. Even if she
sins by his command, she will not be ultimately held answerable.” These
two sentences of the Pope’s homily only made Madame de Granville and her
director accuse him of irreligion.
But before this letter had arrived, Granville had discovered the strict
observance of fast days that his wife forced upon him, and gave his
servants orders to serve him with meat every day in the year. However
much annoyed his wife might be by these commands, Granville, who cared
not a straw for such indulgence or abstinence, persisted with manly
determination.
Is it not an offence to the weakest creature that can think at all to
be compelled to do, by the will of another, anything that he would
otherwise have done simply of his own accord? Of all forms of tyranny,
the most odious is that which constantly robs the soul of the merit of
its thoughts and deeds. It has to abdicate without having reigned. The
word we are readiest to speak, the feelings we most love to express, die
when we are commanded to utter them.
Ere long the young man ceased to invite his friends, to give parties or
dinners; the house might have been shrouded in crape. A house where the
mistress is a bigot has an atmosphere of its own. The servants, who are,
of course, under her immediate control, are chosen among a class who
call themselves pious, and who have an unmistakable physiognomy. Just
as the jolliest fellow alive, when he joins the _gendarmerie_, has the
countenance of a gendarme, so those who give themselves over to the
habit of lowering their eyes and preserving a sanctimonious mien clothes
them in a livery of hypocrisy which rogues can affect to perfection.
And besides, bigots constitute a sort of republic; they all know each
other; the servants they recommend and hand on from one to another are
a race apart, and preserved by them, as horse-breeders will admit
no animal into their stables that has not a pedigree. The more the
impious--as they are thought--come to understand a household of bigots,
the more they perceive that everything is stamped with an indescribable
squalor; they find there, at the same time, an appearance of avarice and
mystery, as in a miser’s home, and the dank scent of cold incense which
gives a chill to the stale atmosphere of a chapel. This methodical
meanness, this narrowness of thought, which is visible in every detail,
can only be expressed by one word--Bigotry. In these sinister and
pitiless houses Bigotry is written on the furniture, the prints, the
pictures; speech is bigoted, the silence is bigoted, the faces are
those of bigots. The transformation of men and things into bigotry is
an inexplicable mystery, but the fact is evident. Everybody can see that
bigots do not walk, do not sit, do not speak, as men of the world
walk, sit, and speak. Under their roof every one is ill at ease, no one
laughs, stiffness and formality infect everything, from the mistress’
cap down to her pincushion; eyes are not honest, the folks are more like
shadows, and the lady of the house seems perched on a throne of ice.
One morning poor Granville discerned with grief and pain that all
the symptoms of bigotry had invaded his home. There are in the world
different spheres in which the same effects are seen though produced by
dissimilar causes. Dulness hedges such miserable homes round with walls
of brass, enclosing the horrors of the desert and the infinite void. The
home is not so much a tomb as that far worse thing--a convent. In
the center of this icy sphere the lawyer could study his wife
dispassionately. He observed, not without keen regret, the
narrow-mindedness that stood confessed in the very way that her hair
grew, low on the forehead, which was slightly depressed; he discovered
in the perfect regularity of her features a certain set rigidity which
before long made him hate the assumed sweetness that had bewitched him.
Intuition told him that one day of disaster those thin lips might say,
“My dear, it is for your good!”
Madame de Granville’s complexion was acquiring a dull pallor and an
austere expression that were a kill-joy to all who came near her. Was
this change wrought by the ascetic habits of a pharisaism which is not
piety any more than avarice is economy? It would be hard to say. Beauty
without expression is perhaps an imposture. This imperturbable set smile
that the young wife always wore when she looked at Granville seemed to
be a sort of Jesuitical formula of happiness, by which she thought
to satisfy all the requirements of married life. Her charity was an
offence, her soulless beauty was monstrous to those who knew her; the
mildness of her speech was an irritation: she acted, not on feeling, but
on duty.
There are faults which may yield in a wife to the stern lessons of
experience, or to a husband’s warnings; but nothing can counteract false
ideas of religion. An eternity of happiness to be won, set in the scale
against worldly enjoyment, triumphs over everything and makes every
pang endurable. Is it not the apotheosis of egotism, of Self beyond the
grave? Thus even the Pope was censured at the tribunal of the priest and
the young devotee. To be always in the right is a feeling which absorbs
every other in these tyrannous souls.
For some time past a secret struggle had been going on between the ideas
of the husband and wife, and the young man was soon weary of a battle to
which there could be no end. What man, what temper, can endure the sight
of a hypocritically affectionate face and categorical resistance to his
slightest wishes? What is to be done with a wife who takes advantage
of his passion to protect her coldness, who seems determined on being
blandly inexorable, prepares herself ecstatically to play the martyr,
and looks on her husband as a scourge from God, a means of flagellation
that may spare her the fires of purgatory? What picture can give an idea
of these women who make virtue hateful by defying the gentle precepts of
that faith which Saint John epitomized in the words, “Love one another”?
If there was a bonnet to be found in a milliner’s shop that was
condemned to remain in the window, or to be packed off to the colonies,
Granville was certain to see it on his wife’s head; if a material of
bad color or hideous design were to be found, she would select it. These
hapless bigots are heart-breaking in their notions of dress. Want of
taste is a defect inseparable from false pietism.
And so, in the home-life that needs the fullest sympathy, Granville had
no true companionship. He went out alone to parties and the theatres.
Nothing in his house appealed to him. A huge Crucifix that hung between
his bed and Angelique’s seemed figurative of his destiny. Does it not
represent a murdered Divinity, a Man-God, done to death in all the prime
of life and beauty? The ivory of that cross was less cold than Angelique
crucifying her husband under the plea of virtue. This it was that lay
at the root of their woes; the young wife saw nothing but duty where
she should have given love. Here, one Ash Wednesday, rose the pale and
spectral form of Fasting in Lent, of Total Abstinence, commanded in a
severe tone--and Granville did not deem it advisable to write in his
turn to the Pope and take the opinion of the Consistory on the proper
way of observing Lent, the Ember days, and the eve of great festivals.
His misfortune was too great! He could not even complain, for what
could he say? He had a pretty young wife attached to her duties,
virtuous--nay, a model of all the virtues. She had a child every year,
nursed them herself, and brought them up in the highest principles.
Being charitable, Angelique was promoted to rank as an angel. The old
women who constituted the circle in which she moved--for at that time it
was not yet “the thing” for young women to be religious as a matter of
fashion--all admired Madame de Granville’s piety, and regarded her,
not indeed as a virgin, but as a martyr. They blamed not the wife’s
scruples, but the barbarous philoprogenitiveness of the husband.
Granville, by insensible degrees, overdone with work, bereft of conjugal
consolations, and weary of a world in which he wandered alone, by the
time he was two-and-thirty had sunk into the Slough of Despond. He hated
life. Having too lofty a notion of the responsibilities imposed on him
by his position to set the example of a dissipated life, he tried to
deaden feeling by hard study, and began a great book on Law.
But he was not allowed to enjoy the monastic peace he had hoped for.
When the celestial Angelique saw him desert worldly society to work at
home with such regularity, she tried to convert him. It had been a real
sorrow to her to know that her husband’s opinions were not strictly
Christian; and she sometimes wept as she reflected that if her husband
should die it would be in a state of final impenitence, so that she
could not hope to snatch him from the eternal fires of Hell. Thus
Granville was a mark for the mean ideas, the vacuous arguments, the
narrow views by which his wife--fancying she had achieved the first
victory--tried to gain a second by bringing him back within the pale of
the Church.
This was the last straw. What can be more intolerable than the blind
struggle in which the obstinacy of a bigot tries to meet the acumen of a
lawyer? What more terrible to endure than the acrimonious pin-pricks to
which a passionate soul prefers a dagger-thrust? Granville neglected his
home. Everything there was unendurable. His children, broken by their
mother’s frigid despotism, dared not go with him to the play; indeed,
Granville could never give them any pleasure without bringing down
punishment from their terrible mother. His loving nature was weaned to
indifference, to a selfishness worse than death. His boys, indeed, he
saved from this hell by sending them to school at an early age, and
insisting on his right to train them. He rarely interfered between his
wife and her daughters; but he was resolved that they should marry as
soon as they were old enough.
Even if he had wished to take violent measures, he could have found no
justification; his wife, backed by a formidable army of dowagers, would
have had him condemned by the whole world. Thus Granville had no choice
but to live in complete isolation; but, crushed under the tyranny of
misery, he could not himself bear to see how altered he was by grief and
toil. And he dreaded any connection or intimacy with women of the world,
having no hope of finding any consolation.
The improving history of this melancholy household gave rise to no
events worthy of record during the fifteen years between 1806 and 1825.
Madame de Granville was exactly the same after losing her husband’s
affection as she had been during the time when she called herself happy.
She paid for Masses, beseeching God and the Saints to enlighten her as
to what the faults were which displeased her husband, and to show her
the way to restore the erring sheep; but the more fervent her prayers,
the less was Granville to be seen at home.
For about five years now, having achieved a high position as a judge,
Granville had occupied the _entresol_ of the house to avoid living with
the Comtesse de Granville. Every morning a little scene took place,
which, if evil tongues are to be believed, is repeated in many
households as the result of incompatibility of temper, of moral or
physical malady, or of antagonisms leading to such disaster as is
recorded in this history. At about eight in the morning a housekeeper,
bearing no small resemblance to a nun, rang at the Comte de Granville’s
door. Admitted to the room next to the Judge’s study, she always
repeated the same message to the footman, and always in the same tone:
“Madame would be glad to know whether Monsieur le Comte has had a good
night, and if she is to have the pleasure of his company at breakfast.”
“Monsieur presents his compliments to Madame la Comtesse,” the valet
would say, after speaking with his master, “and begs her to hold him
excused; important business compels him to be in court this morning.”
A minute later the woman reappeared and asked on madame’s behalf whether
she would have the pleasure of seeing Monsieur le Comte before he went
out.
“He is gone,” was always the rely, though often his carriage was still
waiting.
This little dialogue by proxy became a daily ceremonial. Granville’s
servant, a favorite with his master, and the cause of more than one
quarrel over his irreligious and dissipated conduct, would even go into
his master’s room, as a matter of form, when the Count was not there,
and come back with the same formula in reply.
The aggrieved wife was always on the watch for her husband’s return, and
standing on the steps so as to meet him like an embodiment of remorse.
The petty aggressiveness which lies at the root of the monastic
temper was the foundation of Madame de Granville’s; she was now
five-and-thirty, and looked forty. When the count was compelled by
decency to speak to his wife or to dine at home, she was only too well
pleased to inflict her company upon him, with her acid-sweet remarks and
the intolerable dulness of her narrow-minded circle, and she tried to
put him in the wrong before the servants and her charitable friends.
When, at this time, the post of President in a provincial court was
offered to the Comte de Granville, who was in high favor, he begged to
be allowed to remain in Paris. This refusal, of which the Keeper of the
Seals alone knew the reasons, gave rise to extraordinary conjectures
on the part of the Countess’ intimate friends and of her director.
Granville, a rich man with a hundred thousand francs a year, belonged to
one of the first families of Normandy. His appointment to be Presiding
Judge would have been the stepping-stone to a peer’s seat; whence this
strange lack of ambition? Why had he given up his great book on Law?
What was the meaning of the dissipation which for nearly six years had
made him a stranger to his home, his family, his study, to all he
ought to hold dear? The Countess’ confessor, who based his hopes of a
bishopric quite as much on the families he governed as on the services
he rendered to an association of which he was an ardent propagator,
was much disappointed by Granville’s refusal, and tried to insinuate
calumnious explanations: “If Monsieur le Comte had such an objection to
provincial life, it was perhaps because he dreaded finding himself under
the necessity of leading a regular life, compelled to set an example of
moral conduct, and to live with the Countess, from whom nothing could
have alienated him but some illicit connection; for how could a woman so
pure as Madame de Granville ever tolerate the disorderly life into which
her husband had drifted?” The sanctimonious woman accepted as facts
these hints, which unluckily were not merely hypothetical, and Madame de
Granville was stricken as by a thunderbolt.
Angelique, knowing nothing of the world, of love and its follies, was so
far from conceiving of any conditions of married life unlike those
that had alienated her husband as possible, that she believed him to be
incapable of the errors which are crimes in the eyes of any wife.
When the Count ceased to demand anything of her, she imagined that the
tranquillity he now seemed to enjoy was in the course of nature; and, as
she had really given to him all the love which her heart was capable
of feeling for a man, while the priest’s conjectures were the utter
destruction of the illusions she had hitherto cherished, she defended
her husband; at the same time, she could not eradicate the suspicion
that had been so ingeniously sown in her soul.
These alarms wrought such havoc in her feeble brain that they made her
ill; she was worn by low fever. These incidents took place during Lent
1822; she would not pretermit her austerities, and fell into a decline
that put her life in danger. Granville’s indifference was added torture;
his care and attention were such as a nephew feels himself bound to give
to some old uncle.
Though the Countess had given up her persistent nagging and
remonstrances, and tried to receive her husband with affectionate words,
the sharpness of the bigot showed through, and one speech would often
undo the work of a week.
Towards the end of May, the warm breath of spring, and more nourishing
diet than her Lenten fare, restored Madame de Granville to a little
strength. One morning, on coming home from Mass, she sat down on a stone
bench in the little garden, where the sun’s kisses reminded her of the
early days of her married life, and she looked back across the years to
see wherein she might have failed in her duty as a wife and mother. She
was broken in upon by the Abbe Fontanon in an almost indescribable state
of excitement.