Within a week after his arrival Godefroid had seen such a concourse of
persons, he had overheard fragments of conversation relating to so many
serious topics, that he began to perceive an enormous activity in the
lives of the five inmates of the house. He noticed that none of them
slept more than five hours at the most.
They had all made, in some sort, a first day, before the second
breakfast. During that time strangers came and went, bringing or
carrying away money, sometimes in considerable sums. A messenger
from the Mongenod counting-room often came,--always very early in the
morning, so that his errand might not interfere with the business of the
bank.
One evening Monsieur Mongenod came himself, and Godefroid noticed that
he showed to Monsieur Alain a certain filial familiarity added to the
profound respect which he testified to the three other lodgers of Madame
de la Chanterie.
On that evening the banker merely put a few matter-of-fact questions to
Godefroid: “Was he comfortable? Did he intend to stay?” etc.,--at the
same time advising him to persevere in his plan.
“I need only one thing to make me contented,” said Godefroid.
“What is that?” asked the banker.
“An occupation.”
“An occupation!” remarked the Abbe de Veze. “Then you have changed your
mind? I thought you came to our cloister for rest.”
“Rest, without the prayers that enlivened monasteries, without the
meditation which peopled the Thebaids, becomes a disease,” said Monsieur
Joseph, sententiously.
“Learn book-keeping,” said Monsieur Mongenod, with a smile; “you might
become in a few months very useful to my friends here.”
“Oh! with pleasure,” cried Godefroid.
The next day was Sunday; Madame de la Chanterie requested him to give
her his arm to high mass.
“It is,” she said, “the only coercion I shall put upon you. Several
times during the past week I have wished to speak to you of religion,
but it did not seem to me that the time had come. You would find plenty
of occupation if you shared our beliefs, for then you would share our
labors as well.”
During mass Godefroid noticed the fervor of Messieurs Nicolas, Joseph,
and Alain; and as during the last few days he had also noticed their
superiority and intelligence, and the vast extent of their knowledge;
he concluded, when he saw how they humbled themselves, that the Catholic
religion had secrets which had hitherto escaped him.
“After all,” he said to himself, “it is the religion of Bossuet, Pascal,
Racine, Saint-Louis, Louis XIV., Raffaelle, Michel-Angelo, Ximenes,
Bayard, du Guesclin; and how could I, weakling that I am, compare myself
to those intellects, those statesmen, those poets, those heroes?”
If there were not some real instruction in these minor details it
would be imprudent to dwell upon them in these days; but they are
indispensable to the interests of this history, in which the present
public will be none too ready to believe, and which presents at the
outset a fact that is almost ridiculous,--namely, the empire which a
woman of sixty obtained over a young man disappointed with the world.
“You did not pray at all,” said Madame de la Chanterie to Godefroid as
they left the portal of Notre-Dame; “not for any one,--not even for the
soul of your mother.”
Godefroid colored and said nothing.
“Will you do me the favor,” continued Madame de la Chanterie, “to go to
your room and not come into the salon for an hour? You can meditate,
if you love me, on the first chapter in the third book of the
‘Imitation’--the one entitled: ‘Of inward communing.’”
Godefroid bowed stiffly and went to his room.
“The devil take them!” he exclaimed to himself, giving way to downright
anger. “What do they want with me here? What is all this traffic they
are carrying on? Pooh! all women, even pious ones, are up to the same
tricks. If Madame” (giving her the name by which her lodgers spoke of
her) “wants me out of the way it is probably because they are plotting
something against me.”
With that thought in his mind he tried to look from his window into that
of the salon; but the situation of the rooms did not allow it. He went
down one flight, and then returned,--reflecting that according to the
rigid principles of the house he should be dismissed if discovered
spying. To lose the respect of those five persons seemed to him as
serious as public dishonor.
He waited three quarters of an hour; then he resolved to surprise Madame
de la Chanterie and come upon her suddenly before she expected him. He
invented a lie to excuse himself, saying that his watch was wrong; for
which purpose he set it on twenty minutes. Then he went downstairs,
making no noise, reached the door of the salon, and opened it abruptly.
He saw a man, still young, but already celebrated, a poet, whom he had
frequently met in society, Victor de Vernisset, on his knees before
Madame de la Chanterie and kissing the hem of her dress. If the sky had
fallen, and shivered to atoms like glass, as the ancients thought it
was, Godefroid could not have been more astonished. Shocking thoughts
came into his mind, and then a reaction more terrible still when, before
the sarcasm he was about to utter had left his lips, he saw Monsieur
Alain in a corner of the room counting out bank-notes.
In an instant Vernisset was on his feet, and the worthy Alain looked
thunderstruck. Madame de la Chanterie, on her part, gave Godefroid a
look which petrified him; for the twofold expression on the face of the
visitor had not escaped him.
“Monsieur is one of us,” she said to the young poet, with a sign towards
Godefroid.
“Then you are a happy man, my dear fellow,” said Vernisset; “you are
saved! But, madame,” he added, turning to Madame de la Chanterie, “if
all Paris had seen me, I should rejoice in it. Nothing can ever mark my
gratitude to you. I am yours forever; I belong to you utterly. Command
me as you will and I obey. I owe you my life, and it is yours.”
“Well, well, young man!” said the kind Alain, “then be wise, be
virtuous,--only, _work_; but do not attack religion in your books.
Moreover, remember that you owe a debt.”
And he handed him an envelope thick with the bank-notes he had counted
out. The tears were in Victor de Vernisset’s eyes; he kissed Madame de
la Chanterie’s hand respectfully, and went away, after shaking hands
with Monsieur Alain and Godefroid.
“You have not obeyed madame,” said the goodman Alain solemnly, with a
sad expression on his face that Godefroid had never before seen there;
“and that is a great wrong; if it happens again we must part. This may
seem hard to you after we had begun to give you our confidence.”
“My dear Alain,” said Madame de la Chanterie, “have the kindness for my
sake to say no more about this piece of thoughtlessness. We ought not
to ask too much a new arrival, who has been spared great misfortunes
and knows nothing of religion; and who, moreover, has only an excessive
curiosity about our vocation, and does not yet believe in us.”
“Forgive me, madame,” said Godefroid; “I do desire, from this time
forth, to be worthy of you. I will submit to any trial you think
necessary before initiating me into the secrets of your work; and if the
Abbe de Veze will undertake to instruct me I will listen to him, soul
and mind.”
These words made Madame de la Chanterie so happy that a faint color
stole upon her cheeks. She took Godefroid’s hand and pressed it, then
she said, with strange emotion, “It is well.”
That evening, after dinner, visitors came in: a vicar-general of the
diocese of Paris, two canons, two former mayors of Paris, and one of
the ladies who distributed the charities of Notre-Dame. No cards were
played; but the conversation was gay, without being vapid.
A visit which surprised Godefroid greatly was that of the Comtesse de
Cinq-Cygne, one of the highest personages in aristocratic society, whose
salon was inaccessible to the bourgeoisie and to parvenus. The presence
of this great lady in Madame de la Chanterie’s salon was sufficiently
surprising; but the manner in which the two women met and treated
each other seemed to Godefroid inexplicable; for it showed the closest
intimacy and a constant intercourse which gave Madame de la Chanterie
an added value in his eyes. Madame de Cinq-Cygne was gracious and
affectionate in manner to the four friends of her friend, and showed the
utmost respect to Monsieur Nicolas.
We may see here how social vanities still governed Godefroid; for up to
this visit of Madame de Cinq-Cygne he was still undecided; but he now
resolved to give himself up, with or without conviction, to whatever
Madame de la Chanterie and her friends might exact of him, in order
to get affiliated with their order and initiated into their secrets,
assuring himself that in that way he should find a career.
The next day he went to a book-keeper whom Madame de la Chanterie
recommended, and arranged with him the hours at which they should work
together. His whole time was now employed. The Abbe de Veze instructed
him in the mornings; he was two hours a day with the book-keeper; and
he spent the rest of his time between breakfast and dinner in doing
imaginary commercial accounts which his master required him to write at
home.
Some time passed thus, during which Godefroid felt the charm of a life
in which each hour has its own employment. The recurrence of a settled
work at settled moments, regularity of action, is the secret of many a
happy life; and it proves how deeply the founders of religious orders
had meditated on the nature of man. Godefroid, who had made up his
mind to listen to the Abbe de Veze, began to have serious thoughts of
a future life, and to find how little he knew of the real gravity of
religious questions.
Moreover, from day to day Madame de la Chanterie, with whom he always
remained for an hour after the second breakfast, allowed him to discover
the treasures that were in her; he knew then that he never could have
imagined a loving-kindness so broad and so complete. A woman of Madame
de la Chanterie’s apparent age no longer has the pettiness of younger
women. She is a friend who offers you all feminine refinements, who
displays the graces, the choice attractions which nature inspires in a
woman for man; she gives them, and no longer sells them. Such a woman is
either detestable or perfect; for her gifts are either not of the flesh
or they are worthless. Madame de la Chanterie was perfect. She seemed
never to have had a youth; her glance never told of a past. Godefroid’s
curiosity was far from being appeased by a closer and more intimate
knowledge of this sublime nature; the discoveries of each succeeding day
only redoubled his desire to learn the anterior life of a woman whom he
now thought a saint. Had she ever loved? Had she been a wife,--a mother?
Nothing about her was characteristic of an old maid; she displayed all
the graces of a well-born woman; and an observer would perceive in
her robust health, in the extraordinary phenomena of her physical
preservation, a divine life, and a species of ignorance of the earthly
existence.
Except the gay and cheery goodman Alain, all these persons had suffered;
but Monsieur Nicolas himself seemed to give the palm of martyrdom to
Madame de la Chanterie. Nevertheless, the memory of her sorrows was so
restrained by religious resignation, by her secret avocations, that she
seemed to have been always happy.
“You are the life of your friends,” Godefroid said to her one day; “you
are the tie that unites them,--the house-mother, as it were, of some
great work; and, as we are all mortal, I ask myself sometimes what your
association would become without you.”
“That is what frightens the others; but Providence, to whom we owe our
new book-keeper,” she said, smiling, “will provide. Besides, I am on the
look-out.”
“Will your new book-keeper soon be allowed to work at your business?”
asked Godefroid.
“That depends on himself,” she answered, smiling. “He must be sincerely
religious, truly pious, without the least self-interest, not concerned
about the riches of our house, able to rise above all petty social
considerations on the two wings which God has given us.”
“What are they?”
“Singleness of mind and purity,” replied Madame de la Chanterie. “Your
ignorance shows that you have neglected the reading of our book.”
she added, laughing at the innocent trick she had played to know if
Godefroid had read the “Imitation of Jesus Christ.” “And, lastly,” she
went on, “fill your soul with Saint Paul’s epistle upon Charity. When
that is done,” she added, with a sublime look, “it will not be you who
belong to us, we shall belong to you, and you will be able to count up
greater riches than the sovereigns of this world possess; you will enjoy
as we enjoy; yes, let me tell you (if you remember the ‘Arabian Nights’)
that the treasures of Aladdin are nothing to those we possess. And so
for the last year we have not sufficed for our affairs, and we needed,
as you see, a book-keeper.”
While speaking, she studied Godefroid’s face; he, on his part, did not
know how to take this extraordinary confidence. But as the scene in the
counting-room at Mongenod’s came often to his mind, he hovered between
doubt and belief.
“Ah, you will be very happy!” she said.
Godefroid was so consumed with curiosity that from this moment he
determined to break through the reserve of one of the four friends
and question him. Now, the one to whom he felt the most drawn, and who
seemed naturally to excite the sympathies of all classes, was the kind,
gay, simple Monsieur Alain. By what strange path could Providence have
led a being so guileless into this monastery without a lock, where
recluses of both sexes lived beneath a rule in the midst of Paris,
in absolute freedom, as though they were guarded by the sternest of
superiors? What drama, what event, had made him leave his own road in
life, and take this path among the sorrows of the great city?
Godefroid resolved to ask.