just where the broad and tranquil river shudders with mysterious deep
heavings and meets its dolphin-hued death in the all-devouring sea. Away
off in the shimmering distance is the second seaport city of France. On
still days,--and our gray or golden Norman days are almost always
still,--faint muffled sounds of life, the throbbing of factories, the
farewell boom of cannon from ships setting forth across the Atlantic,
even the musical notes of the Angelus, float across the water to us as
dreamily vague as perhaps our earth-throbs and passion-pulses reach a
world beyond the clouds. This city is our metropolis, with which we are
connected by small steamers crossing to and fro with the tide, and where
all our shopping is done, our own ville being too thoroughly limited and
_roturier_ in taste to merit many of our shekels.
In fact, such of our shopping as is done in our ville is in the quaint
marketplace, where black house-walls are beetling and bent, and
Sainte-Cathérine's ancient wooden tower stands the whole width of the
Place away from its Gothic church. Here we bargain and chaffer with
towering _bonnets blancs_ for peasant pottery and faïence,
paintable half-worn stuffs, and delicious ancestral odds and ends of
broken peasant households.
We have many streets over which wide eaves meet, and within which
twilight dwells at noonday. Some of the hand-wide streets run straight
up the _côte_, and are a succession of steep stairs climbing beside
crouching, timber-skeletoned houses perforated by narrow windows opening
upon vistas of shadow. Others seem only to run down from the _côte_
to the sea as steeply as black planks set against a high building. Upon
the very apex of the _côte_, visible miles away at sea, lives our
richest citizen. His house smiles serenely modern even if only
pseudo-classic contempt on all the quaint duskiness and irregularity
below, and is pillared, corniced, entablatured, and friezed, with lines
severely straight, although the building itself is as round as any
mediæval campanile and surmounted with a Gothic bell-turret, while the
entrance-gate is turreted, machicolated, castellated, like the
fortress-castles of the Goths.
Lower down the _côte_, convent walls raise themselves above
red-tiled and lichen-grown roofs. In one of these convents, behind
eyeless grim walls, are hidden cloistered nuns; from others the Sisters
go freely forth upon errands of both business and mercy. The convent of
cloisters, Couvent des Augustines, is passing rich, and has houses and
lands to let. Once upon a time an _Américaine_ coveted one of these
picturesque houses. She entered the convent and interviewed the
business-manager, a veiled nun behind close bars.
"Madame may occupy the house," said _ma Soeur_, "by paying five
hundred francs a year, by observing every fast and feast of the Church,
by attending either matins or vespers every day, and by attending
confession and partaking of the holy sacrament every month."
Madame is a zealous Catholic, therefore the terms, although peculiar,
did not seem too severe. She was about to remove into the house, when,
lo! she received word that, it having come to the knowledge of the
convent that the husband of Madame was a heretic, he could not be
allowed to occupy any tenement of the Communauté.
Although this cloistered sisterhood is vowed to perpetual seclusion,
once a year even heretics may gaze upon their pale faces. This annual
occasion is the prize-day of the school they teach, when the school-room
is decorated with white cloth and paper roses, the _curés_ of
neighboring parishes and the Maire of our ville, with invited
distinguished guests, occupy the platform, and the floor below is free
to everybody furnished with invitation-cards.
I had always longed to enter these prison-like walls and gaze from my
tempestuous distance upon those peaceful lives set apart from earth's
rush and turmoil in a fair and blessed haven of the Lord. I longed to
see those pure visionaries, pale spouses of Christ, and read upon
illumined faces the unspeakable rapture of mystic union with the Lamb of
God.
Monsieur le Docteur S----, our family physician, is also physician of
the convent.
"You will see nobody," he said, remarking my sentimental curiosity
concerning cloistered nuns,--"you will see nobody but a lot of
lace-mending and stocking-knitting old maids who failed to get
husbands."
I had already heard queer stories of our old doctor's forty years of
attendance upon the convent, and I was not so easily discouraged. I was
especially anxious to see the Mother Superior, having many times heard
the story of her flight in slippers and dressing-gown from the
breakfast-table to bury herself forever within the walls that have held
her now these twenty-five years. In all these years her unforgiving
father has never seen her face, nor she his, although they live within
stone's throw of each other.
"Know about him? of course she does," answered Victoire to my question.
"She knows all about him, and more too. Do you suppose there is an item
of news in the whole town that those cloistered nuns do not hear? If you
had been educated by them, as we were, and pumped dry every day as to
what went on in our own and our neighbors' families, you would not ask
that question."
Victoire and I penetrated into the convent that very same day. We
followed a crowd of women, _paysannes_ and _citoyennes_, into
a sunny court paved with large stones and arched by the noontide sky,
but unsoftened by tree or flower, and surrounded by the open windows of
dormitories. Over the threshold we had just crossed the nuns pass but
once after their vows,--pass outward, feet foremost, deaf and unseeing,
to a closer, darker home than even their cloistered one. Some of them
have seen nothing beyond their convent walls for forty years, while one
has here worn away sixty years.
_Sixty years_ without one single glimpse of sweet dawn or fair
sunset, without one single vision of the sea in winter majesty of storm
or summer glory! _Sixty years_ without sound of lisping music
running through tall grass, without one single whisper of the æolian
pines, or glimpse of blooming orchards against pure skies! _Sixty
years_!
Beside me in the school-room sat a buxom peasant-woman, who, as a little
girl crowned with a gaudy tinsel wreath descended from the platform,
confidentially informed me, "_C'est ma fille._ She has taken the
prize for good conduct, and there isn't a worse _coquine_ in our
whole commune."
I saw the pale visionaries, a circle of black-robed figures, with
dead-white bands, like coffin-cerements, across their brows. I saw them
almost unanimously fat, with pendulous jowls and black and broken teeth,
as remote from any expression of mystic fervors and spiritual espousals
as could be well imagined, _"Vieilles commères_!" grunted my
_paysanne,_ who was evidently neither amiable nor saintly.
Mother Mary-of-the-Angels, once Elise Gautier, was short, fat, and
bustling, with large round-eyed spectacles upon her nose, and the pasty
complexion and premature flaccid wrinkles that come with long seclusion
from sunshine and exercise. She marched about like one who had chosen
Martha's rather than Mary's manner of serving her Lord, and we saw her
chat a full half-hour with the wife of the Maire, bowing, smiling,
gesticulating meantime with all the florid grace of a French woman of
the world.
"The Maire's wife was her former intimate friend," whispered Victoire.
"See how much younger and healthier she looks than the Mother Superior,
and how much happier. _On dit_ that it was chagrin at the marriage
of this friend that caused Élise Gautier to desert her widowed father
and dependent little brothers and sisters to bury herself in a convent."
A more interesting story than Élise Gautier's is told in our ville. Some
years ago a nun left the Couvent des Augustines in open day, passing out
from the central door in her nun's garb, and meeting there a
foreign-looking man accompanied by a posse of gendarmes. The couple,
followed by a half-hooting, half-cheering mob, drove directly to the
hôtel-de-ville, where they were united in marriage. Then they went away
from our ville, where both were born, to the husband's home in Spain.
When those convent doors had closed upon her, a quarter of a century
before, and the lovers believed themselves eternally separated, she was
a lovely girl of twenty, he a bright youth of twenty-five. She passed
away from his despairing sight, fair and fresh as a spring flower, with
beautiful golden hair and violet eyes; she came out from that fatal
portal a woman of forty-five, stout, spectacled, with faded, thin hair
beneath her nun's cowl, to meet a portly gray-haired man of fifty, in
whom not even love's eye could detect the faintest vestige of the
slender bright-eyed lover of her youth.
The unhappy Laure had been forced to unwilling vows to keep her from
this beggarly lover, and, when he fled to Spain, both became dead to our
ville for long years. Twenty-two years after Laure became Soeur Angelica
it was known in the convent that the machinery of the civil law, which
had only lately forbidden eternal religious vows, had been set in motion
to secure her release; but it remained a mystery who the spring of the
movement was, her parents having long been dead. Soeur Angelica herself
seemed almost more terrified than otherwise at the knowledge, for every
conventual influence was brought to bear upon her morbid conscience to
assure her that eternal damnation follows broken vows. It seems,
however, that amid all her spiritual stress she never confessed, even to
her spiritual director, what desecration had come upon that dovecote by
her constant correspondence with the lover of her youth, now a wealthy
wine-merchant in Spain. When she left the convent, some of these
love-letters were left behind; and to this day those scandalized doves,
to whom Soeur Angelica is forever a lost soul, wonder futilely how those
emissaries of Satan penetrated their holy walls.
"How _did_ they, do you suppose?" I asked.
Victoire and Clarice smiled curiously, while Émile, with an expression
savoring of paganism and pig-tails, squinted obliquely toward our
doctor.
"_Nous n'en savons rien_" they answered me.
The social amusements of our ville are few, as must naturally be the
case in a provincial town ruled by the Draconian law that a _jeune
fille à marier_ must be no more than an animated puppet, while
_jeunes gens_ must have their coarse fling before they are fit for
refined society. Occasionally an ambulant theatrical troupe gives an
entertainment in our little theatre. Once a year Talbot comes, during
vacation at the Francais, and gives us "L'Avare" or "Le Roi s'amuse;"
but such are small events, to our provincial taste, compared with the
vaulting and grimacing of the more frequent English and American circus
troupes in our Place Thiers.
Perhaps the chief distraction of our young people is going to early
mass, whither our young ladies go accompanied by _bonnes_, Maman
having not yet emerged from the French mamma's chrysalis condition of
morning crimping-pins, petticoat and short gown, and list slippers. The
_bonnes_ who thus serve as chaperons are often as young as or even
younger than the demoiselles whose virginal modesty they are supposed to
protect. That they are anything more than a mere form of guardian, a
figment of the social fiction that a young French girl never leaves her
mother's side till she goes to her husband's, it is unnecessary to
observe. Human nature, especially French human nature, is human nature
all the world over, and Romeo will woo and Juliet be won during early
mass or twilight vespers as well as from a balcony, in spite of all the
Montagues and Capulets. Girl-chaperons are oftener in sympathy with
ardent daughters than with worldly mothers, while even the oldest and
most sedate of French _bonnes_ are malleable to other influences
than those of their legitimate employers. It was across our river,
yonder from whence the sound of the Angelus comes across the summer
water like the music of dreams, that Balzac's Modest Mignon carried on
her intrigues of hifalutin gush, by means of a facile _bonne_, with
a man whom she had never seen, and who deceived her by personating the
poet she wished him to be. Modest Mignons are not rare in our ville, and
the Gothic vaults of Saint-Léonard and the pillared aisles of
Sainte-Cathérine witness almost as many little intrigues, as many
heart-beats and blushes, as does "evenin' meetin'" in our own bucolic
regions.
Désirée, our _femme-de-chambre,_ before she came to us, lived in a
wealthy _roturier_ family.
"It was a good place, and I was sorry to lose it when Mademoiselle
Eugénie was married," said she. "The little gifts the _jeunes gens_
slipped into my panier as I came with mademoiselle from mass almost
equalled my wages. Mademoiselle had a good _dot_ as well as beauty,
and _ces jeunes gens_ expected to lose nothing by what they gave
me. Mademoiselle herself often said, 'Désirée, walk a few steps behind
me, and, while I keep my eyes upon the pavement, tell me all the young
men who turn to look after me. If you hear any of them say, "_Comme
elle est jolie!_" (How pretty she is!) you shall have my _batiste
mouchoirs_.'"
On Sunday afternoons all the bourgeois world of our ville disports
itself upon the jetty. Not only then do all the mothers of the town with
daughters "to marry" bring those daughters to the weekly matrimonial
mart, but many of the mothers and chaperons of the near country round
about come in from rural _propriété_ and rustic _chalet_ to
exhibit their candidates. The method of procedure is eminently French,
of course, and eminently naïve, as even the intrigues and machinations
of Balzac's _bourgeoisie_, although intended as marvels of finesse,
seem so often naïveté itself to our blunter and less-plotting minds. The
mothers and daughters, or chaperons and charges, walk slowly arm in arm
up and down one side the jetty, facing the counter-current of young men
and men not young who have not lost interest in feminine attractions.
Back and forth, back and forth, for hours, move the two separate
streams, never for one instant commingling, each discussing the other's
prospects, characters, appearance, and, above all, _dots_ and
_rentes_, till twilight falls and all the world goes home to
dinner.
Once upon a time a retired man of business came to our ville,
accompanied by his son. He was one of the class known in England as
"Commys," and so obnoxious in France as _commis-voyageurs._ He
stopped at the Cheval Blanc, and in conversation with mine host inquired
if it might chance that some café-keeper in the town desired to sell his
café and marry his daughter. Monsieur Brissom mentioned to him our
café-keepers blessed with marriageable daughters, and "Commy" made the
rounds among them, announcing that he had a son whom he wished to marry
to some charming demoiselle _dot_ed with a café. One of the
café-keepers had "_précisément votre affaire_." It was arranged
that Mademoiselle Clothilde should be promenaded by her mother the next
Sunday on the jetty, where the young man should join the
counter-current, and thus each take observations of the other.
As said, so done. Monsieur Henri and Mademoiselle Clothilde declared
themselves enchanted with each other.
"_Très-bien_," said the reflective parents. "Now fall in love as
fast as ever you please."
Monsieur and mademoiselle not only "fell," but plunged.
Two weeks afterward, however, the papas fell out. Cafétier exacted more
than Commis could promise, and Commis declared Mademoiselle Clothilde
_pas grand' chose_: her eyebrows were too white, and her toes
turned in.
The marriage was declared "off," and the young people were ordered to
fall out of love the quickest possible.
"Too late!" they cried.
"You have seen each other but four times."
"Quite enough," declared the lovers.
"You shall not marry," shouted the parents.
"We _will_!" screamed their offspring.
Nevertheless they could not, for the French law gives almost absolute
power to parents. Mademoiselle would have no _dot_ unless her
father chose to give her one, and no French marriage is legal without
paternal consent or the almost disgraceful expedient of _sommations
respectueuses_. Mademoiselle threatened to enter a convent. Cafétier
assured her that no convent opens cordial doors to _dot_less girls.
Juliet was ready to defy all the Capulets when she had seen Romeo but
once; Corinne was ready to fling all her laurels at Oswald's feet at
their second interview; Rosamond Vincy planned her house-furnishing
during her second meeting with Lydgate; even Dorothea Brooke felt a
"trembling hope" the very next day after her first sight of Mr.
Casaubon. How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her
undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having
seen him _four_ times?
There was one way out of her troubles,--that to which Alphonse Daudet's
and André Theuriet's people gravitate as needles to their pole. She
walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone. Nobody saw the end; but
the next Sunday, three weeks to a day from the one when the two had
countermarched in matrimonial procession, Mademoiselle Clothilde was
laid in her grave.
The whole French social system revolves around the _dot_.
"How dare you speak to my father so!" I once heard a daughter reproach
her mother. "How dare you, who brought him no _dot_!"
"It is a pity Madame Marais has no more influence in her family," I
heard remarked in a social company. "It is a pity, for she is a good
woman, and her husband and sons are all going to the bad."
"Yes, it is a pity," answered another; "but, then, what else can she
expect? She brought no _dot_ into the family."
Once upon a time a young man made a friendly call upon a family in our
ville, he a distant relative of the family. He sat in the _salon_
with mother and daughter, when suddenly the mother was called away a
moment. When she returned, not more than two minutes later,--horror!
_she could not enter the room!_ In closing the door she had somehow
disarranged the handles; screws had dropped out and could not be found;
the knob would not turn. What a situation! A young girl shut up in a
locked room with a young man! What a scandal if the story got out in the
town! and what could the poor, distracted mamma do to release her
daughter from that damning situation without the knowledge of the
servants? She dared not even summon a locksmith, for locksmith tongues
are free; and who would not shoot out the lip at poor Jeanne, hearing
the miserable story at breakfast-tables to-morrow?
"You must marry Jeanne, _mon cousin_," cried mamma through the
keyhole.
"Impossible, _ma cousine_. You know I am _fiancé_," laughed
he.
Nevertheless he did!
For when papa heard that Jeanne had remained two whole hours shut up
with Cousin Pierre in a brilliantly-lighted _salon_, with a frantic
mother at the keyhole and all the servants grinning upon their knees
searching for the missing screws, he added twenty thousand francs to her
_dot_ on the spot, and Pierre wrote to his other _fiancée_ that he had
"changed his intentions."
"Mamma's _tapage_ was too funny," laughed Madame Pierre, telling me
this story herself. "Pierre and I laughed well on our side of the door,
although we were careful not to let maman hear us. For we had often been
alone together before when _nobody knew it_."
Which makes all the difference in the world in our ville, as well as
elsewhere.
Pierre's funny experience did not end with his betrothal. In relating
the adventure which follows, I wish it distinctly to be understood that
I do it in all respect, admiration, and reverence for the Church which
is the mother of all Churches calling themselves Christian. The Holy
Roman Catholic Church is no less holy that her servants are so often
base and vile and that her livery is so often stolen to serve evil in.
What wickedness and hypocrisy have we not in our own Protestant clergy,
and without even the tremendous excuse for it which the conditions of
European society give for the occasional levity of its priesthood! In
France the Church is a recognized profession, to which parents destine
and for which they educate their sons without waiting for them to
exhibit any special bias toward a religious life. In spite of
themselves, many young men are even forced into the priesthood, not only
by strong family influence, but through having been educated so as to be
absolutely unfitted for any other walk of life. With us the priesthood
is a matter of deliberate and perfectly voluntary choice, and he who
wears it as a cloak is ten thousand times the hypocrite his Catholic
brother is.
It happened that our _curé_ of Saint-Étienne was a jolly good
fellow, somewhat given to wine-bibbing, and much given to Rabelaisian
stories. He was also hail-fellow-well-met with Pierre, and Pierre, like
most of the young men of France, prided himself upon his entire freedom
from the "superstitious." Père Duhaut lived by teaching and preaching.
In France the church sacrament of marriage cannot be performed unless
both the contracting parties furnish certificates of having made
confession within three weeks. To secure his certificate it would be
necessary for Pierre to confess to the _curé_ of Saint-Étienne,
Père Duhaut.
"_I_ confess to Duhaut!" he laughed in our house. "I'll
be--what's-his-named first. Old Duhaut might as well confess to me. I
shall simply give him six francs and get my certificate without any more
ado, just as the other fellows get theirs."
That very afternoon Père Duhaut took tea with us, and Émile was mean
enough to betray Pierre's intentions.
"We'll see," said our _curé_.
The next day Pierre passed our windows. He bowed gayly, and called up
that he was going for his six francs' worth of ante-nuptial absolution.
An hour later he passed again, but he did not look up. In the evening
Père Duhaut came, bursting with laughter.
"Ask Pierre how he got his certificate," he guffawed. Then he told us
the story. Pierre, it seems, had offered the six francs, which offer the
confessor had rejected with scorn.
"In to the confessional," he cried, "and make your confession like a
penitent!"
"I'll make it fifteen," grinned Pierre.
"Not for a thousand. In! _in_!"
"Come, now, Duhaut, this is all humbug. You know I'm not penitent, and
I'll be---- if I'll confess to you."
Without more words, the burly priest seized the recalcitrant and grabbed
him by the neck, trying to force him into the confession-box. Pierre
resisted, and, as the _curé_ told us bursting with laughter, the
two wrestled and waltzed half around the church. Finally Pierre was
brought to his knees.
"_Eh bien, allez_! What am I to confess?" he grumbled.
"Every sin you have committed since your last confession."
How malicious was Père Duhaut in this! for he knew Pierre had not kept
the observances of the Church since he left home at seventeen, and had
not been an anchorite either.
"I'll make it an even hundred," begged the now exasperated yet humbled
Pierre. "Come, now, do be reasonable; that's a jolly old boy."
"Confess! confess!" roared the confessor, dealing the kneeling
impenitent a sounding cuff on the ear.
"Ask Pierre how he got his certificate," roared Père Duhaut.
"_Demandez-lui! Demandez-lui!_"
But we never did.
Until his grave received him, only a few weeks ago, a marked character
of our ville was a stooping old man, of a ghastly paleness, noted
through all the region for avarice and for speaking every one of his
many languages each with worse accent than the other. His Spanish
sounded like German, his German had the strongest possible American
accent, his English was vividly Teutonic, and after forty years of
marriage his Norman wife never ceased to mock at his atrociously-mouthed
French. He was wine-merchant and banker combined, and, though his social
position was among the best in our bourgeoise ville, all the world
smiled with the knowledge that the rich old _banquier_, whose nose
had a strong Hebraic curve, delivered his own merchandise at night from
under his long coat, in order to escape the tax on every bottle of wine
transported from one domicile to another.