Jules escaped from his brother’s house and returned home, wishing
to pass the night beside his wife, and see till the last moment that
celestial creature. As he walked along with an indifference to life
known only to those who have reached the last degree of wretchedness,
he thought of how, in India, the law ordained that widows should die; he
longed to die. He was not yet crushed; the fever of his grief was still
upon him. He reached his home and went up into the sacred chamber; he
saw his Clemence on the bed of death, beautiful, like a saint, her hair
smoothly laid upon her forehead, her hands joined, her body wrapped
already in its shroud. Tapers were lighted, a priest was praying,
Josephine kneeling in a corner, wept, and, near the bed, were two men.
One was Ferragus. He stood erect, motionless, gazing at his daughter
with dry eyes; his head you might have taken for bronze: he did not see
Jules.
The other man was Jacquet,--Jacquet, to whom Madame Jules had been ever
kind. Jacquet felt for her one of those respectful friendships which
rejoice the untroubled heart; a gentle passion; love without its desires
and its storms. He had come to pay his debt of tears, to bid a long
adieu to the wife of his friend, to kiss, for the first time, the icy
brow of the woman he had tacitly made his sister.
All was silence. Here death was neither terrible as in the churches, nor
pompous as it makes its way along the streets; no, it was death in the
home, a tender death; here were pomps of the heart, tears drawn from the
eyes of all. Jules sat down beside Jacquet and pressed his hand; then,
without uttering a word, all these persons remained as they were till
morning.
When daylight paled the tapers, Jacquet, foreseeing the painful scenes
which would then take place, drew Jules away into another room. At this
moment the husband looked at the father, and Ferragus looked at
Jules. The two sorrows arraigned each other, measured each other, and
comprehended each other in that look. A flash of fury shone for an
instant in the eyes of Ferragus.
“You killed her,” thought he.
“Why was I distrusted?” seemed the answer of the husband.
The scene was one that might have passed between two tigers recognizing
the futility of a struggle and, after a moment’s hesitation, turning
away, without even a roar.
“Jacquet,” said Jules, “have you attended to everything?”
“Yes, to everything,” replied his friend, “but a man had forestalled me
who had ordered and paid for all.”
“He tears his daughter from me!” cried the husband, with the violence of
despair.
Jules rushed back to his wife’s room; but the father was there no
longer. Clemence had now been placed in a leaden coffin, and workmen
were employed in soldering the cover. Jules returned, horrified by the
sight; the sound of the hammers the men were using made him mechanically
burst into tears.
“Jacquet,” he said, “out of this dreadful night one idea has come to
me, only one, but one I must make a reality at any price. I cannot let
Clemence stay in any cemetery in Paris. I wish to burn her,--to gather
her ashes and keep her with me. Say nothing of this, but manage on my
behalf to have it done. I am going to _her_ chamber, where I shall stay
until the time has come to go. You alone may come in there to tell me
what you have done. Go, and spare nothing.”
During the morning, Madame Jules, after lying in a mortuary chapel at
the door of her house, was taken to Saint-Roch. The church was hung with
black throughout. The sort of luxury thus displayed had drawn a crowd;
for in Paris all things are sights, even true grief. There are people
who stand at their windows to see how a son deplores a mother as he
follows her body; there are others who hire commodious seats to see how
a head is made to fall. No people in the world have such insatiate eyes
as the Parisians. On this occasion, inquisitive minds were particularly
surprised to see the six lateral chapels at Saint-Roch also hung in
black. Two men in mourning were listening to a mortuary mass said in
each chapel. In the chancel no other persons but Monsieur Desmarets,
the notary, and Jacquet were present; the servants of the household were
outside the screen. To church loungers there was something inexplicable
in so much pomp and so few mourners. But Jules had been determined that
no indifferent persons should be present at the ceremony.
High mass was celebrated with the sombre magnificence of funeral
services. Beside the ministers in ordinary of Saint-Roch, thirteen
priests from other parishes were present. Perhaps never did the _Dies
irae_ produce upon Christians, assembled by chance, by curiosity, and
thirsting for emotions, an effect so profound, so nervously glacial as
that now caused by this hymn when the eight voices of the precentors,
accompanied by the voices of the priests and the choir-boys, intoned it
alternately. From the six lateral chapels twelve other childish voices
rose shrilly in grief, mingling with the choir voices lamentably. From
all parts of the church this mourning issued; cries of anguish responded
to the cries of fear. That terrible music was the voice of sorrows
hidden from the world, of secret friendships weeping for the dead.
Never, in any human religion, have the terrors of the soul, violently
torn from the body and stormily shaken in presence of the fulminating
majesty of God, been rendered with such force. Before that clamor of
clamors all artists and their most passionate compositions must bow
humiliated. No, nothing can stand beside that hymn, which sums all human
passions, gives them a galvanic life beyond the coffin, and leaves them,
palpitating still, before the living and avenging God. These cries of
childhood, mingling with the tones of older voices, including thus in
the Song of Death all human life and its developments, recalling the
sufferings of the cradle, swelling to the griefs of other ages in
the stronger male voices and the quavering of the priests,--all this
strident harmony, big with lightning and thunderbolts, does it not speak
with equal force to the daring imagination, the coldest heart, nay, to
philosophers themselves? As we hear it, we think God speaks; the vaulted
arches of no church are mere material; they have a voice, they tremble,
they scatter fear by the might of their echoes. We think we see
unnumbered dead arising and holding out their hands. It is no more a
father, a wife, a child,--humanity itself is rising from its dust.
It is impossible to judge of the catholic, apostolic, and Roman faith,
unless the soul has known that deepest grief of mourning for a loved one
lying beneath the pall; unless it has felt the emotions that fill the
heart, uttered by that Hymn of Despair, by those cries that crush the
mind, by that sacred fear augmenting strophe by strophe, ascending
heavenward, which terrifies, belittles, and elevates the soul, and
leaves within our minds, as the last sound ceases, a consciousness
of immortality. We have met and struggled with the vast idea of the
Infinite. After that, all is silent in the church. No word is said;
sceptics themselves _know not what they are feeling_. Spanish genius
alone was able to bring this untold majesty to untold griefs.
When the solemn ceremony was over, twelve men came from the six chapels
and stood around the coffin to hear the song of hope which the Church
intones for the Christian soul before the human form is buried. Then,
each man entered alone a mourning-coach; Jacquet and Monsieur Desmarets
took the thirteenth; the servants followed on foot. An hour later, they
were at the summit of that cemetery popularly called Pere-Lachaise. The
unknown twelve men stood in a circle round the grave, where the coffin
had been laid in presence of a crowd of loiterers gathered from all
parts of this public garden. After a few short prayers the priest threw
a handful of earth on the remains of this woman, and the grave-diggers,
having asked for their fee, made haste to fill the grave in order to dig
another.
Here this history seems to end; but perhaps it would be incomplete if,
after giving a rapid sketch of Parisian life, and following certain of
its capricious undulations, the effects of death were omitted. Death in
Paris is unlike death in any other capital; few persons know the trials
of true grief in its struggle with civilization, and the government of
Paris. Perhaps, also, Monsieur Jules and Ferragus XXIII. may have proved
sufficiently interesting to make a few words on their after life not
entirely out of place. Besides, some persons like to be told all, and
wish, as one of our cleverest critics has remarked, to know by what
chemical process oil was made to burn in Aladdin’s lamp.
Jacquet, being a government employee, naturally applied to the
authorities for permission to exhume the body of Madame Jules and burn
it. He went to see the prefect of police, under whose protection the
dead sleep. That functionary demanded a petition. The blank was brought
that gives to sorrow its proper administrative form; it was necessary to
employ the bureaucratic jargon to express the wishes of a man so crushed
that words, perhaps, were lacking to him, and it was also necessary to
coldly and briefly repeat on the margin the nature of the request,
which was done in these words: “The petitioner respectfully asks for the
incineration of his wife.”
When the official charged with making the report to the Councillor of
State and prefect of police read that marginal note, explaining the
object of the petition, and couched, as requested, in the plainest
terms, he said:--
“This is a serious matter! my report cannot be ready under eight days.”
Jules, to whom Jacquet was obliged to speak of this delay, comprehended
the words that Ferragus had said in his hearing, “I’ll burn Paris!”
Nothing seemed to him now more natural than to annihilate that
receptacle of monstrous things.
“But,” he said to Jacquet, “you must go to the minister of the Interior,
and get your minister to speak to him.”
Jacquet went to the minister of the Interior, and asked an audience; it
was granted, but the time appointed was two weeks later. Jacquet was a
persistent man. He travelled from bureau to bureau, and finally reached
the private secretary of the minister of the Interior, to whom he had
made the private secretary of his own minister say a word. These high
protectors aiding, he obtained for the morrow a second interview, in
which, being armed with a line from the autocrat of Foreign affairs to
the pacha of the Interior, Jacquet hoped to carry the matter by assault.
He was ready with reasons, and answers to peremptory questions,--in
short, he was armed at all points; but he failed.
“This matter does not concern me,” said the minister; “it belongs to the
prefect of police. Besides, there is no law giving a husband any legal
right to the body of his wife, nor to fathers those of their children.
The matter is serious. There are questions of public utility involved
which will have to be examined. The interests of the city of Paris might
suffer. Therefore if the matter depended on me, which it does not, I
could not decide _hic et nunc_; I should require a report.”
A _report_ is to the present system of administration what limbo
or hades is to Christianity. Jacquet knew very well the mania for
“reports”; he had not waited until this occasion to groan at that
bureaucratic absurdity. He knew that since the invasion into public
business of the _Report_ (an administrative revolution consummated
in 1804) there was never known a single minister who would take upon
himself to have an opinion or to decide the slightest matter, unless
that opinion or matter had been winnowed, sifted, and plucked to bits
by the paper-spoilers, quill-drivers, and splendid intellects of his
particular bureau. Jacquet--he was one of those who are worthy of
Plutarch as biographer--saw that he had made a mistake in his management
of the affair, and had, in fact, rendered it impossible by trying to
proceed legally. The thing he should have done was to have taken Madame
Jules to one of Desmaret’s estates in the country; and there, under
the good-natured authority of some village mayor to have gratified the
sorrowful longing of his friend. Law, constitutional and administrative,
begets nothing; it is a barren monster for peoples, for kings, and for
private interests. But the peoples decipher no principles but those that
are writ in blood, and the evils of legality will always be pacific; it
flattens a nation down, that is all. Jacquet, a man of modern liberty,
returned home reflecting on the benefits of arbitrary power.
When he went with his report to Jules, he found it necessary to deceive
him, for the unhappy man was in a high fever, unable to leave his bed.
The minister of the Interior mentioned, at a ministerial dinner that
same evening, the singular fancy of a Parisian in wishing to burn his
wife after the manner of the Romans. The clubs of Paris took up the
subject, and talked for a while of the burials of antiquity. Ancient
things were just then becoming a fashion, and some persons declared that
it would be a fine thing to re-establish, for distinguished persons, the
funeral pyre. This opinion had its defenders and its detractors. Some
said that there were too many such personages, and the price of wood
would be enormously increased by such a custom; moreover, it would
be absurd to see our ancestors in their urns in the procession at
Longchamps. And if the urns were valuable, they were likely some day
to be sold at auction, full of respectable ashes, or seized by
creditors,--a race of men who respected nothing. The other side made
answer that our ancestors were much safer in urns than at Pere-Lachaise,
for before very long the city of Paris would be compelled to order a
Saint-Bartholomew against its dead, who were invading the neighboring
country, and threatening to invade the territory of Brie. It was, in
short, one of those futile but witty discussions which sometimes cause
deep and painful wounds. Happily for Jules, he knew nothing of the
conversations, the witty speeches, and arguments which his sorrow had
furnished to the tongues of Paris.
The prefect of police was indignant that Monsieur Jacquet had appealed
to a minister to avoid the wise delays of the commissioners of the
public highways; for the exhumation of Madame Jules was a question
belonging to that department. The police bureau was doing its best to
reply promptly to the petition; one appeal was quite sufficient to set
the office in motion, and once in motion matters would go far. But as
for the administration, that might take the case before the Council of
state,--a machine very difficult indeed to move.
After the second day Jacquet was obliged to tell his friend that he must
renounce his desire, because, in a city where the number of tears shed
on black draperies is tariffed, where the laws recognize seven classes
of funerals, where the scrap of ground to hold the dead is sold at its
weight in silver, where grief is worked for what it is worth, where the
prayers of the Church are costly, and the vestry claim payment for extra
voices in the _Dies irae_,--all attempt to get out of the rut prescribed
by the authorities for sorrow is useless and impossible.
“It would have been to me,” said Jules, “a comfort in my misery. I meant
to have died away from here, and I hoped to hold her in my arms in a
distant grave. I did not know that bureaucracy could send its claws into
our very coffins.”
He now wished to see if room had been left for him beside his wife. The
two friends went to the cemetery. When they reached it they found (as
at the doors of museums, galleries, and coach-offices) _ciceroni_, who
proposed to guide them through the labyrinth of Pere-Lachaise. Neither
Jules nor Jacquet could have found the spot where Clemence lay. Ah,
frightful anguish! They went to the lodge to consult the porter of the
cemetery. The dead have a porter, and there are hours when the dead are
“not receiving.” It is necessary to upset all the rules and regulations
of the upper and lower police to obtain permission to weep at night, in
silence and solitude, over the grave where a loved one lies. There’s a
rule for summer and a rule for winter about this.
Certainly, of all the porters in Paris, the porter of Pere-Lachaise is
the luckiest. In the first place, he has no gate-cord to pull; then,
instead of a lodge, he has a house,--an establishment which is not
quite ministerial, although a vast number of persons come under his
administration, and a good many employees. And this governor of the
dead has a salary, with emoluments, and acts under powers of which
none complain; he plays despot at his ease. His lodge is not a place of
business, though it has departments where the book-keeping of receipts,
expenses, and profits, is carried on. The man is not a _suisse_, nor a
concierge, nor actually a porter. The gate which admits the dead stands
wide open; and though there are monuments and buildings to be cared
for, he is not a care-taker. In short, he is an indefinable anomaly, an
authority which participates in all, and yet is nothing,--an authority
placed, like the dead on whom it is based, outside of all. Nevertheless,
this exceptional man grows out of the city of Paris,--that chimerical
creation like the ship which is its emblem, that creature of reason
moving on a thousand paws which are seldom unanimous in motion.
This guardian of the cemetery may be called a concierge who has reached
the condition of a functionary, not soluble by dissolution! His place
is far from being a sinecure. He does not allow any one to be buried
without a permit; he must count his dead. He points out to you in this
vast field the six feet square of earth where you will one day put all
you love, or all you hate, a mistress, or a cousin. Yes, remember
this: all the feelings and emotions of Paris come to end here, at
this porter’s lodge, where they are administrationized. This man has
registers in which his dead are booked; they are in their graves, and
also on his records. He has under him keepers, gardeners, grave-diggers,
and their assistants. He is a personage. Mourning hearts do not speak to
him at first. He does not appear at all except in serious cases, such as
one corpse mistaken for another, a murdered body, an exhumation, a
dead man coming to life. The bust of the reigning king is in his hall;
possibly he keeps the late royal, imperial, and quasi-royal busts
in some cupboard,--a sort of little Pere-Lachaise all ready for
revolutions. In short, he is a public man, an excellent man, good
husband and good father,--epitaph apart. But so many diverse sentiments
have passed before him on biers; he has seen so many tears, true and
false; he has beheld sorrow under so many aspects and on so many faces;
he has heard such endless thousands of eternal woes,--that to him sorrow
has come to be nothing more than a stone an inch thick, four feet long,
and twenty-four inches wide. As for regrets, they are the annoyances of
his office; he neither breakfasts nor dines without first wiping off
the rain of an inconsolable affliction. He is kind and tender to other
feelings; he will weep over a stage-hero, over Monsieur Germeuil in the
“Auberge des Adrets,” the man with the butter-colored breeches, murdered
by Macaire; but his heart is ossified in the matter of real dead men.
Dead men are ciphers, numbers, to him; it is his business to organize
death. Yet he does meet, three times in a century, perhaps, with an
occasion when his part becomes sublime, and then he _is_ sublime through
every hour of his day,--in times of pestilence.
When Jacquet approached him this absolute monarch was evidently out of
temper.
“I told you,” he was saying, “to water the flowers from the rue Massena
to the place Regnault de Saint-Jean-d’Angely. You paid no attention
to me! _Sac-a-papier_! suppose the relations should take it into their
heads to come here to-day because the weather is fine, what would they
say to me? They’d shriek as if they were burned; they’d say horrid
things of us, and calumniate us--”
“Monsieur,” said Jacquet, “we want to know where Madame Jules is
buried.”
“Madame Jules _who_?” he asked. “We’ve had three Madame Jules within the
last week. Ah,” he said, interrupting himself, “here comes the funeral
of Monsieur le Baron de Maulincour! A fine procession, that! He has soon
followed his grandmother. Some families, when they begin to go, rattle
down like a wager. Lots of bad blood in Parisians.”
“Monsieur,” said Jacquet, touching him on the arm, “the person I spoke
of is Madame Jules Desmarets, the wife of the broker of that name.”
“Ah, I know!” he replied, looking at Jacquet. “Wasn’t it a funeral with
thirteen mourning coaches, and only one mourner in the twelve first? It
was so droll we all noticed it--”
“Monsieur, take care, Monsieur Desmarets is with me; he might hear you,
and what you say is not seemly.”
“I beg pardon, monsieur! you are quite right. Excuse me, I took you for
heirs. Monsieur,” he continued, after consulting a plan of the cemetery,
“Madame Jules is in the rue Marechal Lefebre, alley No. 4, between
Mademoiselle Raucourt, of the Comedie-Francaise, and Monsieur
Moreau-Malvin, a butcher, for whom a handsome tomb in white marble has
been ordered, which will be one of the finest in the cemetery--”
“Monsieur,” said Jacquet, interrupting him, “that does not help us.”
“True,” said the official, looking round him. “Jean,” he cried, to a man
whom he saw at a little distance, “conduct these gentlemen to the
grave of Madame Jules Desmarets, the broker’s wife. You know where it
is,--near to Mademoiselle Raucourt, the tomb where there’s a bust.”
The two friends followed the guide; but they did not reach the steep
path which leads to the upper part of the cemetery without having
to pass through a score of proposals and requests, made, with honied
softness, by the touts of marble-workers, iron-founders, and monumental
sculptors.
“If monsieur would like to order _something_, we would do it on the most
reasonable terms.”
Jacquet was fortunate enough to be able to spare his friend the hearing
of these proposals so agonizing to bleeding hearts; and presently they
reached the resting-place. When Jules beheld the earth so recently dug,
into which the masons had stuck stakes to mark the place for the stone
posts required to support the iron railing, he turned, and leaned upon
Jacquet’s shoulder, raising himself now and again to cast long glances
at the clay mound where he was forced to leave the remains of the being
in and by whom he still lived.
“How miserably she lies there!” he said.
“But she is not there,” said Jacquet, “she is in your memory. Come, let
us go; let us leave this odious cemetery, where the dead are adorned
like women for a ball.”
“Suppose we take her away?”
“Can it be done?”
“All things can be done!” cried Jules. “So, I shall lie there,” he
added, after a pause. “There is room enough.”
Jacquet finally succeeded in getting him to leave the great enclosure,
divided like a chessboard by iron railings and elegant compartments, in
which were tombs decorated with palms, inscriptions, and tears as cold
as the stones on which sorrowing hearts had caused to be carved their
regrets and coats of arms. Many good words are there engraved in black
letters, epigrams reproving the curious, _concetti_, wittily turned
farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears, pretentious
biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel. Here the floriated thyrsus,
there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now and then a few
cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and every style of
art,--Moorish, Greek, Gothic,--friezes, ovules, paintings, vases,
guardian-angels, temples, together with innumerable _immortelles_, and
dead rose-bushes. It is a forlorn comedy! It is another Paris, with its
streets, its signs, its industries, and its lodgings; but a Paris seen
through the diminishing end of an opera-glass, a microscopic Paris
reduced to the littleness of shadows, spectres, dead men, a human race
which no longer has anything great about it, except its vanity. There
Jules saw at his feet, in the long valley of the Seine, between the
slopes of Vaugirard and Meudon and those of Belleville and Montmartre,
the real Paris, wrapped in a misty blue veil produced by smoke, which
the sunlight tendered at that moment diaphanous. He glanced with a
constrained eye at those forty thousand houses, and said, pointing to
the space comprised between the column of the Place Vendome and the
gilded cupola of the Invalides:--
“She was wrenched from me there by the fatal curiosity of that world
which excites itself and meddles solely for excitement and occupation.”
Twelve miles from where they were, on the banks of the Seine, in a
modest village lying on the slope of a hill of that long hilly basin the
middle of which great Paris stirs like a child in its cradle, a death
scene was taking place, far indeed removed from Parisian pomps, with no
accompaniment of torches or tapers or mourning-coaches, without prayers
of the Church, in short, a death in all simplicity. Here are the facts:
The body of a young girl was found early in the morning, stranded on the
river-bank in the slime and reeds of the Seine. Men employed in dredging
sand saw it as they were getting into their frail boat on their way to
their work.
“_Tiens_! fifty francs earned!” said one of them.
“True,” said the other.
They approached the body.
“A handsome girl! We had better go and make our statement.”
And the two dredgers, after covering the body with their jackets, went
to the house of the village mayor, who was much embarrassed at having to
make out the legal papers necessitated by this discovery.
The news of this event spread with the telegraphic rapidity peculiar to
regions where social communications have no distractions, where gossip,
scandal, calumny, in short, the social tale which feasts the world
has no break of continuity from one boundary to another. Before
long, persons arriving at the mayor’s office released him from all
embarrassment. They were able to convert the _proces-verbal_ into a mere
certificate of death, by recognizing the body as that of the Demoiselle
Ida Gruget, corset-maker, living rue de la Corderie-du-Temple, number
14. The judiciary police of Paris arrived, and the mother, bearing her
daughter’s last letter. Amid the mother’s moans, a doctor certified
to death by asphyxia, through the injection of black blood into the
pulmonary system,--which settled the matter. The inquest over, and the
certificates signed, by six o’clock the same evening authority was given
to bury the grisette. The rector of the parish, however, refused to
receive her into the church or to pray for her. Ida Gruget was
therefore wrapped in a shroud by an old peasant-woman, put into a common
pine-coffin, and carried to the village cemetery by four men, followed
by a few inquisitive peasant-women, who talked about the death with
wonder mingled with some pity.
The widow Gruget was charitably taken in by an old lady who prevented
her from following the sad procession of her daughter’s funeral. A man
of triple functions, the bell-ringer, beadle, and grave-digger of the
parish, had dug a grave in the half-acre cemetery behind the church,--a
church well known, a classic church, with a square tower and pointed
roof covered with slate, supported on the outside by strong corner
buttresses. Behind the apse of the chancel, lay the cemetery, enclosed
with a dilapidated wall,--a little field full of hillocks; no marble
monuments, no visitors, but surely in every furrow, tears and true
regrets, which were lacking to Ida Gruget. She was cast into a corner
full of tall grass and brambles. After the coffin had been laid in
this field, so poetic in its simplicity, the grave-digger found himself
alone, for night was coming on. While filling the grave, he stopped now
and then to gaze over the wall along the road. He was standing thus,
resting on his spade, and looking at the Seine, which had brought him
the body.
“Poor girl!” cried the voice of a man who suddenly appeared.
“How you made me jump, monsieur,” said the grave-digger.
“Was any service held over the body you are burying?”
“No, monsieur. Monsieur le cure wasn’t willing. This is the first person
buried here who didn’t belong to the parish. Everybody knows everybody
else in this place. Does monsieur--Why, he’s gone!”
Some days had elapsed when a man dressed in black called at the house
of Monsieur Jules Desmarets, and without asking to see him carried up to
the chamber of his wife a large porphyry vase, on which were inscribed
the words:--
INVITA LEGE
CONJUGI MOERENTI
FILIOLAE CINERES
RESTITUIT
AMICIS XII. JUVANTIBUS
MORIBUNDUS PATER.
“What a man!” cried Jules, bursting into tears.
Eight days sufficed the husband to obey all the wishes of his wife, and
to arrange his own affairs. He sold his practice to a brother of Martin
Falleix, and left Paris while the authorities were still discussing
whether it was lawful for a citizen to dispose of the body of his wife.
* * * * *
Who has not encountered on the boulevards of Paris, at the turn of a
street, or beneath the arcades of the Palais-Royal, or in any part of
the world where chance may offer him the sight, a being, man or woman,
at whose aspect a thousand confused thoughts spring into his mind?
At that sight we are suddenly interested, either by features of some
fantastic conformation which reveal an agitated life, or by a singular
effect of the whole person, produced by gestures, air, gait, clothes; or
by some deep, intense look; or by other inexpressible signs which seize
our minds suddenly and forcibly without our being able to explain even
to ourselves the cause of our emotion. The next day other thoughts and
other images have carried out of sight that passing dream. But if we
meet the same personage again, either passing at some fixed hour, like
the clerk of a mayor’s office, or wandering about the public promenades,
like those individuals who seem to be a sort of furniture of the streets
of Paris, and who are always to be found in public places, at first
representations or noted restaurants,--then this being fastens himself
or herself on our memory, and remains there like the first volume of a
novel the end of which is lost. We are tempted to question this unknown
person, and say, “Who are you?” “Why are you lounging here?” “By what
right do you wear that pleated ruffle, that faded waistcoat, and carry
that cane with an ivory top; why those blue spectacles; for what reason
do you cling to that cravat of a dead and gone fashion?” Among these
wandering creations some belong to the species of the Greek Hermae;
they say nothing to the soul; _they are there_, and that is all. Why? is
known to none. Such figure are a type of those used by sculptors for
the four Seasons, for Commerce, for Plenty, etc. Some others--former
lawyers, old merchants, elderly generals--move and walk, and yet seem
stationary. Like old trees that are half uprooted by the current of a
river, they seem never to take part in the torrent of Paris, with its
youthful, active crowd. It is impossible to know if their friends
have forgotten to bury them, or whether they have escaped out of their
coffins. At any rate, they have reached the condition of semi-fossils.
One of these Parisian Melmoths had come within a few days into a
neighborhood of sober, quiet people, who, when the weather is fine,
are invariably to be found in the space which lies between the
south entrance of the Luxembourg and the north entrance of the
Observatoire,--a space without a name, the neutral space of Paris.
There, Paris is no longer; and there, Paris still lingers. The spot is
a mingling of street, square, boulevard, fortification, garden, avenue,
high-road, province, and metropolis; certainly, all of that is to be
found there, and yet the place is nothing of all that,--it is a desert.
Around this spot without a name stand the Foundling hospital,
the Bourbe, the Cochin hospital, the Capucines, the hospital
La Rochefoucauld, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the hospital of the
Val-de-Grace; in short, all the vices and all the misfortunes of
Paris find their asylum there. And (that nothing may lack in this
philanthropic centre) Science there studies the tides and longitudes,
Monsieur de Chateaubriand has erected the Marie-Therese Infirmary, and
the Carmelites have founded a convent. The great events of life are
represented by bells which ring incessantly through this desert,--for
the mother giving birth, for the babe that is born, for the vice that
succumbs, for the toiler who dies, for the virgin who prays, for the old
man shaking with cold, for genius self-deluded. And a few steps off
is the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, where, hour after hour, the sorry
funerals of the faubourg Saint-Marceau wend their way. This esplanade,
which commands a view of Paris, has been taken possession of by
bowl-players; it is, in fact, a sort of bowling green frequented by old
gray faces, belonging to kindly, worthy men, who seem to continue the
race of our ancestors, whose countenances must only be compared with
those of their surroundings.
The man who had become, during the last few days, an inhabitant of this
desert region, proved an assiduous attendant at these games of bowls;
and must, undoubtedly, be considered the most striking creature of these
various groups, who (if it is permissible to liken Parisians to
the different orders of zoology) belonged to the genus mollusk. The
new-comer kept sympathetic step with the _cochonnet_,--the little
bowl which serves as a goal and on which the interest of the game must
centre. He leaned against a tree when the _cochonnet_ stopped; then,
with the same attention that a dog gives to his master’s gestures, he
looked at the other bowls flying through the air, or rolling along the
ground. You might have taken him for the weird and watchful genii of the
_cochonnet_. He said nothing; and the bowl-players--the most fanatic
men that can be encountered among the sectarians of any faith--had never
asked the reason of his dogged silence; in fact, the most observing of
them thought him deaf and dumb.
When it happened that the distances between the bowls and the
_cochonnet_ had to be measured, the cane of this silent being was used
as a measure, the players coming up and taking it from the icy hands
of the old man and returning it without a word or even a sign of
friendliness. The loan of his cane seemed a servitude to which he
had negatively consented. When a shower fell, he stayed near the
_cochonnet_, the slave of the bowls, and the guardian of the unfinished
game. Rain affected him no more than the fine weather did; he was, like
the players themselves, an intermediary species between a Parisian
who has the lowest intellect of his kind and an animal which has the
highest.
In other respects, pallid and shrunken, indifferent to his own person,
vacant in mind, he often came bareheaded, showing his sparse white
hair, and his square, yellow, bald skull, like the knee of a beggar seen
through his tattered trousers. His mouth was half-open, no ideas were
in his glance, no precise object appeared in his movements; he never
smiled; he never raised his eyes to heaven, but kept them habitually on
the ground, where he seemed to be looking for something. At four o’clock
an old woman arrived, to take him Heaven knows where; which she did by
towing him along by the arm, as a young girl drags a wilful goat which
still wants to browse by the wayside. This old man was a horrible thing
to see.
In the afternoon of the day when Jules Desmarets left Paris, his
travelling-carriage, in which he was alone, passed rapidly through the
rue de l’Est, and came out upon the esplanade of the Observatoire at the
moment when the old man, leaning against a tree, had allowed his cane
to be taken from his hand amid the noisy vociferations of the players,
pacifically irritated. Jules, thinking that he recognized that face,
felt an impulse to stop, and at the same instant the carriage came to a
standstill; for the postilion, hemmed in by some handcarts, had too much
respect for the game to call upon the players to make way for him.
“It is he!” said Jules, beholding in that human wreck, Ferragus XXIII.,
chief of the Devorants. Then, after a pause, he added, “How he loved
her!--Go on, postilion.”
ADDENDUM
Note: Ferragus is the first part of a trilogy. Part two is
entitled The Duchesse de Langeais and part three is The Girl with
the Golden Eyes. In other addendum references all three stories
are usually combined under the title The Thirteen.
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Bourignard, Gratien-Henri-Victor-Jean-Joseph The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Desmartes, Jules Cesar Birotteau
Desmartes, Madame Jules Cesar Birotteau
Desplein The Atheist’s Mass
Cousin Pons
Lost Illusions
The Government Clerks
Pierrette
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Seamy Side of History
Modeste Mignon
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Honorine
Gruget, Madame Etienne The Government Clerks
A Bachelor’s Establishment
Haudry (doctor) Cesar Birotteau
A Bachelor’s Establishment
The Seamy Side of History
Cousin Pons
Langeais, Duchesse Antoinette de Father Goriot
The Duchesse of Langeais
Marsay, Henri de The Duchesse of Langeais
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The Unconscious Humorists
Another Study of Woman
The Lily of the Valley
Father Goriot
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet
A Marriage Settlement
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Letters of Two Brides
The Ball at Sceaux
Modeste Mignon
The Secrets of a Princess
The Gondreville Mystery
A Daughter of Eve
Maulincour, Baronne de A Marriage Settlement
Meynardie, Madame Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Nucingen, Baronne Delphine de Father Goriot
Eugenie Grandet
Cesar Birotteau
Melmoth Reconciled
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
The Commission in Lunacy
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Modeste Mignon
The Firm of Nucingen
Another Study of Woman
A Daughter of Eve
The Member for Arcis
Pamiers, Vidame de The Duchesse of Langeais
Jealousies of a Country Town
Ronquerolles, Marquis de The Imaginary Mistress
The Duchess of Langeais
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The Peasantry
Ursule Mirouet
A Woman of Thirty
Another Study of Woman
The Member for Arcis
Serizy, Comtesse de A Start in Life
The Duchesse of Langeais
Ursule Mirouet
A Woman of Thirty
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Another Study of Woman
The Imaginary Mistress
II. THE DUCHESSE OF LANGEAIS
Translated by Ellen Marriage
To Franz Liszt
In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands a
convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule instituted
by St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first rigor of the
reformation brought about by that illustrious woman. Extraordinary as
this may seem, it is none the less true. Almost every religious house
in the Peninsula, or in Europe for that matter, was either destroyed or
disorganized by the outbreak of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
wars; but as this island was protected through those times by the
English fleet, its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure
from the general trouble and spoliation. The storms of many kinds which
shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century spent their
force before they reached those cliffs at so short a distance from the
coast of Andalusia.
If the rumour of the Emperor’s name so much as reached the shore of the
island, it is doubtful whether the holy women kneeling in the cloisters
grasped the reality of his dream-like progress of glory, or the majesty
that blazed in flame across kingdom after kingdom during his meteor
life.
In the minds of the Roman Catholic world, the convent stood out
pre-eminent for a stern discipline which nothing had changed; the purity
of its rule had attracted unhappy women from the furthest parts of
Europe, women deprived of all human ties, sighing after the long suicide
accomplished in the breast of God. No convent, indeed, was so well
fitted for that complete detachment of the soul from all earthly things,
which is demanded by the religious life, albeit on the continent of
Europe there are many convents magnificently adapted to the purpose
of their existence. Buried away in the loneliest valleys, hanging
in mid-air on the steepest mountainsides, set down on the brink
of precipices, in every place man has sought for the poetry of the
Infinite, the solemn awe of Silence; in every place man has striven to
draw closer to God, seeking Him on mountain peaks, in the depths below
the crags, at the cliff’s edge; and everywhere man has found God. But
nowhere, save on this half-European, half-African ledge of rock could
you find so many different harmonies, combining so to raise the soul,
that the sharpest pain comes to be like other memories; the strongest
impressions are dulled, till the sorrows of life are laid to rest in the
depths.
The convent stands on the highest point of the crags at the uttermost
end of the island. On the side towards the sea the rock was once rent
sheer away in some globe-cataclysm; it rises up a straight wall from
the base where the waves gnaw at the stone below high-water mark. Any
assault is made impossible by the dangerous reefs that stretch far out
to sea, with the sparkling waves of the Mediterranean playing over them.
So, only from the sea can you discern the square mass of the convent
built conformably to the minute rules laid down as to the shape, height,
doors, and windows of monastic buildings. From the side of the town, the
church completely hides the solid structure of the cloisters and their
roofs, covered with broad slabs of stone impervious to sun or storm or
gales of wind.
The church itself, built by the munificence of a Spanish family, is the
crowning edifice of the town. Its fine, bold front gives an imposing
and picturesque look to the little city in the sea. The sight of such
a city, with its close-huddled roofs, arranged for the most part
amphitheatre-wise above a picturesque harbour, and crowned by a glorious
cathedral front with triple-arched Gothic doorways, belfry towers, and
filigree spires, is a spectacle surely in every way the sublimest on
earth. Religion towering above daily life, to put men continually
in mind of the End and the way, is in truth a thoroughly Spanish
conception. But now surround this picture by the Mediterranean, and a
burning sky, imagine a few palms here and there, a few stunted evergreen
trees mingling their waving leaves with the motionless flowers and
foliage of carved stone; look out over the reef with its white fringes
of foam in contrast to the sapphire sea; and then turn to the city, with
its galleries and terraces whither the townsfolk come to take the air
among their flowers of an evening, above the houses and the tops of the
trees in their little gardens; add a few sails down in the harbour; and
lastly, in the stillness of falling night, listen to the organ music,
the chanting of the services, the wonderful sound of bells pealing out
over the open sea. There is sound and silence everywhere; oftener still
there is silence over all.
The church is divided within into a sombre mysterious nave and narrow
aisles. For some reason, probably because the winds are so high, the
architect was unable to build the flying buttresses and intervening
chapels which adorn almost all cathedrals, nor are there openings of any
kind in the walls which support the weight of the roof. Outside there
is simply the heavy wall structure, a solid mass of grey stone further
strengthened by huge piers placed at intervals. Inside, the nave and its
little side galleries are lighted entirely by the great stained-glass
rose-window suspended by a miracle of art above the centre doorway; for
upon that side the exposure permits of the display of lacework in stone
and of other beauties peculiar to the style improperly called Gothic.
The larger part of the nave and aisles was left for the townsfolk, who
came and went and heard mass there. The choir was shut off from the
rest of the church by a grating and thick folds of brown curtain, left
slightly apart in the middle in such a way that nothing of the choir
could be seen from the church except the high altar and the officiating
priest. The grating itself was divided up by the pillars which supported
the organ loft; and this part of the structure, with its carved wooden
columns, completed the line of the arcading in the gallery carried by
the shafts in the nave. If any inquisitive person, therefore, had been
bold enough to climb upon the narrow balustrade in the gallery to look
down into the choir, he could have seen nothing but the tall eight-sided
windows of stained glass beyond the high altar.
At the time of the French expedition into Spain to establish Ferdinand
VII once more on the throne, a French general came to the island after
the taking of Cadiz, ostensibly to require the recognition of the King’s
Government, really to see the convent and to find some means of
entering it. The undertaking was certainly a delicate one; but a man of
passionate temper, whose life had been, as it were, but one series of
poems in action, a man who all his life long had lived romances instead
of writing them, a man pre-eminently a Doer, was sure to be tempted by a
deed which seemed to be impossible.
To open the doors of a convent of nuns by lawful means! The metropolitan
or the Pope would scarcely have permitted it! And as for force or
stratagem--might not any indiscretion cost him his position, his whole
career as a soldier, and the end in view to boot? The Duc d’Angouleme
was still in Spain; and of all the crimes which a man in favour with the
Commander-in-Chief might commit, this one alone was certain to find him
inexorable. The General had asked for the mission to gratify private
motives of curiosity, though never was curiosity more hopeless. This
final attempt was a matter of conscience. The Carmelite convent on the
island was the only nunnery in Spain which had baffled his search.
As he crossed from the mainland, scarcely an hour’s distance, he felt a
presentiment that his hopes were to be fulfilled; and afterwards, when
as yet he had seen nothing of the convent but its walls, and of the nuns
not so much as their robes; while he had merely heard the chanting of
the service, there were dim auguries under the walls and in the sound of
the voices to justify his frail hope. And, indeed, however faint those
so unaccountable presentiments might be, never was human passion more
vehemently excited than the General’s curiosity at that moment. There
are no small events for the heart; the heart exaggerates everything; the
heart weighs the fall of a fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of
a woman’s glove in the same scales, and the glove is nearly always
the heavier of the two. So here are the facts in all their prosaic
simplicity. The facts first, the emotions will follow.
An hour after the General landed on the island, the royal authority was
re-established there. Some few Constitutional Spaniards who had found
their way thither after the fall of Cadiz were allowed to charter
a vessel and sail for London. So there was neither resistance nor
reaction. But the change of government could not be effected in the
little town without a mass, at which the two divisions under the
General’s command were obliged to be present. Now, it was upon this mass
that the General had built his hopes of gaining some information as
to the sisters in the convent; he was quite unaware how absolutely the
Carmelites were cut off from the world; but he knew that there might be
among them one whom he held dearer than life, dearer than honour.
His hopes were cruelly dashed at once. Mass, it is true, was celebrated
in state. In honour of such a solemnity, the curtains which always hid
the choir were drawn back to display its riches, its valuable paintings
and shrines so bright with gems that they eclipsed the glories of
the ex-votos of gold and silver hung up by sailors of the port on
the columns in the nave. But all the nuns had taken refuge in the
organ-loft. And yet, in spite of this first check, during this very mass
of thanksgiving, the most intimately thrilling drama that ever set a
man’s heart beating opened out widely before him.
The sister who played the organ aroused such intense enthusiasm, that
not a single man regretted that he had come to the service. Even the men
in the ranks were delighted, and the officers were in ecstasy. As for
the General, he was seemingly calm and indifferent. The sensations
stirred in him as the sister played one piece after another belong to
the small number of things which it is not lawful to utter; words are
powerless to express them; like death, God, eternity, they can only be
realised through their one point of contact with humanity. Strangely
enough, the organ music seemed to belong to the school of Rossini, the
musician who brings most human passion into his art.
Some day his works, by their number and extent, will receive the
reverence due to the Homer of music. From among all the scores that we
owe to his great genius, the nun seemed to have chosen _Moses in Egypt_
for special study, doubtless because the spirit of sacred music finds
therein its supreme expression. Perhaps the soul of the great musician,
so gloriously known to Europe, and the soul of this unknown executant
had met in the intuitive apprehension of the same poetry. So at least
thought two dilettanti officers who must have missed the Theatre Favart
in Spain.
At last in the _Te Deum_ no one could fail to discern a French soul in
the sudden change that came over the music. Joy for the victory of the
Most Christian King evidently stirred this nun’s heart to the depths.
She was a Frenchwoman beyond mistake. Soon the love of country shone
out, breaking forth like shafts of light from the fugue, as the sister
introduced variations with all a Parisienne’s fastidious taste, and
blended vague suggestions of our grandest national airs with her music.
A Spaniard’s fingers would not have brought this warmth into a
graceful tribute paid to the victorious arms of France. The musician’s
nationality was revealed.
“We find France everywhere, it seems,” said one of the men.
The General had left the church during the _Te Deum_; he could not
listen any longer. The nun’s music had been a revelation of a woman
loved to frenzy; a woman so carefully hidden from the world’s eyes,
so deeply buried in the bosom of the Church, that hitherto the most
ingenious and persistent efforts made by men who brought great influence
and unusual powers to bear upon the search had failed to find her. The
suspicion aroused in the General’s heart became all but a certainty with
the vague reminiscence of a sad, delicious melody, the air of _Fleuve
du Tage_. The woman he loved had played the prelude to the ballad in
a boudoir in Paris, how often! and now this nun had chosen the song
to express an exile’s longing, amid the joy of those that triumphed.
Terrible sensation! To hope for the resurrection of a lost love, to find
her only to know that she was lost, to catch a mysterious glimpse of her
after five years--five years, in which the pent-up passion, chafing
in an empty life, had grown the mightier for every fruitless effort to
satisfy it!
Who has not known, at least once in his life, what it is to lose some
precious thing; and after hunting through his papers, ransacking his
memory, and turning his house upside down; after one or two days spent
in vain search, and hope, and despair; after a prodigious expenditure
of the liveliest irritation of soul, who has not known the ineffable
pleasure of finding that all-important nothing which had come to be a
king of monomania? Very good. Now, spread that fury of search over five
years; put a woman, put a heart, put love in the place of the trifle;
transpose the monomania into the key of high passion; and, furthermore,
let the seeker be a man of ardent temper, with a lion’s heart and a
leonine head and mane, a man to inspire awe and fear in those who come
in contact with him--realise this, and you may, perhaps, understand why
the General walked abruptly out of the church when the first notes of
a ballad, which he used to hear with a rapture of delight in a
gilt-paneled boudoir, began to vibrate along the aisles of the church in
the sea.
The General walked away down the steep street which led to the port, and
only stopped when he could not hear the deep notes of the organ. Unable
to think of anything but the love which broke out in volcanic eruption,
filling his heart with fire, he only knew that the _Te Deum_ was over
when the Spanish congregation came pouring out of the church. Feeling
that his behaviour and attitude might seem ridiculous, he went back to
head the procession, telling the alcalde and the governor that, feeling
suddenly faint, he had gone out into the air. Casting about for a plea
for prolonging his stay, it at once occurred to him to make the most of
this excuse, framed on the spur of the moment. He declined, on a plea of
increasing indisposition, to preside at the banquet given by the town
to the French officers, betook himself to his bed, and sent a message to
the Major-General, to the effect that temporary illness obliged him
to leave the Colonel in command of the troops for the time being.
This commonplace but very plausible stratagem relieved him of all
responsibility for the time necessary to carry out his plans. The
General, nothing if not “catholic and monarchical,” took occasion to
inform himself of the hours of the services, and manifested the greatest
zeal for the performance of his religious duties, piety which caused no
remark in Spain.
The very next day, while the division was marching out of the town, the
General went to the convent to be present at vespers. He found an empty
church. The townsfolk, devout though they were, had all gone down to the
quay to watch the embarkation of the troops. He felt glad to be the only
man there. He tramped noisily up the nave, clanking his spurs till the
vaulted roof rang with the sound; he coughed, he talked aloud to himself
to let the nuns know, and more particularly to let the organist know
that if the troops were gone, one Frenchman was left behind. Was this
singular warning heard and understood? He thought so. It seemed to him
that in the _Magnificat_ the organ made response which was borne to him
on the vibrating air. The nun’s spirit found wings in music and fled
towards him, throbbing with the rhythmical pulse of the sounds. Then, in
all its might, the music burst forth and filled the church with warmth.
The Song of Joy set apart in the sublime liturgy of Latin Christianity
to express the exaltation of the soul in the presence of the glory of
the ever-living God, became the utterance of a heart almost terrified by
its gladness in the presence of the glory of a mortal love; a love that
yet lived, a love that had risen to trouble her even beyond the grave in
which the nun is laid, that she may rise again as the bride of Christ.
The organ is in truth the grandest, the most daring, the most
magnificent of all instruments invented by human genius. It is a whole
orchestra in itself. It can express anything in response to a skilled
touch. Surely it is in some sort a pedestal on which the soul poises for
a flight forth into space, essaying on her course to draw picture after
picture in an endless series, to paint human life, to cross the Infinite
that separates heaven from earth? And the longer a dreamer listens to
those giant harmonies, the better he realizes that nothing save this
hundred-voiced choir on earth can fill all the space between kneeling
men, and a God hidden by the blinding light of the Sanctuary. The music
is the one interpreter strong enough to bear up the prayers of humanity
to heaven, prayer in its omnipotent moods, prayer tinged by the
melancholy of many different natures, coloured by meditative ecstasy,
upspringing with the impulse of repentance--blended with the myriad
fancies of every creed. Yes. In those long vaulted aisles the melodies
inspired by the sense of things divine are blended with a grandeur
unknown before, are decked with new glory and might. Out of the dim
daylight, and the deep silence broken by the chanting of the choir in
response to the thunder of the organ, a veil is woven for God, and the
brightness of His attributes shines through it.
And this wealth of holy things seemed to be flung down like a grain of
incense upon the fragile altar raised to Love beneath the eternal throne
of a jealous and avenging God. Indeed, in the joy of the nun there
was little of that awe and gravity which should harmonize with the
solemnities of the _Magnificat_. She had enriched the music with
graceful variations, earthly gladness throbbing through the rhythm of
each. In such brilliant quivering notes some great singer might strive
to find a voice for her love, her melodies fluttered as a bird flutters
about her mate. There were moments when she seemed to leap back into
the past, to dally there now with laughter, now with tears. Her changing
moods, as it were, ran riot. She was like a woman excited and happy over
her lover’s return.
But at length, after the swaying fugues of delirium, after the
marvellous rendering of a vision of the past, a revulsion swept over the
soul that thus found utterance for itself. With a swift transition from
the major to the minor, the organist told her hearer of her present lot.
She gave the story of long melancholy broodings, of the slow course
of her moral malady. How day by day she deadened the senses, how every
night cut off one more thought, how her heart was slowly reduced
to ashes. The sadness deepened shade after shade through languid
modulations, and in a little while the echoes were pouring out a torrent
of grief. Then on a sudden, high notes rang out like the voices of
angels singing together, as if to tell the lost but not forgotten lover
that their spirits now could only meet in heaven. Pathetic hope! Then
followed the _Amen_. No more joy, no more tears in the air, no sadness,
no regrets. The _Amen_ was the return to God. The final chord was deep,
solemn, even terrible; for the last rumblings of the bass sent a shiver
through the audience that raised the hair on their heads; the nun shook
out her veiling of crepe, and seemed to sink again into the grave from
which she had risen for a moment. Slowly the reverberations died away;
it seemed as if the church, but now so full of light, had returned to
thick darkness.
The General had been caught up and borne swiftly away by this
strong-winged spirit; he had followed the course of its flight from
beginning to end. He understood to the fullest extent the imagery of
that burning symphony; for him the chords reached deep and far. For
him, as for the sister, the poem meant future, present, and past. Is
not music, and even opera music, a sort of text, which a susceptible
or poetic temper, or a sore and stricken heart, may expand as memories
shall determine? If a musician must needs have the heart of a poet, must
not the listener too be in a manner a poet and a lover to hear all that
lies in great music? Religion, love, and music--what are they but a
threefold expression of the same fact, of that craving for expansion
which stirs in every noble soul. And these three forms of poetry ascend
to God, in whom all passion on earth finds its end. Wherefore the holy
human trinity finds a place amid the infinite glories of God; of God,
whom we always represent surrounded with the fires of love and seistrons
of gold--music and light and harmony. Is not He the Cause and the End of
all our strivings?
The French General guessed rightly that here in the desert, on this bare
rock in the sea, the nun had seized upon music as an outpouring of the
passion that still consumed her. Was this her manner of offering up her
love as a sacrifice to God? Or was it Love exultant in triumph over God?
The questions were hard to answer. But one thing at least the General
could not mistake--in this heart, dead to the world, the fire of passion
burned as fiercely as in his own.
Vespers over, he went back to the alcalde with whom he was staying.
In the all-absorbing joy which comes in such full measure when a
satisfaction sought long and painfully is attained at last, he could see
nothing beyond this--he was still loved! In her heart love had grown
in loneliness, even as his love had grown stronger as he surmounted one
barrier after another which this woman had set between them! The glow of
soul came to its natural end. There followed a longing to see her again,
to contend with God for her, to snatch her away--a rash scheme, which
appealed to a daring nature. He went to bed, when the meal was over, to
avoid questions; to be alone and think at his ease; and he lay absorbed
by deep thought till day broke.
He rose only to go to mass. He went to the church and knelt close to
the screen, with his forehead touching the curtain; he would have torn
a hole in it if he had been alone, but his host had come with him out of
politeness, and the least imprudence might compromise the whole future
of his love, and ruin the new hopes.
The organ sounded, but it was another player, and not the nun of the
last two days whose hands touched the keys. It was all colorless and
cold for the General. Was the woman he loved prostrated by emotion which
well-nigh overcame a strong man’s heart? Had she so fully realised and
shared an unchanged, longed-for love, that now she lay dying on her bed
in her cell? While innumerable thoughts of this kind perplexed his mind,
the voice of the woman he worshipped rang out close beside him; he knew
its clear resonant soprano. It was her voice, with that faint tremor in
it which gave it all the charm that shyness and diffidence gives to a
young girl; her voice, distinct from the mass of singing as a _prima
donna’s_ in the chorus of a finale. It was like a golden or silver
thread in dark frieze.
It was she! There could be no mistake. Parisienne now as ever, she had
not laid coquetry aside when she threw off worldly adornments for the
veil and the Carmelite’s coarse serge. She who had affirmed her love
last evening in the praise sent up to God, seemed now to say to her
lover, “Yes, it is I. I am here. My love is unchanged, but I am beyond
the reach of love. You will hear my voice, my soul shall enfold you,
and I shall abide here under the brown shroud in the choir from which no
power on earth can tear me. You shall never see me more!”
“It is she indeed!” the General said to himself, raising his head. He
had leant his face on his hands, unable at first to bear the intolerable
emotion that surged like a whirlpool in his heart, when that well-known
voice vibrated under the arcading, with the sound of the sea for
accompaniment.
Storm was without, and calm within the sanctuary. Still that rich voice
poured out all its caressing notes; it fell like balm on the lover’s
burning heart; it blossomed upon the air--the air that a man would fain
breathe more deeply to receive the effluence of a soul breathed forth
with love in the words of the prayer. The alcalde coming to join
his guest found him in tears during the elevation, while the nun was
singing, and brought him back to his house. Surprised to find so much
piety in a French military man, the worthy magistrate invited the
confessor of the convent to meet his guest. Never had news given the
General more pleasure; he paid the ecclesiastic a good deal of attention
at supper, and confirmed his Spanish hosts in the high opinion they had
formed of his piety by a not wholly disinterested respect.
He inquired with gravity how many sisters there were in the convent, and
asked for particulars of its endowment and revenues, as if from
courtesy he wished to hear the good priest discourse on the subject most
interesting to him. He informed himself as to the manner of life led by
the holy women. Were they allowed to go out of the convent, or to see
visitors?
“Senor,” replied the venerable churchman, “the rule is strict. A woman
cannot enter a monastery of the order of St. Bruno without a special
permission from His Holiness, and the rule here is equally stringent.
No man may enter a convent of Barefoot Carmelites unless he is a priest
specially attached to the services of the house by the Archbishop. None
of the nuns may leave the convent; though the great Saint, St. Theresa,
often left her cell. The Visitor or the Mothers Superior can alone give
permission, subject to an authorization from the Archbishop, for a nun
to see a visitor, and then especially in a case of illness. Now we are
one of the principal houses, and consequently we have a Mother Superior
here. Among other foreign sisters there is one Frenchwoman, Sister
Theresa; she it is who directs the music in the chapel.”
“Oh!” said the General, with feigned surprise. “She must have rejoiced
over the victory of the House of Bourbon.”
“I told them the reason of the mass; they are always a little bit
inquisitive.”
“But Sister Theresa may have interests in France. Perhaps she would like
to send some message or to hear news.”
“I do not think so. She would have come to ask me.”
“As a fellow-countryman, I should be quite curious to see her,” said the
General. “If it is possible, if the Lady Superior consents, if----”
“Even at the grating and in the Reverend Mother’s presence, an interview
would be quite impossible for anybody whatsoever; but, strict as the
Mother is, for a deliverer of our holy religion and the throne of his
Catholic Majesty, the rule might be relaxed for a moment,” said the
confessor, blinking. “I will speak about it.”
“How old is Sister Theresa?” inquired the lover. He dared not ask any
questions of the priest as to the nun’s beauty.
“She does not reckon years now,” the good man answered, with a
simplicity that made the General shudder.
Next day before siesta, the confessor came to inform the French General
that Sister Theresa and the Mother consented to receive him at the
grating in the parlour before vespers. The General spent the siesta in
pacing to and fro along the quay in the noonday heat. Thither the priest
came to find him, and brought him to the convent by way of the gallery
round the cemetery. Fountains, green trees, and rows of arcading
maintained a cool freshness in keeping with the place.
At the further end of the long gallery the priest led the way into a
large room divided in two by a grating covered with a brown curtain. In
the first, and in some sort of public half of the apartment, where the
confessor left the newcomer, a wooden bench ran round the wall, and two
or three chairs, also of wood, were placed near the grating. The ceiling
consisted of bare unornamented joists and cross-beams of ilex wood. As
the two windows were both on the inner side of the grating, and the dark
surface of the wood was a bad reflector, the light in the place was so
dim that you could scarcely see the great black crucifix, the portrait
of Saint Theresa, and a picture of the Madonna which adorned the grey
parlour walls. Tumultuous as the General’s feelings were, they took
something of the melancholy of the place. He grew calm in that homely
quiet. A sense of something vast as the tomb took possession of him
beneath the chill unceiled roof. Here, as in the grave, was there not
eternal silence, deep peace--the sense of the Infinite? And besides this
there was the quiet and the fixed thought of the cloister--a thought
which you felt like a subtle presence in the air, and in the dim dusk
of the room; an all-pervasive thought nowhere definitely expressed, and
looming the larger in the imagination; for in the cloister the great
saying, “Peace in the Lord,” enters the least religious soul as a living
force.
The monk’s life is scarcely comprehensible. A man seems confessed a
weakling in a monastery; he was born to act, to live out a life of work;
he is evading a man’s destiny in his cell. But what man’s strength,
blended with pathetic weakness, is implied by a woman’s choice of the
convent life! A man may have any number of motives for burying himself
in a monastery; for him it is the leap over the precipice. A woman
has but one motive--she is a woman still; she betrothes herself to a
Heavenly Bridegroom. Of the monk you may ask, “Why did you not fight
your battle?” But if a woman immures herself in the cloister, is there
not always a sublime battle fought first?
At length it seemed to the General that that still room, and the lonely
convent in the sea, were full of thoughts of him. Love seldom attains
to solemnity; yet surely a love still faithful in the breast of God was
something solemn, something more than a man had a right to look for
as things are in this nineteenth century? The infinite grandeur of the
situation might well produce an effect upon the General’s mind; he had
precisely enough elevation of soul to forget politics, honours, Spain,
and society in Paris, and to rise to the height of this lofty climax.
And what in truth could be more tragic? How much must pass in the souls
of these two lovers, brought together in a place of strangers, on
a ledge of granite in the sea; yet held apart by an intangible,
unsurmountable barrier! Try to imagine the man saying within himself,
“Shall I triumph over God in her heart?” when a faint rustling sound
made him quiver, and the curtain was drawn aside.
Between him and the light stood a woman. Her face was hidden by the veil
that drooped from the folds upon her head; she was dressed according
to the rule of the order in a gown of the colour become proverbial. Her
bare feet were hidden; if the General could have seen them, he would
have known how appallingly thin she had grown; and yet in spite of the
thick folds of her coarse gown, a mere covering and no ornament, he
could guess how tears, and prayer, and passion, and loneliness had
wasted the woman before him.
An ice-cold hand, belonging, no doubt, to the Mother Superior, held back
the curtain. The General gave the enforced witness of their interview a
searching glance, and met the dark, inscrutable gaze of an aged recluse.
The Mother might have been a century old, but the bright, youthful eyes
belied the wrinkles that furrowed her pale face.
“Mme la Duchesse,” he began, his voice shaken with emotion, “does your
companion understand French?” The veiled figure bowed her head at the
sound of his voice.
“There is no duchess here,” she replied. “It is Sister Theresa whom you
see before you. She whom you call my companion is my mother in God, my
superior here on earth.”
The words were so meekly spoken by the voice that sounded in other years
amid harmonious surroundings of refined luxury, the voice of a queen of
fashion in Paris. Such words from the lips that once spoke so lightly
and flippantly struck the General dumb with amazement.
“The Holy Mother only speaks Latin and Spanish,” she added.
“I understand neither. Dear Antoinette, make my excuses to her.”
The light fell full upon the nun’s figure; a thrill of deep emotion
betrayed itself in a faint quiver of her veil as she heard her name
softly spoken by the man who had been so hard in the past.
“My brother,” she said, drawing her sleeve under her veil, perhaps to
brush tears away, “I am Sister Theresa.”
Then, turning to the Superior, she spoke in Spanish; the General knew
enough of the language to understand what she said perfectly well;
possibly he could have spoken it had he chosen to do so.
“Dear Mother, the gentleman presents his respects to you, and begs you
to pardon him if he cannot pay them himself, but he knows neither of the
languages which you speak----”
The aged nun bent her head slowly, with an expression of angelic
sweetness, enhanced at the same time by the consciousness of her power
and dignity.
“Do you know this gentleman?” she asked, with a keen glance.
“Yes, Mother.”
“Go back to your cell, my daughter!” said the Mother imperiously.
The General slipped aside behind the curtain lest the dreadful tumult
within him should appear in his face; even in the shadow it seemed to
him that he could still see the Superior’s piercing eyes. He was afraid
of her; she held his little, frail, hardly-won happiness in her hands;
and he, who had never quailed under a triple row of guns, now trembled
before this nun. The Duchess went towards the door, but she turned back.
“Mother,” she said, with dreadful calmness, “the Frenchman is one of my
brothers.”
“Then stay, my daughter,” said the Superior, after a pause.
The piece of admirable Jesuitry told of such love and regret, that a man
less strongly constituted might have broken down under the keen delight
in the midst of a great and, for him, an entirely novel peril. Oh! how
precious words, looks, and gestures became when love must baffle lynx
eyes and tiger’s claws! Sister Theresa came back.
“You see, my brother, what I have dared to do only to speak to you for
a moment of your salvation and of the prayers that my soul puts up for
your soul daily. I am committing mortal sin. I have told a lie. How many
days of penance must expiate that lie! But I shall endure it for your
sake. My brother, you do not know what happiness it is to love in
heaven; to feel that you can confess love purified by religion, love
transported into the highest heights of all, so that we are permitted
to lose sight of all but the soul. If the doctrine and the spirit of
the Saint to whom we owe this refuge had not raised me above earth’s
anguish, and caught me up and set me, far indeed beneath the Sphere
wherein she dwells, yet truly above this world, I should not have
seen you again. But now I can see you, and hear your voice, and remain
calm----”
The General broke in, “But, Antoinette, let me see you, you whom I love
passionately, desperately, as you could have wished me to love you.”
“Do not call me Antoinette, I implore you. Memories of the past hurt me.
You must see no one here but Sister Theresa, a creature who trusts in
the Divine mercy.” She paused for a little, and then added, “You must
control yourself, my brother. Our Mother would separate us without pity
if there is any worldly passion in your face, or if you allow the tears
to fall from your eyes.”
The General bowed his head to regain self-control; when he looked up
again he saw her face beyond the grating--the thin, white, but still
impassioned face of the nun. All the magic charm of youth that once
bloomed there, all the fair contrast of velvet whiteness and the colour
of the Bengal rose, had given place to a burning glow, as of a porcelain
jar with a faint light shining through it. The wonderful hair in which
she took such pride had been shaven; there was a bandage round her
forehead and about her face. An ascetic life had left dark traces about
the eyes, which still sometimes shot out fevered glances; their ordinary
calm expression was but a veil. In a few words, she was but the ghost of
her former self.
“Ah! you that have come to be my life, you must come out of this tomb!
You were mine; you had no right to give yourself, even to God. Did you
not promise me to give up all at the least command from me? You may
perhaps think me worthy of that promise now when you hear what I have
done for you. I have sought you all through the world. You have been in
my thoughts at every moment for five years; my life has been given to
you. My friends, very powerful friends, as you know, have helped with
all their might to search every convent in France, Italy, Spain, Sicily,
and America. Love burned more brightly for every vain search. Again and
again I made long journeys with a false hope; I have wasted my life and
the heaviest throbbings of my heart in vain under many a dark convent
wall. I am not speaking of a faithfulness that knows no bounds, for what
is it?--nothing compared with the infinite longings of my love. If your
remorse long ago was sincere, you ought not to hesitate to follow me
today.”
“You forget that I am not free.”
“The Duke is dead,” he answered quickly.
Sister Theresa flushed red.
“May heaven be open to him!” she cried with a quick rush of feeling. “He
was generous to me.--But I did not mean such ties; it was one of my sins
that I was ready to break them all without scruple--for you.”
“Are you speaking of your vows?” the General asked, frowning. “I did not
think that anything weighed heavier with your heart than love. But do
not think twice of it, Antoinette; the Holy Father himself shall absolve
you of your oath. I will surely go to Rome, I will entreat all the
powers of earth; if God could come down from heaven, I would----”
“Do not blaspheme.”
“So do not fear the anger of God. Ah! I would far rather hear that
you would leave your prison for me; that this very night you would let
yourself down into a boat at the foot of the cliffs. And we would go
away to be happy somewhere at the world’s end, I know not where. And
with me at your side, you should come back to life and health under the
wings of love.”
“You must not talk like this,” said Sister Theresa; “you do not know
what you are to me now. I love you far better than I ever loved you
before. Every day I pray for you; I see you with other eyes. Armand, if
you but knew the happiness of giving yourself up, without shame, to a
pure friendship which God watches over! You do not know what joy it is
to me to pray for heaven’s blessing on you. I never pray for myself: God
will do with me according to His will; but, at the price of my soul, I
wish I could be sure that you are happy here on earth, and that you
will be happy hereafter throughout all ages. My eternal life is all that
trouble has left me to offer up to you. I am old now with weeping; I am
neither young nor fair; and in any case, you could not respect the
nun who became a wife; no love, not even motherhood, could give me
absolution.... What can you say to outweigh the uncounted thoughts that
have gathered in my heart during the past five years, thoughts that have
changed, and worn, and blighted it? I ought to have given a heart less
sorrowful to God.”
“What can I say? Dear Antoinette, I will say this, that I love you; that
affection, love, a great love, the joy of living in another heart that
is ours, utterly and wholly ours, is so rare a thing and so hard to
find, that I doubted you, and put you to sharp proof; but now, today, I
love you, Antoinette, with all my soul’s strength.... If you will follow
me into solitude, I will hear no voice but yours, I will see no other
face.”
“Hush, Armand! You are shortening the little time that we may be
together here on earth.”
“Antoinette, will you come with me?”
“I am never away from you. My life is in your heart, not through the
selfish ties of earthly happiness, or vanity, or enjoyment; pale and
withered as I am, I live here for you, in the breast of God. As God is
just, you shall be happy----”
“Words, words all of it! Pale and withered? How if I want you? How if I
cannot be happy without you? Do you still think of nothing but duty with
your lover before you? Is he never to come first and above all things
else in your heart? In time past you put social success, yourself,
heaven knows what, before him; now it is God, it is the welfare of my
soul! In Sister Theresa I find the Duchess over again, ignorant of
the happiness of love, insensible as ever, beneath the semblance of
sensibility. You do not love me; you have never loved me----”
“Oh, my brother----!”
“You do not wish to leave this tomb. You love my soul, do you say?
Very well, through you it will be lost forever. I shall make away with
myself----”
“Mother!” Sister Theresa called aloud in Spanish, “I have lied to you;
this man is my lover!”
The curtain fell at once. The General, in his stupor, scarcely heard the
doors within as they clanged.
“Ah! she loves me still!” he cried, understanding all the sublimity of
that cry of hers. “She loves me still. She must be carried off....”
The General left the island, returned to headquarters, pleaded
ill-health, asked for leave of absence, and forthwith took his departure
for France.
And now for the incidents which brought the two personages in this Scene
into their present relation to each other.
The thing known in France as the Faubourg Saint-Germain is neither a
Quarter, nor a sect, nor an institution, nor anything else that admits
of a precise definition. There are great houses in the Place Royale, the
Faubourg Saint-Honore, and the Chaussee d’Antin, in any one of which you
may breathe the same atmosphere of Faubourg Saint-Germain. So, to begin
with, the whole Faubourg is not within the Faubourg. There are men and
women born far enough away from its influences who respond to them and
take their place in the circle; and again there are others, born within
its limits, who may yet be driven forth forever. For the last forty
years the manners, and customs, and speech, in a word, the tradition of
the Faubourg Saint-Germain, has been to Paris what the Court used to be
in other times; it is what the Hotel Saint-Paul was to the fourteenth
century; the Louvre to the fifteenth; the Palais, the Hotel Rambouillet,
and the Place Royale to the sixteenth; and lastly, as Versailles was to
the seventeenth and the eighteenth.
Just as the ordinary workaday Paris will always centre about some point;
so, through all periods of history, the Paris of the nobles and
the upper classes converges towards some particular spot. It is a
periodically recurrent phenomenon which presents ample matter for
reflection to those who are fain to observe or describe the various
social zones; and possibly an enquiry into the causes that bring about
this centralization may do more than merely justify the probability of
this episode; it may be of service to serious interests which some
day will be more deeply rooted in the commonwealth, unless, indeed,
experience is as meaningless for political parties as it is for youth.
In every age the great nobles, and the rich who always ape the great
nobles, build their houses as far as possible from crowded streets. When
the Duc d’Uzes built his splendid hotel in the Rue Montmartre in
the reign of Louis XIV, and set the fountain at his gates--for which
beneficent action, to say nothing of his other virtues, he was held in
such veneration that the whole quarter turned out in a body to follow
his funeral--when the Duke, I say, chose this site for his house, he
did so because that part of Paris was almost deserted in those days. But
when the fortifications were pulled down, and the market gardens beyond
the line of the boulevards began to fill with houses, then the d’Uzes
family left their fine mansion, and in our time it was occupied by a
banker. Later still, the noblesse began to find themselves out of their
element among shopkeepers, left the Place Royale and the centre of
Paris for good, and crossed the river to breathe freely in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, where palaces were reared already about the great
hotel built by Louis XIV for the Duc de Maine--the Benjamin among his
legitimated offspring. And indeed, for people accustomed to a stately
life, can there be more unseemly surroundings than the bustle, the mud,
the street cries, the bad smells, and narrow thoroughfares of a populous
quarter? The very habits of life in a mercantile or manufacturing
district are completely at variance with the lives of nobles. The
shopkeeper and artisan are just going to bed when the great world is
thinking of dinner; and the noisy stir of life begins among the former
when the latter have gone to rest. Their day’s calculations never
coincide; the one class represents the expenditure, the other the
receipts. Consequently their manners and customs are diametrically
opposed.
Nothing contemptuous is intended by this statement. An aristocracy is in
a manner the intellect of the social system, as the middle classes and
the proletariat may be said to be its organizing and working power. It
naturally follows that these forces are differently situated; and of
their antagonism there is bred a seeming antipathy produced by the
performance of different functions, all of them, however, existing for
one common end.
Such social dissonances are so inevitably the outcome of any charter
of the constitution, that however much a Liberal may be disposed to
complain of them, as of treason against those sublime ideas with which
the ambitious plebeian is apt to cover his designs, he would none the
less think it a preposterous notion that M. le Prince de Montmorency,
for instance, should continue to live in the Rue Saint-Martin at the
corner of the street which bears that nobleman’s name; or that M. le Duc
de Fitz-James, descendant of the royal house of Scotland, should have
his hotel at the angle of the Rue Marie Stuart and the Rue Montorgueil.
_Sint ut sunt, aut non sint_, the grand words of the Jesuit, might be
taken as a motto by the great in all countries. These social differences
are patent in all ages; the fact is always accepted by the people; its
“reasons of state” are self-evident; it is at once cause and effect, a
principle and a law. The common sense of the masses never deserts them
until demagogues stir them up to gain ends of their own; that common
sense is based on the verities of social order; and the social order is
the same everywhere, in Moscow as in London, in Geneva as in Calcutta.
Given a certain number of families of unequal fortune in any given
space, you will see an aristocracy forming under your eyes; there will
be the patricians, the upper classes, and yet other ranks below them.
Equality may be a _right_, but no power on earth can convert it into
_fact_. It would be a good thing for France if this idea could be
popularized. The benefits of political harmony are obvious to the least
intelligent classes. Harmony is, as it were, the poetry of order, and
order is a matter of vital importance to the working population. And
what is order, reduced to its simplest expression, but the agreement
of things among themselves--unity, in short? Architecture, music, and
poetry, everything in France, and in France more than in any other
country, is based upon this principle; it is written upon the very
foundations of her clear accurate language, and a language must always
be the most infallible index of national character. In the same way
you may note that the French popular airs are those most calculated to
strike the imagination, the best-modulated melodies are taken over by
the people; clearness of thought, the intellectual simplicity of an idea
attracts them; they like the incisive sayings that hold the greatest
number of ideas. France is the one country in the world where a little
phrase may bring about a great revolution. Whenever the masses have
risen, it has been to bring men, affairs, and principles into agreement.
No nation has a clearer conception of that idea of unity which should
permeate the life of an aristocracy; possibly no other nation has so
intelligent a comprehension of a political necessity; history will never
find her behind the time. France has been led astray many a time, but
she is deluded, woman-like, by generous ideas, by a glow of enthusiasm
which at first outstrips sober reason.
So, to begin with, the most striking characteristic of the Faubourg
is the splendour of its great mansions, its great gardens, and a
surrounding quiet in keeping with princely revenues drawn from great
estates. And what is this distance set between a class and a whole
metropolis but visible and outward expression of the widely different
attitude of mind which must inevitably keep them apart? The position of
the head is well defined in every organism. If by any chance a nation
allows its head to fall at its feet, it is pretty sure sooner or later
to discover that this is a suicidal measure; and since nations have no
desire to perish, they set to work at once to grow a new head. If they
lack the strength for this, they perish as Rome perished, and Venice,
and so many other states.
This distinction between the upper and lower spheres of social activity,
emphasized by differences in their manner of living, necessarily
implies that in the highest aristocracy there is real worth and some
distinguishing merit. In any state, no matter what form of “government”
is affected, so soon as the patrician class fails to maintain that
complete superiority which is the condition of its existence, it ceases
to be a force, and is pulled down at once by the populace. The people
always wish to see money, power, and initiative in their leaders, hands,
hearts, and heads; they must be the spokesmen, they must represent the
intelligence and the glory of the nation. Nations, like women, love
strength in those who rule them; they cannot give love without respect;
they refuse utterly to obey those of whom they do not stand in awe.
An aristocracy fallen into contempt is a _roi faineant_, a husband in
petticoats; first it ceases to be itself, and then it ceases to be.
And in this way the isolation of the great, the sharply marked
distinction in their manner of life, or in a word, the general custom
of the patrician caste is at once the sign of a real power, and their
destruction so soon as that power is lost. The Faubourg Saint-Germain
failed to recognise the conditions of its being, while it would still
have been easy to perpetuate its existence, and therefore was brought
low for a time. The Faubourg should have looked the facts fairly in the
face, as the English aristocracy did before them; they should have seen
that every institution has its climacteric periods, when words lose
their old meanings, and ideas reappear in a new guise, and the whole
conditions of politics wear a changed aspect, while the underlying
realities undergo no essential alteration.
These ideas demand further development which form an essential part of
this episode; they are given here both as a succinct statement of the
causes, and an explanation of the things which happen in the course of
the story.
The stateliness of the castles and palaces where nobles dwell; the
luxury of the details; the constantly maintained sumptuousness of the
furniture; the “atmosphere” in which the fortunate owner of landed
estates (a rich man before he was born) lives and moves easily and
without friction; the habit of mind which never descends to calculate
the petty workaday gains of existence; the leisure; the higher education
attainable at a much earlier age; and lastly, the aristocratic tradition
that makes of him a social force, for which his opponents, by dint
of study and a strong will and tenacity of vocation, are scarcely a
match-all these things should contribute to form a lofty spirit in a
man, possessed of such privileges from his youth up; they should
stamp his character with that high self-respect, of which the least
consequence is a nobleness of heart in harmony with the noble name that
he bears. And in some few families all this is realised. There are
noble characters here and there in the Faubourg, but they are marked
exceptions to a general rule of egoism which has been the ruin of this
world within a world. The privileges above enumerated are the birthright
of the French noblesse, as of every patrician efflorescence ever formed
on the surface of a nation; and will continue to be theirs so long as
their existence is based upon real estate, or money; _domaine-sol_ and
_domaine-argent_ alike, the only solid bases of an organized society;
but such privileges are held upon the understanding that the patricians
must continue to justify their existence. There is a sort of moral
_fief_ held on a tenure of service rendered to the sovereign, and here
in France the people are undoubtedly the sovereigns nowadays. The times
are changed, and so are the weapons. The knight-banneret of old wore
a coat of chain armor and a hauberk; he could handle a lance well and
display his pennon, and no more was required of him; today he is bound
to give proof of his intelligence. A stout heart was enough in the days
of old; in our days he is required to have a capacious brain-pan. Skill
and knowledge and capital--these three points mark out a social triangle
on which the scutcheon of power is blazoned; our modern aristocracy must
take its stand on these.
A fine theorem is as good as a great name. The Rothschilds, the Fuggers
of the nineteenth century, are princes _de facto_. A great artist is in
reality an oligarch; he represents a whole century, and almost always he
is a law to others. And the art of words, the high pressure machinery
of the writer, the poet’s genius, the merchant’s steady endurance,
the strong will of the statesman who concentrates a thousand dazzling
qualities in himself, the general’s sword--all these victories, in
short, which a single individual will win, that he may tower above the
rest of the world, the patrician class is now bound to win and keep
exclusively. They must head the new forces as they once headed the
material forces; how should they keep the position unless they are
worthy of it? How, unless they are the soul and brain of a nation,
shall they set its hands moving? How lead a people without the power of
command? And what is the marshal’s baton without the innate power of
the captain in the man who wields it? The Faubourg Saint-Germain took to
playing with batons, and fancied that all the power was in its hands.
It inverted the terms of the proposition which called it into existence.
And instead of flinging away the insignia which offended the people,
and quietly grasping the power, it allowed the bourgeoisie to seize the
authority, clung with fatal obstinacy to its shadow, and over and over
again forgot the laws which a minority must observe if it would live.
When an aristocracy is scarce a thousandth part of the body social, it
is bound today, as of old, to multiply its points of action, so as to
counterbalance the weight of the masses in a great crisis. And in our
days those means of action must be living forces, and not historical
memories.
In France, unluckily, the noblesse were still so puffed up with the
notion of their vanished power, that it was difficult to contend against
a kind of innate presumption in themselves. Perhaps this is a national
defect. The Frenchman is less given than anyone else to undervalue
himself; it comes natural to him to go from his degree to the one above
it; and while it is a rare thing for him to pity the unfortunates
over whose heads he rises, he always groans in spirit to see so many
fortunate people above him. He is very far from heartless, but too
often he prefers to listen to his intellect. The national instinct which
brings the Frenchman to the front, the vanity that wastes his substance,
is as much a dominant passion as thrift in the Dutch. For three
centuries it swayed the noblesse, who, in this respect, were certainly
pre-eminently French. The scion of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, beholding
his material superiority, was fully persuaded of his intellectual
superiority. And everything contributed to confirm him in his belief;
for ever since the Faubourg Saint-Germain existed at all--which is
to say, ever since Versailles ceased to be the royal residence--the
Faubourg, with some few gaps in continuity, was always backed up by the
central power, which in France seldom fails to support that side. Thence
its downfall in 1830.
At that time the party of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was rather like
an army without a base of operation. It had utterly failed to take
advantage of the peace to plant itself in the heart of the nation.
It sinned for want of learning its lesson, and through an utter
incapability of regarding its interests as a whole. A future certainty
was sacrificed to a doubtful present gain. This blunder in policy may
perhaps be attributed to the following cause.
The class-isolation so strenuously kept up by the noblesse brought about
fatal results during the last forty years; even caste-patriotism was
extinguished by it, and rivalry fostered among themselves. When the
French noblesse of other times were rich and powerful, the nobles
(_gentilhommes_) could choose their chiefs and obey them in the hour
of danger. As their power diminished, they grew less amenable to
discipline; and as in the last days of the Byzantine Empire, everyone
wished to be emperor. They mistook their uniform weakness for uniform
strength.
Each family ruined by the Revolution and the abolition of the law of
primogeniture thought only of itself, and not at all of the great family
of the noblesse. It seemed to them that as each individual grew rich,
the party as a whole would gain in strength. And herein lay their
mistake. Money, likewise, is only the outward and visible sign of
power. All these families were made up of persons who preserved a high
tradition of courtesy, of true graciousness of life, of refined speech,
with a family pride, and a squeamish sense of _noblesse oblige_ which
suited well with the kind of life they led; a life wholly filled with
occupations which become contemptible so soon as they cease to be
accessories and take the chief place in existence. There was a certain
intrinsic merit in all these people, but the merit was on the surface,
and none of them were worth their face-value.
Not a single one among those families had courage to ask itself the
question, “Are we strong enough for the responsibility of power?” They
were cast on the top, like the lawyers of 1830; and instead of taking
the patron’s place, like a great man, the Faubourg Saint-Germain showed
itself greedy as an upstart. The most intelligent nation in the world
perceived clearly that the restored nobles were organizing everything
for their own particular benefit. From that day the noblesse was doomed.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain tried to be an aristocracy when it could
only be an oligarchy--two very different systems, as any man may see
for himself if he gives an intelligent perusal to the list of the
patronymics of the House of Peers.
The King’s Government certainly meant well; but the maxim that the
people must be made to _will_ everything, even their own welfare, was
pretty constantly forgotten, nor did they bear in mind that La France is
a woman and capricious, and must be happy or chastised at her own good
pleasure. If there had been many dukes like the Duc de Laval, whose
modesty made him worthy of the name he bore, the elder branch would have
been as securely seated on the throne as the House of Hanover at this
day.
In 1814 the noblesse of France were called upon to assert their
superiority over the most aristocratic bourgeoisie in the most feminine
of all countries, to take the lead in the most highly educated epoch the
world had yet seen. And this was even more notably the case in 1820. The
Faubourg Saint-Germain might very easily have led and amused the middle
classes in days when people’s heads were turned with distinctions, and
art and science were all the rage. But the narrow-minded leaders of
a time of great intellectual progress all of them detested art and
science. They had not even the wit to present religion in attractive
colours, though they needed its support. While Lamartine, Lamennais,
Montalembert, and other writers were putting new life and elevation into
men’s ideas of religion, and gilding it with poetry, these bunglers in
the Government chose to make the harshness of their creed felt all over
the country. Never was nation in a more tractable humour; La France,
like a tired woman, was ready to agree to anything; never was
mismanagement so clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have
forgiven wrongs more easily than bungling.
If the noblesse meant to reinstate themselves, the better to found a
strong oligarchy, they should have honestly and diligently searched
their Houses for men of the stamp that Napoleon used; they should
have turned themselves inside out to see if peradventure there was a
Constitutionalist Richelieu lurking in the entrails of the Faubourg; and
if that genius was not forthcoming from among them, they should have set
out to find him, even in the fireless garret where he might happen to
be perishing of cold; they should have assimilated him, as the English
House of Lords continually assimilates aristocrats made by chance; and
finally ordered him to be ruthless, to lop away the old wood, and cut
the tree down to the living shoots. But, in the first place, the great
system of English Toryism was far too large for narrow minds; the
importation required time, and in France a tardy success is no better
than a fiasco. So far, moreover, from adopting a policy of redemption,
and looking for new forces where God puts them, these petty great folk
took a dislike to any capacity that did not issue from their midst; and,
lastly, instead of growing young again, the Faubourg Saint-Germain grew
positively older.