THE WEIGHT OF
THE NAME
BY
PAUL BOURGET
Author of "A Divorce," "Pastels of Men," etc.
_Translated from the French by_
GEORGE BURNHAM IVES
Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1908
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Landri
II. A Grand Seigneur
III. The Tragic Underside of a Grand
Existence
IV. The Tragic Underside of a Grand
Existence (_Concluded_)
V. In Uniform
VI. The Will
VII. All Save Honor
VIII. On a Scent
IX. Separation
X. Epilogue
THE WEIGHT OF
THE NAME
I
LANDRI
The automobile turned sharply about the chevet of
Saint-François-Xavier. With an instinctive movement, Landri de
Claviers-Grandchamp seized the megaphone. He called to the chauffeur to
stop before one of the side entrances. The powerful limousin was still
in motion when he jumped out upon the sidewalk and disappeared within
the church, to reappear a few seconds later, by way of the main portal,
on Boulevard des Invalides. With the elegant and self-assured bearing
characteristic of Landri, with his charming face, at once soldierly and
thoughtful, which a proud, almost haughty mouth, beneath the slightly
tawny veil of the mustache, would have made too stern had not the eyes,
of a caressing brown, softened its expression, that childlike stratagem
could mean, but one thing,--the desire, to guard from curiosity and
comments a clandestine rendezvous.
It was true, but--a circumstance which would have made the officers of
the dragoon regiment in which the young count was serving as a
lieutenant burst with laughter--he had this rendezvous with a woman with
whom he was madly in love without having ever obtained anything from
her. What do I say? He had not even ventured, except on one occasion, to
speak to her of his sentiments.
How many elements in his life had conspired to make him a fop and
blasé: that face and that profession, his fortune and his name--one of
the best in France, which had lacked nothing but the éclat of great
offices at court! But Landri was born romantic. He was still romantic at
twenty-nine. In him, as in the hearts of all genuinely tender-hearted
men, emotion neutralized vanity.
He had met Madame Olier in 1903. That was the name of the woman in
question, a widow to-day, then the wife of one of his comrades. It was
now 1906, so that he had loved her for three years. It had never entered
his head that such perseverance in a dumb and unselfish devotion was a
delusion. He thought so less than ever on this warm and, so to speak,
languid morning of late November, as he went his way, drawn on, uplifted
by a proximate hope.
Although he had reasons for very serious reflection, the air seemed
light to him, his step was buoyant on the sidewalks of that ancient
quarter, of which he recognized the most trivial features. Behind him
the dome of the Invalides stamped the gold of its cupola on a pallid,
pearl-gray mist. At his right the slender towers of Saint-François
soared aloft in a transparent vapor. At his left the trees of a large
private garden waved their almost leafless branches over the enclosing
wall, and, as far as one could see, the populous Boulevard de
Montparnasse stretched away, swarming with tramways and omnibuses, with
cabs and drays.
In due time the young man turned into Rue Oudinot, then into Rue
Monsieur. There he paused before a porte-cochère, the door of which,
although it was ajar, he hesitated for some seconds to open. This door
gave access to a courtyard, at whose farther end was hidden one of those
dainty, oldish hôtels, pleasing to the eye, albeit out of style, of
which that street with its _ancien-régime_ name contained some
half-score or more a quarter of a century since. Alas! they are
vanishing one by one. As soon as the owner of one of them dies, the
crowbars of the demolishers set to work. An aristocratic plaything of
stone is razed to the ground. In its place rises one of those vulgar
income-producing houses, on whose threshold one finds it difficult to
imagine the lingering of such a lover as this. To be sure, it is simply
prejudice. In the eyes of a man in love, the profile of his mistress,
espied in the cage of an elevator, would bedeck with poesy and
fascination the staircase of one of those monstrosities in brick and
steel which the Americans brutally call "sky-scrapers." All the same,
there is a more intimate, a more penetrating sweetness in a perfect
accord between the setting in which a woman lives and the passion that
she inspires. This sweetness Landri de Claviers had ecstatically
intoxicated himself with in all his visits to that hermitage on Rue
Monsieur. Never had he savored it more deeply than at this moment, when
he was about to risk a step most important for the future of his love.
He had come to Valentine Olier's house with the firm determination to
bring about a decisive interview between them, and to ask her for her
hand. If he had insisted that she should receive him at a most
unseasonable hour, he had had for that insistence imperative reasons
which excused him beforehand for his indiscretion. His timidity before
that day, and the rapid throbbing of his pulse as he finally crossed the
courtyard, did not come from an embarrassment of the sort that can be
explained. It was the sinking of the heart from excess of emotion, which
accompanies over-powerful desire in untried sensibilities. Naturally
refined, Landri had not aged himself prematurely by the abuse of
precocious experiments. To this young man, who was really entitled to be
so called, what awaited him behind the curtains of that ground floor was
the happiness or the misery of his whole life. But, we repeat, he hoped.
His eyes feasted themselves, as their custom was, on the lines of that
façade, so closely associated with the image of his Valentine. Ah!
would she ever be his? A reflection of her person illuminated in his
eyes that two-story building, charming in very truth, whose light
pilasters, modest decorations, pediment with balustrades, and niches
adorned with classic busts, presented a perfect specimen of the
architecture of the time of Louis XVI,--a composite style, antique and
pastoral, like that extraordinary epoch itself, in which a moribund
society played at idyls--awaiting the tragedy--amid Pompeian
architecture.
This hôtel had been the "folly" of one of the luxurious farmers-general
of that day. To-day the _petite maison_, divided bourgeois-fashion into
small apartments, numbered among its tenants, besides the officer's
widow, a retired magistrate on the first floor, and on the second the
head of a department in the ministry. Thus an elegant caprice,
originally designed for the suppers of a rival of Grimod de la
Reynière, found itself giving shelter to existences of quasi-cloistral
regularity. How gratifying to Landri was Madame Olier's choice of a
habitation so retired!
Left free and alone, at twenty-seven years, with an infant son, with no
near relatives, having few kindred in the world and a modest fortune,
Valentine had valued in that apartment the very thing that would have
disgusted so many women,--the charm of oblivion, of silence and of
meditation. On the other side the ground floor looked upon a very small
garden, adjoining others much larger; and as the dividing wall was
concealed beneath a cloak of ivy, that enclosure of a few square yards
seemed like the corner of a park.
As he pressed the electric bell, Landri was sure that the only servant,
answering the ring, would conduct him through the narrow reception-room
and the salon with its covered furniture, to a tiny room, looking on the
garden at the rear, which Madame Olier used as a second salon. She would
be there, writing, at the little movable table which she placed by the
fire or by the door-window according to the season. Or else she would be
reading, seated on the bergère covered with an old striped stuff, dead
pink and faded green, always the same. Or else her slender fingers would
be busy with her embroidery needle. Correspondence, reading, work or
music,--a piano which she rarely opened except when alone, told of that
taste of hers,--her occupation would be constantly interrupted by a
glance at the path in the garden, where her son Ludovic was playing.
Landri found therein an image of what the whole life of that widow and
mother had been during the year since she had lost her husband! Great
God! how dearly he loved the young woman for having thus proved to him
how justly he had placed her so far apart from all other women from the
moment of their first meeting!
Valentine was there, in fact, in the small salon softly lighted by the
morning sun which was just making its way through a last film of mist.
She was apparently engrossed by an endless piece of embroidery. But the
music portfolio, still open on the piano, and the stool pushed back a
little way, might have betrayed to the young man how she had passed the
time while awaiting his coming. Still another sign betokened her
agitation. She had not her child with her. Contrary to her custom she
had sent him out to walk at ten o'clock. Why, if not that she might be
alone with her thoughts? Her self-control, however, enabled her to
welcome her visitor with the same inclination of the head as usual,
friendly yet reserved, the same smile of distant affability. At most the
quivering of the eyelids betrayed a nervousness which was contradicted
by the even tones of her voice and by the impenetrable glance of her
limpid blue eyes.
Such women as she, with hair of a pale gold, almost wavy, with slender
hands and feet, with a tapering figure, and dainty gestures, seem
destined to allow their faintest impressions to appear on the surface,
one judges them to be so vibrant and quivering. On the contrary, it is
generally the case that no one can be more secretive than such
creatures, all delicacy and all emotion as they are. Their very excess
of nervousness becomes in them a source of strength. From their first
experience of the world they comprehend to what degree the acuteness of
their sensations renders them exceptional, solitary beings. By one of
those instincts of self-defence which the moral nature possesses no less
than the physical nature, they manœuvre so as to conceal their hearts,
in order that life may not brutalize them. They become, as it were,
ashamed of their emotions. They hold their peace, at first concerning
the most profound of them, then concerning the most superficial. And
thus they end by developing a power of external impassiveness which adds
to their charm the attractive force of an enigma, especially as this
intentional dualism, this constant watch upon themselves, this prolonged
contrast between what they show and what they feel, between their real
personality and avowed personality, does not fail to exert some
influence even on their manner of feeling and thinking. They are capable
of the nicest shades of discrimination, even to subtlety, when they are
pure; and, if they are not pure, even to stratagem, for the fascination
or the despair of the man who falls in love with them, according as he,
in his turn, is very complex or very simple.
Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp was both, for reasons which were connected
with the peculiar features of his destiny. Thus he had already suffered
much through that woman, and still had owed to her the most delicious
hours that his youth, darkened by an inborn and acquired melancholy, had
ever known. The first words exchanged between him and Madame Olier will
enable us to understand why, and at the same time what dangerous, almost
unhuman, chimeras can suggest themselves to a scrupulous sentimental
woman like Valentine, who loves love and fears it, who cannot determine
either to deprive herself of an affection that is dear to her, or to
sacrifice her self-esteem by abandoning herself to it, who becomes
agitated without losing her head, and whose pulses throb without causing
her to abdicate her reason.
But the hour had come to have done with all equivocation. The young
man's mind was made up. The young woman had read it between the
enigmatical lines of his letter. She read it in those eyes, whose
glances she had so often dominated in the past three years, simply by
her attitude. No earthly power would prevent Landri from speaking
to-day. She knew it. She knew what words he would utter, and she was
preparing to listen to them, and then to reply, perturbed to the inmost
depths of her being, and outwardly so calm in her mourning garb. She was
dressed as if to go out, in order to have a pretext for breaking off the
visit at her pleasure. The black cloth and crêpe gave to her delicately
hollowed cheeks an ivory-like pallor which made her even lovelier.
After the first words of commonplace courtesy, amid which she found a
way to slip in an allusion to an errand to be done before luncheon,
there ensued one of those intervals of dumbness that occur between two
persons at the moment of uttering words which cannot be retracted, and
which they crave and fear in equal measure. The crackling of the fire on
the hearth, and the ticking of the clock, suddenly made themselves heard
in that silence, which the officer broke at last, in a tone in which his
emotion betrayed itself.
"Doubtless you understood, madame," he began, "that it was a very
serious matter which made me presume to ask you to receive me at this
hour. I had no other at my disposal. I must start for Saint-Mihiel
to-morrow evening. I was able to obtain only a very short leave of
absence. My father awaits me at Grandchamp, where he is hunting to-day,
and you know how much importance he attaches to his hunt. I must be
there before the end, or run the risk of disappointing him. I succeeded
in catching the train at Commercy last night. I was at the Gare de l'Est
at nine o'clock. In an hour and a half by automobile I shall be at
Grandchamp. I tell you all this because--"
"Because you do not think me your friend," she interrupted, shaking her
head. "But I am, and most cordially. You have nothing to apologize for.
You have accustomed me to a too loyal devotion, which I know to be too
loyal," she repeated, "for me not to divine that a very important motive
dictated your letter. Tell me what it is very simply, as a friend, I say
again, a true friend, who will answer in the same way."
She had assumed, as she said these few words, a very gentle but very
firm expression. Her voice had dwelt with especial force on the word
"friend," which she repeated thrice. It was a reminder of a very
hazardous and very fragile engagement. Thousands of such engagements
have been entered into, since passionate men, like Landri, are able to
respect those whom they love, and since women secretly enamored, like
Valentine, dream of reconciling the emotions of a forbidden affection
with the strict requirements of virtue. The rare thing is not that one
suggests and the other accepts the romantic compact of friendship
without other development, but that the compact is adhered to. Absolute,
almost naïve sincerity on the part of both contracting parties is
essential, a sincerity which excludes all trickery on his part, all
coquetry on hers. There must also be a voluntary separation of their
lives, which does not permit too frequent meetings. He who says
sincerity does not always say truth. One may maintain sincerely a
radically false situation, may obstinately abide by it through mute
rebellions, through secret and long-protracted suffering, through hidden
anguish, like that the memory of which quivered in the young man's
reply:--
"A friend!" What bitterness those soft syllables assumed in passing
through those suddenly contracted lips! "I knew that, at the outset of
our conversation, you would shelter yourself behind my promise. I knew
that you would anticipate the sentences that I wish to say to you, and
that you would not allow me to say them. God is my witness, and you,
too, madame, are my witness, that I have done everything to maintain the
absolute reserve which you imposed as a condition upon the relations
between us.--Let me speak, I deserve that you should let me speak!" he
implored, at a gesture from Valentine, who had half risen. He put such
mournful ardor into that entreaty, that she resumed her seat, without
further attempt to arrest an avowal which her woman's tact had foreseen
only too plainly during these last days. Accustomed as she was to
control herself, her constantly increasing pallor, her more and more
rapid breathing, disclosed the agitation aroused in her by the voice of
him whom she had pretended to look upon only as a friend, and who
continued: "Yes, I deserve it. I have been so honest, so loyal in my
determination to obey you! Anything, even that silence, was less painful
to me than to lose you altogether. And then, I had given you such good
reason! I have reproached myself so bitterly for that madness of a few
minutes, three years ago! That I had confessed to you what I ought
always to have hidden from you, since you were not free, crushed me with
such profound remorse! Every day at Saint-Mihiel I pass the wall of the
garden where that scene took place. Never without seeing you again, in
my thoughts, as I saw you after that mad declaration, abruptly leaving
me and going back to the house, without looking back. And what weeks
those were that followed, when we met almost every day, and I did not
exist for your glance! 'She will never, never forgive me,' I said to
myself, and the thought tore my heart. I was sincere when I determined
to exchange into another regiment, to leave Saint-Mihiel; sincere when I
tried, before my departure, which I believed to be final, to speak with
you once more. I felt that I must explain my action to you, must make
you understand that no degrading thought of seduction had entered my
mind, that I must have been demented, that I had never for one second
ceased to have such unbounded esteem and respect for you! Ah! I shall be
very old, very cold-blooded, when I am able to recall without
tears--see, they are coming to my eyes now!--your face on that day, your
eyes, the tone in which you said to me: 'I have forgotten everything.
Give me your word that that moment of aberration shall never return, and
I will see you as before. I do not wish your life to be turned
topsy-turvy because of me.'--While you were speaking, I was saying to
myself--that hour is so vivid to me!--I was saying to myself: 'To
breathe the air that she breathes, to see her go to and fro, to continue
to hear her voice, there is no price I will not pay.' And you marked out
the programme of our relations in the future. You said that the world
did not place much credit in a disinterested friendship between a man
and a woman, but that you did believe in such a thing provided that both
were really loyal. I could repeat, syllable for syllable, every word
that you said that afternoon. I listened while you said them, with an
utterly indescribable sensation, of assuagement and exaltation as well,
through my whole being. It was as if I had seen your very soul think and
feel. Yes, I solemnly promised you then that, if you would admit me once
more to your intimacy, I would be that friend that you gave me leave to
be, and nothing more. That promise I have the right to say again that I
have kept. I declare that I would continue to keep it if the
circumstances had remained the same. But they have changed. Ah! madame,
if one could read another's heart, I would beseech you to look into
mine. You would see there that at the news of the misfortune which
befell you, I had no selfish reflection concerning that change. I
thought only of your grief, your solitude, your orphan child. So long as
the catastrophe was recent, I was ashamed even to glimpse a new horizon
before me--before us. But I cannot prevent life from being life. At
twenty-seven a woman is entitled to reconstruct her life without
offending in any wise the memory of him who is no more. On my part, I am
not breaking my plighted word when I say: 'Madame, the worship, the
adoration that I had for you three years ago, and that you justly
forbade me to express to you then, I still entertain. My silence
regarding my sentiments since that time is a guarantee of their depth. I
break it to-day, when you can listen to me without having the
protestation of the most fervent, the most respectful, the most
submissive of passions cause you remorse. What I said to you in the
garden I say again to-day, adding to it an entreaty which you will not
deny. I love you. Let me devote to you what I have left of youth, my
whole life. Allow me to be a support in your solitude, a consolation in
your melancholy, a second father to your son. Be my wife and I will
bless this long trial, which justifies me in repeating to you what I
felt on the first day that I met you,--but how could you have failed to
suspect it?--I love you, and I never have loved, I never shall love,
anybody but you.'"
This impassioned harangue, so insistent and so direct, bore little
resemblance to the one that Landri had prepared during the long waking
hours of the night and in the cold light of dawn, while the express
train of the Chemin de Fer de l'Est bore him away from the little
garrison town where his destiny had caused him to meet Captain Olier and
his charming wife. What diplomatic stages he had marked out for himself
beforehand! And he had hurried through them all to go straight to that
offer of marriage, put forth, abruptly, with the spontaneity that is
more adroit than all the prudence in the world with a woman who
loves,--and Valentine loved Landri. She loved him despite complexities
upon which we must insist once again in order to avoid the illogical
aspects of that woman's nature, loyal even in its subtleties, even to
the slightest appearance of coquetry. She loved him, but in a strange
ignorance of the elements of love, despite her marriage and maternity.
Her union with a man older than herself, arranged by her family, had not
caused her to know that total revolution of her existence, after which a
woman is truly woman. With her, affection had never been anything more
than imaginary. In the chaste and artless delights of this intimacy,
without caresses or definite words, with a young man by whom
nevertheless she knew that she was loved, and whom she loved, she had
found the only pleasure which her sensibility, still altogether mental,
could conceive. To tell the whole fact, she loved--and that friendship
had sufficed for her! It was inevitable, therefore, that at the first
attempt of her alleged "friend" to draw her into the ardent world of
complete passion,--and this offer of marriage, under such conditions,
was such an attempt,--she should throw herself almost violently back.
She ought, however, to have foreseen it, that step which would put an
end to the paradoxical and unreliable compromise of conscience devised
by her between her conjugal duties and her secret love. Yes, she had
foreseen it, and on the day after her husband's death. Her habit of
reflection, intensified by the monotony of her semi-recluse existence,
had led her to take an almost painful pleasure in a minute scrutiny of
the reasons for and against a decision, and she had ended, in the false
perspective of solitary meditation, by thinking solely in opposition to
her heart. She had ceased to see anything but the force of the
objections, the insurmountable difficulties, and she had taken her stand
with the party most strongly opposed to her passionate desire. With that
she had soothed herself with the chimerical hope of postponing from week
to week the explanation which had suddenly forced itself upon her so
imperatively. She came to it deeply moved and at the same time prepared,
overwhelmed with surprise and, as it were, armored rather than armed
with arguments long since thought out. She ran the risk thus of seeming
very cold when she was deeply moved, very self-controlled and
conventional, when she was all a-quiver. How near to weakness was her
borrowed energy from the moment that she began her reply!
"You have made me very unhappy, my friend,--for I shall continue to give
you in my heart that name which you no longer care for. I do not
reproach you. It was I who deceived myself, in thinking that your
feeling for me might change, that it had changed. Perhaps such a
transformation is not possible. I too have acted in good faith in
wishing for it, in longing for it, in hoping for it. You know it, do you
not?--Now that dream is at an end." She repeated, as if speaking to
herself: "At an end, at an end." And, turning toward Landri: "How do you
expect me to permit you to come here now, to indulge myself in those
long conversations and that correspondence which were so dear to me,
after you have talked to me in this way? One does not try such an
experiment twice. Three years ago I was able to believe in an
unconscious outbreak of your youth, in an exaltation which would soon
subside. To-day, I am no longer able to flatter myself with that
illusion. But on one point you are right. The circumstances are no
longer the same. If at that time it was my right and my duty to judge
severely a declaration which I should have been as culpable to listen to
as you were to make it, how can I blame you now for a step in which
there is no other feeling for me than respect and esteem? I have not
lived much in the world,--enough, however, to realize that the fidelity
of a heart like yours, prolonged thus and under such conditions, is no
ordinary thing. It touches me far more than I can tell you."--Despite
herself, her voice trembled as she let fall those words which signified
too clearly: "And I, too, love you."--"But," she continued, firmly,
"this interview must be the last, since I cannot answer you with the
words that you ask, since in that hand which you offer me I cannot place
mine."
"Then," he faltered, "if I understand you, you refuse--"
"To be your wife. Yes," she said; and this time her blue eyes beneath
their half-closed lids gazed steadfastly at Landri. Her delicate mouth
closed in a fold of decision. Her whole fragile person was as if
stiffened in a tension which proved to the lover the force of the
emotion that she held in check. She repeated: "Yes, I refuse. I could
find many pretexts to give you which, to others, would be good reasons,
and which should be so to me. I have a child. I might say to you: 'I do
not want him to have a stepfather.' That would not be true. You would be
to him, I am sure, as you said, a second father. I might dwell upon my
loss, which is so recent, in order to postpone my reply until later.
Later, the reason which makes me decline the offer of your name would be
the same, for it is just that name, it is what it represents, which
forbids me to abandon myself to a liking of which you have had too many
proofs. I shall soon be twenty-eight, my friend. I am no longer exactly
a young woman. I have reflected much on marriage. I know that if people
marry to love each other, they marry also to live and remain together,
to have a home, to be a family. For that it is essential that there
should not be, between the husband and wife, one of those unalterable
differences of birth and environment, which make it impossible that her
people should ever be really related to his.--Your name? It is not only
very old, it is illustrious. It is blended with the whole history of
France. There was a Maréchal de Claviers-Grandchamp who was a comrade
of Bayard, a Cardinal de Claviers-Grandchamp who was a friend of
Bossuet. Claviers-Grandchamps have been ambassadors, governors of
provinces, commanders of the Saint-Esprit, peers of France. Your house
has contracted alliances with ten other houses of the French or European
aristocracy. You are cousins of English dukes, of German and Italian
princes. You are a _grand seigneur_, and I a bourgeoise, a very petty
bourgeoise.--Do not you interrupt me, either," she said, placing her
slender hand on the young man's arm and arresting thus his protest; "it
is better that I should say it all at once. In all this I am moved
neither by humility nor by pride. I have never understood either of
those sentiments, when there is question of facts so impossible to deny
or to modify as our situation. I am a bourgeoise, I say again. That
means that my people lived in straitened circumstances at first, then
modestly. I consider myself rich with the thirty thousand francs a year
that they saved for me, in how many years! It is a fortune in our world,
in yours it would be ruin. When I walk in that quarter, before those
ancient hôtels which are still to be found there, on the afternoon of a
grand reception, I see their courtyards, the coupés and automobiles
waiting, the footmen in livery, all that luxury of existence which you
no longer notice, it is so natural to you,--and do you know what my
feeling always is? That if it were necessary for me to live there, and
in such fashion, I should be too much out of my element, too
overpowered! These are trifles. I mention them to you because they
represent a whole type of customs, an entire social code. Do not say
that you will not impose those customs on your wife, that you will
liberate her from that code. You could not do it. To-day, as a bachelor,
and because you are an officer, you have been able to simplify your life
a great deal. But your wife would not be merely the companion of
Monsieur de Claviers-Grandchamp, a simple lieutenant of dragoons,
stationed at Saint-Mihiel, she would be also the daughter-in-law of the
Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp, who lives in a veritable palace in
Paris, and who has a historic château in the Oise. He is a widower. He
would require, and he would have a right to require, his
daughter-in-law, with him and for him, to do the honors of those
princely residences. And besides, he would begin by not accepting me.
You have talked so much to me about him! I know him so well, without
having seen him. Not for nothing do you call him the 'Émigré.' So many
times you have exerted yourself to prove to me that he is not a man of
our time; that he has the pride, the religious veneration of his race
and of old France. And such a man would consent that his heir, the only
survivor of his four sons, should take for his wife the widow of an
officer who was the son of a physician, herself the daughter of a
provincial notary, who, before she became Madame Olier, bore the name of
Mademoiselle Barral? Never! To marry me, my friend, would be first of
all to quarrel with your father, and, more or less, with all your
relations and your whole social circle. What do you care? you will say.
When two people love, they suffice for each other. That is true and it
is not true. You would suffer death and torture that I should be
humiliated, even in trifles, that I should not have the rank due to your
wife, being your wife. I should suffer to see you suffer, and perhaps--I
do not make myself out any better than I am--on my own account. People
are so ingenious in all societies in wounding those whom they look upon
as intruders. If we should have children, would they feel that they were
really the brothers and sisters of my boy, of a poor little Olier, they
who would be Claviers-Grandchamps? And if--But what's the use of
enumerating the miseries comprised in that cruel, wise, profoundly
significant word--mésalliance. No. I will not be your wife, my friend,
and the day will come when you will thank me for having defended you
against yourself, for having defended us--dare I say it?--But not
effectively, for I could not prevent your saying words which are
destined to break off forever, for a long time at all events, relations
so pleasant as ours.--So pleasant!" she repeated. And then, with
something very like a sob: "Oh! why, why did you speak so to me again?"
"Because I love you," he replied, almost fiercely. "And you! But if you
loved me, you would bless them, these differences between our
environments, instead of fearing them! You would see in the hostility of
my circle--I admit that I had not thought of it!--a means of having me
entirely to yourself. I should have heard you simply discuss the matter
and hesitate. But the coldness of your reply, this keen analysis of our
respective social positions, this balance-sheet of our families spread
out before me, calmly, coldly, mathematically, when I had come here, mad
with emotion, and thinking only of the life of the heart!--I am more
deeply hurt by that than by your refusal. I might have discussed it and
argued against your reasons. One does not discuss, one does not combat
indifference. One submits to it, and it is horrible!"
"How unjust you are, Landri!" she exclaimed. It very rarely happened
that she addressed him so, by his first name. That caress of language,
the only kind that she had ever bestowed on him, and that so seldom,
came to her lips in face of the young man's evident despair. A woman who
loves can endure everything, conceal everything, except the compassion
aroused by a sorrow which she has inflicted upon the man she loves; and,
destroying, by that involuntary outburst of her passion, the whole
effect of her previous refusal, she added: "I! indifferent to you! Why,
of whom was I thinking when I spoke, if not of you, solely and only of
you, of your future and your happiness?"
"How happy I should be," he interrupted, "if, on the other hand, you
would think only of yourself, if you would have the selfishness of love,
its exigences, its unreasonableness! And yet," he continued with the
asperity of a passion which feels that it is reciprocated, despite all
manner of resistance, and which is exasperated by that assurance, "it is
true. You have some feeling for me in your heart. You are not a
coquette. You would not make sport of a man who has shown you so plainly
that he loves you, and how dearly! I said just now that you didn't love
me. At certain times I believe it, and it tortures me. At other times I
feel that you are so moved, so trembling--see, now!--Oh! by everything
on earth that you hold sacred, Valentine,"--he had never before allowed
himself that familiarity, which made her start like a kiss,--"if you
really regard me with the feeling that I have for you, if my long
fidelity has touched you, answer me. Is it true, really true, that
between me and my happiness,--for you are my happiness, only you, I tell
you,--between your heart and my heart there is nothing but that single,
wretched obstacle, my name?"
"There is nothing else," she replied, "I swear."
"And you expect me to bow before that, to give you up because I am
called Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp and you Madame Olier, and because my
social circle will frown upon the marriage!"
"It is not I who expect it," she replied, "it is life!"
"Life?" he repeated in a voice that had suddenly become dull and harsh;
"what do you mean by that? But what need have I to ask you? As if, ever
since my youth, I had not seen that same barrier always standing in the
path of all my impulses: my name, always my name, again my name! I shall
end by cursing it! I am a _grand seigneur_, you say. Say rather a
pariah, before whom so many avenues were closed, when he was twenty
years old, because he is called by that great name; and the woman he
loves won't have him because of it! Ah! how truly I shall have known and
lived the tragedy of the noble,--since my evil fate decrees that I am a
noble,--that paralysis of the youthful being, quivering with life,
hungry for action, because of a past which was not his own, suffocation
by prejudices which he does not even share.--Valentine, say that you do
not love me. I shall be terribly unhappy, but I shall not feel what I
felt just now, and with such violence,--a fresh outbreak of that old
revolt through which I have suffered so keenly, which I have always
fought within myself, and which goes so far, at times, as downright
hatred of my caste. Yes, I have been, I am now sometimes, very near
hating it, and that is so painful to me, for I belong to that caste, in
spite of everything. It holds me a prisoner. I know its good qualities.
I have its pride at certain moments, and at others, this one for
instance, it is a perfect horror to me!"
"Do not speak so, do not feel so," pleaded Madame Olier. "You frighten
me when I see you so unjust, not only to me,--I have forgiven you,--but
to your own destiny. It is tempting God. You speak of barriers, of
prison, of suffocation. For my part, I think of all the privileges you
received at your birth, and first of all, and greatest of all, that of
being so easily an example to others. If you could have heard the
remarks that were made about you when you came to Saint-Mihiel, you
would appreciate more justly the value of that name which you all but
blasphemed just now--and for what reason? I heard those remarks, and I
am still proud for you. 'He's the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, and he
works! He'll have three hundred thousand francs a year and he passed his
examinations brilliantly! He's a good fellow. He treats people well. He
has all the qualities of a leader of men.'--You call nobles pariahs,
because they arouse much envy. But when they are worthy of their rank,
what influence they can exert! And all this is no longer of any account,
because you can't bend to your will the will of a poor woman, who, in
ten years, will be _passée_! And you will say of her then, if you
recognize her: 'Where were my wits when I thought that I loved her so
dearly?'"
"And if, ten years hence,--I still love her," said the young man, "and
if I have employed those ten years in regretting her! Suppose it should
happen that that woman's refusal were coincident with one of those
crises as a result of which one's whole life is transformed? Suppose I
had reached one of those times when a man has to make a decision of
tragical importance to himself, and when he needs to know upon what
support he can count?"
He seemed to hesitate, and then continued in the altered tone of one
who, having just abandoned himself to the tumult of his emotions, puts
constraint upon himself and resolves to confine himself to a formal
statement of facts: "You will understand me in a moment. I came here
with the idea of beginning with this. Your presence moved me too deeply!
I have told you that I was able to obtain only a very short leave of
absence, forty-eight hours, and that with difficulty. Our new colonel
does not agree with you about nobles. He is strict and harsh with them.
He made this remark about me the other day, because of my title and my
'de': 'I don't like names with currents of air.' Under the circumstances
he was not wrong in requiring me to return to-morrow night. Within a few
days, we know from official sources, there will be two church
inventories made in the district. And they anticipate resistance."
"Is it possible?" cried Valentine, clasping her hands. "Since the law of
separation was passed, I have never read about a scene like those at
Paramé and Saint-Servan without trembling lest you should be caught in
one of those cases of conscience of which so many gallant officers have
been the victims! I thought that at Saint-Mihiel everything had passed
off quietly and that the troops had not had to interfere. Besides, they
so rarely use in that business the arm of the service to which you
belong."
"They will use it this time," Landri replied; "we have been warned. It
is logical. Either the chasseurs or we will have to serve. Those two
regiments contain a considerable number of people who bear names 'with
currents of air,' one of whom is that same Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp,
who 'works,' who 'treats people well,' who 'has all the qualities of a
leader of men.' It is an excellent opportunity to break his ribs and
those of some others of his sort! The pretext is all ready: the two
churches to be inventoried are those of Hugueville-en-Plaine, and the
Sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Montmartin. In the former there is an old
priest, revered for fifty leagues around, who has declared from the
pulpit that he will not yield except to force. You know the devotion of
the department to the Madonna of Montmartin. It is essential to act
quickly, very quickly, so that the peasants may not have time to
collect. Hugueville and Montmartin are a long way from Saint-Mihiel. The
cavalry is already selected. If the dragoons march, as my term of duty
comes at the end of the week, I have an excellent chance of being in the
affair."
"My poor, poor friend!" said the young woman, enveloping the officer in
a glance eloquent with the affection which she had sworn so often to
conceal from him; "so you, too, are going to be forced to leave the
army, of which you are so fond, and in which so fine a place is in store
for you--"
"I shall not leave it," he interrupted; and his face was, as it were,
frozen in an expression so stern that Valentine was amazed by it.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"That I have questioned myself closely, and have not found in my
conscience what my comrades of whom you speak have found in theirs. They
were believers, and I--you know too well that I have doubts which I do
not parade. I shall have to execute certain orders with repugnance. But
repugnance is not scruple. I shall go ahead. I shall not leave the
army."
"Even if it is necessary to order your men to break down the door of a
church?"
"I shall give them that order."
"You!" she cried. "You--"
"Finish your sentence," he rejoined with a still more gloomy expression.
"'You, a Claviers-Grandchamp!' You dare not say the word. You think it,
you have it on the end of your lips. In another than myself, you would
consider it perfectly natural--you above all, who know our
profession--that he should execute, in my frame of mind, a military
order, and that he should see, in the taking possession of the church of
Hugueville or Montmartin, simply a matter of duty to be done. In me you
do not admit it. Why? Again, because of my name! And you are surprised
that I break out in explosions like that of a moment ago against
a servitude of which I alone know the weight!--Oh, well!" he
continued, with increasing wrath, "it is precisely because I am a
Claviers-Grandchamp that I don't propose to leave the army. I propose to
do my duty. You hear, _to do my duty_, not to be a useless idler, a rich
man with a most authentic coat-of-arms on his carriages. I do not
propose, for the purpose of handing down an example for which I am not
responsible, to undo the work of my whole youth, to become an 'Émigré'
within the country, like so many of my kinsmen, so many of my
friends,--like my father!"
"You are not going to deny him, him too!" she implored. "You loved him,
you admired him so much!"
"I love him and admire him still," replied the young man in a tone of
the utmost earnestness; "yes, I admire him. No one knows better than I
his great qualities and what he might have been. What a soldier! He
proved it during the war. What a diplomatist! What an administrator!
What a Councillor of State! And he is nothing. Nothing, nothing,
nothing! Why, it is the whole tragedy of my thoughts, the evidence of my
father's magnificent gifts, paralyzed by his name, solely by his name!
Since I have become observant, I have seen that he, intelligent,
generous, straightforward as he is, makes no use of his energies, takes
part in none of the activities of his time. And yet there is a
contemporaneous France. He is in it, but not of it. It will have none of
him, who will have none of it. He will have passed his youth, his
maturity, his old age, in what? In taking part in a pompous parade of
the _ancien régime_, what with his receptions at Paris and Grandchamp,
his stag-hunting, and the playing the patron to an enormous and utterly
unprofitable clientage, of low and high estate, who live on his luxury
or his income. I felt the worthlessness of all that too soon; he will
never feel it. He is deceived by a mirage. He is close to a time when
the nobility was still an aristocracy. My grandfather was twenty-six
years old in 1827, when he succeeded to my great-grandfather's peerage,
and my great-grandfather was colonel of the dragoons of Claviers before
'89. For there were dragoons of Claviers-Grandchamp as there were of
Custine and Jarnac, Belzunce and Lanan. They are far away. But in my
father's eyes all those things so entirely uprooted and done away with
are still realities. He is in touch with them. He has known those who
saw them. As a little boy he played on the knees of old ladies who had
been at court at Versailles. One would say that that past fascinates him
more and more as it recedes. To me it is death, and I desired to live.
That was the motive that led me to enter the army. Indeed, I had no
choice. All other careers were closed to the future Marquis de
Claviers-Grandchamp.--These are the privileges you spoke of just now. I
let you have your say.--Yes, closed. Foreign affairs? Closed. My father
would have been welcomed by the Empire at least. To-day they no longer
want us. The Council of State? Closed. The government? Closed. Can you
imagine a nobleman as a prefect? They were under Napoleon and the
Restoration. The liberal professions? Closed. Though a noble had the
genius of a Trosseau, a Berryer, or a Séguin, no one would have him to
treat a cold in the head, to try a case about a division fence, or to
build a foot-bridge. Commerce? Closed. Manufacturing? Closed, or
practically so. To succeed in it we nobles must have a superior talent
of which I, for my part, have never been conscious. Politics? That is
like all the rest. People blame nobles for not taking up a profession!
They forget that they are excluded from almost all, and the others are
made ten times more difficult by their birth. And you would have me not
call them pariahs! I say again, I resolved not to be one. The army was
left. I prepared at Saint-Cyr, not without a struggle. There at least I
knew the pleasure of not being a creature apart, of feeling that I was a
Frenchman like the others, of not being exiled from my time, from my
generation, from my fatherland; the delight of the uniform, of touching
elbows with comrades, of obeying my superiors and of commanding my
inferiors. That uniform no one shall tear from me except with my life.
In losing it I should lose all my reasons for living.--All, no, since I
love you. I wanted to speak to you to-day to learn whether I shall keep
you in the trial that is in store for me. It will have its painful
sides!--Now that you know what the crisis is that I am on the point of
passing through," he added, "will you still answer no as you did a
moment ago? I have no pride and I ask you again, will you be my wife?
Not the wife of the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, whose father and whose
environment you dread, but of a soldier with whom that environment will
have no more to do, whom his father will have spurned? If I should ever
have superintended the taking of a church inventory, it will arouse in
the mothers another sort of indignation than for a mésalliance, as you
call it, and as I do not call it. If I have you, the wound will bleed,
doubtless, but I shall have you. You and my profession, my profession
and you, those are enough to make me very strong."
"You have disturbed me too profoundly," said Valentine. "I no longer
know anything. I do not see clear within myself. I have felt your
suffering too keenly. Mon Dieu! when I received your letter, I did guess
what you wanted to speak to me about. I did not guess everything. I had
taken a resolution. I believed that I was sure of keeping to it. In the
face of your trouble I can not.--Listen. Be generous Do not urge me any
further. Give me credit for the answer that you ask. I told you just now
that I could not receive you any more after this. I have no pride,
either. I withdraw that also. As you will pass through Paris again
to-morrow, returning to Saint-Mihiel, come again to see me. I shall have
reflected meanwhile. I shall be in a condition to answer otherwise than
under the impulse of an emotion which discomposes me. Oh! why, in all
the talks we have had together in these last three years, have you never
told me so much about all these intimate details of your life? I would
have helped you--I would have tried, at all events."
"That is another of the misfortunes of the noble," Landri replied.
"There is one subject that he can never broach first, the precise
subject of his nobility. But calm yourself, I implore you, as I do
myself. See. It is enough that you do not repeat the 'never' of a few
moments ago, for me to recover my self-control. I will be here
to-morrow, and if you still cannot answer me, I will wait. I have seen
that you pity me, understand me. That is one piece of good fortune which
wipes out many disappointments! Am I as you would have me? Do I speak to
you as you wish?"