There are, no doubt, many young girls in the world as pure as Veronique,
but none purer or more modest. Her confessions might have surprised the
angels and rejoiced the Blessed Virgin.
At sixteen years of age she was fully developed, and appeared the woman
she was eventually to become. She was of medium height, neither her
father nor her mother being tall; but her figure was charming in its
graceful suppleness, and in the serpentine curves laboriously sought by
painters and sculptors,--curves which Nature herself draws so delicately
with her lissom outlines, revealed to the eye of artists in spite of
swathing linen and thick clothes, which mould themselves, inevitably,
upon the nude. Sincere, simple, and natural, Veronique set these
beauties of her form into relief by movements that were wholly free from
affectation. She brought out her “full and complete effect,” if we may
borrow that strong term from legal phraseology. She had the plump arms
of the Auvergnat women, the red and dimpled hand of a barmaid, and her
strong but well-shaped feet were in keeping with the rest of her figure.
At times there seemed to pass within her a marvellous and delightful
phenomenon which promised to Love a woman concealed thus far from every
eye. This phenomenon was perhaps one cause of the admiration her
father and mother felt for her beauty, which they often declared to
be divine,--to the great astonishment of their neighbors. The first to
remark it were the priests of the cathedral and the worshippers with
her at the same altar. When a strong emotion took possession of
Veronique,--and the religious exaltation to which she yielded herself on
receiving the communion must be counted among the strongest emotions of
so pure and candid a young creature,--an inward light seemed to efface
for the moment all traces of the small-pox. The pure and radiant face of
her childhood reappeared in its pristine beauty. Though slightly veiled
by the thickened surface disease had laid there, it shone with the
mysterious brilliancy of a flower blooming beneath the water of the sea
when the sun is penetrating it. Veronique was changed for a few
moments; the Little Virgin reappeared and then disappeared again, like a
celestial vision. The pupils of her eyes, gifted with the power of great
expansion, widened until they covered the whole surface of the blue iris
except for a tiny circle. Thus the metamorphose of the eye, which became
as keen and vivid as that of an eagle, completed the extraordinary
change in the face. Was it the storm of restrained passions; was it some
power coming from the depths of the soul, which enlarged the pupils
in full daylight as they sometimes in other eyes enlarge by night,
darkening the azure of those celestial orbs?
However that may be, it was impossible to look indifferently at
Veronique as she returned to her seat from the altar where she had
united herself with God,--a moment when she appeared to all the parish
in her primitive splendor. At such moments her beauty eclipsed that
of the most beautiful of women. What a charm was there for the man who
loved her, guarding jealously that veil of flesh which hid the woman’s
soul from every eye,--a veil which the hand of love might lift for an
instant and then let drop over conjugal delights! Veronique’s lips were
faultlessly curved and painted in the clear vermilion of her pure warm
blood. Her chin and the lower part of her face were a little heavy, in
the acceptation given by painters to that term,--a heaviness which is,
according to the relentless laws of physiognomy, the indication of an
almost morbid vehemence in passion. She had above her brow, which was
finely modelled and almost imperious, a magnificent diadem of hair,
voluminous, redundant, and now of a chestnut color.
From the age of sixteen to the day of her marriage Veronique’s bearing
was always thoughtful, and sometimes melancholy. Living in such deep
solitude, she was forced, like other solitary persons, to examine and
consider the spectacle of that which went on within her,--the progress
of her thought, the variety of the images in her mind, and the scope of
feelings warmed and nurtured in a life so pure.
Those who looked up from their lower level as they passed along the
rue de la Cite might have seen, on all fine days, the daughter of the
Sauviats sitting at her open window, sewing, embroidering, or pricking
the needle through the canvas of her worsted-work, with a look that
was often dreamy. Her head was vividly defined among the flowers which
poetized the brown and crumbling sills of her casement windows
with their leaded panes. Sometimes the reflection of the red damask
window-curtains added to the effect of that head, already so highly
colored; like a crimson flower she glowed in the aerial garden so
carefully trained upon her window-sill.
The quaint old house possessed therefore something more quaint than
itself,--the portrait of a young girl worthy of Mieris, or Van Ostade,
or Terburg, or Gerard Douw, framed in one of those old, defaced, half
ruined windows the brushes of the old Dutch painters loved so well. When
some stranger, surprised or interested by the building, stopped before
it and gazed at the second story, old Sauviat would poke his head beyond
the overhanging projection, certain that he should see his daughter at
her window. Then he would retreat into the shop rubbing his hands and
saying to his wife in the Auvergne vernacular:--
“Hey! old woman; they’re admiring your daughter!”
In 1820 an incident occurred in the simple uneventful life the girl was
leading, which might have had no importance in the life of any other
young woman, but which, in point of fact, did no doubt exercise over
Veronique’s future a terrible influence.
On one of the suppressed church fete-days, when many persons went about
their daily labor, though the Sauviats scrupulously closed their shop,
attended mass, and took a walk, Veronique passed, on their way to the
fields, a bookseller’s stall on which lay a copy of “Paul and Virginia.”
She had a fancy to buy it for the sake of the engraving, and her father
paid a hundred sous for the fatal volume, which he put into the pocket
of his coat.
“Wouldn’t it be well to show that book to Monsieur le vicaire before
you read it?” said her mother, to whom all printed books were a sealed
mystery.
“I thought of it,” answered Veronique.
The girl passed the whole night reading the story,--one of the most
touching bits of writing in the French language. The picture of mutual
love, half Biblical and worthy of the earlier ages of the world, ravaged
her heart. A hand--was it divine or devilish?--raised the veil which,
till then, had hidden nature from her. The Little Virgin still existing
in the beautiful young girl thought on the morrow that her flowers had
never been so beautiful; she heard their symbolic language, she looked
into the depths of the azure sky with a fixedness that was almost
ecstasy, and tears without a cause rolled down her cheeks.
In the life of all women there comes a moment when they comprehend their
destiny,--when their hitherto mute organization speaks peremptorily.
It is not always a man, chosen by some furtive involuntary glance, who
awakens their slumbering sixth sense; oftener it is some unexpected
sight, the aspect of scenery, the _coup d’oeil_ of religious pomp, the
harmony of nature’s perfumes, a rosy dawn veiled in slight mists, the
winning notes of some divinest music, or indeed any unexpected motion
within the soul or within the body. To this lonely girl, buried in that
old house, brought up by simple, half rustic parents, who had never
heard an unfit word, whose pure unsullied mind had never known the
slightest evil thought,--to the angelic pupil of Soeur Marthe and the
vicar of Saint-Etienne the revelation of love, the life of womanhood,
came from the hand of genius through one sweet book. To any other
mind the book would have offered no danger; to her it was worse in its
effects than an obscene tale. Corruption is relative. There are chaste
and virgin natures which a single thought corrupts, doing all the more
harm because no thought of the duty of resistance has occurred.
The next day Veronique showed the book to the good priest, who approved
the purchase; for what could be more childlike and innocent and pure
than the history of Paul and Virginia? But the warmth of the tropics,
the beauty of the scenery, the almost puerile innocence of a love that
seemed so sacred had done their work on Veronique. She was led by the
sweet and noble achievement of its author to the worship of the Ideal,
that fatal human religion! She dreamed of a lover like Paul. Her
thoughts caressed the voluptuous image of that balmy isle. Childlike,
she named an island in the Vienne, below Limoges and nearly opposite to
the Faubourg Saint-Martial, the Ile de France. Her mind lived there in
the world of fancy all young girls construct,--a world they enrich with
their own perfections. She spent long hours at her window, looking
at the artisans or the mechanics who passed it, the only men whom the
modest position of her parents allowed her to think of. Accustomed, of
course, to the idea of eventually marrying a man of the people, she
now became aware of instincts within herself which revolved from all
coarseness.
In such a situation she naturally made many a romance such as young
girls are fond of weaving. She clasped the idea--perhaps with the
natural ardor of a noble and virgin imagination--of ennobling one of
those men, and of raising him to the height where her own dreams led
her. She may have made a Paul of some young man who caught her eye,
merely to fasten her wild ideas on an actual being, as the mists of a
damp atmosphere, touched by frost, crystallize on the branches of a tree
by the wayside. She must have flung herself deep into the abysses of
her dream, for though she often returned bearing on her brow, as if from
vast heights, some luminous reflections, oftener she seemed to carry in
her hand the flowers that grew beside a torrent she had followed down a
precipice.
On the warm summer evenings she would ask her father to take her on his
arm to the banks of the Vienne, where she went into ecstasies over the
beauties of the sky and fields, the glories of the setting sun, or
the infinite sweetness of the dewy evening. Her soul exhaled itself
thenceforth in a fragrance of natural poesy. Her hair, until then simply
wound about her head, she now curled and braided. Her dress showed
some research. The vine which was running wild and naturally among the
branches of the old elm, was transplanted, cut and trained over a green
and pretty trellis.
After the return of old Sauviat (then seventy years of age) from a trip
to Paris in December, 1822, the vicar came to see him one evening, and
after a few insignificant remarks he said suddenly:--
“You had better think of marrying your daughter, Sauviat. At your age
you ought not to put off the accomplishment of so important a duty.”
“But is Veronique willing to be married?” asked the old man, startled.
“As you please, father,” she said, lowering her eyes.
“Yes, we’ll marry her!” cried stout Madame Sauviat, smiling.
“Why didn’t you speak to me about it before I went to Paris, mother?”
said Sauviat. “I shall have to go back there.”
Jerome-Baptiste Sauviat, a man in whose eyes money seemed to constitute
the whole of happiness, who knew nothing of love, and had never seen
in marriage anything but the means of transmitting property to another
self, had long sworn to marry Veronique to some rich bourgeois,--so
long, in fact, that the idea had assumed in his brain the
characteristics of a hobby. His neighbor, the hat-maker, who possessed
about two thousand francs a year, had already asked, on behalf of his
son, to whom he proposed to give up his hat-making establishment, the
hand of a girl so well known in the neighborhood for her exemplary
conduct and Christian principles. Sauviat had politely refused, without
saying anything to Veronique. The day after the vicar--a very important
personage in the eyes of the Sauviat household--had mentioned the
necessary of marrying Veronique, whose confessor he was, the old man
shaved and dressed himself as for a fete-day, and went out without
saying a word to his wife or daughter; both knew very well, however,
that the father was in search of a son-in-law. Old Sauviat went to
Monsieur Graslin.
Monsieur Graslin, a rich banker in Limoges, had, like Sauviat himself,
started from Auvergne without a penny; he came to Limoges to be a
porter, found a place as an office-boy in a financial house, and there,
like many other financiers, he made his way by dint of economy, and also
through fortunate circumstances. Cashier at twenty-five years of age,
partner ten years later, in the firm of Perret and Grossetete, he ended
by finding himself the head of the house, after buying out the senior
partners, both of whom retired into the country, leaving him their funds
to manage in the business at a low interest.
Pierre Graslin, then forty-seven years of age, was supposed to possess
about six hundred thousand francs. The estimate of his fortune had
lately increased throughout the department, in consequence of his outlay
in having built, in a new quarter of the town called the place d’Arbres
(thus assisting to give Limoges an improved aspect), a fine house, the
front of it being on a line with a public building with the facade of
which it corresponded. This house had now been finished six months, but
Pierre Graslin delayed furnishing it; it had cost him so much that he
shrank from the further expense of living in it. His vanity had led him
to transgress the wise laws by which he governed his life. He felt, with
the good sense of a business man, that the interior of the house
ought to correspond with the character of the outside. The furniture,
silver-ware, and other needful accessories to the life he would have to
lead in his new mansion would, he estimated, cost him nearly as much as
the original building. In spite, therefore, of the gossip of tongues and
the charitable suppositions of his neighbors, he continued to live on
in the damp, old, and dirty ground-floor apartment in the rue
Montantmanigne where his fortune had been made. The public carped,
but Graslin had the approval of his former partners, who praised a
resolution that was somewhat uncommon.
A fortune and a position like those of Pierre Graslin naturally excited
the greed of not a few in a small provincial city. During the last
ten years more than one proposition of marriage had been intimated to
Monsieur Graslin. But the bachelor state was so well suited to a man
who was busy from morning till night, overrun with work, eager in the
pursuit of money as a hunter for game, and always tired out with his
day’s labor, that Graslin fell into none of the traps laid for him
by ambitious mothers who coveted so brilliant a position for their
daughters.
Graslin, another Sauviat in an upper sphere, did not spend more than
forty sous a day, and clothed himself no better than his under-clerk.
Two clerks and an office-boy sufficed him to carry on his business,
which was immense through the multiplicity of its details. One clerk
attended to the correspondence; the other had charge of the accounts;
but Pierre Graslin was himself the soul, and body too, of the whole
concern. His clerks, chosen from his own relations, were safe men,
intelligent and as well-trained in the work as himself. As for the
office-boy, he led the life of a truck horse,--up at five in the morning
at all seasons, and never getting to bed before eleven at night.
Graslin employed a charwoman by the day, an old peasant from Auvergne,
who did his cooking. The brown earthenware off which he ate, and the
stout coarse linen which he used, were in keeping with the character of
his food. The old woman had strict orders never to spend more than three
francs daily for the total expenses of the household. The office-boy
was also man-of-all-work. The clerks took care of their own rooms. The
tables of blackened wood, the straw chairs half unseated, the wretched
beds, the counters and desks, in short, the whole furniture of house and
office was not worth more than a thousand francs, including a colossal
iron safe, built into the wall, before which slept the man-of-all-work
with two dogs at his feet.
Graslin did not often go into society, which, however, discussed
him constantly. Two or three times a year he dined with the
receiver-general, with whom his business brought him into occasional
intercourse. He also occasionally took a meal at the prefecture; for he
had been appointed, much to his regret, a member of the Council-general
of the department--“a waste of time,” he remarked. Sometimes his brother
bankers with whom he had dealings kept him to breakfast or dinner; and
he was forced also to visit his former partners, who spent their winters
in Limoges. He cared so little to keep up his relations to society that
in twenty-five years Graslin had not offered so much as a glass of water
to any one. When he passed along the street persons would nudge each
other and say: “That’s Monsieur Graslin”; meaning, “There’s a man
who came to Limoges without a penny and has now acquired an enormous
fortune.” The Auvergnat banker was a model which more than one father
pointed out to his son, and wives had been known to fling him in the
faces of their husbands.
We can now understand the reasons that led a man who had become the
pivot of the financial machine of Limoges to repulse the various
propositions of marriage which parents never ceased to make to him. The
daughters of his partners, Messrs. Perret and Grossetete, were married
before Graslin was in a position to take a wife; but as each of these
ladies had young daughters, the wiseheads of the community finally
concluded that old Perret or old Grossetete had made an arrangement with
Graslin to wait for one of his granddaughters, and thenceforth they left
him alone.
Sauviat had watched the ascending career of his compatriot more
attentively and seriously than any one else. He had known him from
the time he first came to Limoges; but their respective positions had
changed so much, at least apparently, that their friendship, now become
merely superficial, was seldom freshened. Still, in his relation as
compatriot, Graslin never disdained to talk with Sauviat when they
chanced to meet. Both continued to keep up their early _tutoiement_, but
only in their native dialect. When the receiver-general of Bourges, the
youngest of the brothers Grossetete, married his daughter in 1823 to the
youngest son of Comte Fontaine, Sauviat felt sure that the Grossetetes
would never allow Graslin to enter their family.
After his conference with the banker, Pere Sauviat returned home
joyously. He dined that night in his daughter’s room, and after dinner
he said to his womenkind:--
“Veronique will be Madame Graslin.”
“Madame Graslin!” exclaimed Mere Sauviat, astounded.
“Is it possible?” said Veronique, to whom Graslin was personally
unknown, and whose imagination regarded him very much as a Parisian
grisette would regard a Rothschild.
“Yes, it is settled,” said old Sauviat solemnly. “Graslin will furnish
his house magnificently; he is to give our daughter a fine Parisian
carriage and the best horses to be found in the Limousin; he will buy
an estate worth five hundred thousand francs, and settle that and his
town-house upon her. Veronique will be the first lady in Limoges,
the richest in the department, and she can do what she pleases with
Graslin.”
Veronique’s education, her religious ideas, and her boundless affection
for her parents, prevented her from making a single objection; it did
not even cross her mind to think that she had been disposed of without
reference to her own will. On the morrow Sauviat went to Paris, and was
absent for nearly a week.
Pierre Graslin was, as can readily be imagined, not much of a talker; he
went straight and rapidly to deeds. A thing decided on was a thing done.
In February, 1822, a strange piece of news burst like a thunderbolt on
the town of Limoges. The hotel Graslin was being handsomely furnished;
carriers’ carts came day after day from Paris, and their contents were
unpacked in the courtyard. Rumors flew about the town as to the beauty
and good taste of the modern or the antique furniture as it was seen
to arrive. The great firm of Odiot and Company sent down a magnificent
service of plate by the mail-coach. Three carriages, a caleche, a coupe,
and a cabriolet arrived, wrapped in straw with as much care as if they
were jewels.
“Monsieur Graslin is going to be married!”
These words were said by every pair of lips in Limoges in the course of
a single evening,--in the salons of the upper classes, in the kitchens,
in the shops, in the streets, in the suburbs, and before long throughout
the whole surrounding country. But to whom? No one could answer. Limoges
had a mystery.