"Prends garde a moi, ma fille, et couvre moi bien!" Marceline Desbordes-
Valmore, writing from France to her daughter Ondine, who was delicate and
chilly in London in 1841, has the same solicitous, journeying fancy as
was expressed by two other women, both also Frenchwomen, and both
articulate in tenderness. Eugenie de Guerin, that queen of sisters, had
preceded her with her own complaint, "I have a pain in my brother's
side"; and in another age Mme. de Sevigne had suffered, in the course of
long posts and through infrequent letters--a protraction of conjectured
pain--within the frame of her absent daughter. She phrased her plight in
much the same words, confessing the uncancelled union with her child that
had effaced for her the boundaries of her personal life.
Is not what we call a life--the personal life--a separation from the
universal life, a seclusion, a division, a cleft, a wound? For these
women, such a severance was in part healed, made whole, closed up, and
cured. Life was restored between two at a time of human-kind. Did these
three women guess that their sufferings of sympathy with their children
were indeed the signs of a new and universal health--the prophecy of
human unity?
The sign might have been a more manifest and a happier prophecy had this
union of tenderness taken the gay occasion as often as the sad. Except
at times, in the single case of Mme. de Sevigne, all three--far more
sensitive than the rest of the world--were yet not sensitive enough to
feel equally the less sharp communication of joy. They claimed, owned,
and felt sensibly the pangs and not the pleasures of the absent. Or if
not only the pangs, at least they were apprehensive chiefly in that sense
which human anxiety and foreboding have lent to the word; they were
apprehensive of what they feared. "Are you warm?" writes Marceline
Valmore to her child. "You have so little to wear--are you really warm?
Oh, take care of me--cover me well." Elsewhere she says, "You are an
insolent child to think of work. Nurse your health, and mine. Let us
live like fools"; whereby she meant that she should work with her own
fervent brain for both, and take the while her rest in Ondine. If this
living and unshortened love was sad, it must be owned that so, too, was
the story. Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin were both to die soon, and
Marceline was to lose this daughter and another.
But set free from the condition and occasion of pain and sorrow, this
life without boundaries which mothers have undergone seems to suggest and
to portend what the progressive charity of generations may be--and is, in
fact, though the continuity does not always appear--in the course of the
world. If a love and life without boundaries go down from a mother into
her child, and from that child into her children again, then
incalculable, intricate, universal, and eternal are the unions that
seem--and only seem--so to transcend the usual experience. The love of
such a mother passes unchanged out of her own sight. It drops down ages,
but why should it alter? What in her daughter should she make so much
her own as that daughter's love for her daughter in turn? There are no
lapses.
Marceline Valmore, married to an actor who seems to have "created the
classic genre" in vain, found the sons and daughters of other women in
want. Some of her rich friends, she avers, seem to think that the
sadness of her poems is a habit--a matter of metre and rhyme, or, at
most, that it is "temperament." But others take up the cause of those
whose woes, as she says, turned her long hair white too soon.
Sainte-Beuve gave her his time and influence, succoured twenty political
offenders at her instance, and gave perpetually to her poor. "He never
has any socks," said his mother; "he gives them all away, like Beranger."
"He gives them with a different accent," added the literary Marceline.
Even when the stroller's life took her to towns she did not hate, but
loved--her own Douai, where the names of the streets made her heart leap,
and where her statue stands, and Bordeaux, which was, in her eyes, "rosy
with the reflected colour of its animating wine"--she was taken away from
the country of her verse. The field and the village had been dear to
her, and her poems no longer trail and droop, but take wing, when they
come among winds, birds, bells, and waves. They fly with the whole
volley of a summer morning. She loved the sun and her liberty, and the
liberty of others. It was apparently a horror of prisons that chiefly
inspired her public efforts after certain riots at Lyons had been reduced
to peace. The dead were free, but for the prisoners she worked, wrote,
and petitioned. She looked at the sentinels at the gates of the Lyons
gaols with such eyes as might have provoked a shot, she thinks.
During her lifetime she very modestly took correction from her
contemporaries, for her study had hardly been enough for the whole art of
French verse. But Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Verlaine have praised
her as one of the poets of France. The later critics--from Verlaine
onwards--will hold that she needs no pardon for certain slight
irregularities in the grouping of masculine and feminine rhymes, for upon
this liberty they themselves have largely improved. The old rules in
their completeness seemed too much like a prison to her. She was set
about with importunate conditions--a caesura, a rhyme, narrow lodgings in
strange towns, bankruptcies, salaries astray--and she took only a little
gentle liberty.