“The _procureur-general_ has done his professional duty; I was going,
and he has pushed me on.”
The old mother looked at her and laid a finger on her lips.
“Mother, I shall speak,” replied Veronique. “See! the hand of God is in
all this; I am dying in a red room--”
Madame Sauviat went out, unable to bear those words.
“Aline,” she said, “she will speak! she will speak!”
“Ah! madame is out of her mind,” cried the faithful maid, who was
bringing sheets. “Fetch the rector, madame.”
“Your mistress must be undressed,” said Bianchon to the maid.
“It will be very difficult to do it, monsieur; madame is wrapped in a
hair-cloth garment.”
“What! in the nineteenth-century can such horrors be revived?” said the
great doctor.
“Madame Graslin has never allowed me to touch her stomach,” said
Roubaud. “I have been able to judge of the progress of the disease only
from her face and her pulse, and the little information I could get from
her mother and the maid.”
Veronique was now placed on a sofa while the bed was being made. The
doctors spoke together in a low voice. Madame Sauviat and Aline made the
bed. The faces of the two women were full of anguish; their hearts were
wrung by the thought, “We are making her bed for the last time--she will
die here!”
The consultation was not long. But Bianchon exacted at the outset that
Aline should, in spite of the patient’s resistance, cut off the hair
shirt and put on a night-dress. The doctors returned to the salon while
this was being done. When Aline passed them carrying the instrument of
torture wrapped in a napkin, she said:--
“Madame’s body is one great wound.”
The doctors returned to the bedroom.
“Your will is stronger than that of Napoleon, madame,” said Bianchon,
after asking a few questions, to which Veronique replied very clearly.
“You keep your mind and your faculties in the last stages of a disease
which robbed the Emperor of his brilliant intellect. From what I know of
you I think I ought to tell you the truth.”
“I implore you to do so,” she said. “You are able to estimate what
strength remains to me; and I have need of all my vigor for a few
hours.”
“Think only of your salvation,” replied Bianchon.
“If God has given me grace to die in possession of all my faculties,”
she said with a celestial smile, “be sure that this favor will be used
to the glory of his Church. The possession of my mind and senses is
necessary to fulfil a command of God, whereas Napoleon had accomplished
all his destiny.”
The doctors looked at each other in astonishment at hearing these words,
said with as much ease as though Madame Graslin were still presiding in
her salon.
“Ah! here is the doctor who is to cure me,” she said presently, when the
archbishop, summoned by Roubaud, entered the room.
She collected all her strength and rose to a sitting posture, in order
to bow graciously to Monsieur Bianchon, and beg him to accept something
else than money for the good news he gave her. She said a few words in
her mother’s ear, and Madame Sauviat immediately led away the doctors;
then Veronique requested the archbishop to postpone their interview till
the rector could come to her, expressing a wish to rest for a while.
Aline watched beside her.
At midnight Madame Graslin awoke, and asked for the archbishop and
rector, whom Aline silently showed her close at hand, praying for her.
She made a sign dismissing her mother and the maid, and, at another
sign, the two priests came to the bedside.
“Monseigneur, and you, my dear rector,” she said, “will hear nothing you
do not already know. You were the first, Monseigneur, to cast your eyes
into my inner self; you read there nearly all my past; and what you read
sufficed you. My confessor, that guardian angel whom heaven placed near
me, knows more; I have told him all. You, whose minds are enlightened
by the spirit of the Church, I wish to consult you as to the manner in
which I ought as a true Christian to leave this life. You, austere
and saintly spirits, think you that if God deigns to pardon one whose
repentance is the deepest, the most absolute, that ever shook a human
soul, think you that even then I have made my full expiation here
below?”
“Yes,” said the archbishop; “yes, my daughter.”
“No, my father, no!” she said rising in her bed, the lightning flashing
from her eyes. “Not far from here there is a grave, where an unhappy man
is lying beneath the weight of a dreadful crime; here in this sumptuous
home is a woman, crowned with the fame of benevolence and virtue. This
woman is blessed; that poor young man is cursed. The criminal is covered
with obloquy; I receive the respect of all. I had the largest share in
the sin; he has a share, a large share in the good which has won for me
such glory and such gratitude. Fraud that I am, I have the honor; he,
the martyr to his loyalty, has the shame. I shall die in a few hours,
and the canton will mourn me; the whole department will ring with my
good deeds, my piety, my virtue; but he died covered with insults, in
sight of a whole population rushing, with hatred to a murderer, to see
him die. You, my judges, you are indulgent to me; yet I hear within
myself an imperious voice which will not let me rest. Ah! the hand of
God, less tender than yours, strikes me from day to day, as if to warn
me that all is not expiated. My sins cannot be redeemed except by a
public confession. He is happy! criminal, he gave his life with ignominy
in face of earth and heaven; and I, I cheat the world as I cheated human
justice. The homage I receive humiliates me; praise sears my heart. Do
you not see, in the very coming of the _procureur-general_, a command
from heaven echoing the voice in my own soul which cries to me:
Confess!”
The two priests, the prince of the Church as well as the humble rector,
these two great lights, each in his own way, stood with their
eyes lowered and were silent. Deeply moved by the grandeur and the
resignation of the guilty woman, the judges could not pronounce her
sentence.
“My child,” said the archbishop at last, raising his noble head,
macerated by the customs of his austere life, “you are going beyond the
commandments of the Church. The glory of the Church is to make her dogma
conform to the habits and manners of each age; for the Church goes
on from age to age in company with humanity. According to her present
decision secret confession has taken the place of public confession.
This substitution has made the new law. The sufferings you have endured
suffice. Die in peace: God has heard you.”
“But is not this desire of a guilty woman in conformity with the law
of the first Church, which has enriched heaven with as many saints
and martyrs and confessing souls as there are stars in the firmament?”
persisted Veronique, vehemently. “Who said: _Confess yourselves to one
another_? Was it not the disciples, who lived with the Saviour? Let
me confess my shame publicly on my knees. It will redeem my sin to the
world, to that family exiled and almost extinct through me. The world
ought to know that my benefactions are not an offering, but the payment
of a debt. Suppose that later, after my death, something tore from my
memory the lying veil which covers me. Ah! that idea is more than I can
bear, it is death indeed!”
“I see in this too much of calculation, my child,” said the archbishop,
gravely. “Passions are still too strong in you; the one I thought
extinct is--”
“Oh! I swear to you, Monseigneur,” she said, interrupting the prelate
and fixing her eyes, full of horror, upon him, “my heart is as purified
as that of a guilty and repentant woman can be; there is nothing now
within me but the thought of God.”
“Monseigneur,” said the rector in a tender voice, “let us leave
celestial justice to take its course. It is now four years since I have
strongly opposed this wish; it is the only difference that has ever come
between my penitent and myself. I have seen to the depths of that soul,
and I know this earth has no longer any hold there. Though the tears,
the remorse, the contrition of fifteen years relate to the mutual sin of
those two persons, believe me there are no remains of earthly passion
in this long and terrible bewailing. Memory no longer mingles its flames
with those of an ardent penitence. Yes, tears have at last extinguished
that great fire. I guarantee,” he said, stretching his hand over Madame
Graslin’s head, and letting his moistened eyes be seen, “I guarantee the
purity of that angelic soul. And also I see in this desire the thought
of reparation to an absent family, a member of which God has brought
back here by one of those events which reveal His providence.”
Veronique took the trembling hand of the rector and kissed it.
“You have often been very stern to me, dear pastor, but at this moment I
see where you keep your apostolic gentleness. You,” she said, looking at
the archbishop, “you, the supreme head of this corner of God’s kingdom,
be to me, in this moment of ignominy, a support. I must bow down as the
lowest of women, but you will lift me up pardoned and--possibly--the
equal of those who never sinned.”
The archbishop was silent, weighing no doubt all the considerations his
practised eye perceived.
“Monseigneur,” said the rector, “religion has had some heavy blows. This
return to ancient customs, brought about by the greatness of the sin and
its repentance, may it not be a triumph we have no right to refuse?”
“But they will say we are fanatics! They will declare we have exacted
this cruel scene!”
And again the archbishop was silent and thoughtful.
At this moment Horace Bianchon and Roubaud entered the room, after
knocking. As the door opened Veronique saw her mother, her son, and all
the servants of the household on their knees praying. The rectors of
the two adjacent parishes had come to assist Monsieur Bonnet, and also,
perhaps, to pay their respects to the great prelate, for whom the
French clergy now desired the honors of the cardinalate, hoping that
the clearness of his intellect, which was thoroughly Gallican, would
enlighten the Sacred College.
Horace Bianchon returned to Paris; before departing, he came to bid
farewell to the dying woman and thank her for her munificence. Slowly he
approached, perceiving from the faces of the priests that the wounds of
the soul had been the determining cause of those of the body. He took
Madame Graslin’s hand, laid it on the bed and felt the pulse. The deep
silence, that of a summer night in a country solitude, gave additional
solemnity to the scene. The great salon, seen through the double doors,
was lighted up for the little company of persons who were praying there;
all were on their knees except the two priests who were seated and
reading their brevaries. On either side of the grand state bed were the
prelate in his violet robes, the rector, and the two physicians.
“She is agitated almost unto death,” said Horace Bianchon, who, like all
men of great talent, sometimes used speech as grand as the occasion that
called it forth.
The archbishop rose as if some inward impulse drove him; he called to
Monsieur Bonnet, and together they crossed the room, passed through the
salon, and went out upon the terrace, where they walked up and down
for some moments. When they returned, after discussing this case of
ecclesiastical discipline, Roubaud met them.