[219] IN his latest novel M. Octave Feuillet adds two charming people
to that chosen group of personages in which he loves to trace the
development of the more serious elements of character amid the
refinements and artifices of modern society, and which make such good
company. The proper function of fictitious literature in affording us
a refuge into a world slightly better--better conceived, or better
finished--than the real one, is effected in most instances less through
the imaginary events at which a novelist causes us to assist, than by
the imaginary persons to whom he introduces us. The situations of M.
Feuillet's novels are indeed of a real and intrinsic
importance:--tragic crises, inherent in the general conditions of human
nature itself, or which arise necessarily out of the special conditions
of modern society. Still, with him, in the actual result, they become
subordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life, to the
characters they help to form. Often, his most attentive reader will
have forgotten the actual details of his plot; while [220] the soul,
tried, enlarged, shaped by it, remains as a well-fixed type in the
memory. He may return a second or third time to Sibylle, or Le Journal
d'une Femme, or Les Amours de Philippe, and watch, surprised afresh,
the clean, dainty, word-sparing literary operation (word-sparing, yet
with no loss of real grace or ease) which, sometimes in a few pages,
with the perfect logic of a problem of Euclid, complicates and then
unravels some moral embarrassment, really worthy of a trained dramatic
expert. But the characters themselves, the agents in those difficult,
revealing situations, such a reader will recognise as old acquaintances
after the first reading, feeling for them as for some gifted and
attractive persons he has known in the actual world--Raoul de Chalys,
Henri de Lerne, Madame de Técle, Jeanne de la Roche-Ermel, Maurice de
Frémeuse, many others; to whom must now be added Bernard and Aliette de
Vaudricourt.
"How I love those people!" cries Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, of Madame
de Sévigné and some other of her literary favourites in the days of the
Grand Monarch. "What good company! What pleasure they took in high
things! How much more worthy they were than the people who live
now!"--What good company! That is precisely what the admirer of M.
Feuillet's books feels as one by one he places them on his book-shelf,
to be sought again. What is proposed here is not to tell his last
story, [221] but to give the English reader specimens of his most
recent effort at characterisation.
It is with the journal of Bernard himself that the story opens,
September 187-. Bernard-Maurice Hugon de Montauret, Vicomte de
Vaudricourt, is on a visit to his uncle, the head of his family, at La
Savinière, a country-house somewhere between Normandy and Brittany.
This uncle, an artificial old Parisian in manner, but honest in
purpose, a good talker, and full of real affection for his heir
Bernard, is one of M. Feuillet's good minor characters--one of the
quietly humorous figures with which he relieves his more serious
company. Bernard, with whom the refinements of a man of fashion in the
Parisian world by no means disguise a powerful intelligence cultivated
by wide reading, has had thoughts during his tedious stay at La
Savinière of writing a history of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth,
the library of a neighbouring château being rich in memoirs of that
period. Finally, he prefers to write his own story, a story so much
more interesting to himself; to write it at a peculiar crisis in his
life, the moment when his uncle, unmarried, but anxious to perpetuate
his race, is bent on providing him with a wife, and indeed has one in
view.
The accomplished Bernard, with many graces of person, by his own
confession, takes nothing seriously. As to that matter of religious
beliefs, "the breeze of the age, and of science, has blown [222] over
him, as it has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty space
there." Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departing from
him, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from all intelligent male
Parisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, a gaiety, serene and
imperturbable, has been the mainstay of his happily constituted
character. The girl to whom his uncle desires to see him united--odd,
quixotic, intelligent, with a sort of pathetic and delicate grace, and
herself very religious--belongs to an old-fashioned, devout family,.
resident at Varaville, near by. M. Feuillet, with half a dozen fine
touches of his admirable pencil makes us see the place. And the
enterprise has at least sufficient interest to keep Bernard in the
country, which the young Parisian detests. "This piquant episode of my
life," he writes, "seems to me to be really deserving of study; to be
worth etching off, day by day, by an observer well informed on the
subject."
Recognising in himself, though as his one real fault, that he can take
nothing seriously in heaven or earth, Bernard de Vaudricourt, like all
M. Feuillet's favourite young men, so often erring or corrupt, is a man
of scrupulous "honour." He has already shown disinterestedness in
wishing his rich uncle to marry again. His friends at Varaville think
so well-mannered a young man more of a Christian than he really is;
and, at all events, he will never owe his happiness to a falsehood. If
he has great faults, [223] hypocrisy at least is no part of them. In
oblique paths he finds himself ill at ease. Decidedly, as he thinks,
he was born for straight ways, for loyalty in all his enterprises; and
he congratulates himself upon the fact.
In truth, Bernard has merits which he ignores, at least in this first
part of his journal: merits which are necessary to explain the
influence he is able to exercise from the first over such a character
as Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. His charm, in fact, is in the union of
that gay and apparently wanton nature with a genuine power of
appreciating devotion in others, which becomes devotion in himself.
With all the much-cherished elegance and worldly glitter of his
personality, he is capable of apprehending, of understanding and being
touched by the presence of great matters. In spite of that happy
lightness of heart, so jealously fenced about, he is to be wholly
caught at last, as he is worthy to be, by the serious, the generous
influence of things. In proportion to his immense worldly strength is
his capacity for the immense pity which breaks his heart.
In a few life-like touches M. Feuillet brings out, as if it were indeed
a thing of ordinary existence, the simple yet delicate life of a French
country-house, the ideal life in an ideal France. Bernard is paying a
morning visit at the old turreted home of the "prehistoric" Courteheuse
family. Mademoiselle Aliette de Courteheuse, a studious girl, though a
bold and excellent rider [224] --Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, "with her
hair of that strange colour of fine ashes"--has conducted her visitor
to see the library:
One day she took me to see the library, rich in works of the
seventeenth century and in memoirs relating to that time. I remarked
there also a curious collection of engravings of the same period.
"Your father," I observed, "had a strong predilection for the age of
Louis the Fourteenth."
"My father lived in that age," she answered gravely. And as I looked
at her with surprise, and a little embarrassed, she added, "He made me
live there too, in his company."
And then the eyes of this singular girl filled with tears. She turned
away, took a few steps to suppress her emotion, and returning, pointed
me to a chair. Then seating herself on the step of the book-case, she
said, "I must explain my father to you."
She was half a minute collecting her thoughts: then, speaking with an
expansion of manner not habitual with her, hesitating, and blushing
deeply, whenever she was about to utter a word that might seem a shade
too serious for lips so youthful:--"My father," she proceeded, "died of
the consequences of a wound he had received at Patay. That may show
you that he loved his country, but he was no lover of his own age. He
possessed in the highest degree the love of order; and order was a
thing nowhere to be seen. He had a horror of disorder; and he saw it
everywhere. In those last years, especially, his reverence, his
beliefs, his tastes, all alike were ruffled to the point of actual
suffering, by whatever was done and said and written around him.
Deeply saddened by the conditions of the present time, he habituated
himself to find a refuge in the past, and the seventeenth century more
particularly offered him the kind of society in which he would have
wished to live--a society, well-ordered, polished, lettered, believing.
More and more he loved to shut himself up in it. More and more also he
loved to make the moral discipline and the literary tastes of that
favourite age prevail in his own household. You may even have remarked
that he carried his predilection into minute matters of arrangement and
decoration. You can see from this window the straight paths, the box
in [225] patterns, the yew trees and clipped alleys of our garden. You
may notice that in our garden-beds we have none but flowers of the
period--lilies, rose-mallows, immortelles, rose-pinks, in short what
people call parsonage flowers--des fleurs de curé. Our old silvan
tapestries, similarly, are of that age. You see too that all our
furniture, from presses and sideboards, down to our little tables and
our arm-chairs, is in the severest style of Louis the Fourteenth. My
father did not appreciate the dainty research of our modern luxury. He
maintained that our excessive care for the comforts of life weakened
mind as well as body. That," added the girl with a laugh,--"that is
why you find your chair so hard when you come to see us."
Then, with resumed gravity--"It was thus that my father endeavoured, by
the very aspect and arrangement of outward things, to promote in
himself the imaginary presence of the epoch in which his thoughts
delighted. As for myself--need I tell you that I was the confidant of
that father, so well-beloved: a confidant touched by his sorrows, full
of indignation at his disappointments, charmed by his consolations.
Here, precisely--surrounded by those books which we read together, and
which he taught me to love--it is here that I have passed the
pleasantest hours of my youth. In common we indulged our enthusiasm
for those days of faith; of the quiet life; its blissful hours of
leisure well-secured; for the French language in its beauty and purity;
the delicate, the noble urbanity, which was then the honour and the
special mark of our country, but has ceased to be so."
She paused, with a little confusion, as I thought, at the warmth of her
last words.
And then, just to break the silence, "You have explained," I said, "an
impression which I have experienced again and again in my visits here,
and which has sometimes reached the intensity of an actual illusion,
though a very agreeable one. The look of your house, its style, its
tone and keeping, carried me two centuries back so completely that I
should hardly have been surprised to hear Monsieur le Prince, Madame de
la Fayette, or Madame de Sévigné herself, announced at your
drawing-room door."
"Would it might be!" said Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. [226] "Ah!
Monsieur, how I love those people! What good company! What pleasure
they took in high things! How much more worthy they were than the
people who live now!" I tried to calm a little this retrospective
enthusiasm, so much to the prejudice of my contemporaries and of
myself. "Most truly, Mademoiselle," I said, "the age which you regret
had its rare merits--merits which I appreciate as you do. But then,
need one say that that society, so regular, so choice in appearance,
had, like our own, below the surface, its troubles, its disorders? I
see here many of the memoirs of that time. I can't tell exactly which
of them you may or may not have read, and so I feel a certain
difficulty in speaking."
She interrupted me: "Ah!" she said, with entire simplicity, "I
understand you. I have not read all you see here. But I have read
enough of it to know that my friends in that past age had, like those
who live now, their passions, their weaknesses, their mistakes. But,
as my father used to say to me, all that did but pass over a ground of
what was solid and serious, which always discovered itself again anew.
There were great faults then; but there were also great repentances.
There was a certain higher region to which everything conducted--even
what as evil." She blushed deeply: then rising a little suddenly, "A
long speech!" she said: "Forgive me! I am not usually so very
talkative. It is because my father was in question; and I should wish
his memory to be as dear and as venerable to all the rest of the world
as it is to me."
We pass over the many little dramatic intrigues and misunderstandings,
with the more or less adroit interferences of the uncle, which raise
and lower alternately Bernard's hopes. M. Feuillet has more than once
tried his hand with striking success in the portraiture of French
ecclesiastics. He has drawn none better than the Bishop of Saint-Méen,
uncle of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, to whose interests he is devoted.
Bernard feels that to gain the influence of this prelate [227] would be
to gain his cause; and the opportunity for an interview comes.
Monseigneur de Courteheuse would seem to be little over fifty years of
age: he is rather tall, and very thin: the eyes, black and full of
life, are encircled by a ring of deep brown. His speech and gesture
are animated, and, at times, as if carried away. He adopts frequently
a sort of furious manner which on a sudden melts into the smile of an
honest man. He has beautiful silvery hair, flying in vagrant locks
over his forehead, and beautiful bishop's hands. As he becomes calm he
has an imposing way of gently resettling himself in his sacerdotal
dignity. To sum up: his is a physiognomy full of passion, consumed
with zeal, yet still frank and sincere.
I was hardly seated, when with a motion of the hand he invited me to
speak.
"Monseigneur!" I said, "I come to you (you understand me?) as to my
last resource. What I am now doing is almost an act of despair; for it
might seem at first sight that no member of the family of Mademoiselle
de Courteheuse must show himself more pitiless than yourself towards
the faults with which I am reproached. I am an unbeliever: you are an
apostle! And yet, Monseigneur, it is often at the hands of saintly
priests, such as yourself, that the guilty find most indulgence. And
then, I am not indeed guilty: I have but wandered. I am refused the
hand of your niece because I do not share her faith--your own faith.
But, Monseigneur, unbelief is not a crime, it is a misfortune. I know
people often say, a man denies God when by his own conduct he has
brought himself into a condition in which he may well desire that God
does not exist. In this way he is made guilty, or, in a sense,
responsible for his incredulity. For myself, Monseigneur, I have
consulted my conscience with an entire sincerity; and although my youth
has been amiss, I am certain that my atheism proceeds from no sentiment
of personal interest. On the contrary, I may tell you with truth that
the day on which I perceived my faith come to nought, the day on which
I lost hope in God, I shed the bitterest tears of my life. In spite of
appearances, I am not so light a spirit as people think. I am not one
of those for whom God, when He disappears, [228] leaves no sense of a
void place. Believe me!--a man may love sport, his club, his worldly
habits, and yet have his hours of thought, of self-recollection. Do
you suppose that in those hours one does not feel the frightful
discomfort of an existence with no moral basis, without principles,
with no outlook beyond this world? And yet, what can one do? You
would tell me forthwith, in the goodness, the compassion, which I read
in your eyes; Confide to me your objections to religion, and I will try
to solve them. Monseigneur, I should hardly know how to answer you.
My objections are 'Legion!' They are without number, like the stars in
the sky: they come to us on all sides, from every quarter of the
horizon, as if on the wings of the wind; and they leave in us, as they
pass, ruins only, and darkness. Such has been my experience, and that
of many others; and it has been as involuntary as it is irreparable."
"And I--Monsieur!" said the bishop, suddenly, casting on me one of his
august looks, "Do you suppose that I am but a play-actor in my
cathedral church?"
"Monseigneur!"
"Yes! Listening to you, one would suppose that we were come to a
period of the world in which one must needs be either an atheist or a
hypocrite! Personally, I claim to be neither one nor the other."
"Need I defend myself on that point, Monseigneur? Need I say that I
did not come here to give you offence?"
"Doubtless! doubtless! Well, Monsieur, I admit; not without great
reserves, mind! for one is always more or less responsible for the
atmosphere in which he lives, the influences to which he is subject,
for the habitual turn he gives to his thoughts; still, I admit that you
are the victim of the incredulity of the age, that you are altogether
guiltless in your scepticism, your atheism! since you have no fear of
hard words. Is it therefore any the less certain that the union of a
fervent believer, such as my niece, with a man like yourself would be a
moral disorder of which the consequences might be disastrous? Do you
think it could be my duty, as a relative of Mademoiselle de
Courteheuse, her spiritual father, as a prelate of the Church, to lend
my hands to such disorder, to preside over the shocking union of two
souls separated by the whole width of heaven?"
[229] The bishop, in proposing that question, kept his eyes fixed
ardently on mine.
"Monseigneur," I answered, after a moment's embarrassment, "you know as
well as, and better than I, the condition of the world, and of our
country, at this time. You know that unhappily I am not an exception:
that men of faith are rare in it. And permit me to tell you my whole
mind. If I must needs suffer the inconsolable misfortune of renouncing
the happiness I had hoped for, are you quite sure that the man to whom
one of these days you will give your niece may not be something more
than a sceptic, or even an atheist?"
"What, Monsieur?"
"A hypocrite, Monseigneur! Mademoiselle de Courteheuse is beautiful
enough, rich enough, to excite the ambition of those who may be less
scrupulous than I. As for me, if you now know that I am a sceptic, you
know also that I am a man of honour: and there is something in that!"
"A man of honour!" the bishop muttered to himself, with a little
petulance and hesitation. "A man of honour! Yes, I believe it!"
Then, after an interval, "Come, Monsieur," he said gently, "your case
is not as desperate as you suppose. My Aliette is one of those young
enthusiasts through whom Heaven sometimes works miracles." And Bernard
refusing any encouragement of that hope (the "very roots of faith are
dead" in him for ever) "since you think that," the bishop answers, "it
is honest to say so. But God has His ways!"
Soon after, the journal comes to an end with that peculiar crisis in
Bernard's life which had suggested the writing of it. Aliette, with
the approval of her family, has given him her hand. Bernard accepts it
with the full purpose of doing all he can to make his wife as happy as
she is charming and beloved. The virginal first period of their
married life in their dainty house in Paris--the pure and beautiful
picture of the mother, the father, and at last the child, a little
[230] girl, Jeanne--is presented with M. Feuillet's usual grace.
Certain embarrassments succeed; the development of what was ill-matched
in their union; but still with mutual loyalty. A far-reaching
acquaintance with, and reflection upon, the world and its ways,
especially the Parisian world, has gone into the apparently slight
texture of these pages. The accomplished playwright may be recognised
in the skilful touches with which M. Feuillet, unrivalled, as his
regular readers know, in his power of breathing higher notes into the
frivolous prattle of fashionable French life, develops the tragic germ
in the elegant, youthful household. Amid the distractions of a
society, frivolous, perhaps vulgar, Aliette's mind is still set on
greater things; and, in spite of a thousand rude discouragements, she
maintains her generous hope for Bernard's restoration to faith. One
day, a little roughly, he bids her relinquish that dream finally. She
looks at him with the moist, suppliant eyes of some weak animal at bay.
Then his native goodness returns. In a softened tone he owns himself
wrong.
"As to conversions;--no one must be despaired of. Do you remember M.
de Rancé? He lived in your favourite age;--M. de Rancé. Well! before
he became the reformer of La Trappe he had been a worldling like me,
and a great sceptic--what people called a libertine. Still he became a
saint! It is true he had a terrible reason for it. Do you know what
it was converted him?"
Aliette gave a sign that she did not know.
"Well! he returned to Paris after a few days' absence. He [231] ran
straight to the lady he loved; Madame Montbazon, I think: he went up a
little staircase of which he had the key, and the first thing he saw on
the table in the middle of the room was the head of his mistress, of
which the doctors were about to make a post-mortem examination."
"If I were sure," said Aliette, "that my head could have such power, I
would love to die."
She said it in a low voice, but with such an accent of loving sincerity
that her husband had a sensation of a sort of painful disquiet. He
smiled, however, and tapping her cheek softly, "Folly!" he said. "A
head, charming as yours, has no need to be dead that it may work
miracles!"
Certainly M. Feuillet has some weighty charges to bring against the
Parisian society of our day. When Aliette revolts from a world of
gossip, which reduces all minds alike to the same level of vulgar
mediocrity, Bernard, on his side, can perceive there a deterioration of
moral tone which shocks his sense of honour. As a man of honour, he
can hardly trust his wife to the gaieties of a society which welcomes
all the world "to amuse itself in undress."
It happened that at this perplexed period in the youthful household,
one and the same person became the recipient both of the tearful
confidences of Madame de Vaudricourt and those of her husband. It was
the Duchess of Castel-Moret [she is another of M. Feuillet's admirable
minor sketches] an old friend of the Vaudricourt family, and the only
woman with whom Aliette since her arrival in Paris had formed a kind of
intimacy. The Duchess was far from sharing, on points of morality, and
above all of religion, the severe and impassioned orthodoxy of her
young friend. She had lived, it is true, an irreproachable life, but
less in consequence of defined principles than by instinct and natural
taste. She admitted to herself that she was an honest woman as a result
of her birth, and had no further merit in the matter. She was old, very
careful of [232] herself, and a pleasant aroma floated about her, below
her silvery hair. People loved her for her grace--the grace of another
time than ours--for her wit, and her worldly wisdom, which she placed
freely at the disposal of the public. Now and then she made a match:
but her special gift lay rather in the way in which she came to the
rescue when a marriage turned out ill. And she had no sinecure: the
result was that she passed the best part of her time in repairing
family rents. That might "last its time," she would say. "And then we
know that what has been well mended sometimes lasts better than what is
new."
A little later, Bernard, in the interest of Aliette, has chivalrously
determined to quit Paris. At Valmoutiers, a fine old place in the
neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, they established themselves for a
country life. Here Aliette tastes the happiest days since her
marriage. Bernard, of course, after a little time is greatly bored.
But so far they have never seriously doubted of their great love for
each other. It is here that M. Feuillet brings on the scene a kind of
character new in his books; perhaps hardly worthy of the other company
there; a sort of female Monsieur de Camors, but without his grace and
tenderness, and who actually commits a crime. How would the morbid
charms of M. de Camors have vanished, if, as his wife once suspected of
him, he had ever contemplated crime! And surely, the showy insolent
charms of Sabine de Tallevaut, beautiful, intellectually gifted,
supremely Amazonian, yet withal not drawn with M. Feuillet's usual
fineness, scarcely hold out for the reader, any more than for [233]
Bernard himself, in the long run, against the vulgarising touch of her
cold wickedness. Living in the neighbourhood of Valmoutiers, in a
somewhat melancholy abode (the mystery of which in the eyes of Bernard
adds to her poetic charm) with her guardian, an old, rich, freethinking
doctor, devoted to research, she comes to Valmoutiers one night in his
company on the occasion of the alarming illness of the only child.
They arrive escorted by Bernard himself. The little Jeanne, wrapped in
her coverlet, was placed upon the table of her play-room, which was
illuminated as if for a party. The illness, the operation (skilfully
performed by the old doctor) which restores her to life, are described
with that seemingly simple pathos in which M. Feuillet's consummate art
hides itself. Sabine remains to watch the child's recovery, and
becomes an intimate. In vain Bernard struggles against the first real
passion of his life;--does everything but send its object out of his
sight. Aliette has divined their secret. In the fatal illness which
follows soon after, Bernard watches over her with tender solicitude;
hoping against hope that the disease may take a favourable turn.
"My child," he said to her one day, taking the hand which she abandoned
to him, "I have just been scolding old Victoire. She is losing her
head. In spite of the repeated assurances of the doctors, she is
alarmed at seeing you a little worse than usual to-day, and has had the
Curé sent for. Do you wish to see him?"
"Pray let me see him!"
[234] She sighed heavily, and fixed upon her husband her large blue
eyes, full of anguish--an anguish so sharp and so singular that he felt
frozen to the marrow.
He could not help saying with deep emotion, "Do you love me no longer,
Aliette?"
"For ever!" murmured the poor child.
He leaned over her with a long kiss upon the forehead. She saw tears
stealing from the eyes of her husband, and seemed as if surprised.
Soon afterwards Aliette is dead, to the profound sorrow of Bernard.
Less than two years later he has become the husband of Mademoiselle
Tallevaut. It was about two years after his marriage with Sabine that
Bernard resumed the journal with which we began. In the pages which he
now adds he seems at first unchanged. How then as to that story of M.
de Rancé, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head of his dead
mistress; an incident which the reader of La Morte will surely have
taken as a "presentiment"? Aliette had so taken it. "A head so
charming as yours," Bernard had assured her tenderly, "does not need to
be dead that it may work miracles!"--How, in the few pages that remain,
will M. Feuillet justify that, and certain other delicate touches of
presentiment, and at the same time justify the title of his book?
The journal is recommenced in February. On the twentieth of April
Bernard writes, at Valmoutiers:
Under pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come to pass a
week at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air. By my orders they have
kept Aliette's room under lock and key since [235] the day when she
left it in her coffin. To-day I re-entered it for the first time.
There was a vague odour of her favourite perfumes. My poor Aliette!
why was I unable, as you so ardently desired, to share your gentle
creed, and associate myself to the life of your dreams, the life of
honesty and peace? Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems to
me like paradise. What a terrible scene it was, here in this room!
What a memory! I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a look
almost of terror! and how quickly she died! I have taken the room for
my own. But I shall not remain here long. I intend to go for a few
days to Varaville. I want to see my little girl: her dear angel's face.
VALMOUTIERS, April 22.--What a change there has been in the world since
my childhood: since my youth even! what a surprising change in so short
a period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing! Then we were, as it
were, impregnated with the thought of God--a just God, but benevolent
and fatherlike. We really lived under His eyes, as under the eyes of a
parent, with respect and fear, but with confidence. We felt sustained
by His invisible but undoubted presence. We spoke to Him, and it
seemed that He answered. And now we feel ourselves alone--as it were
abandoned in the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard,
savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle for
existence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements, let
loose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, with
no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above us, in place of
the good God of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse than
nothing--a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares nothing at all
about us.
The aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter, is
lately dead. Bernard proposes to take the child away with him to
Paris. The child's old nurse objects. On April the twenty-seventh,
Bernard writes:
For a moment--for a few moments--in that room where I have been
shutting myself up with the shadow of my poor [236] dead one, a
horrible thought had come to me. I had driven it away as an insane
fancy. But now, yes! it is becoming a reality. Shall I write this?
Yes! I will write it. It is my duty to do so; for from this moment
the journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart, is but my last will and
testament. If I should disappear from the world, the secret must not
die with me. It must be bequeathed to the natural protectors of my
child. Her interests, if not her life, are concerned therein.
Here, then, is what passed: I had not arrived in time to render my last
duty to Madame de Courteheuse. The family was already dispersed. I
found here only Aliette's brother. To him I communicated my plan
concerning the child, and he could but approve. My intention was to
bring away with Jeanne her nurse Victoire, who had brought her up, as
she brought up her mother. But she is old, and in feeble health, and I
feared some difficulties on her part; the more as her attitude towards
myself since the death of my first wife has been marked by an ill grace
approaching to hostility. I took her aside while Jeanne was playing in
the garden.
"My good Victoire," I said, "while Madame de Courteheuse was living, I
considered it a duty to leave her granddaughter in her keeping.
Besides, no one was better fitted to watch over her education. At
present my duty is to watch over it myself. I propose therefore to take
Jeanne with me to Paris; and I hope that you may be willing to
accompany her, and remain in her service." When she understood my
intention, the old woman, in whose hands I had noticed a faint
trembling, became suddenly very pale. She fixed her firm, grey eyes
upon me: "Monsieur le Comte will not do that!"
"Pardon me, my good Victoire, that I shall do. I appreciate your good
qualities of fidelity and devotion. I shall be very grateful if you
will continue to take care of my daughter, as you have done so
excellently. But for the rest, I intend to be the only master in my
own house, and the only master of my child." She laid a hand upon my
arm: "I implore you, Monsieur, don't do this!" Her fixed look did not
leave my face, and seemed to be questioning me to the very bottom of my
soul. "I have never believed it," she murmured, "No! I [237] never
could believe it. But if you take the child away I shall."
"Believe what, wretched woman? believe what?"
Her voice sank lower still. "Believe that you knew how her mother came
by her death; and that you mean the daughter to die as she did."
"Die as her mother did?"
"Yes! by the same hand!"
The sweat came on my forehead. I felt as it were a breathing of death
upon me. But still I thrust away from me that terrible light on things.
"Victoire!" I said, "take care! You are no fool: you are something
worse. Your hatred of the woman who has taken the place of my first
wife--your blind hatred--has suggested to you odious, nay! criminal
words."
"Ah! Ah! Monsieur", she cried with wild energy. "After what I have
just told you, take your daughter to live with that woman if you dare."
I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses. Then,
returning to the old woman, "Yet how can I believe you?" I asked. "If
you had had the shadow of a proof of what you give me to understand,
how could you have kept silence so long? How could you have allowed me
to contract that hateful marriage?"
She seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler. "Monsieur, it
is because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oath on the
crucifix to keep that secret for ever."
"Yet not with me, in fact,--not with me!" And I, in turn, questioned
her; my eyes upon hers. She hesitated: then stammered out, "True! not
with you! because she believed, poor little soul! that..."
"What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice? Tell
me!" Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. "Is it possible, my God,
is it possible? But come, sit by me here, and tell me all you know,
all you saw. At what time was it you noticed anything--the precise
moment?" For in truth she had been suffering for a long time past.
Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's [238] crime--we must
pardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary world
M. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of fully
knowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised her in the
very act, and did not credit her explanation. "When I surprised her,"
she goes on:
"It may already have been too late--be sure it was not the first time
she had been guilty--my first thought was to give you information. But
I had not the courage. Then I told Madame. I thought I saw plainly
that I had nothing to tell she was not already aware of. Nevertheless
she chided me almost harshly. 'You know very well,' she said, 'that my
husband is always there when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. So
that he too would be guilty. Rather than believe that, I would accept
death at his hands a hundred times over!' And I remember, Monsieur,
how at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from the
little boudoir, and brought her a glass of valerian. She cast on me a
terrible look and drank. A few minutes afterwards she was so ill that
she thought the end was come. She begged me to give her her crucifix,
and made me swear never to utter a word concerning our suspicions. It
was then I sent for the priest. I have told you, Monsieur, what I
know; what I have seen with my own eyes. I swear that I have said
nothing but what is absolutely true." She paused. I could not answer
her. I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them to
my forehead, and wept like a child.
May 10.--She died believing me guilty! The thought is terrible to me.
I know not what to do. A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet.
"Yes!" she said to herself, "my husband is a murderer; what he is
giving me is poison, and he knows it." She died with that thought in
her mind--her last thought. And she will never, never know that it was
not so; that I am innocent; that the thought is torment to me: that I
am the most unhappy of men. Ah! God, all-powerful! if you indeed
exist, you see what I suffer. Have pity on me!
Ah! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between [239] her
and me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew the truth. But I
find it impossible! impossible!
June.--That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she will never
be undeceived.
All seems so completely ended when one dies. All returns to its first
elements. How credit that miracle of a personal resurrection? and yet
in truth all is mystery,--miracle, around us, about us, within
ourselves. The entire universe is but a continuous miracle. Man's new
birth from the womb of death--is it a mystery less comprehensible than
his birth from the womb of his mother?
Those lines are the last written by Bernard de Vaudricourt. His health,
for some time past disturbed by grief, was powerless against the
emotions of the last terrible trial imposed on him. A malady, the
exact nature of which was not determined, in a few days assumed a
mortal character. Perceiving that his end was come, he caused
Monseigneur de Courteheuse to be summoned--he desired to die in the
religion of Aliette. Living, the poor child had been defeated: she
prevailed in her death.
Two distinguished souls! deux êtres d'élite--M. Feuillet thinks--whose
fine qualities properly brought them together. When Mademoiselle de
Courteheuse said of the heroes of her favourite age, that their
passions, their errors, did but pass over a ground of what was solid
and serious, and which always discovered itself afresh, she was
unconsciously describing Bernard. Singular young brother of Monsieur
de Camors--after all, certainly, more fortunate than he--he belongs to
the age, which, if it had great faults, had also great repentances. In
appearance, frivolous; with all the light charm of the world, yet with
that impressibility to great things, according to the law which makes
the best of M. Feuillet's [240] characters so interesting; above all,
with that capacity for pity which almost everything around him tended
to suppress; in real life, if he exists there, and certainly in M.
Feuillet's pages, it is a refreshment to meet him.
1886.