Title: The Lily of the Valley
Author: Balzac, Honoré de
Language: English
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THE LILY OF THE VALLEY


By Honore De Balzac


Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                             DEDICATION

  To Monsieur J. B. Nacquart,
  Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine.

  Dear Doctor--Here is one of the most carefully hewn stones in the
  second course of the foundation of a literary edifice which I have
  slowly and laboriously constructed. I wish to inscribe your name
  upon it, as much to thank the man whose science once saved me as
  to honor the friend of my daily life.


                                                       De Balzac.



THE LILY OF THE VALLEY


  ENVOI

  Felix de Vandenesse to Madame la Comtesse Natalie de Manerville:

  I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we
  love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore
  the ordinary rules of common-sense. To smooth the frown upon their
  brow, to soften the pout upon their lips, what obstacles we
  miraculously overcome! We shed our blood, we risk our future!

  You exact the history of my past life; here it is. But remember
  this, Natalie; in obeying you I crush under foot a reluctance
  hitherto unconquerable. Why are you jealous of the sudden reveries
  which overtake me in the midst of our happiness? Why show the
  pretty anger of a petted woman when silence grasps me? Could you
  not play upon the contradictions of my character without inquiring
  into the causes of them? Are there secrets in your heart which
  seek absolution through a knowledge of mine? Ah! Natalie, you have
  guessed mine; and it is better you should know the whole truth.
  Yes, my life is shadowed by a phantom; a word evokes it; it hovers
  vaguely above me and about me; within my soul are solemn memories,
  buried in its depths like those marine productions seen in calmest
  weather and which the storms of ocean cast in fragments on the
  shore.

  The mental labor which the expression of ideas necessitates has
  revived the old, old feelings which give me so much pain when they
  come suddenly; and if in this confession of my past they break
  forth in a way that wounds you, remember that you threatened to
  punish me if I did not obey your wishes, and do not, therefore,
  punish my obedience. I would that this, my confidence, might
  increase your love.

  Until we meet,

  Felix.



CHAPTER I. TWO CHILDHOODS

To what genius fed on tears shall we some day owe that most touching of
all elegies,--the tale of tortures borne silently by souls whose tender
roots find stony ground in the domestic soil, whose earliest buds are
torn apart by rancorous hands, whose flowers are touched by frost at the
moment of their blossoming? What poet will sing the sorrows of the child
whose lips must suck a bitter breast, whose smiles are checked by the
cruel fire of a stern eye? The tale that tells of such poor hearts,
oppressed by beings placed about them to promote the development of
their natures, would contain the true history of my childhood.

What vanity could I have wounded,--I a child new-born? What moral or
physical infirmity caused by mother’s coldness? Was I the child of
duty, whose birth is a mere chance, or was I one whose very life was
a reproach? Put to nurse in the country and forgotten by my family for
over three years, I was treated with such indifference on my return to
the parental roof that even the servants pitied me. I do not know to
what feeling or happy accident I owed my rescue from this first neglect;
as a child I was ignorant of it, as a man I have not discovered it. Far
from easing my lot, my brother and my two sisters found amusement in
making me suffer. The compact in virtue of which children hide each
other’s peccadilloes, and which early teaches them the principles
of honor, was null and void in my case; more than that, I was often
punished for my brother’s faults, without being allowed to prove the
injustice. The fawning spirit which seems instinctive in children
taught my brother and sisters to join in the persecutions to which I was
subjected, and thus keep in the good graces of a mother whom they
feared as much as I. Was this partly the effect of a childish love of
imitation; was it from a need of testing their powers; or was it simply
through lack of pity? Perhaps these causes united to deprive me of the
sweets of fraternal intercourse.

Disinherited of all affection, I could love nothing; yet nature had made
me loving. Is there an angel who garners the sighs of feeling hearts
rebuffed incessantly? If in many such hearts the crushed feelings turn
to hatred, in mine they condensed and hollowed a depth from which, in
after years, they gushed forth upon my life. In many characters the
habit of trembling relaxes the fibres and begets fear, and fear ends
in submission; hence, a weakness which emasculates a man, and makes him
more or less a slave. But in my case these perpetual tortures led to the
development of a certain strength, which increased through exercise
and predisposed my spirit to the habit of moral resistance. Always
in expectation of some new grief--as the martyrs expected some fresh
blow--my whole being expressed, I doubt not, a sullen resignation which
smothered the grace and gaiety of childhood, and gave me an appearance
of idiocy which seemed to justify my mother’s threatening prophecies.
The certainty of injustice prematurely roused my pride--that fruit
of reason--and thus, no doubt, checked the evil tendencies which an
education like mine encouraged.

Though my mother neglected me I was sometimes the object of her
solicitude; she occasionally spoke of my education and seemed desirous
of attending to it herself. Cold chills ran through me at such times
when I thought of the torture a daily intercourse with her would inflict
upon me. I blessed the neglect in which I lived, and rejoiced that I
could stay alone in the garden and play with the pebbles and watch the
insects and gaze into the blueness of the sky. Though my loneliness
naturally led me to reverie, my liking for contemplation was first
aroused by an incident which will give you an idea of my early troubles.
So little notice was taken of me that the governess occasionally forgot
to send me to bed. One evening I was peacefully crouching under a
fig-tree, watching a star with that passion of curiosity which takes
possession of a child’s mind, and to which my precocious melancholy
gave a sort of sentimental intuition. My sisters were playing about
and laughing; I heard their distant chatter like an accompaniment to my
thoughts. After a while the noise ceased and darkness fell. My mother
happened to notice my absence. To escape blame, our governess, a
terrible Mademoiselle Caroline, worked upon my mother’s fears,--told her
I had a horror of my home and would long ago have run away if she had
not watched me; that I was not stupid but sullen; and that in all her
experience of children she had never known one of so bad a disposition
as mine. She pretended to search for me. I answered as soon as I was
called, and she came to the fig-tree, where she very well knew I was.
“What are you doing there?” she asked. “Watching a star.” “You were
not watching a star,” said my mother, who was listening on her balcony;
“children of your age know nothing of astronomy.” “Ah, madame,” cried
Mademoiselle Caroline, “he has opened the faucet of the reservoir; the
garden is inundated!” Then there was a general excitement. The fact was
that my sisters had amused themselves by turning the cock to see the
water flow, but a sudden spurt wet them all over and frightened them
so much that they ran away without closing it. Accused and convicted
of this piece of mischief and told that I lied when I denied it, I was
severely punished. Worse than all, I was jeered at for my pretended love
of the stars and forbidden to stay in the garden after dark.

Such tyrannical restrains intensify a passion in the hearts of children
even more than in those of men; children think of nothing but the
forbidden thing, which then becomes irresistibly attractive to them. I
was often whipped for my star. Unable to confide in my kind, I told it
all my troubles in that delicious inward prattle with which we stammer
our first ideas, just as once we stammered our first words. At twelve
years of age, long after I was at school, I still watched that star
with indescribable delight,--so deep and lasting are the impressions we
receive in the dawn of life.

My brother Charles, five years older than I and as handsome a boy as he
now is a man, was the favorite of my father, the idol of my mother, and
consequently the sovereign of the house. He was robust and well-made,
and had a tutor. I, puny and even sickly, was sent at five years of age
as day pupil to a school in the town; taken in the morning and brought
back at night by my father’s valet. I was sent with a scanty lunch,
while my school-fellows brought plenty of good food. This trifling
contrast between my privations and their prosperity made me suffer
deeply. The famous potted pork prepared at Tours and called “rillettes”
 and “rillons” was the chief feature of their mid-day meal, between
the early breakfast and the parent’s dinner, which was ready when we
returned from school. This preparation of meat, much prized by certain
gourmands, is seldom seen at Tours on aristocratic tables; if I had
ever heard of it before I went to school, I certainly had never had
the happiness of seeing that brown mess spread on slices of bread and
butter. Nevertheless, my desire for those “rillons” was so great that it
grew to be a fixed idea, like the longing of an elegant Parisian duchess
for the stews cooked by a porter’s wife,--longings which, being a woman,
she found means to satisfy. Children guess each other’s covetousness,
just as you are able to read a man’s love, by the look in the eyes;
consequently I became an admirable butt for ridicule. My comrades,
nearly all belonging to the lower bourgeoisie, would show me their
“rillons” and ask if I knew how they were made and where they were sold,
and why it was that I never had any. They licked their lips as they
talked of them--scraps of pork pressed in their own fat and looking like
cooked truffles; they inspected my lunch-basket, and finding nothing
better than Olivet cheese or dried fruits, they plagued me
with questions: “Is that all you have? have you really nothing
else?”--speeches which made me realize the difference between my brother
and myself.

This contrast between my own abandonment and the happiness of others
nipped the roses of my childhood and blighted my budding youth. The
first time that I, mistaking my comrades’ actions for generosity, put
forth my hand to take the dainty I had so long coveted and which was now
hypocritically held out to me, my tormentor pulled back his slice to the
great delight of his comrades who were expecting that result. If noble
and distinguished minds are, as we often find them, capable of vanity,
can we blame the child who weeps when despised and jeered at? Under such
a trial many boys would have turned into gluttons and cringing beggars.
I fought to escape my persecutors. The courage of despair made me
formidable; but I was hated, and thus had no protection against
treachery. One evening as I left school I was struck in the back by
a handful of small stones tied in a handkerchief. When the valet, who
punished the perpetrator, told this to my mother she exclaimed: “That
dreadful child! he will always be a torment to us.”

Finding that I inspired in my schoolmates the same repulsion that was
felt for me by my family, I sank into a horrible distrust of myself. A
second fall of snow checked the seeds that were germinating in my soul.
The boys whom I most liked were notorious scamps; this fact roused my
pride and I held aloof. Again I was shut up within myself and had no
vent for the feelings with which my heart was full. The master of the
school, observing that I was gloomy, disliked by my comrades, and always
alone, confirmed the family verdict as to my sulky temper. As soon as I
could read and write, my mother transferred me to Pont-le-Voy, a school
in charge of Oratorians who took boys of my age into a form called the
“class of the Latin steps” where dull lads with torpid brains were apt
to linger.

There I remained eight years without seeing my family; living the life
of a pariah,--partly for the following reason. I received but three
francs a month pocket-money, a sum barely sufficient to buy the pens,
ink, paper, knives, and rules which we were forced to supply ourselves.
Unable to buy stilts or skipping-ropes, or any of the things that were
used in the playground, I was driven out of the games; to gain admission
on suffrage I should have had to toady the rich and flatter the strong
of my division. My heart rose against either of these meannesses, which,
however, most children readily employ. I lived under a tree, lost in
dejected thought, or reading the books distributed to us monthly by the
librarian. How many griefs were in the shadow of that solitude; what
genuine anguish filled my neglected life! Imagine what my sore heart
felt when, at the first distribution of prizes,--of which I obtained
the two most valued, namely, for theme and for translation,--neither my
father nor my mother was present in the theatre when I came forward to
receive the awards amid general acclamations, although the building was
filled with the relatives of all my comrades. Instead of kissing the
distributor, according to custom, I burst into tears and threw myself on
his breast. That night I burned my crowns in the stove. The parents of
the other boys were in town for a whole week preceding the distribution
of the prizes, and my comrades departed joyfully the next day; while I,
whose father and mother were only a few miles distant, remained at the
school with the “outremers,”--a name given to scholars whose families
were in the colonies or in foreign countries.

You will notice throughout how my unhappiness increased in proportion as
the social spheres on which I entered widened. God knows what efforts I
made to weaken the decree which condemned me to live within myself! What
hopes, long cherished with eagerness of soul, were doomed to perish in
a day! To persuade my parents to come and see me, I wrote them letters
full of feeling, too emphatically worded, it may be; but surely such
letters ought not to have drawn upon me my mother’s reprimand, coupled
with ironical reproaches for my style. Not discouraged even then,
I implored the help of my sisters, to whom I always wrote on their
birthdays and fete-days with the persistence of a neglected child; but
it was all in vain. As the day for the distribution of prizes approached
I redoubled my entreaties, and told of my expected triumphs. Misled by
my parents’ silence, I expected them with a beating heart. I told my
schoolfellows they were coming; and then, when the old porter’s step
sounded in the corridors as he called my happy comrades one by one to
receive their friends, I was sick with expectation. Never did that old
man call my name!

One day, when I accused myself to my confessor of having cursed my life,
he pointed to the skies, where grew, he said, the promised palm for the
“Beati qui lugent” of the Saviour. From the period of my first communion
I flung myself into the mysterious depths of prayer, attracted to
religious ideas whose moral fairyland so fascinates young spirits.
Burning with ardent faith, I prayed to God to renew in my behalf the
miracles I had read of in martyrology. At five years of age I fled to
my star; at twelve I took refuge in the sanctuary. My ecstasy
brought dreams unspeakable, which fed my imagination, fostered my
susceptibilities, and strengthened my thinking powers. I have often
attributed those sublime visions to the guardian angel charged with
moulding my spirit to its divine destiny; they endowed my soul with the
faculty of seeing the inner soul of things; they prepared my heart for
the magic craft which makes a man a poet when the fatal power is his to
compare what he feels within him with reality,--the great things aimed
for with the small things gained. Those visions wrote upon my brain a
book in which I read that which I must voice; they laid upon my lips the
coal of utterance.

My father having conceived some doubts as to the tendency of the
Oratorian teachings, took me from Pont-le-Voy, and sent me to Paris to
an institution in the Marais. I was then fifteen. When examined as to
my capacity, I, who was in the rhetoric class at Pont-le-Voy, was
pronounced worthy of the third class. The sufferings I had endured in my
family and in school were continued under another form during my stay
at the Lepitre Academy. My father gave me no money; I was to be fed,
clothed, and stuffed with Latin and Greek, for a sum agreed on. During
my school life I came in contact with over a thousand comrades; but I
never met with such an instance of neglect and indifference as mine.
Monsieur Lepitre, who was fanatically attached to the Bourbons, had had
relations with my father at the time when all devoted royalists were
endeavoring to bring about the escape of Marie Antoinette from the
Temple. They had lately renewed acquaintance; and Monsieur Lepitre
thought himself obliged to repair my father’s oversight, and to give me
a small sum monthly. But not being authorized to do so, the amount was
small indeed.

The Lepitre establishment was in the old Joyeuse mansion where, as in
all seignorial houses, there was a porter’s lodge. During a recess,
which preceded the hour when the man-of-all-work took us to the
Charlemagne Lyceum, the well-to-do pupils used to breakfast with the
porter, named Doisy. Monsieur Lepitre was either ignorant of the fact or
he connived at this arrangement with Doisy, a regular smuggler whom it
was the pupils’ interest to protect,--he being the secret guardian
of their pranks, the safe confidant of their late returns and their
intermediary for obtaining forbidden books. Breakfast on a cup of
“cafe-au-lait” is an aristocratic habit, explained by the high prices
to which colonial products rose under Napoleon. If the use of sugar
and coffee was a luxury to our parents, with us it was the sign of
self-conscious superiority. Doisy gave credit, for he reckoned on the
sisters and aunts of the pupils, who made it a point of honor to pay
their debts. I resisted the blandishments of his place for a long time.
If my judges knew the strength of its seduction, the heroic efforts I
made after stoicism, the repressed desires of my long resistance, they
would pardon my final overthrow. But, child as I was, could I have the
grandeur of soul that scorns the scorn of others? Moreover, I may have
felt the promptings of several social vices whose power was increased by
my longings.

About the end of the second year my father and mother came to Paris. My
brother had written me the day of their arrival. He lived in Paris, but
had never been to see me. My sisters, he said, were of the party; we
were all to see Paris together. The first day we were to dine in the
Palais-Royal, so as to be near the Theatre-Francais. In spite of the
intoxication such a programme of unhoped-for delights excited, my joy
was dampened by the wind of a coming storm, which those who are used
to unhappiness apprehend instinctively. I was forced to own a debt of
a hundred francs to the Sieur Doisy, who threatened to ask my parents
himself for the money. I bethought me of making my brother the emissary
of Doisy, the mouth-piece of my repentance and the mediator of pardon.
My father inclined to forgiveness, but my mother was pitiless; her dark
blue eye froze me; she fulminated cruel prophecies: “What should I
be later if at seventeen years of age I committed such follies? Was I
really a son of hers? Did I mean to ruin my family? Did I think myself
the only child of the house? My brother Charles’s career, already begun,
required large outlay, amply deserved by his conduct which did honor to
the family, while mine would always disgrace it. Did I know nothing of
the value of money, and what I cost them? Of what use were coffee and
sugar to my education? Such conduct was the first step into all the
vices.”

After enduring the shock of this torrent which rasped my soul, I was
sent back to school in charge of my brother. I lost the dinner at the
Freres Provencaux, and was deprived of seeing Talma in Britannicus.
Such was my first interview with my mother after a separation of twelve
years.

When I had finished school my father left me under the guardianship of
Monsieur Lepitre. I was to study the higher mathematics, follow a course
of law for one year, and begin philosophy. Allowed to study in my own
room and released from the classes, I expected a truce with trouble.
But, in spite of my nineteen years, perhaps because of them, my father
persisted in the system which had sent me to school without food, to an
academy without pocket-money, and had driven me into debt to Doisy. Very
little money was allowed to me, and what can you do in Paris without
money? Moreover, my freedom was carefully chained up. Monsieur Lepitre
sent me to the law school accompanied by a man-of-all-work who handed me
over to the professor and fetched me home again. A young girl would have
been treated with less precaution than my mother’s fears insisted on for
me. Paris alarmed my parents, and justly. Students are secretly engaged
in the same occupation which fills the minds of young ladies in their
boarding-schools. Do what you will, nothing can prevent the latter from
talking of lovers, or the former of women. But in Paris, and especially
at this particular time, such talk among young lads was influenced by
the oriental and sultanic atmosphere and customs of the Palais-Royal.

The Palais-Royal was an Eldorado of love where the ingots melted away in
coin; there virgin doubts were over; there curiosity was appeased. The
Palais-Royal and I were two asymptotes bearing one towards the other,
yet unable to meet. Fate miscarried all my attempts. My father had
presented me to one of my aunts who lived in the Ile St. Louis. With her
I was to dine on Sundays and Thursdays, escorted to the house by either
Monsieur or Madame Lepitre, who went out themselves on those days and
were to call for me on their way home. Singular amusement for a
young lad! My aunt, the Marquise de Listomere, was a great lady, of
ceremonious habits, who would never have dreamed of offering me money.
Old as a cathedral, painted like a miniature, sumptuous in dress, she
lived in her great house as though Louis XV. were not dead, and saw none
but old women and men of a past day,--a fossil society which made me
think I was in a graveyard. No one spoke to me and I had not the courage
to speak first. Cold and alien looks made me ashamed of my youth,
which seemed to annoy them. I counted on this indifference to aid me in
certain plans; I was resolved to escape some day directly after dinner
and rush to the Palais-Royal. Once seated at whist my aunt would pay no
attention to me. Jean, the footman, cared little for Monsieur Lepitre
and would have aided me; but on the day I chose for my adventure that
luckless dinner was longer than usual,--either because the jaws employed
were worn out or the false teeth more imperfect. At last, between eight
and nine o’clock, I reached the staircase, my heart beating like that of
Bianca Capello on the day of her flight; but when the porter pulled the
cord I beheld in the street before me Monsieur Lepitre’s hackney-coach,
and I heard his pursy voice demanding me!

Three times did fate interpose between the hell of the Palais-Royal and
the heaven of my youth. On the day when I, ashamed at twenty years of
age of my own ignorance, determined to risk all dangers to put an end
to it, at the very moment when I was about to run away from Monsieur
Lepitre as he got into the coach,--a difficult process, for he was
as fat as Louis XVIII. and club-footed,--well, can you believe it, my
mother arrived in a post-chaise! Her glance arrested me; I stood
still, like a bird before a snake. What fate had brought her there? The
simplest thing in the world. Napoleon was then making his last efforts.
My father, who foresaw the return of the Bourbons, had come to Paris
with my mother to advise my brother, who was employed in the imperial
diplomatic service. My mother was to take me back with her, out of the
way of dangers which seemed, to those who followed the march of events
intelligently, to threaten the capital. In a few minutes, as it were, I
was taken out of Paris, at the very moment when my life there was about
to become fatal to me.

The tortures of imagination excited by repressed desires, the weariness
of a life depressed by constant privations had driven me to study, just
as men, weary of fate, confine themselves in a cloister. To me,
study had become a passion, which might even be fatal to my health by
imprisoning me at a period of life when young men ought to yield to the
bewitching activities of their springtide youth.

This slight sketch of my boyhood, in which you, Natalie, can readily
perceive innumerable songs of woe, was needful to explain to you its
influence on my future life. At twenty years of age, and affected by
many morbid elements, I was still small and thin and pale. My soul,
filled with the will to do, struggled with a body that seemed weakly,
but which, in the words of an old physician at Tours, was undergoing its
final fusion into a temperament of iron. Child in body and old in mind,
I had read and thought so much that I knew life metaphysically at its
highest reaches at the moment when I was about to enter the tortuous
difficulties of its defiles and the sandy roads of its plains. A strange
chance had held me long in that delightful period when the soul awakes
to its first tumults, to its desires for joy, and the savor of life
is fresh. I stood in the period between puberty and manhood,--the one
prolonged by my excessive study, the other tardily developing its living
shoots. No young man was ever more thoroughly prepared to feel and to
love. To understand my history, let your mind dwell on that pure time
of youth when the mouth is innocent of falsehood; when the glance of
the eye is honest, though veiled by lids which droop from timidity
contradicting desire; when the soul bends not to worldly Jesuitism,
and the heart throbs as violently from trepidation as from the generous
impulses of young emotion.

I need say nothing of the journey I made with my mother from Paris to
Tours. The coldness of her behavior repressed me. At each relay I tried
to speak; but a look, a word from her frightened away the speeches I had
been meditating. At Orleans, where we had passed the night, my mother
complained of my silence. I threw myself at her feet and clasped her
knees; with tears I opened my heart. I tried to touch hers by the
eloquence of my hungry love in accents that might have moved a
stepmother. She replied that I was playing comedy. I complained that she
had abandoned me. She called me an unnatural child. My whole nature was
so wrung that at Blois I went upon the bridge to drown myself in the
Loire. The height of the parapet prevented my suicide.

When I reached home, my two sisters, who did not know me, showed
more surprise than tenderness. Afterwards, however, they seemed, by
comparison, to be full of kindness towards me. I was given a room on the
third story. You will understand the extent of my hardships when I tell
you that my mother left me, a young man of twenty, without other linen
than my miserable school outfit, or any other outside clothes than those
I had long worn in Paris. If I ran from one end of the room to the other
to pick up her handkerchief, she took it with the cold thanks a lady
gives to her footman. Driven to watch her to find if there were any soft
spot where I could fasten the rootlets of affection, I came to see
her as she was,--a tall, spare woman, given to cards, egotistical and
insolent, like all the Listomeres, who count insolence as part of their
dowry. She saw nothing in life except duties to be fulfilled. All
cold women whom I have known made, as she did, a religion of duty; she
received our homage as a priest receives the incense of the mass. My
elder brother appeared to absorb the trifling sentiment of maternity
which was in her nature. She stabbed us constantly with her sharp
irony,--the weapon of those who have no heart,--and which she used
against us, who could make her no reply.

Notwithstanding these thorny hindrances, the instinctive sentiments
have so many roots, the religious fear inspired by a mother whom it
is dangerous to displease holds by so many threads, that the sublime
mistake--if I may so call it--of our love for our mother lasted until
the day, much later in our lives, when we judged her finally. This
terrible despotism drove from my mind all thoughts of the voluptuous
enjoyments I had dreamed of finding at Tours. In despair I took refuge
in my father’s library, where I set myself to read every book I did not
know. These long periods of hard study saved me from contact with my
mother; but they aggravated the dangers of my moral condition. Sometimes
my eldest sister--she who afterwards married our cousin, the Marquis de
Listomere--tried to comfort me, without, however, being able to calm the
irritation to which I was a victim. I desired to die.

Great events, of which I knew nothing, were then in preparation. The Duc
d’Angouleme, who had left Bordeaux to join Louis XVIII. in Paris, was
received in every town through which he passed with ovations inspired by
the enthusiasm felt throughout old France at the return of the Bourbons.
Touraine was aroused for its legitimate princes; the town itself was
in a flutter, every window decorated, the inhabitants in their Sunday
clothes, a festival in preparation, and that nameless excitement in the
air which intoxicates, and which gave me a strong desire to be present
at the ball given by the duke. When I summoned courage to make this
request of my mother, who was too ill to go herself, she became
extremely angry. “Had I come from Congo?” she inquired. “How could I
suppose that our family would not be represented at the ball? In
the absence of my father and brother, of course it was my duty to be
present. Had I no mother? Was she not always thinking of the welfare of
her children?”

In a moment the semi-disinherited son had become a personage! I was more
dumfounded by my importance than by the deluge of ironical reasoning
with which my mother received my request. I questioned my sisters, and
then discovered that my mother, who liked such theatrical plots,
was already attending to my clothes. The tailors in Tours were fully
occupied by the sudden demands of their regular customers, and my mother
was forced to employ her usual seamstress, who--according to provincial
custom--could do all kinds of sewing. A bottle-blue coat had been
secretly made for me, after a fashion, and silk stockings and pumps
provided; waistcoats were then worn short, so that I could wear one
of my father’s; and for the first time in my life I had a shirt with a
frill, the pleatings of which puffed out my chest and were gathered
in to the knot of my cravat. When dressed in this apparel I looked so
little like myself that my sister’s compliments nerved me to face
all Touraine at the ball. But it was a bold enterprise. Thanks to my
slimness I slipped into a tent set up in the gardens of the Papion
house, and found a place close to the armchair in which the duke was
seated. Instantly I was suffocated by the heat, and dazzled by the
lights, the scarlet draperies, the gilded ornaments, the dresses, and
the diamonds of the first public ball I had ever witnessed. I was pushed
hither and thither by a mass of men and women, who hustled each other in
a cloud of dust. The brazen clash of military music was drowned in the
hurrahs and acclamations of “Long live the Duc d’Angouleme! Long live
the King! Long live the Bourbons!” The ball was an outburst of pent-up
enthusiasm, where each man endeavored to outdo the rest in his fierce
haste to worship the rising sun,--an exhibition of partisan greed which
left me unmoved, or rather, it disgusted me and drove me back within
myself.

Swept onward like a straw in the whirlwind, I was seized with a childish
desire to be the Duc d’Angouleme himself, to be one of these princes
parading before an awed assemblage. This silly fancy of a Tourangean lad
roused an ambition to which my nature and the surrounding circumstances
lent dignity. Who would not envy such worship?--a magnificent repetition
of which I saw a few months later, when all Paris rushed to the feet
of the Emperor on his return from Elba. The sense of this dominion
exercised over the masses, whose feelings and whose very life are thus
merged into one soul, dedicated me then and thenceforth to glory, that
priestess who slaughters the Frenchmen of to-day as the Druidess once
sacrificed the Gauls.

Suddenly I met the woman who was destined to spur these ambitious
desires and to crown them by sending me into the heart of royalty.
Too timid to ask any one to dance,--fearing, moreover, to confuse the
figures,--I naturally became very awkward, and did not know what to
do with my arms and legs. Just as I was suffering severely from the
pressure of the crowd an officer stepped on my feet, swollen by the new
leather of my shoes as well as by the heat. This disgusted me with the
whole affair. It was impossible to get away; but I took refuge in a
corner of a room at the end of an empty bench, where I sat with
fixed eyes, motionless and sullen. Misled by my puny appearance, a
woman--taking me for a sleepy child--slid softly into the place beside
me, with the motion of a bird as she drops upon her nest. Instantly I
breathed the woman-atmosphere, which irradiated my soul as, in after
days, oriental poesy has shone there. I looked at my neighbor, and was
more dazzled by that vision than I had been by the scene of the fete.

If you have understood this history of my early life you will guess
the feelings which now welled up within me. My eyes rested suddenly
on white, rounded shoulders where I would fain have laid my
head,--shoulders faintly rosy, which seemed to blush as if uncovered for
the first time; modest shoulders, that possessed a soul, and reflected
light from their satin surface as from a silken texture. These shoulders
were parted by a line along which my eyes wandered. I raised myself to
see the bust and was spell-bound by the beauty of the bosom, chastely
covered with gauze, where blue-veined globes of perfect outline were
softly hidden in waves of lace. The slightest details of the head were
each and all enchantments which awakened infinite delights within
me; the brilliancy of the hair laid smoothly above a neck as soft
and velvety as a child’s, the white lines drawn by the comb where my
imagination ran as along a dewy path,--all these things put me, as it
were, beside myself. Glancing round to be sure that no one saw me, I
threw myself upon those shoulders as a child upon the breast of its
mother, kissing them as I laid my head there. The woman uttered a
piercing cry, which the noise of the music drowned; she turned, saw
me, and exclaimed, “Monsieur!” Ah! had she said, “My little lad, what
possesses you?” I might have killed her; but at the word “Monsieur!” hot
tears fell from my eyes. I was petrified by a glance of saintly anger,
by a noble face crowned with a diadem of golden hair in harmony with
the shoulders I adored. The crimson of offended modesty glowed on her
cheeks, though already it was appeased by the pardoning instinct of
a woman who comprehends a frenzy which she inspires, and divines the
infinite adoration of those repentant tears. She moved away with the
step and carriage of a queen.

I then felt the ridicule of my position; for the first time I realized
that I was dressed like the monkey of a barrel organ. I was ashamed.
There I stood, stupefied,--tasting the fruit that I had stolen,
conscious of the warmth upon my lips, repenting not, and following with
my eyes the woman who had come down to me from heaven. Sick with the
first fever of the heart I wandered through the rooms, unable to find
mine Unknown, until at last I went home to bed, another man.

A new soul, a soul with rainbow wings, had burst its chrysalis.
Descending from the azure wastes where I had long admired her, my star
had come to me a woman, with undiminished lustre and purity. I loved,
knowing naught of love. How strange a thing, this first irruption of the
keenest human emotion in the heart of a man! I had seen pretty women in
other places, but none had made the slightest impression upon me.
Can there be an appointed hour, a conjunction of stars, a union of
circumstances, a certain woman among all others to awaken an exclusive
passion at the period of life when love includes the whole sex?

The thought that my Elect lived in Touraine made the air I breathed
delicious; the blue of the sky seemed bluer than I had ever yet seen it.
I raved internally, but externally I was seriously ill, and my mother
had fears, not unmingled with remorse. Like animals who know when danger
is near, I hid myself away in the garden to think of the kiss that I
had stolen. A few days after this memorable ball my mother attributed my
neglect of study, my indifference to her tyrannical looks and sarcasms,
and my gloomy behavior to the condition of my health. The country, that
perpetual remedy for ills that doctors cannot cure, seemed to her the
best means of bringing me out of my apathy. She decided that I should
spend a few weeks at Frapesle, a chateau on the Indre midway between
Montbazon and Azay-le-Rideau, which belonged to a friend of hers, to
whom, no doubt, she gave private instructions.

By the day when I thus for the first time gained my liberty I had swum
so vigorously in Love’s ocean that I had well-nigh crossed it. I knew
nothing of mine unknown lady, neither her name, nor where to find
her; to whom, indeed, could I speak of her? My sensitive nature so
exaggerated the inexplicable fears which beset all youthful hearts at
the first approach of love that I began with the melancholy which often
ends a hopeless passion. I asked nothing better than to roam about the
country, to come and go and live in the fields. With the courage of
a child that fears no failure, in which there is something really
chivalrous, I determined to search every chateau in Touraine, travelling
on foot, and saying to myself as each old tower came in sight, “She is
there!”

Accordingly, of a Thursday morning I left Tours by the barrier of
Saint-Eloy, crossed the bridges of Saint-Sauveur, reached Poncher whose
every house I examined, and took the road to Chinon. For the first
time in my life I could sit down under a tree or walk fast or slow as
I pleased without being dictated to by any one. To a poor lad crushed
under all sorts of despotism (which more or less does weigh upon all
youth) the first employment of freedom, even though it be expended upon
nothing, lifts the soul with irrepressible buoyancy. Several reasons
combined to make that day one of enchantment. During my school years I
had never been taken to walk more than two or three miles from a city;
yet there remained in my mind among the earliest recollections of my
childhood that feeling for the beautiful which the scenery about Tours
inspires. Though quite untaught as to the poetry of such a landscape,
I was, unknown to myself, critical upon it, like those who imagine the
ideal of art without knowing anything of its practice.

To reach the chateau of Frapesle, foot-passengers, or those
on horseback, shorten the way by crossing the Charlemagne
moors,--uncultivated tracts of land lying on the summit of the plateau
which separates the valley of the Cher from that of the Indre, and over
which there is a cross-road leading to Champy. These moors are flat and
sandy, and for more than three miles are dreary enough until you reach,
through a clump of woods, the road to Sache, the name of the township
in which Frapesle stands. This road, which joins that of Chinon beyond
Ballan, skirts an undulating plain to the little hamlet of Artanne. Here
we come upon a valley, which begins at Montbazon, ends at the Loire,
and seems to rise and fall,--to bound, as it were,--beneath the chateaus
placed on its double hillsides,--a splendid emerald cup, in the depths
of which flow the serpentine lines of the river Indre. I gazed at this
scene with ineffable delight, for which the gloomy moor-land and the
fatigue of the sandy walk had prepared me.

“If that woman, the flower of her sex, does indeed inhabit this earth,
she is here, on this spot.”

Thus musing, I leaned against a walnut-tree, beneath which I have rested
from that day to this whenever I return to my dear valley. Beneath that
tree, the confidant of my thoughts, I ask myself what changes there are
in me since last I stood there.

My heart deceived me not--she lived there; the first castle that I saw
on the slope of a hill was the dwelling that held her. As I sat beneath
my nut-tree, the mid-day sun was sparkling on the slates of her roof and
the panes of her windows. Her cambric dress made the white line which I
saw among the vines of an arbor. She was, as you know already without
as yet knowing anything, the Lily of this valley, where she grew for
heaven, filling it with the fragrance of her virtues. Love, infinite
love, without other sustenance than the vision, dimly seen, of which my
soul was full, was there, expressed to me by that long ribbon of water
flowing in the sunshine between the grass-green banks, by the lines of
the poplars adorning with their mobile laces that vale of love, by the
oak-woods coming down between the vineyards to the shore, which the
river curved and rounded as it chose, and by those dim varying horizons
as they fled confusedly away.

If you would see nature beautiful and virgin as a bride, go there of a
spring morning. If you would still the bleeding wounds of your heart,
return in the last days of autumn. In the spring, Love beats his wings
beneath the broad blue sky; in the autumn, we think of those who are no
more. The lungs diseased breathe in a blessed purity; the eyes will rest
on golden copses which impart to the soul their peaceful stillness. At
this moment, when I stood there for the first time, the mills upon
the brooksides gave a voice to the quivering valley; the poplars were
laughing as they swayed; not a cloud was in the sky; the birds sang,
the crickets chirped,--all was melody. Do not ask me again why I love
Touraine. I love it, not as we love our cradle, not as we love the oasis
in a desert; I love it as an artist loves art; I love it less than I
love you; but without Touraine, perhaps I might not now be living.

Without knowing why, my eyes reverted ever to that white spot, to the
woman who shone in that garden as the bell of a convolvulus shines amid
the underbrush, and wilts if touched. Moved to the soul, I descended
the slope and soon saw a village, which the superabounding poetry that
filled my heart made me fancy without an equal. Imagine three mills
placed among islands of graceful outline crowned with groves of trees
and rising from a field of water,--for what other name can I give to
that aquatic vegetation, so verdant, so finely colored, which carpeted
the river, rose above its surface and undulated upon it, yielding to its
caprices and swaying to the turmoil of the water when the mill-wheels
lashed it. Here and there were mounds of gravel, against which the
wavelets broke in fringes that shimmered in the sunlight. Amaryllis,
water-lilies, reeds, and phloxes decorated the banks with their glorious
tapestry. A trembling bridge of rotten planks, the abutments swathed
with flowers, and the hand-rails green with perennials and velvet
mosses drooping to the river but not falling to it; mouldering boats,
fishing-nets; the monotonous sing-song of a shepherd; ducks paddling
among the islands or preening on the “jard,”--a name given to the coarse
sand which the Loire brings down; the millers, with their caps over
one ear, busily loading their mules,--all these details made the scene
before me one of primitive simplicity. Imagine, also, beyond the bridge
two or three farm-houses, a dove-cote, turtle-doves, thirty or more
dilapidated cottages, separated by gardens, by hedges of honeysuckle,
clematis, and jasmine; a dunghill beside each door, and cocks and hens
about the road. Such is the village of Pont-de-Ruan, a picturesque
little hamlet leading up to an old church full of character, a church
of the days of the Crusades, such a one as painters desire for their
pictures. Surround this scene with ancient walnut-trees and slim young
poplars with their pale-gold leaves; dot graceful buildings here and
there along the grassy slopes where sight is lost beneath the vaporous,
warm sky, and you will have some idea of one of the points of view of
this most lovely region.

I followed the road to Sache along the left bank of the river, noticing
carefully the details of the hills on the opposite shore. At length I
reached a park embellished with centennial trees, which I knew to be
that of Frapesle. I arrived just as the bell was ringing for breakfast.
After the meal, my host, who little suspected that I had walked from
Tours, carried me over his estate, from the borders of which I saw the
valley on all sides under its many aspects,--here through a vista, there
to its broad extent; often my eyes were drawn to the horizon along the
golden blade of the Loire, where the sails made fantastic figures among
the currents as they flew before the wind. As we mounted a crest I
came in sight of the chateau d’Azay, like a diamond of many facets in
a setting of the Indre, standing on wooden piles concealed by flowers.
Farther on, in a hollow, I saw the romantic masses of the chateau
of Sache, a sad retreat though full of harmony; too sad for the
superficial, but dear to a poet with a soul in pain. I, too, came to
love its silence, its great gnarled trees, and the nameless mysterious
influence of its solitary valley. But now, each time that we reached
an opening towards the neighboring slope which gave to view the pretty
castle I had first noticed in the morning, I stopped to look at it with
pleasure.

“Hey!” said my host, reading in my eyes the sparkling desires which
youth so ingenuously betrays, “so you scent from afar a pretty woman as
a dog scents game!”

I did not like the speech, but I asked the name of the castle and of its
owner.

“It is Clochegourde,” he replied; “a pretty house belonging to the Comte
de Mortsauf, the head of an historic family in Touraine, whose fortune
dates from the days of Louis XI., and whose name tells the story to
which they owe their arms and their distinction. Monsieur de Mortsauf
is descended from a man who survived the gallows. The family bear: Or,
a cross potent and counter-potent sable, charged with a fleur-de-lis or;
and ‘Dieu saulve le Roi notre Sire,’ for motto. The count settled here
after the return of the emigration. The estate belongs to his wife, a
demoiselle de Lenoncourt, of the house of Lenoncourt-Givry which is now
dying out. Madame de Mortsauf is an only daughter. The limited fortune
of the family contrasts strangely with the distinction of their names;
either from pride, or, possibly, from necessity, they never leave
Clochegourde and see no company. Until now their attachment to the
Bourbons explained this retirement, but the return of the king has not
changed their way of living. When I came to reside here last year I paid
them a visit of courtesy; they returned it and invited us to dinner; the
winter separated us for some months, and political events kept me away
from Frapesle until recently. Madame de Mortsauf is a woman who would
hold the highest position wherever she might be.”

“Does she often come to Tours?”

“She never goes there. However,” he added, correcting himself, “she did
go there lately to the ball given to the Duc d’Angouleme, who was very
gracious to her husband.”

“It was she!” I exclaimed.

“She! who?”

“A woman with beautiful shoulders.”

“You will meet a great many women with beautiful shoulders in Touraine,”
 he said, laughing. “But if you are not tired we can cross the river
and call at Clochegourde and you shall renew acquaintance with those
particular shoulders.”

I agreed, not without a blush of shame and pleasure. About four o’clock
we reached the little chateau on which my eyes had fastened from the
first. The building, which is finely effective in the landscape, is in
reality very modest. It has five windows on the front; those at each
end of the facade, looking south, project about twelve feet,--an
architectural device which gives the idea of two towers and adds grace
to the structure. The middle window serves as a door from which you
descend through a double portico into a terraced garden which joins the
narrow strip of grass-land that skirts the Indre along its whole course.
Though this meadow is separated from the lower terrace, which is shaded
by a double line of acacias and Japanese ailanthus, by the country road,
it nevertheless appears from the house to be a part of the garden, for
the road is sunken and hemmed in on one side by the terrace, on the
other side by a Norman hedge. The terraces being very well managed
put enough distance between the house and the river to avoid the
inconvenience of too great proximity to water, without losing the charms
of it. Below the house are the stables, coach-house, green-houses,
and kitchen, the various openings to which form an arcade. The roof is
charmingly rounded at the angles, and bears mansarde windows with carved
mullions and leaden finials on their gables. This roof, no doubt much
neglected during the Revolution, is stained by a sort of mildew produced
by lichens and the reddish moss which grows on houses exposed to the
sun. The glass door of the portico is surmounted by a little tower
which holds the bell, and on which is carved the escutcheon of the
Blamont-Chauvry family, to which Madame de Mortsauf belonged, as
follows: Gules, a pale vair, flanked quarterly by two hands clasped or,
and two lances in chevron sable. The motto, “Voyez tous, nul ne touche!”
 struck me greatly. The supporters, a griffin and dragon gules, enchained
or, made a pretty effect in the carving. The Revolution has damaged the
ducal crown and the crest, which was a palm-tree vert with fruit or.
Senart, the secretary of the committee of public safety was bailiff of
Sache before 1781, which explains this destruction.

These arrangements give an elegant air to the little castle, dainty as
a flower, which seems to scarcely rest upon the earth. Seen from the
valley the ground-floor appears to be the first story; but on the
other side it is on a level with a broad gravelled path leading to a
grass-plot, on which are several flower-beds. To right and left are
vineyards, orchards, and a few acres of tilled land planted with
chestnut-trees which surround the house, the ground falling rapidly to
the Indre, where other groups of trees of variegated shades of green,
chosen by Nature herself, are spread along the shore. I admired these
groups, so charmingly disposed, as we mounted the hilly road which
borders Clochegourde; I breathed an atmosphere of happiness. Has
the moral nature, like the physical nature, its own electrical
communications and its rapid changes of temperature? My heart was
beating at the approach of events then unrevealed which were to change
it forever, just as animals grow livelier when foreseeing fine weather.

This day, so marked in my life, lacked no circumstance that was needed
to solemnize it. Nature was adorned like a woman to meet her lover.
My soul heard her voice for the first time; my eyes worshipped her,
as fruitful, as varied as my imagination had pictured her in those
school-dreams the influence of which I have tried in a few unskilful
words to explain to you, for they were to me an Apocalypse in which my
life was figuratively foretold; each event, fortunate or unfortunate,
being mated to some one of these strange visions by ties known only to
the soul.

We crossed a court-yard surrounded by buildings necessary for the farm
work,--a barn, a wine-press, cow-sheds, and stables. Warned by the
barking of the watch-dog, a servant came to meet us, saying that
Monsieur le comte had gone to Azay in the morning but would soon return,
and that Madame la comtesse was at home. My companion looked at me. I
fairly trembled lest he should decline to see Madame de Mortsauf in
her husband’s absence; but he told the man to announce us. With the
eagerness of a child I rushed into the long antechamber which crosses
the whole house.

“Come in, gentlemen,” said a golden voice.

Though Madame de Mortsauf had spoken only one word at the ball, I
recognized her voice, which entered my soul and filled it as a ray of
sunshine fills and gilds a prisoner’s dungeon. Thinking, suddenly, that
she might remember my face, my first impulse was to fly; but it was too
late,--she appeared in the doorway, and our eyes met. I know not which
of us blushed deepest. Too much confused for immediate speech she
returned to her seat at an embroidery frame while the servant placed two
chairs, then she drew out her needle and counted some stitches, as if
to explain her silence; after which she raised her head, gently yet
proudly, in the direction of Monsieur de Chessel as she asked to what
fortunate circumstance she owed his visit. Though curious to know the
secret of my unexpected appearance, she looked at neither of us,--her
eyes were fixed on the river; and yet you could have told by the way she
listened that she was able to recognize, as the blind do, the agitations
of a neighboring soul by the imperceptible inflexions of the voice.

Monsieur de Chessel gave my name and biography. I had lately arrived
at Tours, where my parents had recalled me when the armies threatened
Paris. A son of Touraine to whom Touraine was as yet unknown, she would
find me a young man weakened by excessive study and sent to Frapesle to
amuse himself; he had already shown me his estate, which I saw for
the first time. I had just told him that I had walked from Tours to
Frapesle, and fearing for my health--which was really delicate--he had
stopped at Clochegourde to ask her to allow me to rest there. Monsieur
de Chessel told the truth; but the accident seemed so forced that Madame
de Mortsauf distrusted us. She gave me a cold, severe glance, under
which my own eyelids fell, as much from a sense of humiliation as
to hide the tears that rose beneath them. She saw the moisture on my
forehead, and perhaps she guessed the tears; for she offered me the
restoratives I needed, with a few kind and consoling words, which gave
me back the power of speech. I blushed like a young girl, and in a voice
as tremulous as that of an old man I thanked her and declined.

“All I ask,” I said, raising my eyes to hers, which mine now met for the
second time in a glance as rapid as lightning,--“is to rest here. I am
so crippled with fatigue I really cannot walk farther.”

“You must not doubt the hospitality of our beautiful Touraine,” she
said; then, turning to my companion, she added: “You will give us the
pleasure of your dining at Clochegourde?”

I threw such a look of entreaty at Monsieur de Chessel that he began
the preliminaries of accepting the invitation, though it was given in
a manner that seemed to expect a refusal. As a man of the world,
he recognized these shades of meaning; but I, a young man without
experience, believed so implicitly in the sincerity between word and
thought of this beautiful woman that I was wholly astonished when my
host said to me, after we reached home that evening, “I stayed because I
saw you were dying to do so; but if you do not succeed in making it
all right, I may find myself on bad terms with my neighbors.” That
expression, “if you do not make it all right,” made me ponder the matter
deeply. In other words, if I pleased Madame de Mortsauf, she would
not be displeased with the man who introduced me to her. He evidently
thought I had the power to please her; this in itself gave me that
power, and corroborated my inward hope at a moment when it needed some
outward succor.

“I am afraid it will be difficult,” he began; “Madame de Chessel expects
us.”

“She has you every day,” replied the countess; “besides, we can send her
word. Is she alone?”

“No, the Abbe de Quelus is there.”

“Well, then,” she said, rising to ring the bell, “you really must dine
with us.”

This time Monsieur de Chessel thought her in earnest, and gave me a
congratulatory look. As soon as I was sure of passing a whole evening
under that roof I seemed to have eternity before me. For many miserable
beings to-morrow is a word without meaning, and I was of the number who
had no faith in it; when I was certain of a few hours of happiness I
made them contain a whole lifetime of delight.

Madame de Mortsauf talked about local affairs, the harvest, the vintage,
and other matters to which I was a total stranger. This usually argues
either a want of breeding or great contempt for the stranger present
who is thus shut out from the conversation, but in this case it was
embarrassment. Though at first I thought she treated me as a child and
I envied the man of thirty to whom she talked of serious matters which
I could not comprehend, I came, a few months later, to understand how
significant a woman’s silence often is, and how many thoughts a voluble
conversation masks. At first I attempted to be at my ease and take part
in it, then I perceived the advantages of my situation and gave myself
up to the charm of listening to Madame de Mortsauf’s voice. The breath
of her soul rose and fell among the syllables as sound is divided by the
notes of a flute; it died away to the ear as it quickened the pulsation
of the blood. Her way of uttering the terminations in “i” was like a
bird’s song; the “ch” as she said it was a kiss, but the “t’s” were
an echo of her heart’s despotism. She thus extended, without herself
knowing that she did so, the meaning of her words, leading the soul of
the listener into regions above this earth. Many a time I have continued
a discussion I could easily have ended, many a time I have allowed
myself to be unjustly scolded that I might listen to those harmonies of
the human voice, that I might breathe the air of her soul as it left
her lips, and strain to my soul that spoken light as I would fain have
strained the speaker to my breast. A swallow’s song of joy it was when
she was gay!--but when she spoke of her griefs, a swan’s voice calling
to its mates!

Madame de Mortsauf’s inattention to my presence enabled me to examine
her. My eyes rejoiced as they glided over the sweet speaker; they kissed
her feet, they clasped her waist, they played with the ringlets of her
hair. And yet I was a prey to terror, as all who, once in their lives,
have experienced the illimitable joys of a true passion will understand.
I feared she would detect me if I let my eyes rest upon the shoulder I
had kissed, and the fear sharpened the temptation. I yielded, I looked,
my eyes tore away the covering; I saw the mole which lay where the
pretty line between the shoulders started, and which, ever since the
ball, had sparkled in that twilight which seems the region of the sleep
of youths whose imagination is ardent and whose life is chaste.

I can sketch for you the leading features which all eyes saw in Madame
de Mortsauf; but no drawing, however correct, no color, however warm,
can represent her to you. Her face was of those that require the
unattainable artist, whose hand can paint the reflection of inward
fires and render that luminous vapor which defies science and is not
revealable by language--but which a lover sees. Her soft, fair hair
often caused her much suffering, no doubt through sudden rushes of blood
to the head. Her brow, round and prominent like that of Joconda, teemed
with unuttered thoughts, restrained feelings--flowers drowning in bitter
waters. The eyes, of a green tinge flecked with brown, were always wan;
but if her children were in question, or if some keen condition of joy
or suffering (rare in the lives of all resigned women) seized her, those
eyes sent forth a subtile gleam as if from fires that were consuming
her,--the gleam that wrung the tears from mine when she covered me with
her contempt, and which sufficed to lower the boldest eyelid. A Grecian
nose, designed it might be by Phidias, and united by its double arch to
lips that were gracefully curved, spiritualized the face, which was
oval with a skin of the texture of a white camellia colored with soft
rose-tints upon the cheeks. Her plumpness did not detract from the
grace of her figure nor from the rounded outlines which made her shape
beautiful though well developed. You will understand the character of
this perfection when I say that where the dazzling treasures which
had so fascinated me joined the arm there was no crease or wrinkle. No
hollow disfigured the base of her head, like those which make the necks
of some women resemble trunks of trees; her muscles were not harshly
defined, and everywhere the lines were rounded into curves as fugitive
to the eye as to the pencil. A soft down faintly showed upon her cheeks
and on the outline of her throat, catching the light which made it
silken. Her little ears, perfect in shape, were, as she said herself,
the ears of a mother and a slave. In after days, when our hearts were
one, she would say to me, “Here comes Monsieur de Mortsauf”; and she was
right, though I, whose hearing is remarkably acute, could hear nothing.

Her arms were beautiful. The curved fingers of the hand were long, and
the flesh projected at the side beyond the finger-nails, like those
of antique statues. I should displease you, I know, if you were not
yourself an exception to my rule, when I say that flat waists should
have the preference over round ones. The round waist is a sign of
strength; but women thus formed are imperious, self-willed, and more
voluptuous than tender. On the other hand, women with flat waists are
devoted in soul, delicately perceptive, inclined to sadness, more truly
woman than the other class. The flat waist is supple and yielding; the
round waist is inflexible and jealous.

You now know how she was made. She had the foot of a well-bred
woman,--the foot that walks little, is quickly tired, and delights the
eye when it peeps beneath the dress. Though she was the mother of two
children, I have never met any woman so truly a young girl as she. Her
whole air was one of simplicity, joined to a certain bashful dreaminess
which attracted others, just as a painter arrests our steps before a
figure into which his genius has conveyed a world of sentiment. If you
recall the pure, wild fragrance of the heath we gathered on our return
from the Villa Diodati, the flower whose tints of black and rose you
praised so warmly, you can fancy how this woman could be elegant though
remote from the social world, natural in expression, fastidious in
all things which became part of herself,--in short, like the heath of
mingled colors. Her body had the freshness we admire in the unfolding
leaf; her spirit the clear conciseness of the aboriginal mind; she was a
child by feeling, grave through suffering, the mistress of a household,
yet a maiden too. Therefore she charmed artlessly and unconsciously,
by her way of sitting down or rising, of throwing in a word or keeping
silence. Though habitually collected, watchful as the sentinel on
whom the safety of others depends and who looks for danger, there were
moments when smiles would wreathe her lips and betray the happy nature
buried beneath the saddened bearing that was the outcome of her life.
Her gift of attraction was mysterious. Instead of inspiring the gallant
attentions which other women seek, she made men dream, letting them see
her virginal nature of pure flame, her celestial visions, as we see the
azure heavens through rifts in the clouds. This involuntary revelation
of her being made others thoughtful. The rarity of her gestures, above
all, the rarity of her glances--for, excepting her children, she seldom
looked at any one--gave a strange solemnity to all she said and did when
her words or actions seemed to her to compromise her dignity.

On this particular morning Madame de Mortsauf wore a rose-colored gown
patterned in tiny stripes, a collar with a wide hem, a black belt, and
little boots of the same hue. Her hair was simply twisted round her
head, and held in place by a tortoise-shell comb. Such, my dear Natalie,
is the imperfect sketch I promised you. But the constant emanation of
her soul upon her family, that nurturing essence shed in floods around
her as the sun emits its light, her inward nature, her cheerfulness on
days serene, her resignation on stormy ones,--all those variations of
expression by which character is displayed depend, like the effects
in the sky, on unexpected and fugitive circumstances, which have no
connection with each other except the background against which they
rest, though all are necessarily mingled with the events of this
history,--truly a household epic, as great to the eyes of a wise man as
a tragedy to the eyes of the crowd, an epic in which you will feel an
interest, not only for the part I took in it, but for the likeness that
it bears to the destinies of so vast a number of women.

Everything at Clochegourde bore signs of a truly English cleanliness.
The room in which the countess received us was panelled throughout and
painted in two shades of gray. The mantelpiece was ornamented with a
clock inserted in a block of mahogany and surmounted with a tazza, and
two large vases of white porcelain with gold lines, which held bunches
of Cape heather. A lamp was on a pier-table, and a backgammon board on
legs before the fireplace. Two wide bands of cotton held back the white
cambric curtains, which had no fringe. The furniture was covered with
gray cotton bound with a green braid, and the tapestry on the countess’s
frame told why the upholstery was thus covered. Such simplicity rose to
grandeur. No apartment, among all that I have seen since, has given me
such fertile, such teeming impressions as those that filled my mind
in that salon of Clochegourde, calm and composed as the life of its
mistress, where the conventual regularity of her occupations made itself
felt. The greater part of my ideas in science or politics, even the
boldest of them, were born in that room, as perfumes emanate from
flowers; there grew the mysterious plant that cast upon my soul its
fructifying pollen; there glowed the solar warmth which developed my
good and shrivelled my evil qualities. Through the windows the eye took
in the valley from the heights of Pont-de-Ruan to the chateau d’Azay,
following the windings of the further shore, picturesquely varied by the
towers of Frapesle, the church, the village, and the old manor-house of
Sache, whose venerable pile looked down upon the meadows.

In harmony with this reposeful life, and without other excitements to
emotion than those arising in the family, this scene conveyed to the
soul its own serenity. If I had met her there for the first time,
between the count and her two children, instead of seeing her
resplendent in a ball dress, I should not have ravished that delirious
kiss, which now filled me with remorse and with the fear of having lost
the future of my love. No; in the gloom of my unhappy life I should have
bent my knee and kissed the hem of her garment, wetting it with tears,
and then I might have flung myself into the Indre. But having breathed
the jasmine perfume of her skin and drunk the milk of that cup of love,
my soul had acquired the knowledge and the hope of human joys; I would
live and await the coming of happiness as the savage awaits his hour of
vengeance; I longed to climb those trees, to creep among the vines, to
float in the river; I wanted the companionship of night and its silence,
I needed lassitude of body, I craved the heat of the sun to make the
eating of the delicious apple into which I had bitten perfect. Had she
asked of me the singing flower, the riches buried by the comrades of
Morgan the destroyer, I would have sought them, to obtain those other
riches and that mute flower for which I longed.

When my dream, the dream into which this first contemplation of my
idol plunged me, came to an end and I heard her speaking of Monsieur de
Mortsauf, the thought came that a woman must belong to her husband, and
a raging curiosity possessed me to see the owner of this treasure. Two
emotions filled my mind, hatred and fear,--hatred which allowed of no
obstacles and measured all without shrinking, and a vague, but real fear
of the struggle, of its issue, and above all of _her_.

“Here is Monsieur de Mortsauf,” she said.

I sprang to my feet like a startled horse. Though the movement was seen
by Monsieur de Chessel and the countess, neither made any observation,
for a diversion was effected at this moment by the entrance of a little
girl, whom I took to be about six years old, who came in exclaiming,
“Here’s papa!”

“Madeleine?” said her mother, gently.

The child at once held out her hand to Monsieur de Chessel, and looked
attentively at me after making a little bow with an air of astonishment.

“Are you more satisfied about her health?” asked Monsieur de Chessel.

“She is better,” replied the countess, caressing the little head which
was already nestling in her lap.

The next question of Monsieur de Chessel let me know that Madeleine
was nine years old; I showed great surprise, and immediately the clouds
gathered on the mother’s brow. My companion threw me a significant
look,--one of those which form the education of men of the world. I had
stumbled no doubt upon some maternal wound the covering of which should
have been respected. The sickly child, whose eyes were pallid and
whose skin was white as a porcelain vase with a light within it, would
probably not have lived in the atmosphere of a city. Country air and her
mother’s brooding care had kept the life in that frail body, delicate
as a hot-house plant growing in a harsh and foreign climate. Though in
nothing did she remind me of her mother, Madeleine seemed to have her
soul, and that soul held her up. Her hair was scanty and black, her eyes
and cheeks hollow, her arms thin, her chest narrow, showing a battle
between life and death, a duel without truce in which the mother had
so far been victorious. The child willed to live,--perhaps to spare her
mother, for at times, when not observed, she fell into the attitude of
a weeping-willow. You might have thought her a little gypsy dying of
hunger, begging her way, exhausted but always brave and dressed up to
play her part.

“Where have you left Jacques?” asked the countess, kissing the white
line which parted the child’s hair into two bands that looked like a
crow’s wings.

“He is coming with papa.”

Just then the count entered, holding his son by the hand. Jacques, the
image of his sister, showed the same signs of weakness. Seeing these
sickly children beside a mother so magnificently healthy it was
impossible not to guess at the causes of the grief which clouded her
brow and kept her silent on a subject she could take to God only. As
he bowed, Monsieur de Mortsauf gave me a glance that was less observing
than awkwardly uneasy,--the glance of a man whose distrust grows out
of his inability to analyze. After explaining the circumstances of our
visit, and naming me to him, the countess gave him her place and left
the room. The children, whose eyes were on those of their mother as if
they drew the light of theirs from hers, tried to follow her; but she
said, with a finger on her lips, “Stay dears!” and they obeyed, but
their eyes filled. Ah! to hear that one word “dears” what tasks they
would have undertaken!

Like the children, I felt less warm when she had left us. My name seemed
to change the count’s feeling toward me. Cold and supercilious in his
first glance, he became at once, if not affectionate, at least politely
attentive, showing me every consideration and seeming pleased to receive
me as a guest. My father had formerly done devoted service to the
Bourbons, and had played an important and perilous, though secret part.
When their cause was lost by the elevation of Napoleon, he took
refuge in the quietude of the country and domestic life, accepting the
unmerited accusations that followed him as the inevitable reward of
those who risk all to win all, and who succumb after serving as pivot to
the political machine. Knowing nothing of the fortunes, nor of the past,
nor of the future of my family, I was unaware of this devoted service
which the Comte de Mortsauf well remembered. Moreover, the antiquity of
our name, the most precious quality of a man in his eyes, added to the
warmth of his greeting. I knew nothing of these reasons until later; for
the time being the sudden transition to cordiality put me at my ease.
When the two children saw that we were all three fairly engaged in
conversation, Madeleine slipped her head from her father’s hand, glanced
at the open door, and glided away like an eel, Jacques following
her. They rejoined their mother, and I heard their voices and their
movements, sounding in the distance like the murmur of bees about a
hive.

I watched the count, trying to guess his character, but I became so
interested in certain leading traits that I got no further than
a superficial examination of his personality. Though he was only
forty-five years old, he seemed nearer sixty, so much had the great
shipwreck at the close of the eighteenth century aged him. The crescent
of hair which monastically fringed the back of his head, otherwise
completely bald, ended at the ears in little tufts of gray mingled with
black. His face bore a vague resemblance to that of a white wolf with
blood about its muzzle, for his nose was inflamed and gave signs of a
life poisoned at its springs and vitiated by diseases of long standing.
His flat forehead, too broad for the face beneath it, which ended in a
point, and transversely wrinkled in crooked lines, gave signs of a life
in the open air, but not of any mental activity; it also showed the
burden of constant misfortunes, but not of any efforts made to surmount
them. His cheekbones, which were brown and prominent amid the general
pallor of his skin, showed a physical structure which was likely to
ensure him a long life. His hard, light-yellow eye fell upon mine like
a ray of wintry sun, bright without warmth, anxious without thought,
distrustful without conscious cause. His mouth was violent and
domineering, his chin flat and long. Thin and very tall, he had the
bearing of a gentleman who relies upon the conventional value of his
caste, who knows himself above others by right, and beneath them in
fact. The carelessness of country life had made him neglect his external
appearance. His dress was that of a country-man whom peasants and
neighbors no longer considered except for his territorial worth. His
brown and wiry hands showed that he wore no gloves unless he mounted a
horse, or went to church, and his shoes were thick and common.

Though ten years of emigration and ten years more of farm-life had
changed his physical condition, he still retained certain vestiges of
nobility. The bitterest liberal (a term not then in circulation)
would readily have admitted his chivalric loyalty and the imperishable
convictions of one who puts his faith to the “Quotidienne”; he would
have felt respect for the man religiously devoted to a cause, honest
in his political antipathies, incapable of serving his party but very
capable of injuring it, and without the slightest real knowledge of the
affairs of France. The count was in fact one of those upright men who
are available for nothing, but stand obstinately in the way of all;
ready to die under arms at the post assigned to them, but preferring to
give their life rather than to give their money.

During dinner I detected, in the hanging of his flaccid cheeks and the
covert glances he cast now and then upon his children, the traces
of some wearing thought which showed for a moment upon the surface.
Watching him, who could fail to understand him? Who would not have seen
that he had fatally transmitted to his children those weakly bodies in
which the principle of life was lacking. But if he blamed himself he
denied to others the right to judge him. Harsh as one who knows himself
in fault, yet without greatness of soul or charm to compensate for the
weight of misery he had thrown into the balance, his private life was
no doubt the scene of irascibilities that were plainly revealed in his
angular features and by the incessant restlessness of his eye. When his
wife returned, followed by the children who seemed fastened to her side,
I felt the presence of unhappiness, just as in walking over the roof
of a vault the feet become in some way conscious of the depths below.
Seeing these four human beings together, holding them all as it were in
one glance, letting my eye pass from one to the other, studying their
countenances and their respective attitudes, thoughts steeped in sadness
fell upon my heart as a fine gray rain dims a charming landscape after
the sun has risen clear.

When the immediate subject of conversation was exhausted the count told
his wife who I was, and related certain circumstances connected with my
family that were wholly unknown to me. He asked me my age. When I told
it, the countess echoed my own exclamation of surprise at her daughter’s
age. Perhaps she had thought me fifteen. Later on, I discovered that
this was still another tie which bound her strongly to me. Even then I
read her soul. Her motherhood quivered with a tardy ray of hope.
Seeing me at over twenty years of age so slight and delicate and yet so
nervously strong, a voice cried to her, “They too will live!” She looked
at me searchingly, and in that moment I felt the barriers of ice melting
between us. She seemed to have many questions to ask, but uttered none.

“If study has made you ill,” she said, “the air of our valley will soon
restore you.”

“Modern education is fatal to children,” remarked the count. “We stuff
them with mathematics and ruin their health with sciences, and make them
old before their time. You must stay and rest here,” he added, turning
to me. “You are crushed by the avalanche of ideas that have rolled down
upon you. What sort of future will this universal education bring upon
us unless we prevent its evils by replacing public education in the
hands of the religious bodies?”

These words were in harmony with a speech he afterwards made at the
elections when he refused his support to a man whose gifts would have
done good service to the royalist cause. “I shall always distrust men of
talent,” he said.

Presently the count proposed that we should make the tour of the
gardens.

“Monsieur--” said his wife.

“Well, what, my dear?” he said, turning to her with an arrogant
harshness which showed plainly enough how absolute he chose to be in his
own home.

“Monsieur de Vandenesse walked from Tours this morning and Monsieur de
Chessel, not aware of it, has already taken him on foot over Frapesle.”

“Very imprudent of you,” the count said, turning to me; “but at your
age--” and he shook his head in sign of regret.

The conversation was resumed. I soon saw how intractable his royalism
was, and how much care was needed to swim safely in his waters. The
man-servant, who had now put on his livery, announced dinner. Monsieur
de Chessel gave his arm to Madame de Mortsauf, and the count gaily
seized mine to lead me into the dining-room, which was on the
ground-floor facing the salon.

This room, floored with white tiles made in Touraine, and wainscoted to
the height of three feet, was hung with a varnished paper divided into
wide panels by wreaths of flowers and fruit; the windows had cambric
curtains trimmed with red, the buffets were old pieces by Boulle
himself, and the woodwork of the chairs, which were covered by hand-made
tapestry, was carved oak. The dinner, plentifully supplied, was not
luxurious; family silver without uniformity, Dresden china which was
not then in fashion, octagonal decanters, knives with agate handles, and
lacquered trays beneath the wine-bottles, were the chief features of the
table, but flowers adorned the porcelain vases and overhung the gilding
of their fluted edges. I delighted in these quaint old things. I thought
the Reveillon paper with its flowery garlands beautiful. The sweet
content that filled my sails hindered me from perceiving the obstacles
which a life so uniform, so unvarying in solitude of the country placed
between her and me. I was near her, sitting at her right hand, serving
her with wine. Yes, unhoped-for joy! I touched her dress, I ate her
bread. At the end of three hours my life had mingled with her life! That
terrible kiss had bound us to each other in a secret which inspired us
with mutual shame. A glorious self-abasement took possession of me. I
studied to please the count, I fondled the dogs, I would gladly have
gratified every desire of the children, I would have brought them hoops
and marbles and played horse with them; I was even provoked that
they did not already fasten upon me as a thing of their own. Love has
intuitions like those of genius; and I dimly perceived that gloom,
discontent, hostility would destroy my footing in that household.

The dinner passed with inward happiness on my part. Feeling that I was
there, under her roof, I gave no heed to her obvious coldness, nor to
the count’s indifference masked by his politeness. Love, like life,
has an adolescence during which period it suffices unto itself. I made
several stupid replies induced by the tumults of passion, but no one
perceived their cause, not even SHE, who knew nothing of love. The rest
of my visit was a dream, a dream which did not cease until by moonlight
on that warm and balmy night I recrossed the Indre, watching the white
visions that embellished meadows, shores, and hills, and listening to
the clear song, the matchless note, full of deep melancholy and uttered
only in still weather, of a tree-frog whose scientific name is unknown
to me. Since that solemn evening I have never heard it without infinite
delight. A sense came to me then of the marble wall against which
my feelings had hitherto dashed themselves. Would it be always so? I
fancied myself under some fatal spell; the unhappy events of my past
life rose up and struggled with the purely personal pleasure I had just
enjoyed. Before reaching Frapesle I turned to look at Clochegourde
and saw beneath its windows a little boat, called in Touraine a punt,
fastened to an ash-tree and swaying on the water. This punt belonged to
Monsieur de Mortsauf, who used it for fishing.

“Well,” said Monsieur de Chessel, when we were out of ear-shot. “I
needn’t ask if you found those shoulders; I must, however, congratulate
you on the reception Monsieur de Mortsauf gave you. The devil! you
stepped into his heart at once.”

These words followed by those I have already quoted to you raised my
spirits. I had not as yet said a word, and Monsieur de Chessel may have
attributed my silence to happiness.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“He never, to my knowledge, received any one so well.”

“I will admit that I am rather surprised myself,” I said, conscious of a
certain bitterness underlying my companion’s speech.

Though I was too inexpert in social matters to understand its cause, I
was much struck by the feeling Monsieur de Chessel betrayed. His real
name was Durand, but he had had the weakness to discard the name of
a worthy father, a merchant who had made a large fortune under
the Revolution. His wife was sole heiress of the Chessels, an old
parliamentary family under Henry IV., belonging to the middle classes,
as did most of the Parisian magistrates. Ambitious of higher flights
Monsieur de Chessel endeavored to smother the original Durand. He first
called himself Durand de Chessel, then D. de Chessel, and that made him
Monsieur de Chessel. Under the Restoration he entailed an estate with
the title of count in virtue of letters-patent from Louis XVIII. His
children reaped the fruits of his audacity without knowing what it cost
him in sarcastic comments. Parvenus are like monkeys, whose cleverness
they possess; we watch them climbing, we admire their agility, but
once at the summit we see only their absurd and contemptible parts. The
reverse side of my host’s character was made up of pettiness with the
addition of envy. The peerage and he were on diverging lines. To have an
ambition and gratify it shows merely the insolence of strength, but to
live below one’s avowed ambition is a constant source of ridicule
to petty minds. Monsieur de Chessel did not advance with the
straightforward step of a strong man. Twice elected deputy, twice
defeated; yesterday director-general, to-day nothing at all, not even
prefect, his successes and his defeats had injured his nature, and given
him the sourness of invalided ambition. Though a brave man and a witty
one and capable of great things, envy, which is the root of existence
in Touraine, the inhabitants of which employ their native genius in
jealousy of all things, injured him in upper social circles, where a
dissatisfied man, frowning at the success of others, slow at compliments
and ready at epigram, seldom succeeds. Had he sought less he might
perhaps have obtained more; but unhappily he had enough genuine
superiority to make him wish to advance in his own way.

At this particular time Monsieur de Chessel’s ambition had a second
dawn. Royalty smiled upon him, and he was now affecting the grand
manner. Still he was, I must say, most kind to me, and he pleased me for
the very simple reason that with him I had found peace and rest for the
first time. The interest, possibly very slight, which he showed in
my affairs, seemed to me, lonely and rejected as I was, an image of
paternal love. His hospitable care contrasted so strongly with the
neglect to which I was accustomed, that I felt a childlike gratitude
to the home where no fetters bound me and where I was welcomed and even
courted.

The owners of Frapesle are so associated with the dawn of my life’s
happiness that I mingle them in all those memories I love to revive.
Later, and more especially in connection with his letters-patent, I had
the pleasure of doing my host some service. Monsieur de Chessel enjoyed
his wealth with an ostentation that gave umbrage to certain of his
neighbors. He was able to vary and renew his fine horses and elegant
equipages; his wife dressed exquisitely; he received on a grand scale;
his servants were more numerous than his neighbors approved; for all of
which he was said to be aping princes. The Frapesle estate is immense.
Before such luxury as this the Comte de Mortsauf, with one family
cariole,--which in Touraine is something between a coach without springs
and a post-chaise,--forced by limited means to let or farm Clochegourde,
was Tourangean up to the time when royal favor restored the family to a
distinction possibly unlooked for. His greeting to me, the younger son
of a ruined family whose escutcheon dated back to the Crusades, was
intended to show contempt for the large fortune and to belittle the
possessions, the woods, the arable lands, the meadows, of a neighbor who
was not of noble birth. Monsieur de Chessel fully understood this. They
always met politely; but there was none of that daily intercourse or
that agreeable intimacy which ought to have existed between Clochegourde
and Frapesle, two estates separated only by the Indre, and whose
mistresses could have beckoned to each other from their windows.

Jealousy, however, was not the sole reason for the solitude in which the
Count de Mortsauf lived. His early education was that of the children
of great families,--an incomplete and superficial instruction as to
knowledge, but supplemented by the training of society, the habits of a
court life, and the exercise of important duties under the crown or in
eminent offices. Monsieur de Mortsauf had emigrated at the very
moment when the second stage of his education was about to begin, and
accordingly that training was lacking to him. He was one of those
who believed in the immediate restoration of the monarchy; with that
conviction in his mind, his exile was a long and miserable period of
idleness. When the army of Conde, which his courage led him to join with
the utmost devotion, was disbanded, he expected to find some other post
under the white flag, and never sought, like other emigrants, to take up
an industry. Perhaps he had not the sort of courage that could lay aside
his name and earn his living in the sweat of a toil he despised. His
hopes, daily postponed to the morrow, and possibly a scruple of honor,
kept him from offering his services to foreign powers. Trials undermined
his courage. Long tramps afoot on insufficient nourishment, and above
all, on hopes betrayed, injured his health and discouraged his mind. By
degrees he became utterly destitute. If to some men misery is a tonic,
on others it acts as a dissolvent; and the count was of the latter.

Reflecting on the life of this poor Touraine gentleman, tramping and
sleeping along the highroads of Hungary, sharing the mutton of Prince
Esterhazy’s shepherds, from whom the foot-worn traveller begged the food
he would not, as a gentleman, have accepted at the table of the master,
and refusing again and again to do service to the enemies of France, I
never found it in my heart to feel bitterness against him, even when I
saw him at his worst in after days. The natural gaiety of a Frenchman
and a Tourangean soon deserted him; he became morose, fell ill, and
was charitably cared for in some German hospital. His disease was an
inflammation of the mesenteric membrane, which is often fatal, and
is liable, even if cured, to change the constitution and produce
hypochondria. His love affairs, carefully buried out of sight and which
I alone discovered, were low-lived, and not only destroyed his health
but ruined his future.

After twelve years of great misery he made his way to France, under the
decree of the Emperor which permitted the return of the emigrants. As
the wretched wayfarer crossed the Rhine and saw the tower of Strasburg
against the evening sky, his strength gave way. “‘France! France!’ I
cried. ‘I see France!’” (he said to me) “as a child cries ‘Mother!’ when
it is hurt.” Born to wealth, he was now poor; made to command a regiment
or govern a province, he was now without authority and without a future;
constitutionally healthy and robust, he returned infirm and utterly worn
out. Without enough education to take part among men and affairs, now
broadened and enlarged by the march of events, necessarily without
influence of any kind, he lived despoiled of everything, of his moral
strength as well as his physical. Want of money made his name a burden.
His unalterable opinions, his antecedents with the army of Conde, his
trials, his recollections, his wasted health, gave him susceptibilities
which are but little spared in France, that land of jest and sarcasm.
Half dead he reached Maine, where, by some accident of the civil war,
the revolutionary government had forgotten to sell one of his farms of
considerable extent, which his farmer had held for him by giving out
that he himself was the owner of it.

When the Lenoncourt family, living at Givry, an estate not far from
this farm, heard of the arrival of the Comte de Mortsauf, the Duc de
Lenoncourt invited him to stay at Givry while a house was being prepared
for him. The Lenoncourt family were nobly generous to him, and with them
he remained some months, struggling to hide his sufferings during that
first period of rest. The Lenoncourts had themselves lost an immense
property. By birth Monsieur de Mortsauf was a suitable husband for their
daughter. Mademoiselle de Lenoncourt, instead of rejecting a marriage
with a feeble and worn-out man of thirty-five, seemed satisfied to
accept it. It gave her the opportunity of living with her aunt, the
Duchesse de Verneuil, sister of the Prince de Blamont-Chauvry, who was
like a mother to her.

Madame de Verneuil, the intimate friend of the Duchesse de Bourbon, was
a member of the devout society of which Monsieur Saint-Martin (born
in Touraine and called the Philosopher of Mystery) was the soul. The
disciples of this philosopher practised the virtues taught them by the
lofty doctrines of mystical illumination. These doctrines hold the key
to worlds divine; they explain existence by reincarnations through which
the human spirit rises to its sublime destiny; they liberate duty from
its legal degradation, enable the soul to meet the trials of life
with the unalterable serenity of the Quaker, ordain contempt for the
sufferings of this life, and inspire a fostering care of that angel
within us who allies us to the divine. It is stoicism with an immortal
future. Active prayer and pure love are the elements of this faith,
which is born of the Roman Church but returns to the Christianity of the
primitive faith. Mademoiselle de Lenoncourt remained, however, in the
Catholic communion, to which her aunt was equally bound. Cruelly tried
by revolutionary horrors, the Duchesse de Verneuil acquired in the
last years of her life a halo of passionate piety, which, to use the
phraseology of Saint-Martin, shed the light of celestial love and the
chrism of inward joy upon the soul of her cherished niece.

After the death of her aunt, Madame de Mortsauf received several visits
at Clochegourde from Saint-Martin, a man of peace and of virtuous
wisdom. It was at Clochegourde that he corrected his last books, printed
at Tours by Letourmy. Madame de Verneuil, wise with the wisdom of an old
woman who has known the stormy straits of life, gave Clochegourde to
the young wife for her married home; and with the grace of old age, so
perfect where it exists, the duchess yielded everything to her niece,
reserving for herself only one room above the one she had always
occupied, and which she now fitted up for the countess. Her sudden
death threw a gloom over the early days of the marriage, and connected
Clochegourde with ideas of sadness in the sensitive mind of the
bride. The first period of her settlement in Touraine was to Madame de
Mortsauf, I cannot say the happiest, but the least troubled of her life.

After the many trials of his exile, Monsieur de Mortsauf, taking comfort
in the thought of a secure future, had a certain recovery of mind; he
breathed anew in this sweet valley the intoxicating essence of revived
hope. Compelled to husband his means, he threw himself into agricultural
pursuits and began to find some happiness in life. But the birth of his
first child, Jacques, was a thunderbolt which ruined both the past and
the future. The doctor declared the child had not vitality enough to
live. The count concealed this sentence from the mother; but he sought
other advice, and received the same fatal answer, the truth of which
was confirmed at the subsequent birth of Madeleine. These events and a
certain inward consciousness of the cause of this disaster increased the
diseased tendencies of the man himself. His name doomed to extinction, a
pure and irreproachable young woman made miserable beside him and doomed
to the anguish of maternity without its joys--this uprising of his
former into his present life, with its growth of new sufferings, crushed
his spirit and completed its destruction.

The countess guessed the past from the present, and read the future.
Though nothing is so difficult as to make a man happy when he knows
himself to blame, she set herself to that task, which is worthy of an
angel. She became stoical. Descending into an abyss, whence she still
could see the sky, she devoted herself to the care of one man as
the sister of charity devotes herself to many. To reconcile him with
himself, she forgave him that for which he had no forgiveness. The count
grew miserly; she accepted the privations he imposed. Like all who have
known the world only to acquire its suspiciousness, he feared betrayal;
she lived in solitude and yielded without a murmur to his mistrust. With
a woman’s tact she made him will to do that which was right, till he
fancied the ideas were his own, and thus enjoyed in his own person the
honors of a superiority that was never his. After due experience of
married life, she came to the resolution of never leaving Clochegourde;
for she saw the hysterical tendencies of the count’s nature, and feared
the outbreaks which might be talked of in that gossipping and jealous
neighborhood to the injury of her children. Thus, thanks to her, no one
suspected Monsieur de Mortsauf’s real incapacity, for she wrapped
his ruins in a mantle of ivy. The fickle, not merely discontented but
embittered nature of the man found rest and ease in his wife; his secret
anguish was lessened by the balm she shed upon it.

This brief history is in part a summary of that forced from Monsieur de
Chessel by his inward vexation. His knowledge of the world enabled
him to penetrate several of the mysteries of Clochegourde. But the
prescience of love could not be misled by the sublime attitude with
which Madame de Mortsauf deceived the world. When alone in my little
bedroom, a sense of the full truth made me spring from my bed; I
could not bear to stay at Frapesle when I saw the lighted windows of
Clochegourde. I dressed, went softly down, and left the chateau by the
door of a tower at the foot of a winding stairway. The coolness of the
night calmed me. I crossed the Indre by the bridge at the Red Mill,
took the ever-blessed punt, and rowed in front of Clochegourde, where a
brilliant light was streaming from a window looking towards Azay.

Again I plunged into my old meditations; but they were now peaceful,
intermingled with the love-note of the nightingale and the solitary cry
of the sedge-warbler. Ideas glided like fairies through my mind, lifting
the black veil which had hidden till then the glorious future. Soul and
senses were alike charmed. With what passion my thoughts rose to her!
Again and again I cried, with the repetition of a madman, “Will she be
mine?” During the preceding days the universe had enlarged to me, but
now in a single night I found its centre. On her my will and my ambition
henceforth fastened; I desired to be all in all to her, that I might
heal and fill her lacerated heart.

Beautiful was that night beneath her windows, amid the murmur of waters
rippling through the sluices, broken only by a voice that told the hours
from the clock-tower of Sache. During those hours of darkness bathed in
light, when this sidereal flower illumined my existence, I betrothed to
her my soul with the faith of the poor Castilian knight whom we laugh at
in the pages of Cervantes,--a faith, nevertheless, with which all love
begins.

At the first gleam of day, the first note of the waking birds, I fled
back among the trees of Frapesle and reached the house; no one had seen
me, no one suspected by absence, and I slept soundly until the bell rang
for breakfast. When the meal was over I went down, in spite of the heat,
to the meadow-lands for another sight of the Indre and its isles, the
valley and its slopes, of which I seemed so passionate an admirer. But
once there, thanks to a swiftness of foot like that of a loose horse, I
returned to my punt, the willows, and Clochegourde. All was silent and
palpitating, as a landscape is at midday in summer. The still foliage
lay sharply defined on the blue of the sky; the insects that live by
light, the dragon-flies, the cantharides, were flying among the reeds
and the ash-trees; cattle chewed the cud in the shade, the ruddy earth
of the vineyards glowed, the adders glided up and down the banks. What a
change in the sparkling and coquettish landscape while I slept! I sprang
suddenly from the boat and ran up the road which went round Clochegourde
for I fancied that I saw the count coming out. I was not mistaken; he
was walking beside the hedge, evidently making for a gate on the road to
Azay which followed the bank of the river.

“How are you this morning, Monsieur le comte?”

He looked at me pleasantly, not being used to hear himself thus
addressed.

“Quite well,” he answered. “You must love the country, to be rambling
about in this heat!”

“I was sent here to live in the open air.”

“Then what do you say to coming with me to see them cut my rye?”

“Gladly,” I replied. “I’ll own to you that my ignorance is past belief;
I don’t know rye from wheat, nor a poplar from an aspen; I know nothing
of farming, nor of the various methods of cultivating the soil.”

“Well, come and learn,” he cried gaily, returning upon his steps. “Come
in by the little gate above.”

The count walked back along the hedge, he being within it and I without.

“You will learn nothing from Monsieur de Chessel,” he remarked; “he is
altogether too fine a gentleman to do more than receive the reports of
his bailiff.”

The count then showed me his yards and the farm buildings, the
pleasure-grounds, orchards, vineyards, and kitchen garden, until we
finally came to the long alley of acacias and ailanthus beside the
river, at the end of which I saw Madame de Mortsauf sitting on a bench,
with her children. A woman is very lovely under the light and quivering
shade of such foliage. Surprised, perhaps, at my prompt visit, she did
not move, knowing very well that we should go to her. The count made me
admire the view of the valley, which at this point is totally different
from that seen from the heights above. Here I might have thought myself
in a corner of Switzerland. The meadows, furrowed with little brooks
which flow into the Indre, can be seen to their full extent till lost in
the misty distance. Towards Montbazon the eye ranges over a vast green
plain; in all other directions it is stopped by hills, by masses of
trees, and rocks. We quickened our steps as we approached Madame de
Mortsauf, who suddenly dropped the book in which Madeleine was reading
to her and took Jacques upon her knees, in the paroxysms of a violent
cough.

“What’s the matter?” cried the count, turning livid.

“A sore throat,” answered the mother, who seemed not to see me; “but it
is nothing serious.”

She was holding the child by the head and body, and her eyes seemed to
shed two rays of life into the poor frail creature.

“You are so extraordinarily imprudent,” said the count, sharply; “you
expose him to the river damps and let him sit on a stone bench.”

“Why, papa, the stone is burning hot,” cried Madeleine.

“They were suffocating higher up,” said the countess.

“Women always want to prove they are right,” said the count, turning to
me.

To avoid agreeing or disagreeing with him by word or look I watched
Jacques, who complained of his throat. His mother carried him away, but
as she did so she heard her husband say:--

“When they have brought such sickly children into the world they ought
to learn how to take care of them.”

Words that were cruelly unjust; but his self-love drove him to defend
himself at the expense of his wife. The countess hurried up the steps
and across the portico, and I saw her disappear through the glass door.
Monsieur de Mortsauf seated himself on the bench, his head bowed in
gloomy silence. My position became annoying; he neither spoke nor looked
at me. Farewell to the walk he had proposed, in the course of which I
had hoped to fathom him. I hardly remember a more unpleasant moment.
Ought I to go away, or should I not go? How many painful thoughts must
have arisen in his mind, to make him forget to follow Jacques and learn
how he was! At last however he rose abruptly and came towards me. We
both turned and looked at the smiling valley.

“We will put off our walk to another day, Monsieur le comte,” I said
gently.

“No, let us go,” he replied. “Unfortunately, I am accustomed to such
scenes--I, who would give my life without the slightest regret to save
that of the child.”

“Jacques is better, my dear; he has gone to sleep,” said a golden voice.
Madame de Mortsauf suddenly appeared at the end of the path. She came
forward, without bitterness or ill-will, and bowed to me.

“I am glad to see that you like Clochegourde,” she said.

“My dear, should you like me to ride over and fetch Monsieur Deslandes?”
 said the count, as if wishing her to forgive his injustice.

“Don’t be worried,” she said. “Jacques did not sleep last night, that’s
all. The child is very nervous; he had a bad dream, and I told him
stories all night to keep him quiet. His cough is purely nervous; I have
stilled it with a lozenge, and he has gone to sleep.”

“Poor woman!” said her husband, taking her hand in his and giving her a
tearful look, “I knew nothing of it.”

“Why should you be troubled when there is no occasion?” she replied.
“Now go and attend to the rye. You know if you are not there the men
will let the gleaners of the other villages get into the field before
the sheaves are carried away.”

“I am going to take a first lesson in agriculture, madame,” I said to
her.

“You have a very good master,” she replied, motioning towards the count,
whose mouth screwed itself into that smile of satisfaction which is
vulgarly termed a “bouche en coeur.”

Two months later I learned she had passed that night in great anxiety,
fearing that her son had the croup; while I was in the boat, rocked by
thoughts of love, imagined that she might see me from her window adoring
the gleam of the candle which was then lighting a forehead furrowed by
fears! The croup prevailed at Tours, and was often fatal. When we were
outside the gate, the count said in a voice of emotion, “Madame de
Mortsauf is an angel!” The words staggered me. As yet I knew but little
of the family, and the natural conscience of a young soul made me
exclaim inwardly: “What right have I to trouble this perfect peace?”

Glad to find a listener in a young man over whom he could lord it so
easily, the count talked to me of the future which the return of the
Bourbons would secure to France. We had a desultory conversation, in
which I listened to much childish nonsense which positively amazed
me. He was ignorant of facts susceptible of proof that might be called
geometric; he feared persons of education; he rejected superiority,
and scoffed, perhaps with some reason, at progress. I discovered in his
nature a number of sensitive fibres which it required the utmost caution
not to wound; so that a conversation with him of any length was a
positive strain upon the mind. When I had, as it were, felt of his
defects, I conformed to them with the same suppleness that his wife
showed in soothing him. Later in life I should certainly have made him
angry, but now, humble as a child, supposing that I knew nothing and
believing that men in their prime knew all, I was genuinely amazed at
the results obtained at Clochegourde by this patient agriculturist. I
listened admiringly to his plans; and with an involuntary flattery
which won his good-will, I envied him the estate and its outlook--a
terrestrial paradise, I called it, far superior to Frapesle.

“Frapesle,” I said, “is a massive piece of plate, but Clochegourde is a
jewel-case of gems,”--a speech which he often quoted, giving credit to
its author.

“Before we came here,” he said, “it was desolation itself.”

I was all ears when he told of his seed-fields and nurseries. New to
country life, I besieged him with questions about prices, means of
preparing and working the soil, etc., and he seemed glad to answer all
in detail.

“What in the world do they teach you in your colleges?” he exclaimed at
last in astonishment.

On this first day the count said to his wife when he reached home,
“Monsieur Felix is a charming young man.”

That evening I wrote to my mother and asked her to send my clothes and
linen, saying that I should remain at Frapesle. Ignorant of the great
revolution which was just taking place, and not perceiving the influence
it was to have upon my fate, I expected to return to Paris to resume
my legal studies. The Law School did not open till the first week in
November; meantime I had two months and a half before me.

The first part of my stay, while I studied to understand the count,
was a period of painful impressions to me. I found him a man of extreme
irascibility without adequate cause; hasty in action in hazardous cases
to a degree that alarmed me. Sometimes he showed glimpses of the brave
gentleman of Conde’s army, parabolic flashes of will such as may, in
times of emergency, tear through politics like bomb-shells, and may
also, by virtue of honesty and courage, make a man condemned to live
buried on his property an Elbee, a Bonchamp, or a Charette. In presence
of certain ideas his nostril contracted, his forehead cleared, and his
eyes shot lightnings, which were soon quenched. Sometimes I feared he
might detect the language of my eyes and kill me. I was young then
and merely tender. Will, that force that alters men so strangely,
had scarcely dawned within me. My passionate desires shook me with an
emotion that was like the throes of fear. Death I feared not, but I
would not die until I knew the happiness of mutual love--But how tell
of what I felt! I was a prey to perplexity; I hoped for some fortunate
chance; I watched; I made the children love me; I tried to identify
myself with the family.

Little by little the count restrained himself less in my presence. I
came to know his sudden outbreaks of temper, his deep and ceaseless
melancholy, his flashes of brutality, his bitter, cutting complaints,
his cold hatreds, his impulses of latent madness, his childish moans,
his cries of a man’s despair, his unexpected fury. The moral nature
differs from the physical nature inasmuch as nothing is absolute in it.
The force of effects is in direct proportion to the characters or the
ideas which are grouped around some fact. My position at Clochegourde,
my future life, depended on this one eccentric will.

I cannot describe to you the distress that filled my soul (as quick in
those days to expand as to contract), whenever I entered Clochegourde,
and asked myself, “How will he receive me?” With what anxiety of heart
I saw the clouds collecting on that stormy brow. I lived in a perpetual
“qui-vive.” I fell under the dominion of that man; and the sufferings I
endured taught me to understand those of Madame de Mortsauf. We began
by exchanging looks of comprehension; tried by the same fire, how many
discoveries I made during those first forty days!--of actual bitterness,
of tacit joys, of hopes alternately submerged and buoyant. One evening I
found her pensively watching a sunset which reddened the summits with so
ravishing a glow that it was impossible not to listen to that voice of
the eternal Song of Songs by which Nature herself bids all her creatures
love. Did the lost illusions of her girlhood return to her? Did
the woman suffer from an inward comparison? I fancied I perceived a
desolation in her attitude that was favorable to my first appeal, and I
said, “Some days are hard to bear.”

“You read my soul,” she answered; “but how have you done so?”

“We touch at many points,” I replied. “Surely we belong to the small
number of human beings born to the highest joys and the deepest sorrows;
whose feeling qualities vibrate in unison and echo each other inwardly;
whose sensitive natures are in harmony with the principle of things.
Put such beings among surroundings where all is discord and they suffer
horribly, just as their happiness mounts to exaltation when they meet
ideas, or feelings, or other beings who are congenial to them. But
there is still a third condition, where sorrows are known only to souls
affected by the same distress; in this alone is the highest fraternal
comprehension. It may happen that such souls find no outlet either
for good or evil. Then the organ within us endowed with expression and
motion is exercised in a void, expends its passion without an
object, utters sounds without melody, and cries that are lost in
solitude,--terrible defeat of a soul which revolts against the inutility
of nothingness. These are struggles in which our strength oozes away
without restraint, as blood from an inward wound. The sensibilities
flow to waste and the result is a horrible weakening of the soul; an
indescribable melancholy for which the confessional itself has no ears.
Have I not expressed our mutual sufferings?”

She shuddered, and then without removing her eyes from the setting sun,
she said, “How is it that, young as you are, you know these things? Were
you once a woman?”

“Ah!” I replied, “my childhood was like a long illness--”

“I hear Madeleine coughing,” she cried, leaving me abruptly.

The countess showed no displeasure at my constant visits, and for two
reasons. In the first place she was pure as a child, and her thoughts
wandered into no forbidden regions; in the next I amused the count and
made a sop for that lion without claws or mane. I found an excuse for
my visits which seemed plausible to every one. Monsieur de Mortsauf
proposed to teach me backgammon, and I accepted; as I did so the
countess was betrayed into a look of compassion, which seemed to say,
“You are flinging yourself into the jaws of the lion.” If I did not
understand this at the time, three days had not passed before I knew
what I had undertaken. My patience, which nothing exhausts, the fruit
of my miserable childhood, ripened under this last trial. The count
was delighted when he could jeer at me for not putting in practice the
principles or the rules he had explained; if I reflected before I played
he complained of my slowness; if I played fast he was angry because
I hurried him; if I forgot to mark my points he declared, making his
profit out of the mistake, that I was always too rapid. It was like
the tyranny of a schoolmaster, the despotism of the rod, of which I can
really give you no idea unless I compare myself to Epictetus under the
yoke of a malicious child. When we played for money his winnings gave
him the meanest and most abject delight.

A word from his wife was enough to console me, and it frequently
recalled him to a sense of politeness and good-breeding. But before
long I fell into the furnace of an unexpected misery. My money was
disappearing under these losses. Though the count was always present
during my visits until I left the house, which was sometimes very late,
I cherished the hope of finding some moment when I might say a word
that would reach my idol’s heart; but to obtain that moment, for which
I watched and waited with a hunter’s painful patience, I was forced to
continue these weary games, during which my feelings were lacerated and
my money lost. Still, there were moments when we were silent, she and
I, looking at the sunlight on the meadows, the clouds in a gray sky, the
misty hills, or the quivering of the moon on the sandbanks of the river;
saying only, “Night is beautiful!”

“Night is woman, madame.”

“What tranquillity!”

“Yes, no one can be absolutely wretched here.”

Then she would return to her embroidery frame. I came at last to hear
the inward beatings of an affection which sought its object. But the
fact remained--without money, farewell to these evenings. I wrote to my
mother to send me some. She scolded me and sent only enough to last a
week. Where could I get more? My life depended on it. Thus it happened
that in the dawn of my first great happiness I found the same sufferings
that assailed me elsewhere; but in Paris, at college, at school I evaded
them by abstinence; there my privations were negative, at Frapesle they
were active; so active that I was possessed by the impulse to theft, by
visions of crime, furious desperations which rend the soul and must
be subdued under pain of losing our self-respect. The memory of what
I suffered through my mother’s parsimony taught me that indulgence
for young men which one who has stood upon the brink of the abyss and
measured its depths, without falling into them, must inevitably feel.
Though my own rectitude was strengthened by those moments when life
opened and let me see the rocks and quicksands beneath the surface, I
have never known that terrible thing called human justice draw its blade
through the throat of a criminal without saying to myself: “Penal laws
are made by men who have never known misery.”

At this crisis I happened to find a treatise on backgammon in Monsieur
de Chessel’s library, and I studied it. My host was kind enough to give
me a few lessons; less harshly taught by the count I made good progress
and applied the rules and calculations I knew by heart. Within a few
days I was able to beat Monsieur de Mortsauf; but no sooner had I
done so and won his money for the first time than his temper became
intolerable; his eyes glittered like those of tigers, his face
shrivelled, his brows knit as I never saw brows knit before or since.
His complainings were those of a fretful child. Sometimes he flung
down the dice, quivered with rage, bit the dice-box, and said insulting
things to me. Such violence, however, came to an end. When I had
acquired enough mastery of the game I played it to suit me; I so managed
that we were nearly equal up to the last moment; I allowed him to win
the first half and made matters even during the last half. The end of
the world would have surprised him less than the rapid superiority of
his pupil; but he never admitted it. The unvarying result of our games
was a topic of discourse on which he fastened.

“My poor head,” he would say, “is fatigued; you manage to win the last
of the game because by that time I lose my skill.”

The countess, who knew backgammon, understood my manoeuvres from the
first, and gave me those mute thanks which swell the heart of a young
man; she granted me the same look she gave to her children. From that
ever-blessed evening she always looked at me when she spoke. I cannot
explain to you the condition I was in when I left her. My soul had
annihilated my body; it weighed nothing; I did not walk, I flew. That
look I carried within me; it bathed me with light just as her last
words, “Adieu, monsieur,” still sounded in my soul with the harmonies of
“O filii, o filioe” in the paschal choir. I was born into a new life,
I was something to her! I slept on purple and fine linen. Flames darted
before my closed eyelids, chasing each other in the darkness like
threads of fire in the ashes of burned paper. In my dreams her voice
became, though I cannot describe it, palpable, an atmosphere of light
and fragrance wrapping me, a melody enfolding my spirit. On the morrow
her greeting expressed the fulness of feelings that remained unuttered,
and from that moment I was initiated into the secrets of her voice.

That day was to be one of the most decisive of my life. After dinner we
walked on the heights across a barren plain where no herbage grew;
the ground was stony, arid, and without vegetable soil of any kind;
nevertheless a few scrub oaks and thorny bushes straggled there, and in
place of grass, a carpet of crimped mosses, illuminated by the setting
sun and so dry that our feet slipped upon it. I held Madeleine by the
hand to keep her up. Madame de Mortsauf was leading Jacques. The count,
who was in front, suddenly turned round and striking the earth with his
cane said to me in a dreadful tone: “Such is my life!--but before I knew
you,” he added with a look of penitence at his wife. The reparation
was tardy, for the countess had turned pale; what woman would not have
staggered as she did under the blow?

“But what delightful scenes are wafted here, and what a view of the
sunset!” I cried. “For my part I should like to own this barren moor; I
fancy there may be treasures if we dig for them. But its greatest wealth
is that of being near you. Who would not pay a great cost for such a
view?--all harmony to the eye, with that winding river where the soul
may bathe among the ash-trees and the alders. See the difference
of taste! To you this spot of earth is a barren waste; to me, it is
paradise.”

She thanked me with a look.

“Bucolics!” exclaimed the count, with a bitter look. “This is no life
for a man who bears your name.” Then he suddenly changed his tone--“The
bells!” he cried, “don’t you hear the bells of Azay? I hear them
ringing.”

Madame de Mortsauf gave me a frightened look. Madeleine clung to my
hand.

“Suppose we play a game of backgammon?” I said. “Let us go back; the
rattle of the dice will drown the sound of the bells.”

We returned to Clochegourde, conversing by fits and starts. Once in the
salon an indefinable uncertainty and dread took possession of us. The
count flung himself into an armchair, absorbed in reverie, which his
wife, who knew the symptoms of his malady and could foresee an outbreak,
was careful not to interrupt. I also kept silence. As she gave me no
hint to leave, perhaps she thought backgammon might divert the count’s
mind and quiet those fatal nervous susceptibilities, the excitements of
which were killing him. Nothing was ever harder than to make him play
that game, which, however, he had a great desire to play. Like a pretty
woman, he always required to be coaxed, entreated, forced, so that he
might not seem the obliged person. If by chance, being interested in the
conversation, I forgot to propose it, he grew sulky, bitter, insulting,
and spoiled the talk by contradicting everything. If, warned by his
ill-humor, I suggested a game, he would dally and demur. “In the first
place, it is too late,” he would say; “besides, I don’t care for it.”
 Then followed a series of affectations like those of women, which often
leave you in ignorance of their real wishes.

On this occasion I pretended a wild gaiety to induce him to play. He
complained of giddiness which hindered him from calculating; his brain,
he said, was squeezed into a vice; he heard noises, he was choking; and
thereupon he sighed heavily. At last, however, he consented to the
game. Madame de Mortsauf left us to put the children to bed and lead the
household in family prayers. All went well during her absence; I allowed
Monsieur de Mortsauf to win, and his delight seemed to put him beside
himself. This sudden change from a gloom that led him to make the
darkest predictions to the wild joy of a drunken man, expressed in a
crazy laugh and without any adequate motive, distressed and alarmed me.
I had never seen him in quite so marked a paroxysm. Our intimacy had
borne fruits in the fact that he no longer restrained himself before me.
Day by day he had endeavored to bring me under his tyranny, and obtain
fresh food, as it were, for his evil temper; for it really seems as
though moral diseases were creatures with appetites and instincts,
seeking to enlarge the boundaries of their empire as a landowner seeks
to increase his domain.

Presently the countess came down, and sat close to the backgammon table,
apparently for better light on her embroidery, though the anxiety which
led her to place her frame was ill-concealed. A piece of fatal ill-luck
which I could not prevent changed the count’s face; from gaiety it
fell to gloom, from purple it became yellow, and his eyes rolled.
Then followed worse ill-luck, which I could neither avert nor repair.
Monsieur de Mortsauf made a fatal throw which decided the game.
Instantly he sprang up, flung the table at me and the lamp on the floor,
struck the chimney-piece with his fist and jumped, for I cannot say
he walked, about the room. The torrent of insults, imprecations, and
incoherent words which rushed from his lips would have made an observer
think of the old tales of satanic possession in the Middle Ages. Imagine
my position!

“Go into the garden,” said the countess, pressing my hand.

I left the room before the count could notice my disappearance. On the
terrace, where I slowly walked about, I heard his shouts and then his
moans from the bedroom which adjoined the dining-room. Also I heard at
intervals through that tempest of sound the voice of an angel, which
rose like the song of a nightingale as the rain ceases. I walked about
under the acacias in the loveliest night of the month of August, waiting
for the countess to join me. I knew she would come; her gesture promised
it. For several days an explanation seemed to float between us; a word
would suffice to send it gushing from the spring, overfull, in our
souls. What timidity had thus far delayed a perfect understanding
between us? Perhaps she loved, as I did, these quiverings of the spirit
which resembled emotions of fear and numbed the sensibilities while we
held our life unuttered within us, hesitating to unveil its secrets
with the modesty of the young girl before the husband she loves. An
hour passed. I was sitting on the brick balustrade when the sound of
her footsteps blending with the undulating ripple of her flowing gown
stirred the calm air of the night. These are sensations to which the
heart suffices not.

“Monsieur de Mortsauf is sleeping,” she said. “When he is thus I give
him an infusion of poppies, a cup of water in which a few poppies have
been steeped; the attacks are so infrequent that this simple remedy
never loses its effect--Monsieur,” she continued, changing her tone and
using the most persuasive inflexion of her voice, “this most unfortunate
accident has revealed to you a secret which has hitherto been sedulously
kept; promise me to bury the recollection of that scene. Do this for my
sake, I beg of you. I don’t ask you to swear it; give me your word of
honor and I shall be content.”

“Need I give it to you?” I said. “Do we not understand each other?”

“You must not judge unfavorably of Monsieur de Mortsauf; you see the
effects of his many sufferings under the emigration,” she went on.
“To-morrow he will entirely forget all that he has said and done; you
will find him kind and excellent as ever.”

“Do not seek to excuse him, madame,” I replied. “I will do all you wish.
I would fling myself into the Indre at this moment if I could restore
Monsieur de Mortsauf’s health and ensure you a happy life. The only
thing I cannot change is my opinion. I can give you my life, but not
my convictions; I can pay no heed to what he says, but can I hinder him
from saying it? No, in my opinion Monsieur de Mortsauf is--”

“I understand you,” she said, hastily interrupting me; “you are right.
The count is as nervous as a fashionable woman,” she added, as if to
conceal the idea of madness by softening the word. “But he is only so
at intervals, once a year, when the weather is very hot. Ah, what evils
have resulted from the emigration! How many fine lives ruined! He would
have been, I am sure of it, a great soldier, an honor to his country--”

“I know,” I said, interrupting in my turn to let her see that it was
useless to attempt to deceive me.

She stopped, laid one hand lightly on my brow, and looked at me. “Who
has sent you here,” she said, “into this home? Has God sent me help, a
true friendship to support me?” She paused, then added, as she laid her
hand firmly upon mine, “For you are good and generous--” She raised her
eyes to heaven, as if to invoke some invisible testimony to confirm her
thought, and then let them rest upon me. Electrified by the look, which
cast a soul into my soul, I was guilty, judging by social laws, of a
want of tact, though in certain natures such indelicacy really means a
brave desire to meet danger, to avert a blow, to arrest an evil before
it happens; oftener still, an abrupt call upon a heart, a blow given to
learn if it resounds in unison with ours. Many thoughts rose like gleams
within my mind and bade me wash out the stain that blotted my conscience
at this moment when I was seeking a complete understanding.

“Before we say more,” I said in a voice shaken by the throbbings of
my heart, which could be heard in the deep silence that surrounded us,
“suffer me to purify one memory of the past.”

“Hush!” she said quickly, touching my lips with a finger which she
instantly removed. She looked at me haughtily, with the glance of a
woman who knows herself too exalted for insult to reach her. “Be silent;
I know of what you are about to speak,--the first, the last, the only
outrage ever offered to me. Never speak to me of that ball. If as a
Christian I have forgiven you, as a woman I still suffer from your act.”

“You are more pitiless than God himself,” I said, forcing back the tears
that came into my eyes.

“I ought to be so, I am more feeble,” she replied.

“But,” I continued with the persistence of a child, “listen to me now if
only for the first, the last, the only time in your life.”

“Speak, then,” she said; “speak, or you will think I dare not hear you.”

Feeling that this was the turning moment of our lives, I spoke to her in
the tone that commands attention; I told her that all women whom I had
ever seen were nothing to me; but when I met her, I, whose life was
studious, whose nature was not bold, I had been, as it were, possessed
by a frenzy that no one who once felt it could condemn; that never heart
of man had been so filled with the passion which no being can resist,
which conquers all things, even death--

“And contempt?” she asked, stopping me.

“Did you despise me?” I exclaimed.

“Let us say no more on this subject,” she replied.

“No, let me say all!” I replied, in the excitement of my intolerable
pain. “It concerns my life, my whole being, my inward self; it contains
a secret you must know or I must die in despair. It also concerns you,
who, unawares, are the lady in whose hand is the crown promised to the
victor in the tournament!”

Then I related to her my childhood and youth, not as I have told it to
you, judged from a distance, but in the language of a young man whose
wounds are still bleeding. My voice was like the axe of a woodsman
in the forest. At every word the dead years fell with echoing sound,
bristling with their anguish like branches robbed of their foliage. I
described to her in feverish language many cruel details which I have
here spared you. I spread before her the treasure of my radiant hopes,
the virgin gold of my desires, the whole of a burning heart kept alive
beneath the snow of these Alps, piled higher and higher by perpetual
winter. When, bowed down by the weight of these remembered sufferings,
related as with the live coal of Isaiah, I awaited the reply of the
woman who listened with a bowed head, she illumined the darkness with
a look, she quickened the worlds terrestrial and divine with a single
sentence.

“We have had the same childhood!” she said, turning to me a face on
which the halo of the martyrs shone.

After a pause, in which our souls were wedded in the one consoling
thought, “I am not alone in suffering,” the countess told me, in the
voice she kept for her little ones, how unwelcome she was as a girl when
sons were wanted. She showed me how her troubles as a daughter bound to
her mother’s side differed from those of a boy cast out upon the world
of school and college life. My desolate neglect seemed to me a paradise
compared to that contact with a millstone under which her soul was
ground until the day when her good aunt, her true mother, had saved her
from this misery, the ever-recurring pain of which she now related
to me; misery caused sometimes by incessant faultfinding, always
intolerable to high-strung natures which do not shrink before death
itself but die beneath the sword of Damocles; sometimes by the crushing
of generous impulses beneath an icy hand, by the cold rebuffal of her
kisses, by a stern command of silence, first imposed and then as often
blamed; by inward tears that dared not flow but stayed within the heart;
in short, by all the bitterness and tyranny of convent rule, hidden
to the eyes of the world under the appearance of an exalted motherly
devotion. She gratified her mother’s vanity before strangers, but
she dearly paid in private for this homage. When, believing that by
obedience and gentleness she had softened her mother’s heart, she opened
hers, the tyrant only armed herself with the girl’s confidence. No spy
was ever more traitorous and base. All the pleasures of girlhood, even
her fete days, were dearly purchased, for she was scolded for her gaiety
as much as for her faults. No teaching and no training for her position
had been given in love, always with sarcastic irony. She was not angry
against her mother; in fact she blamed herself for feeling more terror
than love for her. “Perhaps,” she said, dear angel, “these severities
were needful; they had certainly prepared her for her present life.” As
I listened it seemed to me that the harp of Job, from which I had drawn
such savage sounds, now touched by the Christian fingers gave forth the
litanies of the Virgin at the foot of the cross.

“We lived in the same sphere before we met in this,” I said; “you coming
from the east, I from the west.”

She shook her head with a gesture of despair.

“To you the east, to me the west,” she replied. “You will live happy, I
must die of pain. Life is what we make of it, and mine is made forever.
No power can break the heavy chain to which a woman is fastened by this
ring of gold--the emblem of a wife’s purity.”

We knew we were twins of one womb; she never dreamed of a
half-confidence between brothers of the same blood. After a short sigh,
natural to pure hearts when they first open to each other, she told me
of her first married life, her deceptions and disillusions, the rebirth
of her childhood’s misery. Like me, she had suffered under trifles;
mighty to souls whose limpid substance quivers to the least shock, as
a lake quivers on the surface and to its utmost depths when a stone is
flung into it. When she married she possessed some girlish savings; a
little gold, the fruit of happy hours and repressed fancies. These, in
a moment when they were needed, she gave to her husband, not telling him
they were gifts and savings of her own. He took no account of them, and
never regarded himself her debtor. She did not even obtain the glance
of thanks that would have paid for all. Ah! how she went from trial to
trial! Monsieur de Mortsauf habitually neglected to give her money for
the household. When, after a struggle with her timidity, she asked him
for it, he seemed surprised and never once spared her the mortification
of petitioning for necessities. What terror filled her mind when the
real nature of the ruined man’s disease was revealed to her, and
she quailed under the first outbreak of his mad anger! What bitter
reflections she had made before she brought herself to admit that her
husband was a wreck! What horrible calamities had come of her bearing
children! What anguish she felt at the sight of those infants born
almost dead! With what courage had she said in her heart: “I will
breathe the breath of life into them; I will bear them anew day by day!”
 Then conceive the bitterness of finding her greatest obstacle in the
heart and hand from which a wife should draw her greatest succor! She
saw the untold disaster that threatened him. As each difficulty was
conquered, new deserts opened before her, until the day when she
thoroughly understood her husband’s condition, the constitution of her
children, and the character of the neighborhood in which she lived;
a day when (like the child taken by Napoleon from a tender home) she
taught her feet to trample through mud and snow, she trained her nerves
to bullets and all her being to the passive obedience of a soldier.

These things, of which I here make a summary, she told me in all their
dark extent, with every piteous detail of conjugal battles lost and
fruitless struggles.

“You would have to live here many months,” she said, in conclusion, “to
understand what difficulties I have met with in improving Clochegourde;
what persuasions I have had to use to make him do a thing which was most
important to his interests. You cannot imagine the childish glee he has
shown when anything that I advised was not at once successful. All that
turned out well he claimed for himself. Yes, I need an infinite patience
to bear his complaints when I am half-exhausted in the effort to amuse
his weary hours, to sweeten his life and smooth the paths which he
himself has strewn with stones. The reward he gives me is that awful
cry: ‘Let me die, life is a burden to me!’ When visitors are here and he
enjoys them, he forgets his gloom and is courteous and polite. You ask
me why he cannot be so to his family. I cannot explain that want of
loyalty in a man who is truly chivalrous. He is quite capable of riding
at full speed to Paris to buy me a set of ornaments, as he did the other
day before the ball. Miserly in his household, he would be lavish upon
me if I wished it. I would it were reversed; I need nothing for myself,
but the wants of the household are many. In my strong desire to make him
happy, and not reflecting that I might be a mother, I began my married
life by letting him treat me as a victim, I, who at that time by using a
few caresses could have led him like a child--but I was unable to play a
part I should have thought disgraceful. Now, however, the welfare of my
family requires me to be as calm and stern as the figure of Justice--and
yet, I too have a heart that overflows with tenderness.”

“But why,” I said, “do you not use this great influence to master him
and govern him?”

“If it concerned myself only I should not attempt either to overcome the
dogged silence with which for days together he meets my arguments,
nor to answer his irrational remarks, his childish reasons. I have no
courage against weakness, any more than I have against childhood;
they may strike me as they will, I cannot resist. Perhaps I might meet
strength with strength, but I am powerless against those I pity. If I
were required to coerce Madeleine in some matter that would save her
life, I should die with her. Pity relaxes all my fibres and unstrings
my nerves. So it is that the violent shocks of the last ten years have
broken me down; my feelings, so often battered, are numb at times;
nothing can revive them; even the courage with which I once faced my
troubles begins to fail me. Yes, sometimes I am beaten. For want of
rest--I mean repose--and sea-baths by which to recover my nervous
strength, I shall perish. Monsieur de Mortsauf will have killed me, and
he will die of my death.”

“Why not leave Clochegourde for a few months? Surely you could take your
children and go to the seashore.”

“In the first place, Monsieur de Mortsauf would think he were lost if I
left him. Though he will not admit his condition he is well aware of it.
He is both sane and mad, two natures in one man, a contradiction which
explains many an irrational action. Besides this, he would have good
reason for objecting. Nothing would go right here if I were absent. You
may have seen in me the mother of a family watchful to protect her young
from the hawk that is hovering over them; a weighty task, indeed, but
harder still are the cares imposed upon me by Monsieur de Mortsauf,
whose constant cry, as he follows me about is, ‘Where is Madame?’ I
am Jacques’ tutor and Madeleine’s governess; but that is not all, I am
bailiff and steward too. You will understand what that means when you
come to see, as you will, that the working of an estate in these parts
is the most fatiguing of all employments. We get small returns in money;
the farms are cultivated on shares, a system which needs the closest
supervision. We are obliged ourselves to sell our own produce, our
cattle and harvests of all kinds. Our competitors in the markets are our
own farmers, who meet consumers in the wine-shops and determine
prices by selling first. I should weary you if I explained the many
difficulties of agriculture in this region. No matter what care I give
to it, I cannot always prevent our tenants from putting our manure upon
their ground, I cannot be ever on the watch lest they take advantage
of us in the division of the crops; neither can I always know the
exact moment when sales should be made. So, if you think of Monsieur de
Mortsauf’s defective memory, and the difficulty you have seen me have in
persuading him to attend to business, you can understand the burden that
is on my shoulders, and the impossibility of my laying it down for a
single day. If I were absent we should be ruined. No one would obey
Monsieur de Mortsauf. In the first place his orders are conflicting;
then no one likes him; he finds incessant fault, and he is very
domineering. Moreover, like all men of feeble mind, he listens too
readily to his inferiors. If I left the house not a servant would be in
it in a week’s time. So you see I am attached to Clochegourde as those
leaden finals are to our roof. I have no reserves with you. The whole
country-side is still ignorant of the secrets of this house, but
you know them, you have seen them. Say nothing but what is kind and
friendly, and you shall have my esteem--my gratitude,” she added in a
softer voice. “On those terms you are welcome at Clochegourde, where you
will find friends.”

“Ah!” I exclaimed, “I see that I have never really suffered, while
you--”

“No, no!” she exclaimed, with a smile, that smile of all resigned women
which might melt a granite rock. “Do not be astonished at my frank
confidence; it shows you life as it is, not as your imagination pictures
it. We all have our defects and our good qualities. If I had married a
spendthrift he would have ruined me. If I had given myself to an ardent
and pleasure-loving young man, perhaps I could not have retained him;
he might have left me, and I should have died of jealousy. For I
am jealous!” she said, in a tone of excitement, which was like the
thunderclap of a passing storm. “But Monsieur de Mortsauf loves me
as much as he is capable of loving; all that his heart contains of
affection he pours at my feet, like the Magdalen’s cup of ointment.
Believe me, a life of love is an exception to the laws of this earth;
all flowers fade; great joys and emotions have a morrow of evil--if
a morrow at all. Real life is a life of anguish; its image is in that
nettle growing there at the foot of the wall,--no sun can reach it and
it keeps green. Yet, here, as in parts of the North, there are smiles in
the sky, few to be sure, but they compensate for many a grief.
Moreover, women who are naturally mothers live and love far more through
sacrifices than through pleasures. Here I draw upon myself the storms I
fear may break upon my children or my people; and in doing so I feel
a something I cannot explain, which gives me secret courage. The
resignation of the night carries me through the day that follows.
God does not leave me comfortless. Time was when the condition of my
children filled me with despair; to-day as they advance in life they
grow healthier and stronger. And then, after all, our home is improved
and beautified, our means are improving also. Who knows but Monsieur de
Mortsauf’s old age may be a blessing to me? Ah, believe me! those
who stand before the Great Judge with palms in their hands, leading
comforted to Him the beings who cursed their lives, they, they have
turned their sorrows into joy. If my sufferings bring about the
happiness of my family, are they sufferings at all?”

“Yes,” I said, “they are; but they were necessary, as mine have been, to
make us understand the true flavor of the fruit that has ripened on our
rocks. Now, surely, we shall taste it together; surely we may admire its
wonders, the sweetness of affection it has poured into our souls,
that inward sap which revives the searing leaves--Good God! do you not
understand me?” I cried, falling into the mystical language to which our
religious training had accustomed us. “See the paths by which we
have approached each other; what magnet led us through that ocean of
bitterness to these springs of running water, flowing at the foot of
those hills above the shining sands and between their green and flowery
meadows? Have we not followed the same star? We stand before the cradle
of a divine child whose joyous carol will renew the world for us, teach
us through happiness a love of life, give to our nights their long-lost
sleep, and to the days their gladness. What hand is this that year by
year has tied new cords between us? Are we not more than brother and
sister? That which heaven has joined we must not keep asunder. The
sufferings you reveal are the seeds scattered by the sower for the
harvest already ripening in the sunshine. Shall we not gather it sheaf
by sheaf? What strength is in me that I dare address you thus! Answer,
or I will never again recross that river!”

“You have spared me the word _love_,” she said, in a stern voice, “but
you have spoken of a sentiment of which I know nothing and which is not
permitted to me. You are a child; and again I pardon you, but for the
last time. Endeavor to understand, Monsieur, that my heart is, as it
were, intoxicated with motherhood. I love Monsieur de Mortsauf neither
from social duty nor from a calculated desire to win eternal blessings,
but from an irresistible feeling which fastens all the fibres of my
heart upon him. Was my marriage a mistake? My sympathy for misfortune
led to it. It is the part of women to heal the woes caused by the march
of events, to comfort those who rush into the breach and return wounded.
How shall I make you understand me? I have felt a selfish pleasure in
seeing that you amused him; is not that pure motherhood? Did I not make
you see by what I owned just now, the _three_ children to whom I am
bound, to whom I shall never fail, on whom I strive to shed a healing
dew and the light of my own soul without withdrawing or adulterating a
single particle? Do not embitter the mother’s milk! though as a wife I
am invulnerable, you must never again speak thus to me. If you do not
respect this command, simple as it is, the door of this house will
be closed to you. I believed in pure friendship, in a voluntary
brotherhood, more real, I thought, than the brotherhood of blood. I
was mistaken. I wanted a friend who was not a judge, a friend who would
listen to me in those moments of weakness when reproof is killing, a
sacred friend from whom I should have nothing to fear. Youth is noble,
truthful, capable of sacrifice, disinterested; seeing your persistency
in coming to us, I believed, yes, I will admit that I believed in some
divine purpose; I thought I should find a soul that would be mine, as
the priest is the soul of all; a heart in which to pour my troubles
when they deluged mine, a friend to hear my cries when if I continued
to smother them they would strangle me. Could I but have this friend,
my life, so precious to these children, might be prolonged until Jacques
had grown to manhood. But that is selfish! The Laura of Petrarch cannot
be lived again. I must die at my post, like a soldier, friendless. My
confessor is harsh, austere, and--my aunt is dead.”

Two large tears filled her eyes, gleamed in the moonlight, and rolled
down her cheeks; but I stretched my hand in time to catch them, and I
drank them with an avidity excited by her words, by the thought of
those ten years of secret woe, of wasted feelings, of constant care, of
ceaseless dread--years of the lofty heroism of her sex. She looked at me
with gentle stupefaction.

“It is the first communion of love,” I said. “Yes, I am now a sharer of
your sorrows. I am united to your soul as our souls are united to Christ
in the sacrament. To love, even without hope, is happiness. Ah! what
woman on earth could give me a joy equal to that of receiving your
tears! I accept the contract which must end in suffering to myself. I
give myself to you with no ulterior thought. I will be to you that which
you will me to be--”

She stopped me with a motion of her hand, and said in her deep voice, “I
consent to this agreement if you will promise never to tighten the bonds
which bind us together.”

“Yes,” I said; “but the less you grant the more evidence of possession I
ought to have.”

“You begin by distrusting me,” she replied, with an expression of
melancholy doubt.

“No, I speak from pure happiness. Listen; give me a name by which no one
calls you; a name to be ours only, like the feeling which unites us.”

“That is much to ask,” she said, “but I will show you that I am not
petty. Monsieur de Mortsauf calls me Blanche. One only person, the one I
have most loved, my dear aunt, called me Henriette. I will be Henriette
once more, to you.”

I took her hand and kissed it. She left it in mine with the trustfulness
that makes a woman so far superior to men; a trustfulness that shames
us. She was leaning on the brick balustrade and gazing at the river.

“Are you not unwise, my friend, to rush at a bound to the extremes of
friendship? You have drained the cup, offered in all sincerity, at a
draught. It is true that a real feeling is never piecemeal; it must be
whole, or it does not exist. Monsieur de Mortsauf,” she added after a
short silence, “is above all things loyal and brave. Perhaps for my
sake you will forget what he said to you to-day; if he has forgotten
it to-morrow, I will myself tell him what occurred. Do not come to
Clochegourde for a few days; he will respect you more if you do not.
On Sunday, after church, he will go to you. I know him; he will wish to
undo the wrong he did, and he will like you all the better for treating
him as a man who is responsible for his words and actions.”

“Five days without seeing you, without hearing your voice!”

“Do not put such warmth into your manner of speaking to me,” she said.

We walked twice round the terrace in silence. Then she said, in a tone
of command which proved to me that she had taken possession of my soul,
“It is late; we will part.”

I wished to kiss her hand; she hesitated, then gave it to me, and said
in a voice of entreaty: “Never take it unless I give it to you; leave me
my freedom; if not, I shall be simply a thing of yours, and that ought
not to be.”

“Adieu,” I said.

I went out by the little gate of the lower terrace, which she opened for
me. Just as she was about to close it she opened it again and offered me
her hand, saying: “You have been truly good to me this evening; you have
comforted my whole future; take it, my friend, take it.”

I kissed her hand again and again, and when I raised my eyes I saw the
tears in hers. She returned to the upper terrace and I watched her for
a moment from the meadow. When I was on the road to Frapesle I again saw
her white robe shimmering in a moonbeam; then, a few moments later, a
light was in her bedroom.

“Oh, my Henriette!” I cried, “to you I pledge the purest love that ever
shone upon this earth.”

I turned at every step as I regained Frapesle. Ineffable contentment
filled my mind. A way was open for the devotion that swells in all
youthful hearts and which in mine had been so long inert. Like the
priest who by one solemn step enters a new life, my vows were taken; I
was consecrated. A simple “Yes” had bound me to keep my love within my
soul and never to abuse our friendship by leading this woman step by
step to love. All noble feelings were awakened within me, and I heard
the murmur of their voices. Before confining myself within the narrow
walls of a room, I stopped beneath the azure heavens sown with stars,
I listened to the ring-dove plaints of my own heart, I heard again the
simple tones of that ingenuous confidence, I gathered in the air the
emanations of that soul which henceforth must ever seek me. How grand
that woman seemed to me, with her absolute forgetfulness of self, her
religion of mercy to wounded hearts, feeble or suffering, her declared
allegiance to her legal yoke. She was there, serene upon her pyre of
saint and martyr. I adored her face as it shone to me in the darkness.
Suddenly I fancied I perceived a meaning in her words, a mysterious
significance which made her to my eyes sublime. Perhaps she longed that
I should be to her what she was to the little world around her. Perhaps
she sought to draw from me her strength and consolation, putting me thus
within her sphere, her equal, or perhaps above her. The stars, say
some bold builders of the universe, communicate to each other light and
motion. This thought lifted me to ethereal regions. I entered once more
the heaven of my former visions; I found a meaning for the miseries of
my childhood in the illimitable happiness to which they had led me.

Spirits quenched by tears, hearts misunderstood, saintly Clarissa
Harlowes forgotten or ignored, children neglected, exiles innocent of
wrong, all ye who enter life through barren ways, on whom men’s faces
everywhere look coldly, to whom ears close and hearts are shut, cease
your complaints! You alone can know the infinitude of joy held in that
moment when one heart opens to you, one ear listens, one look answers
yours. A single day effaces all past evil. Sorrow, despondency, despair,
and melancholy, passed but not forgotten, are links by which the soul
then fastens to its mate. Woman falls heir to all our past, our sighs,
our lost illusions, and gives them back to us ennobled; she explains
those former griefs as payment claimed by destiny for joys eternal,
which she brings to us on the day our souls are wedded. The angels alone
can utter the new name by which that sacred love is called, and none but
women, dear martyrs, truly know what Madame de Mortsauf now became to
me--to me, poor and desolate.



CHAPTER II. FIRST LOVE

This scene took place on a Tuesday. I waited until Sunday and did not
cross the river. During those five days great events were happening at
Clochegourde. The count received his brevet as general of brigade, the
cross of Saint Louis, and a pension of four thousand francs. The Duc
de Lenoncourt-Givry, made peer of France, recovered possession of two
forests, resumed his place at court, and his wife regained all her
unsold property, which had been made part of the imperial crown lands.
The Comtesse de Mortsauf thus became an heiress. Her mother had arrived
at Clochegourde, bringing her a hundred thousand francs economized at
Givry, the amount of her dowry, still unpaid and never asked for by the
count in spite of his poverty. In all such matters of external life the
conduct of this man was proudly disinterested. Adding to this sum his
own few savings he was able to buy two neighboring estates, which would
yield him some nine thousand francs a year. His son would of course
succeed to the grandfather’s peerage, and the count now saw his way to
entail the estate upon him without injury to Madeleine, for whom the Duc
de Lenoncourt would no doubt assist in promoting a good marriage.

These arrangements and this new happiness shed some balm upon the
count’s sore mind. The presence of the Duchesse de Lenoncourt at
Clochegourde was a great event to the neighborhood. I reflected gloomily
that she was a great lady, and the thought made me conscious of the
spirit of caste in the daughter which the nobility of her sentiments
had hitherto hidden from me. Who was I--poor, insignificant, and with
no future but my courage and my faculties? I did not then think of the
consequences of the Restoration either for me or for others. On Sunday
morning, from the private chapel where I sat with Monsieur and Madame
de Chessel and the Abbe de Quelus, I cast an eager glance at another
lateral chapel occupied by the duchess and her daughter, the count and
his children. The large straw hat which hid my idol from me did not
tremble, and this unconsciousness of my presence seemed to bind me
to her more than all the past. This noble Henriette de Lenoncourt, my
Henriette, whose life I longed to garland, was praying earnestly; faith
gave to her figure an abandonment, a prosternation, the attitude of some
religious statue, which moved me to the soul.

According to village custom, vespers were said soon after mass. Coming
out of church Madame de Chessel naturally proposed to her neighbors to
pass the intermediate time at Frapesle instead of crossing the Indre and
the meadows twice in the great heat. The offer was accepted. Monsieur de
Chessel gave his arm to the duchess, Madame de Chessel took that of the
count. I offered mine to the countess, and felt, for the first time,
that beautiful arm against my side. As we walked from the church to
Frapesle by the woods of Sache, where the light, filtering down through
the foliage, made those pretty patterns on the path which seem like
painted silk, such sensations of pride, such ideas took possession of me
that my heart beat violently.

“What is the matter?” she said, after walking a little way in a silence
I dared not break. “Your heart beats too fast--”

“I have heard of your good fortune,” I replied, “and, like all others
who love truly, I am beset with vague fears. Will your new dignities
change you and lessen your friendship?”

“Change me!” she said; “oh, fie! Another such idea and I shall--not
despise you, but forget you forever.”

I looked at her with an ecstasy which should have been contagious.

“We profit by the new laws which we have neither brought about nor
demanded,” she said; “but we are neither place-hunters nor beggars;
besides, as you know very well, neither Monsieur de Mortsauf nor I can
leave Clochegourde. By my advice he has declined the command to which
his rank entitled him at the Maison Rouge. We are quite content that my
father should have the place. This forced modesty,” she added with some
bitterness, “has already been of service to our son. The king, to whose
household my father is appointed, said very graciously that he
would show Jacques the favor we were not willing to accept. Jacques’
education, which must now be thought of, is already being discussed.
He will be the representative of two houses, the Lenoncourt and the
Mortsauf families. I can have no ambition except for him, and therefore
my anxieties seem to have increased. Not only must Jacques live, but
he must be made worthy of his name; two necessities which, as you know,
conflict. And then, later, what friend will keep him safe for me in
Paris, where all things are pitfalls for the soul and dangers for the
body? My friend,” she said, in a broken voice, “who could not see upon
your brow and in your eyes that you are one who will inhabit heights?
Be some day the guardian and sponsor of our boy. Go to Paris; if your
father and brother will not second you, our family, above all my mother,
who has a genius for the management of life, will help you. Profit by
our influence; you will never be without support in whatever career you
choose; put the strength of your desires into a noble ambition--”

“I understand you,” I said, interrupting her; “ambition is to be my
mistress. I have no need of that to be wholly yours. No, I will not be
rewarded for my obedience here by receiving favors there. I will go;
I will make my own way; I will rise alone. From you I would accept
everything, from others nothing.”

“Child!” she murmured, ill-concealing a smile of pleasure.

“Besides, I have taken my vows,” I went on. “Thinking over our situation
I am resolved to bind myself to you by ties that never can be broken.”

She trembled slightly and stopped short to look at me.

“What do you mean?” she asked, letting the couples who preceded us walk
on, and keeping the children at her side.

“This,” I said; “but first tell me frankly how you wish me to love you.”

“Love me as my aunt loved me; I gave you her rights when I permitted you
to call me by the name which she chose for her own among my others.”

“Then I am to love without hope and with an absolute devotion. Well,
yes; I will do for you what some men do for God. I shall feel that you
have asked it. I will enter a seminary and make myself a priest, and
then I will educate your son. Jacques shall be myself in his own form;
political conceptions, thoughts, energy, patience, I will give him all.
In that way I shall live near to you, and my love, enclosed in religion
as a silver image in a crystal shrine, can never be suspected of evil.
You will not have to fear the undisciplined passions which grasp a man
and by which already I have allowed myself to be vanquished. I will
consume my own being in the flame, and I will love you with a purified
love.”

She turned pale and said, hurrying her words: “Felix, do not put
yourself in bonds that might prove an obstacle to our happiness. I
should die of grief for having caused a suicide like that. Child, do you
think despairing love a life’s vocation? Wait for life’s trials before
you judge of life; I command it. Marry neither the Church nor a woman;
marry not at all,--I forbid it. Remain free. You are twenty-one years
old--My God! can I have mistaken him? I thought two months sufficed to
know some souls.”

“What hope have you?” I cried, with fire in my eyes.

“My friend, accept our help, rise in life, make your way and your
fortune and you shall know my hope. And,” she added, as if she were
whispering a secret, “never release the hand you are holding at this
moment.”

She bent to my ear as she said these words which proved her deep
solicitude for my future.

“Madeleine!” I exclaimed “never!”

We were close to a wooden gate which opened into the park of Frapesle;
I still seem to see its ruined posts overgrown with climbing plants and
briers and mosses. Suddenly an idea, that of the count’s death, flashed
through my brain, and I said, “I understand you.”

“I am glad of it,” she answered in a tone which made me know I had
supposed her capable of a thought that could never be hers.

Her purity drew tears of admiration from my eyes which the selfishness
of passion made bitter indeed. My mind reacted and I felt that she did
not love me enough even to wish for liberty. So long as love recoils
from a crime it seems to have its limits, and love should be infinite. A
spasm shook my heart.

“She does not love me,” I thought.

To hide what was in my soul I stooped over Madeleine and kissed her
hair.

“I am afraid of your mother,” I said to the countess presently, to renew
the conversation.

“So am I,” she answered with a gesture full of childlike gaiety. “Don’t
forget to call her Madame la duchesse, and to speak to her in the third
person. The young people of the present day have lost these polite
manners; you must learn them; do that for my sake. Besides, it is such
good taste to respect women, no matter what their age may be, and to
recognize social distinctions without disputing them. The respect shown
to established superiority is guarantee for that which is due to you.
Solidarity is the basis of society. Cardinal Della Rovere and Raffaelle
were two powers equally revered. You have sucked the milk of the
Revolution in your academy and your political ideas may be influenced by
it; but as you advance in life you will find that crude and ill-defined
principles of liberty are powerless to create the happiness of the
people. Before considering, as a Lenoncourt, what an aristocracy ought
to be, my common-sense as a woman of the people tells me that societies
can exist only through a hierarchy. You are now at a turning-point in
your life, when you must choose wisely. Be on our side,--especially
now,” she added, laughing, “when it triumphs.”

I was keenly touched by these words, in which the depth of her political
feeling mingled with the warmth of affection,--a combination which gives
to women so great a power of persuasion; they know how to give to the
keenest arguments a tone of feeling. In her desire to justify all her
husband’s actions Henriette had foreseen the criticisms that would rise
in my mind as soon as I saw the servile effects of a courtier’s life
upon him. Monsieur de Mortsauf, king in his own castle and surrounded
by an historic halo, had, to my eyes, a certain grandiose dignity. I
was therefore greatly astonished at the distance he placed between the
duchess and himself by manners that were nothing less than obsequious. A
slave has his pride and will only serve the greatest despots. I confess
I was humiliated at the degradation of one before whom I trembled as the
power that ruled my love. This inward repulsion made me understand the
martyrdom of women of generous souls yoked to men whose meannesses they
bury daily. Respect is a safeguard which protects both great and small
alike; each side can hold its own. I was respectful to the duchess
because of my youth; but where others saw only a duchess I saw the
mother of my Henriette, and that gave sanctity to my homage.

We reached the great court-yard of Frapesle, where we found the others.
The Comte de Mortsauf presented me very gracefully to the duchess, who
examined me with a cold and reserved air. Madame de Lenoncourt was then
a woman fifty-six years of age, wonderfully well preserved and with
grand manners. When I saw the hard blue eyes, the hollow temples, the
thin emaciated face, the erect, imposing figure slow of movement, and
the yellow whiteness of the skin (reproduced with such brilliancy in the
daughter), I recognized the cold type to which my own mother belonged,
as quickly as a mineralogist recognizes Swedish iron. Her language was
that of the old court; she pronounced the “oit” like “ait,” and said
“frait” for “froid,” “porteux” for “porteurs.” I was not a courtier,
neither was I stiff-backed in my manner to her; in fact I behaved so
well that as I passed the countess she said in a low voice, “You are
perfect.”

The count came to me and took my hand, saying: “You are not angry with
me, Felix, are you? If I was hasty you will pardon an old soldier? We
shall probably stay here to dinner, and I invite you to dine with us
on Thursday, the evening before the duchess leaves. I must go to Tours
to-morrow to settle some business. Don’t neglect Clochegourde. My
mother-in-law is an acquaintance I advise you to cultivate. Her
salon will set the tone for the faubourg St. Germain. She has all the
traditions of the great world, and possesses an immense amount of social
knowledge; she knows the blazon of the oldest as well as the newest
family in Europe.”

The count’s good taste, or perhaps the advice of his domestic genius,
appeared under his altered circumstances. He was neither arrogant nor
offensively polite, nor pompous in any way, and the duchess was not
patronizing. Monsieur and Madame de Chessel gratefully accepted the
invitation to dinner on the following Thursday. I pleased the duchess,
and by her glance I knew she was examining a man of whom her daughter
had spoken to her. As we returned from vespers she questioned me about
my family, and asked if the Vandenesse now in diplomacy was my relative.
“He is my brother,” I replied. On that she became almost affectionate.
She told me that my great-aunt, the old Marquise de Listomere, was a
Grandlieu. Her manners were as cordial as those of Monsieur de Mortsauf
the day he saw me for the first time; the haughty glance with which
these sovereigns of the earth make you measure the distance that lies
between you and them disappeared. I knew almost nothing of my family.
The duchess told me that my great-uncle, an old abbe whose very name I
did not know, was to be member of the privy council, that my brother was
already promoted, and also that by a provision of the Charter, of which
I had not yet heard, my father became once more Marquis de Vandenesse.

“I am but one thing, the serf of Clochegourde,” I said in a low voice to
the countess.

The transformation scene of the Restoration was carried through with a
rapidity which bewildered the generation brought up under the imperial
regime. To me this revolution meant nothing. The least word or gesture
from Madame de Mortsauf were the sole events to which I attached
importance. I was ignorant of what the privy council was, and knew
as little of politics as of social life; my sole ambition was to love
Henriette better than Petrarch loved Laura. This indifference made the
duchess take me for a child. A large company assembled at Frapesle and
we were thirty at table. What intoxication it is for a young man unused
to the world to see the woman he loves more beautiful than all others
around her, the centre of admiring looks; to know that for him alone is
reserved the chaste fire of those eyes, that none but he can discern in
the tones of that voice, in the words it utters, however gay or jesting
they may be, the proofs of unremitting thought. The count, delighted
with the attentions paid to him, seemed almost young; his wife looked
hopeful of a change; I amused myself with Madeleine, who, like all
children with bodies weaker than their minds, made others laugh with her
clever observations, full of sarcasm, though never malicious, and
which spared no one. It was a happy day. A word, a hope awakened in the
morning illumined nature. Seeing me so joyous, Henriette was joyful too.

“This happiness smiling on my gray and cloudy life seems good,” she said
to me the next day.

That day I naturally spent at Clochegourde. I had been banished for five
days, I was athirst for life. The count left at six in the morning for
Tours. A serious disagreement had arisen between mother and daughter.
The duchess wanted the countess to move to Paris, where she promised her
a place at court, and where the count, reconsidering his refusal, might
obtain some high position. Henriette, who was thought happy in
her married life, would not reveal, even to her mother, her tragic
sufferings and the fatal incapacity of her husband. It was to hide his
condition from the duchess that she persuaded him to go to Tours and
transact business with his notaries. I alone, as she had truly said,
knew the dark secret of Clochegourde. Having learned by experience
how the pure air and the blue sky of the lovely valley calmed the
excitements and soothed the morbid griefs of the diseased mind, and what
beneficial effect the life at Clochegourde had upon the health of her
children, she opposed her mother’s desire that she should leave it with
reasons which the overbearing woman, who was less grieved than mortified
by her daughter’s bad marriage, vigorously combated.

Henriette saw that the duchess cared little for Jacques and
Madeleine,--a terrible discovery! Like all domineering mothers who
expect to continue the same authority over their married daughters that
they maintained when they were girls, the duchess brooked no opposition;
sometimes she affected a crafty sweetness to force her daughter to
compliance, at other times a cold severity, intending to obtain by fear
what gentleness had failed to win; then, when all means failed, she
displayed the same native sarcasm which I had often observed in my own
mother. In those ten days Henriette passed through all the contentions a
young woman must endure to establish her independence. You, who for your
happiness have the best of mothers, can scarcely comprehend such trials.
To gain a true idea of the struggle between that cold, calculating,
ambitious woman and a daughter abounding in the tender natural kindness
that never faileth, you must imagine a lily, to which my heart has
always compared her, bruised beneath the polished wheels of a steel car.
That mother had nothing in common with her daughter; she was unable
even to imagine the real difficulties which hindered her from taking
advantage of the Restoration and forced her to continue a life of
solitude. Though families bury their internal dissensions with the
utmost care, enter behind the scenes, and you will find in nearly all
of them deep, incurable wounds, which lessen the natural affections.
Sometimes these wounds are given by passions real and most affecting,
rendered eternal by the dignity of those who feel them; sometimes by
latent hatreds which slowly freeze the heart and dry all tears when the
hour of parting comes. Tortured yesterday and to-day, wounded by all,
even by the suffering children who were guiltless of the ills they
endured, how could that poor soul fail to love the one human being who
did not strike her, who would fain have built a wall of defence around
her to guard her from storms, from harsh contacts and cruel blows?
Though I suffered from a knowledge of these debates, there were moments
when I was happy in the sense that she rested upon my heart; for she
told me of these new troubles. Day by day I learned more fully the
meaning of her words,--“Love me as my aunt loved me.”

“Have you no ambition?” the duchess said to me at dinner, with a stern
air.

“Madame,” I replied, giving her a serious look, “I have enough in me to
conquer the world; but I am only twenty-one, and I am all alone.”

She looked at her daughter with some astonishment. Evidently she
believed that Henriette had crushed my ambition in order to keep me
near her. The visit of Madame de Lenoncourt was a period of unrelieved
constraint. The countess begged me to be cautious; she was frightened
by the least kind word; to please her I wore the harness of deceit. The
great Thursday came; it was a day of wearisome ceremonial,--one of
those stiff days which lovers hate, when their chair is no longer in
its place, and the mistress of the house cannot be with them. Love has a
horror of all that does not concern itself. But the duchess returned at
last to the pomps and vanities of the court, and Clochegourde recovered
its accustomed order.

My little quarrel with the count resulted in making me more at home in
the house than ever; I could go there at all times without hindrance;
and the antecedents of my life inclined me to cling like a climbing
plant to the beautiful soul which had opened to me the enchanting world
of shared emotions. Every hour, every minute, our fraternal marriage,
founded on trust, became a surer thing; each of us settled firmly into
our own position; the countess enfolded me with her nurturing care, with
the white draperies of a love that was wholly maternal; while my love
for her, seraphic in her presence, seared me as with hot irons when
away from her. I loved her with a double love which shot its arrows of
desire, and then lost them in the sky, where they faded out of sight in
the impermeable ether. If you ask me why, young and ardent, I continued
in the deluding dreams of Platonic love, I must own to you that I was
not yet man enough to torture that woman, who was always in dread of
some catastrophe to her children, always fearing some outburst of her
husband’s stormy temper, martyrized by him when not afflicted by the
illness of Jacques or Madeleine, and sitting beside one or the other of
them when her husband allowed her a little rest. The mere sound of too
warm a word shook her whole being; a desire shocked her; what she needed
was a veiled love, support mingled with tenderness,--that, in short,
which she gave to others. Then, need I tell you, who are so truly
feminine? this situation brought with it hours of delightful languor,
moments of divine sweetness and content which followed by secret
immolation. Her conscience was, if I may call it so, contagious; her
self-devotion without earthly recompense awed me by its persistence; the
living, inward piety which was the bond of her other virtues filled
the air about her with spiritual incense. Besides, I was young,--young
enough to concentrate my whole being on the kiss she allowed me too
seldom to lay upon her hand, of which she gave me only the back, and
never the palm, as though she drew the line of sensual emotions there.
No two souls ever clasped each other with so much ardor, no bodies were
ever more victoriously annihilated. Later I understood the cause of this
sufficing joy. At my age no worldly interests distracted my heart; no
ambitions blocked the stream of a love which flowed like a torrent,
bearing all things on its bosom. Later, we love the woman in a woman;
but the first woman we love is the whole of womanhood; her children are
ours, her interests are our interests, her sorrows our greatest sorrow;
we love her gown, the familiar things about her; we are more grieved by
a trifling loss of hers than if we knew we had lost everything. This
is the sacred love that makes us live in the being of another; whereas
later, alas! we draw another life into ours, and require a woman to
enrich our pauper spirit with her young soul.

I was now one of the household, and I knew for the first time an
infinite sweetness, which to a nature bruised as mine was like a bath
to a weary body; the soul is refreshed in every fibre, comforted to its
very depths. You will hardly understand me, for you are a woman, and
I am speaking now of a happiness women give but do not receive. A man
alone knows the choice happiness of being, in the midst of a strange
household, the privileged friend of its mistress, the secret centre
of her affections. No dog barks at you; the servants, like the dogs,
recognize your rights; the children (who are never misled, and know that
their power cannot be lessened, and that you cherish the light of their
life), the children possess the gift of divination, they play with you
like kittens and assume the friendly tyranny they show only to those
they love; they are full of intelligent discretion and come and go on
tiptoe without noise. Every one hastens to do you service; all like you,
and smile upon you. True passions are like beautiful flowers all the
more charming to the eye when they grow in a barren soil.

But if I enjoyed the delightful benefits of naturalization in a family
where I found relations after my own heart, I had also to pay some costs
for it. Until then Monsieur de Mortsauf had more or less restrained
himself before me. I had only seen his failings in the mass; I was
now to see the full extent of their application and discover how nobly
charitable the countess had been in the account she had given me of
these daily struggles. I learned now all the angles of her husband’s
intolerable nature; I heard his perpetual scolding about nothing,
complaints of evils of which not a sign existed; I saw the inward
dissatisfaction which poisoned his life, and the incessant need of his
tyrannical spirit for new victims. When we went to walk in the evenings
he selected the way; but whichever direction we took he was always
bored; when we reached home he blamed others; his wife had insisted on
going where she wanted; why was he governed by her in all the trifling
things of life? was he to have no will, no thought of his own? must
he consent to be a cipher in his own house? If his harshness was to be
received in patient silence he was angry because he felt a limit to his
power; he asked sharply if religion did not require a wife to please
her husband, and whether it was proper to despise the father of her
children? He always ended by touching some sensitive chord in his wife’s
mind; and he seemed to find a domineering pleasure in making it sound.
Sometimes he tried gloomy silence and a morbid depression, which always
alarmed his wife and made her pay him the most tender attentions.
Like petted children, who exercise their power without thinking of the
distress of their mother, he would let her wait upon him as upon Jacques
and Madeleine, of whom he was jealous.

I discovered at last that in small things as well as in great ones the
count acted towards his servants, his children, his wife, precisely as
he had acted to me about the backgammon. The day when I understood,
root and branch, these difficulties, which like a rampant overgrowth
repressed the actions and stifled the breathing of the whole family,
hindered the management of the household and retarded the improvement of
the estate by complicating the most necessary acts, I felt an admiring
awe which rose higher than my love and drove it back into my heart. Good
God! what was I? Those tears that I had taken on my lips solemnized
my spirit; I found happiness in wedding the sufferings of that woman.
Hitherto I had yielded to the count’s despotism as the smuggler pays his
fine; henceforth I was a voluntary victim that I might come the nearer
to her. The countess understood me, allowed me a place beside her, and
gave me permission to share her sorrows; like the repentant apostate,
eager to rise to heaven with his brethren, I obtained the favor of dying
in the arena.

“Were it not for you I must have succumbed under this life,” Henriette
said to me one evening when the count had been, like the flies on a hot
day, more stinging, venomous, and persistent than usual.

He had gone to bed. Henriette and I remained under the acacias; the
children were playing about us, bathed in the setting sun. Our few
exclamatory words revealed the mutuality of the thoughts in which we
rested from our common sufferings. When language failed silence as
faithfully served our souls, which seemed to enter one another without
hindrance; together they luxuriated in the charms of pensive languor,
they met in the undulations of the same dream, they plunged as one into
the river and came out refreshed like two nymphs as closely united as
their souls could wish, but with no earthly tie to bind them. We entered
the unfathomable gulf, we returned to the surface with empty hands,
asking each other by a look, “Among all our days on earth will there be
one for us?”

In spite of the tranquil poetry of evening which gave to the bricks of
the balustrade their orange tones, so soothing and so pure; in spite of
the religious atmosphere of the hour, which softened the voices of the
children and wafted them towards us, desire crept through my veins like
the match to the bonfire. After three months of repression I was unable
to content myself with the fate assigned me. I took Henriette’s hand and
softly caressed it, trying to convey to her the ardor that invaded me.
She became at once Madame de Mortsauf, and withdrew her hand; tears
rolled from my eyes, she saw them and gave me a chilling look, as she
offered her hand to my lips.

“You must know,” she said, “that this will cause me grief. A friendship
that asks so great a favor is dangerous.”

Then I lost my self-control; I reproached her, I spoke of my sufferings,
and the slight alleviation that I asked for them. I dared to tell her
that at my age, if the senses were all soul still the soul had a sex;
that I could meet death, but not with closed lips. She forced me to
silence with her proud glance, in which I seemed to read the cry of the
Mexican: “And I, am I on a bed of roses?” Ever since that day by the
gate of Frapesle, when I attributed to her the hope that our happiness
might spring from a grave, I had turned with shame from the thought of
staining her soul with the desires of a brutal passion. She now spoke
with honeyed lip, and told me that she never could be wholly mine, and
that I ought to know it. As she said the words I know that in obeying
her I dug an abyss between us. I bowed my head. She went on, saying she
had an inward religious certainty that she might love me as a brother
without offending God or man; such love was a living image of the divine
love, which her good Saint-Martin told her was the life of the world.
If I could not be to her somewhat as her old confessor was, less than a
lover yet more than a brother, I must never see her again. She could
die and take to God her sheaf of sufferings, borne not without tears and
anguish.

“I gave you,” she said in conclusion, “more than I ought to have given,
so that nothing might be left to take, and I am punished.”

I was forced to calm her, to promise never to cause her pain, and to
love her at twenty-one years of age as old men love their youngest
child.

The next day I went early. There were no flowers in the vases of her
gray salon. I rushed into the fields and vineyards to make her two
bouquets; but as I gathered the flowers, one by one, cutting their long
stalks and admiring their beauty, the thought occurred to me that the
colors and foliage had a poetry, a harmony, which meant something to
the understanding while they charmed the eye; just as musical melodies
awaken memories in hearts that are loving and beloved. If color is light
organized, must it not have a meaning of its own, as the combinations
of the air have theirs? I called in the assistance of Jacques and
Madeleine, and all three of us conspired to surprise our dear one. I
arranged, on the lower steps of the portico, where we established
our floral headquarters, two bouquets by which I tried to convey a
sentiment. Picture to yourself a fountain of flowers gushing from the
vases and falling back in curving waves; my message springing from its
bosom in white roses and lilies with their silver cups. All the blue
flowers, harebells, forget-me-nots, and ox-tongues, whose tines, caught
from the skies, blended so well with the whiteness of the lilies,
sparkled on this dewy texture; were they not the type of two purities,
the one that knows nothing, the other that knows all; an image of the
child, an image of the martyr? Love has its blazon, and the countess
discerned it inwardly. She gave me a poignant glance which was like
the cry of a soldier when his wound is touched; she was humbled but
enraptured too. My reward was in that glance; to refresh her heart, to
have given her comfort, what encouragement for me! Then it was that
I pressed the theories of Pere Castel into the service of love, and
recovered a science lost to Europe, where written pages have supplanted
the flowery missives of the Orient with their balmy tints. What charm in
expressing our sensations through these daughters of the sun, sisters to
the flowers that bloom beneath the rays of love! Before long I communed
with the flora of the fields, as a man whom I met in after days at
Grandlieu communed with his bees.

Twice a week during the remainder of my stay at Frapesle I continued the
slow labor of this poetic enterprise, for the ultimate accomplishment of
which I needed all varieties of herbaceous plants; into these I made a
deep research, less as a botanist than as a poet, studying their spirit
rather than their form. To find a flower in its native haunts I walked
enormous distances, beside the brooklets, through the valleys, to the
summit of the cliffs, across the moorland, garnering thoughts even from
the heather. During these rambles I initiated myself into pleasures
unthought of by the man of science who lives in meditation, unknown to
the horticulturist busy with specialities, to the artisan fettered to
a city, to the merchant fastened to his desk, but known to a few
foresters, to a few woodsmen, and to some dreamers. Nature can show
effects the significations of which are limitless; they rise to the
grandeur of the highest moral conceptions--be it the heather in bloom,
covered with the diamonds of the dew on which the sunlight dances;
infinitude decked for the single glance that may chance to fall upon
it:--be it a corner of the forest hemmed in with time-worn rocks
crumbling to gravel and clothed with mosses overgrown with juniper,
which grasps our minds as something savage, aggressive, terrifying as
the cry of the kestrel issuing from it:--be it a hot and barren moor
without vegetation, stony, rigid, its horizon like those of the desert,
where once I gathered a sublime and solitary flower, the anemone
pulsatilla, with its violet petals opening for the golden stamens;
affecting image of my pure idol alone in her valley:--be it great sheets
of water, where nature casts those spots of greenery, a species of
transition between the plant and animal, where life makes haste to come
in flowers and insects, floating there like worlds in ether:--be it
a cottage with its garden of cabbages, its vineyards, its hedges
overhanging a bog, surrounded by a few sparse fields of rye; true image
of many humble existences:--be it a forest path like some cathedral
nave, where the trees are columns and their branches arch the roof, at
the far end of which a light breaks through, mingled with shadows or
tinted with sunset reds athwart the leaves which gleam like the colored
windows of a chancel:--then, leaving these woods so cool and branchy,
behold a chalk-land lying fallow, where among the warm and cavernous
mosses adders glide to their lairs, or lift their proud slim heads. Cast
upon all these pictures torrents of sunlight like beneficent waters,
or the shadow of gray clouds drawn in lines like the wrinkles of an old
man’s brow, or the cool tones of a sky faintly orange and streaked with
lines of a paler tint; then listen--you will hear indefinable harmonies
amid a silence which blends them all.

During the months of September and October I did not make a single
bouquet which cost me less than three hours search; so much did I
admire, with the real sympathy of a poet, these fugitive allegories of
human life, that vast theatre I was about to enter, the scenes of which
my memory must presently recall. Often do I now compare those splendid
scenes with memories of my soul thus expending itself on nature; again I
walk that valley with my sovereign, whose white robe brushed the coppice
and floated on the green sward, whose spirit rose, like a promised
fruit, from each calyx filled with amorous stamens.

No declaration of love, no vows of uncontrollable passion ever conveyed
more than these symphonies of flowers; my baffled desires impelled me to
efforts of expression through them like those of Beethoven through his
notes, to the same bitter reactions, to the same mighty bounds towards
heaven. In their presence Madame de Mortsauf was my Henriette. She
looked at them constantly; they fed her spirit, she gathered all the
thoughts I had given them, saying, as she raised her head from the
embroidery frame to receive my gift, “Ah, how beautiful!”

Natalie, you will understand this delightful intercourse through the
details of a bouquet, just as you would comprehend Saadi from a fragment
of his verse. Have you ever smelt in the fields in the month of May the
perfume that communicates to all created beings the intoxicating sense
of a new creation; the sense that makes you trail your hand in the water
from a boat, and loosen your hair to the breeze while your mind revives
with the springtide greenery of the trees? A little plant, a species of
vernal grass, is a powerful element in this veiled harmony; it cannot be
worn with impunity; take into your hand its shining blade, striped green
and white like a silken robe, and mysterious emotions will stir the
rosebuds your modesty keeps hidden in the depths of your heart. Round
the neck of a porcelain vase imagine a broad margin of the gray-white
tufts peculiar to the sedum of the vineyards of Touraine, vague image
of submissive forms; from this foundation come tendrils of the bind-weed
with its silver bells, sprays of pink rest-barrow mingled with a few
young shoots of oak-leaves, lustrous and magnificently colored;
these creep forth prostrate, humble as the weeping-willow, timid and
supplicating as prayer. Above, see those delicate threads of the purple
amoret, with its flood of anthers that are nearly yellow; the snowy
pyramids of the meadow-sweet, the green tresses of the wild oats, the
slender plumes of the agrostis, which we call wind-ear; roseate hopes,
decking love’s earliest dream and standing forth against the gray
surroundings. But higher still, remark the Bengal roses, sparsely
scattered among the laces of the daucus, the plumes of the linaria, the
marabouts of the meadow-queen; see the umbels of the myrrh, the spun
glass of the clematis in seed, the dainty petals of the cross-wort,
white as milk, the corymbs of the yarrow, the spreading stems of the
fumitory with their black and rosy blossoms, the tendrils of the grape,
the twisted shoots of the honeysuckle; in short, all the innocent
creatures have that is most tangled, wayward, wild,--flames and triple
darts, leaves lanceolated or jagged, stalks convoluted like passionate
desires writhing in the soul. From the bosom of this torrent of love
rises the scarlet poppy, its tassels about to open, spreading its
flaming flakes above the starry jessamine, dominating the rain of
pollen--that soft mist fluttering in the air and reflecting the light in
its myriad particles. What woman intoxicated with the odor of the vernal
grasses would fail to understand this wealth of offered thoughts, these
ardent desires of a love demanding the happiness refused in a hundred
struggles which passion still renews, continuous, unwearying, eternal!

Put this speech of the flowers in the light of a window to show its
crisp details, its delicate contrasts, its arabesques of color, and
allow the sovereign lady to see a tear upon some petal more expanded
than the rest. What do we give to God? perfumes, light, and song, the
purest expression of our nature. Well, these offerings to God, are they
not likewise offered to love in this poem of luminous flowers murmuring
their sadness to the heart, cherishing its hidden transports, its
unuttered hopes, its illusions which gleam and fall to fragments like
the gossamer of a summer’s night?

Such neutral pleasures help to soothe a nature irritated by long
contemplation of the person beloved. They were to me, I dare not say to
her, like those fissures in a dam through which the water finds a vent
and avoids disaster. Abstinence brings deadly exhaustion, which a
few crumbs falling from heaven like manna in the desert, suffices to
relieve. Sometimes I found my Henriette standing before these bouquets
with pendant arms, lost in agitated reverie, thoughts swelling her
bosom, illumining her brow as they surged in waves and sank again,
leaving lassitude and languor behind them. Never again have I made a
bouquet for any one. When she and I had created this language and formed
it to our uses, a satisfaction filled our souls like that of a slave who
escapes his masters.

During the rest of this month as I came from the meadows through the
gardens I often saw her face at the window, and when I reached the salon
she was ready at her embroidery frame. If I did not arrive at the hour
expected (though never appointed), I saw a white form wandering on the
terrace, and when I joined her she would say, “I came to meet you; I
must show a few attentions to my youngest child.”

The miserable games of backgammon had come to end. The count’s late
purchases took all his time in going hither and thither about the
property, surveying, examining, and marking the boundaries of his new
possessions. He had orders to give, rural works to overlook which needed
a master’s eye,--all of them planned and decided on by his wife and
himself. We often went to meet him, the countess and I, with the
children, who amused themselves on the way by running after insects,
stag-beetles, darning-needles, they too making their bouquets, or to
speak more truly, their bundles of flowers. To walk beside the woman we
love, to take her on our arm, to guide her steps,--these are illimitable
joys that suffice a lifetime. Confidence is then complete. We went
alone, we returned with the “general,” a title given to the count when
he was good-humored. These two ways of taking the same path gave light
and shade to our pleasure, a secret known only to hearts debarred from
union. Our talk, so free as we went, had hidden significations as
we returned, when either of us gave an answer to some furtive
interrogation, or continued a subject, already begun, in the enigmatic
phrases to which our language lends itself, and which women are so
ingenious in composing. Who has not known the pleasure of such secret
understandings in a sphere apart from those about us, a sphere where
spirits meet outside of social laws?

One day a wild hope, quickly dispelled, took possession of me, when the
count, wishing to know what we were talking of, put the inquiry,
and Henriette answered in words that allowed another meaning, which
satisfied him. This amused Madeleine, who laughed; after a moment her
mother blushed and gave me a forbidding look, as if to say she might
still withdraw from me her soul as she had once withdrawn her hand. But
our purely spiritual union had far too many charms, and on the morrow it
continued as before.

The hours, days, and weeks fled by, filled with renascent joys. Grape
harvest, the festal season in Touraine, began. Toward the end of
September the sun, less hot than during the wheat harvest, allows of our
staying in the vineyards without danger of becoming overheated. It is
easier to gather grapes than to mow wheat. Fruits of all kinds are ripe,
harvests are garnered, bread is less dear; the sense of plenty makes the
country people happy. Fears as to the results of rural toil, in which
more money than sweat is often spent, vanish before a full granary and
cellars about to overflow. The vintage is then like a gay dessert after
the dinner is eaten; the skies of Touraine, where the autumns are always
magnificent, smile upon it. In this hospitable land the vintagers
are fed and lodged in the master’s house. The meals are the only
ones throughout the year when these poor people taste substantial,
well-cooked food; and they cling to the custom as the children of
patriarchal families cling to anniversaries. As the time approaches they
flock in crowds to those houses where the masters are known to treat the
laborers liberally. The house is full of people and of provisions. The
presses are open. The country is alive with the coming and going of
itinerant coopers, of carts filled with laughing girls and joyous
husbandmen, who earn better wages than at any other time during
the year, and who sing as they go. There is also another cause of
pleasurable content: classes and ranks are equal; women, children,
masters, and men, all that little world, share in the garnering of
the divine hoard. These various elements of satisfaction explain the
hilarity of the vintage, transmitted from age to age in these last
glorious days of autumn, the remembrance of which inspired Rabelais with
the bacchic form of his great work.

The children, Jacques and Madeleine, had never seen a vintage; I was
like them, and they were full of infantine delight at finding a sharer
of their pleasure; their mother, too, promised to accompany us. We went
to Villaines, where baskets are manufactured, in quest of the prettiest
that could be bought; for we four were to cut certain rows reserved for
our scissors; it was, however, agreed that none of us were to eat too
many grapes. To eat the fat bunches of Touraine in a vineyard seemed
so delicious that we all refused the finest grapes on the dinner-table.
Jacques made me swear I would go to no other vineyard, but stay closely
at Clochegourde. Never were these frail little beings, usually pallid
and smiling, so fresh and rosy and active as they were this morning.
They chattered for chatter’s sake, and trotted about without apparent
object; they suddenly seemed, like other children, to have more life
than they needed; neither Monsieur nor Madame de Mortsauf had ever seen
them so before. I became a child again with them, more of a child than
either of them, perhaps; I, too, was hoping for my harvest. It was
glorious weather when we went to the vineyard, and we stayed there half
the day. How we disputed as to who had the finest grapes and who could
fill his basket quickest! The little human shoots ran to and fro from
the vines to their mother; not a bunch could be cut without showing it
to her. She laughed with the good, gay laugh of her girlhood when I,
running up with my basket after Madeleine, cried out, “Mine too! See
mine, mamma!” To which she answered: “Don’t get overheated, dear child.”
 Then passing her hand round my neck and through my hair, she added,
giving me a little tap on the cheek, “You are melting away.” It was
the only caress she ever gave me. I looked at the pretty line of purple
clusters, the hedges full of haws and blackberries; I heard the voices
of the children; I watched the trooping girls, the cart loaded with
barrels, the men with the panniers. Ah, it is all engraved on my memory,
even to the almond-tree beside which she stood, girlish, rosy, smiling,
beneath the sunshade held open in her hand. Then I busied myself in
cutting the bunches and filling my basket, going forward to empty it
in the vat, silently, with measured bodily movement and slow steps that
left my spirit free. I discovered then the ineffable pleasure of an
external labor which carries life along, and thus regulates the rush of
passion, often so near, but for this mechanical motion, to kindle
into flame. I learned how much wisdom is contained in uniform labor; I
understood monastic discipline.

For the first time in many days the count was neither surly nor cruel.
His son was so well; the future Duc de Lenoncourt-Mortsauf, fair and
rosy and stained with grape-juice, rejoiced his heart. This day
being the last of the vintage, he had promised a dance in front of
Clochegourde in honor of the return of the Bourbons, so that our
festival gratified everybody. As we returned to the house, the countess
took my arm and leaned upon it, as if to let my heart feel the weight of
hers,--the instinctive movement of a mother who seeks to convey her joy.
Then she whispered in my ear, “You bring us happiness.”

Ah, to me, who knew her sleepless nights, her cares, her fears, her
former existence, in which, although the hand of God sustained her, all
was barren and wearisome, those words uttered by that rich voice brought
pleasures no other woman in the world could give me.

“The terrible monotony of my life is broken, all things are radiant with
hope,” she said after a pause. “Oh, never leave me! Do not despise my
harmless superstitions; be the elder son, the protector of the younger.”

In this, Natalie, there is nothing romantic. To know the infinite of our
deepest feelings, we must in youth cast our lead into those great
lakes upon whose shores we live. Though to many souls passions are lava
torrents flowing among arid rocks, other souls there be in whom passion,
restrained by insurmountable obstacles, fills with purest water the
crater of the volcano.

We had still another fete. Madame de Mortsauf, wishing to accustom
her children to the practical things of life, and to give them some
experience of the toil by which men earn their living, had provided
each of them with a source of income, depending on the chances of
agriculture. To Jacques she gave the produce of the walnut-trees, to
Madeleine that of the chestnuts. The gathering of the nuts began soon
after the vintage,--first the chestnuts, then the walnuts. To beat
Madeleine’s trees with a long pole and hear the nuts fall and rebound on
the dry, matted earth of a chestnut-grove; to see the serious gravity of
the little girl as she examined the heaps and estimated their probable
value, which to her represented many pleasures on which she counted;
the congratulations of Manette, the trusted servant who alone supplied
Madame de Mortsauf’s place with the children; the explanations of the
mother, showing the necessity of labor to obtain all crops, so often
imperilled by the uncertainties of climate,--all these things made up a
charming scene of innocent, childlike happiness amid the fading colors
of the late autumn.

Madeleine had a little granary of her own, in which I was to see her
brown treasure garnered and share her delight. Well, I quiver still when
I recall the sound of each basketful of nuts as it was emptied on the
mass of yellow husks, mixed with earth, which made the floor of the
granary. The count bought what was needed for the household; the farmers
and tenants, indeed, every one around Clochegourde, sent buyers to the
Mignonne, a pet name which the peasantry give even to strangers, but
which in this case belonged exclusively to Madeleine.

Jacques was less fortunate in gathering his walnuts. It rained for
several days; but I consoled him with the advice to hold back his nuts
and sell them a little later. Monsieur de Chessel had told me that the
walnut-trees in the Brehemont, also those about Amboise and Vouvray,
were not bearing. Walnut oil is in great demand in Touraine. Jacques
might get at least forty sous for the product of each tree, and as he
had two hundred the amount was considerable; he intended to spend it on
the equipment of a pony. This wish led to a discussion with his father,
who bade him think of the uncertainty of such returns, and the wisdom of
creating a reserve fund for the years when the trees might not bear,
and so equalizing his resources. I felt what was passing through the
mother’s mind as she sat by in silence; she rejoiced in the way Jacques
listened to his father, the father seeming to recover the paternal
dignity that was lacking to him, thanks to the ideas which she herself
had prompted in him. Did I not tell you truly that in picturing this
woman earthly language was insufficient to render either her character
or her spirit. When such scenes occurred my soul drank in their delights
without analyzing them; but now, with what vigor they detach themselves
on the dark background of my troubled life! Like diamonds they shine
against the settling of thoughts degraded by alloy, of bitter regrets
for a lost happiness. Why do the names of the two estates purchased
after the Restoration, and in which Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf both
took the deepest interest, the Cassine and the Rhetoriere, move me more
than the sacred names of the Holy Land or of Greece? “Who loves, knows!”
 cried La Fontaine. Those names possess the talismanic power of words
uttered under certain constellations by seers; they explain magic to me;
they awaken sleeping forms which arise and speak to me; they lead me to
the happy valley; they recreate skies and landscape. But such evocations
are in the regions of the spiritual world; they pass in the silence of
my own soul. Be not surprised, therefore, if I dwell on all these homely
scenes; the smallest details of that simple, almost common life are
ties which, frail as they may seem, bound me in closest union to the
countess.

The interests of her children gave Madame de Mortsauf almost as much
anxiety as their health. I soon saw the truth of what she had told me as
to her secret share in the management of the family affairs, into which
I became slowly initiated. After ten years’ steady effort Madame de
Mortsauf had changed the method of cultivating the estate. She had “put
it in fours,” as the saying is in those parts, meaning the new system
under which wheat is sown every four years only, so as to make the soil
produce a different crop yearly. To evade the obstinate unwillingness of
the peasantry it was found necessary to cancel the old leases and give
new ones, to divide the estate into four great farms and let them
on equal shares, the sort of lease that prevails in Touraine and its
neighborhood. The owner of the estate gives the house, farm-buildings,
and seed-grain to tenants-at-will, with whom he divides the costs of
cultivation and the crops. This division is superintended by an agent or
bailiff, whose business it is to take the share belonging to the owner;
a costly system, complicated by the market changes of values, which
alter the character of the shares constantly. The countess had induced
Monsieur de Mortsauf to cultivate a fifth farm, made up of the reserved
lands about Clochegourde, as much to occupy his mind as to show other
farmers the excellence of the new method by the evidence of facts. Being
thus, in a hidden way, the mistress of the estate, she had slowly
and with a woman’s persistency rebuilt two of the farm-houses on the
principle of those in Artois and Flanders. It is easy to see her motive.
She wished, after the expiration of the leases on shares, to relet to
intelligent and capable persons for rental in money, and thus simplify
the revenues of Clochegourde. Fearing to die before her husband, she
was anxious to secure for him a regular income, and to her children a
property which no incapacity could jeopardize. At the present time the
fruit-trees planted during the last ten years were in full bearing; the
hedges, which secured the boundaries from dispute, were in good order;
the elms and poplars were growing well. With the new purchases and the
new farming system well under way, the estate of Clochegourde, divided
into four great farms, two of which still needed new houses, was capable
of bringing in forty thousand francs a year, ten thousand for each farm,
not counting the yield of the vineyards, and the two hundred acres of
woodland which adjoined them, nor the profits of the model home-farm.
The roads to the great farms all opened on an avenue which followed a
straight line from Clochegourde to the main road leading to Chinon.
The distance from the entrance of this avenue to Tours was only fifteen
miles; tenants would never be wanting, especially now that everybody was
talking of the count’s improvements and the excellent condition of his
land.

The countess wished to put some fifteen thousand francs into each of
the estates lately purchased, and to turn the present dwellings into two
large farm-houses and buildings, in order that the property might bring
in a better rent after the ground had been cultivated for a year or two.
These ideas, so simple in themselves, but complicated with the thirty
odd thousand francs it was necessary to expend upon them, were just now
the topic of many discussions between herself and the count, sometimes
amounting to bitter quarrels, in which she was sustained by the thought
of her children’s interests. The fear, “If I die to-morrow what will
become of them?” made her heart beat. The gentle, peaceful hearts to
whom anger is an impossibility, and whose sole desire is to shed on
those about them their own inward peace, alone know what strength is
needed for such struggles, what demands upon the spirit must be made
before beginning the contest, what weariness ensues when the fight is
over and nothing has been won. At this moment, just as her children
seemed less anemic, less frail, more active (for the fruit season had
had its effect on them), and her moist eyes followed them as they played
about her with a sense of contentment which renewed her strength and
refreshed her heart, the poor woman was called upon to bear the sharp
sarcasms and attacks of an angry opposition. The count, alarmed at the
plans she proposed, denied with stolid obstinacy the advantages of all
she had done and the possibility of doing more. He replied to conclusive
reasoning with the folly of a child who denies the influence of the
sun in summer. The countess, however, carried the day. The victory
of commonsense over insanity so healed her wounds that she forgot the
battle. That day we all went to the Cassine and the Rhetoriere, to
decide upon the buildings. The count walked alone in front, the children
went next, and we ourselves followed slowly, for she was speaking in a
low, gentle tone, which made her words like the murmur of the sea as it
ripples on a smooth beach.

She was, she said, certain of success. A new line of communication
between Tours and Chinon was to be opened by an active man, a carrier,
a cousin of Manette’s, who wanted a large farm on the route. His family
was numerous; the eldest son would drive the carts, the second could
attend to the business, the father living half-way along the road, at
Rabelaye, one of the farms then to let, would look after the relays and
enrich his land with the manure of the stables. As to the other farm, la
Baude, the nearest to Clochegourde, one of their own people, a worthy,
intelligent, and industrious man, who saw the advantages of the new
system of agriculture, was ready to take a lease on it. The Cassine and
the Rhetoriere need give no anxiety; their soil was the very best in the
neighborhood; the farm-houses once built, and the ground brought into
cultivation, it would be quite enough to advertise them at Tours;
tenants would soon apply for them. In two years’ time Clochegourde would
be worth at least twenty-four thousand francs a year. Gravelotte,
the farm in Maine, which Monsieur de Mortsauf had recovered after the
emigration, was rented for seven thousand francs a year for nine years;
his pension was four thousand. This income might not be a fortune, but
it was certainly a competence. Later, other additions to it might enable
her to go to Paris and attend to Jacques’ education; in two years, she
thought, his health would be established.

With what feeling she uttered the word “Paris!” I knew her thought; she
wished to be as little separated as possible from her friend. On that I
broke forth; I told her that she did not know me; that without talking
of it, I had resolved to finish my education by working day and night so
as to fit myself to be Jacques’ tutor. She looked grave.

“No, Felix,” she said, “that cannot be, any more than your priesthood.
I thank you from my heart as a mother, but as a woman who loves you
sincerely I can never allow you to be the victim of your attachment to
me. Such a position would be a social discredit to you, and I could not
allow it. No! I cannot be an injury to you in any way. You, Vicomte
de Vandenesse, a tutor! You, whose motto is ‘Ne se vend!’ Were you
Richelieu himself it would bar your way in life; it would give the
utmost pain to your family. My friend, you do not know what insult women
of the world, like my mother, can put into a patronizing glance, what
degradation into a word, what contempt into a bow.”

“But if you love me, what is the world to me?”

She pretended not to hear, and went on:--

“Though my father is most kind and desirous of doing all I ask, he would
never forgive your taking so humble a position; he would refuse you his
protection. I could not consent to your becoming tutor to the Dauphin
even. You must accept society as it is; never commit the fault of flying
in the face of it. My friend, this rash proposal of--”

“Love,” I whispered.

“No, charity,” she said, controlling her tears, “this wild idea
enlightens me as to your character; your heart will be your bane. I
shall claim from this moment the right to teach you certain things.
Let my woman’s eye see for you sometimes. Yes, from the solitudes of
Clochegourde I mean to share, silently, contentedly, in your successes.
As to a tutor, do not fear; we shall find some good old abbe, some
learned Jesuit, and my father will gladly devote a handsome sum to the
education of the boy who is to bear his name. Jacques is my pride. He
is, however, eleven years old,” she added after a pause. “But it is with
him as with you; when I first saw you I took you to be about thirteen.”

We now reached the Cassine, where Jacques, Madeleine, and I followed her
about as children follow a mother; but we were in her way; I left her
presently and went into the orchard where Martineau the elder, keeper
of the place, was discussing with Martineau the younger, the bailiff,
whether certain trees ought or ought not to be taken down; they were
arguing the matter as if it concerned their own property. I then saw
how much the countess was beloved. I spoke of it to a poor laborer, who,
with one foot on his spade and an elbow on its handle, stood listening
to the two doctors of pomology.

“Ah, yes, monsieur,” he answered, “she is a good woman, and not haughty
like those hussies at Azay, who would see us die like dogs sooner than
yield us one penny of the price of a grave! The day when that woman
leaves these parts the Blessed Virgin will weep, and we too. She knows
what is due to her, but she knows our hardships, too, and she puts them
into the account.”

With what pleasure I gave that man all the money I had.

A few days later a pony arrived for Jacques, his father, an excellent
horseman, wishing to accustom the child by degrees to the fatigues
of such exercise. The boy had a pretty riding-dress, bought with
the product of the nuts. The morning when he took his first lesson
accompanied by his father and by Madeleine, who jumped and shouted about
the lawn round which Jacques was riding, was a great maternal festival
for the countess. The boy wore a blue collar embroidered by her, a
little sky-blue overcoat fastened by a polished leather belt, a pair of
white trousers pleated at the waist, and a Scotch cap, from which his
fair hair flowed in heavy locks. He was charming to behold. All the
servants clustered round to share the domestic joy. The little heir
smiled at his mother as he passed her, sitting erect, and quite
fearless. This first manly act of a child to whom death had often seemed
so near, the promise of a sound future warranted by this ride which
showed him so handsome, so fresh, so rosy,--what a reward for all her
cares! Then too the joy of the father, who seemed to renew his youth,
and who smiled for the first time in many long months; the pleasure
shown on all faces, the shout of an old huntsman of the Lenoncourts, who
had just arrived from Tours, and who, seeing how the boy held the reins,
shouted to him, “Bravo, monsieur le vicomte!”--all this was too much for
the poor mother, and she burst into tears; she, so calm in her griefs,
was too weak to bear the joy of admiring her boy as he bounded over the
gravel, where so often she had led him in the sunshine inwardly weeping
his expected death. She leaned upon my arm unreservedly, and said: “I
think I have never suffered. Do not leave us to-day.”

The lesson over, Jacques jumped into his mother’s arms; she caught
him and held him tightly to her, kissing him passionately. I went with
Madeleine to arrange two magnificent bouquets for the dinner-table
in honor of the young equestrian. When we returned to the salon the
countess said: “The fifteenth of October is certainly a great day with
me. Jacques has taken his first riding lesson, and I have just set the
last stitch in my furniture cover.”

“Then, Blanche,” said the count, laughing, “I must pay you for it.”

He offered her his arm and took her to the first courtyard, where stood
an open carriage which her father had sent her, and for which the count
had purchased two English horses. The old huntsman had prepared the
surprise while Jacques was taking his lesson. We got into the carriage,
and went to see where the new avenue entered the main road towards
Chinon. As we returned, the countess said to me in an anxious tone, “I
am too happy; to me happiness is like an illness,--it overwhelms me; I
fear it may vanish like a dream.”

I loved her too passionately not to feel jealous,--I who could give her
nothing! In my rage against myself I longed for some means of dying for
her. She asked me to tell her the thoughts that filled my eyes, and I
told her honestly. She was more touched than by all her presents; then
taking me to the portico, she poured comfort into my heart. “Love me as
my aunt loved me,” she said, “and that will be giving me your life; and
if I take it, must I not ever be grateful to you?

“It was time I finished my tapestry,” she added as we re-entered the
salon, where I kissed her hand as if to renew my vows. “Perhaps you do
not know, Felix, why I began so formidable a piece of work. Men find the
occupations of life a great resource against troubles; the management of
affairs distracts their mind; but we poor women have no support within
ourselves against our sorrows. To be able to smile before my children
and my husband when my heart was heavy I felt the need of controlling my
inward sufferings by some physical exercise. In this way I escaped
the depression which is apt to follow a great strain upon the moral
strength, and likewise all outbursts of excitement. The mere action of
lifting my arm regularly as I drew the stitches rocked my thoughts and
gave to my spirit when the tempest raged a monotonous ebb and flow
which seemed to regulate its emotions. To every stitch I confided my
secrets,--you understand me, do you not? Well, while doing my last chair
I have thought much, too much, of you, dear friend. What you have put
into your bouquets I have said in my embroidery.”

The dinner was lovely. Jacques, like all children when you take notice
of them, jumped into my arms when he saw the flowers I had arranged for
him as a garland. His mother pretended to be jealous; ah, Natalie, you
should have seen the charming grace with which the dear child offered
them to her. In the afternoon we played a game of backgammon, I alone
against Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf, and the count was charming.
They accompanied me along the road to Frapesle in the twilight of a
tranquil evening, one of those harmonious evenings when our feelings
gain in depth what they lose in vivacity. It was a day of days in
this poor woman’s life; a spot of brightness which often comforted her
thoughts in painful hours.

Soon, however, the riding lessons became a subject of contention. The
countess justly feared the count’s harsh reprimands to his son. Jacques
grew thin, dark circles surrounded his sweet blue eyes; rather than
trouble his mother, he suffered in silence. I advised him to tell
his father he was tired when the count’s temper was violent; but that
expedient proved unavailing, and it became necessary to substitute
the old huntsman as a teacher in place of the father, who could
with difficulty be induced to resign his pupil. Angry reproaches and
contentions began once more; the count found a text for his continual
complaints in the base ingratitude of women; he flung the carriage,
horses, and liveries in his wife’s face twenty times a day. At last a
circumstance occurred on which a man with his nature and his disease
naturally fastened eagerly. The cost of the buildings at the Cassine
and the Rhetoriere proved to be half as much again as the estimate.
This news was unfortunately given in the first instance to Monsieur de
Mortsauf instead of to his wife. It was the ground of a quarrel, which
began mildly but grew more and more embittered until it seemed as
though the count’s madness, lulled for a short time, was demanding its
arrearages from the poor wife.

That day I had started from Frapesle at half-past ten to search for
flowers with Madeleine. The child had brought the two vases to the
portico, and I was wandering about the gardens and adjoining meadows
gathering the autumn flowers, so beautiful, but too rare. Returning from
my final quest, I could not find my little lieutenant with her white
cape and broad pink sash; but I heard cries within the house, and
Madeleine presently came running out.

“The general,” she said, crying (the term with her was an expression of
dislike), “the general is scolding mamma; go and defend her.”

I sprang up the steps of the portico and reached the salon without being
seen by either the count or his wife. Hearing the madman’s sharp cries
I first shut all the doors, then I returned and found Henriette as white
as her dress.

“Never marry, Felix,” said the count as soon as he saw me; “a woman is
led by the devil; the most virtuous of them would invent evil if it did
not exist; they are all vile.”

Then followed arguments without beginning or end. Harking back to
the old troubles, Monsieur de Mortsauf repeated the nonsense of the
peasantry against the new system of farming. He declared that if he had
had the management of Clochegourde he should be twice as rich as he now
was. He shouted these complaints and insults, he swore, he sprang around
the room knocking against the furniture and displacing it; then in the
middle of a sentence he stopped short, complained that his very marrow
was on fire, his brains melting away like his money, his wife had ruined
him! The countess smiled and looked upward.

“Yes, Blanche,” he cried, “you are my executioner; you are killing me; I
am in your way; you want to get rid of me; you are monster of hypocrisy.
She is smiling! Do you know why she smiles, Felix?”

I kept silence and looked down.

“That woman,” he continued, answering his own question, “denies me all
happiness; she is no more to me than she is to you, and yet she pretends
to be my wife! She bears my name and fulfils none of the duties which
all laws, human and divine, impose upon her; she lies to God and man.
She obliges me to go long distances, hoping to wear me out and make me
leave her to herself; I am displeasing to her, she hates me; she puts
all her art into keeping me away from her; she has made me mad through
the privations she imposes on me--for everything flies to my poor head;
she is killing me by degrees, and she thinks herself a saint and takes
the sacrament every month!”

The countess was weeping bitterly, humiliated by the degradation of
the man, to whom she kept saying for all answer, “Monsieur! monsieur!
monsieur!”

Though the count’s words made me blush, more for him than for Henriette,
they stirred my heart violently, for they appealed to the sense of
chastity and delicacy which is indeed the very warp and woof of first
love.

“She is virgin at my expense,” cried the count.

At these words the countess cried out, “Monsieur!”

“What do you mean with your imperious ‘Monsieur!’” he shouted. “Am I not
your master? Must I teach you that I am?”

He came towards her, thrusting forward his white wolf’s head, now
hideous, for his yellow eyes had a savage expression which made him look
like a wild beast rushing out of a wood. Henriette slid from her chair
to the ground to avoid a blow, which however was not given; she lay at
full length on the floor and lost consciousness, completely exhausted.
The count was like a murderer who feels the blood of his victim spurting
in his face; he stopped short, bewildered. I took the poor woman in my
arms, and the count let me take her, as though he felt unworthy to touch
her; but he went before me to open the door of her bedroom next the
salon,--a sacred room I had never entered. I put the countess on her
feet and held her for a moment in one arm, passing the other round her
waist, while Monsieur de Mortsauf took the eider-down coverlet from the
bed; then together we lifted her and laid her, still dressed, on the
bed. When she came to herself she motioned to us to unfasten her belt.
Monsieur de Mortsauf found a pair of scissors, and cut through it; I
made her breathe salts, and she opened her eyes. The count left the
room, more ashamed than sorry. Two hours passed in perfect silence.
Henriette’s hand lay in mine; she pressed it to mine, but could not
speak. From time to time she opened her eyes as if to tell me by a look
that she wished to be still and silent; then suddenly, for an instant,
there seemed a change; she rose on her elbow and whispered, “Unhappy
man!--ah! if you did but know--”

She fell back upon the pillow. The remembrance of her past sufferings,
joined to the present shock, threw her again into the nervous
convulsions I had just calmed by the magnetism of love,--a power then
unknown to me, but which I used instinctively. I held her with gentle
force, and she gave me a look which made me weep. When the nervous
motions ceased I smoothed her disordered hair, the first and only time
that I ever touched it; then I again took her hand and sat looking
at the room, all brown and gray, at the bed with its simple chintz
curtains, at the toilet table draped in a fashion now discarded, at the
commonplace sofa with its quilted mattress. What poetry I could read
in that room! What renunciations of luxury for herself; the only luxury
being its spotless cleanliness. Sacred cell of a married nun, filled
with holy resignation; its sole adornments were the crucifix of her bed,
and above it the portrait of her aunt; then, on each side of the holy
water basin, two drawings of the children made by herself, with locks
of their hair when they were little. What a retreat for a woman whose
appearance in the great world of fashion would have made the handsomest
of her sex jealous! Such was the chamber where the daughter of an
illustrious family wept out her days, sunken at this moment in anguish,
and denying herself the love that might have comforted her. Hidden,
irreparable woe! Tears of the victim for her slayer, tears of the slayer
for his victim! When the children and waiting-woman came at length into
the room I left it. The count was waiting for me; he seemed to seek me
as a mediating power between himself and his wife. He caught my hands,
exclaiming, “Stay, stay with us, Felix!”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “Monsieur de Chessel has a party, and my
absence would cause remark. But after dinner I will return.”

He left the house when I did, and took me to the lower gate without
speaking; then he accompanied me to Frapesle, seeming not to know what
he was doing. At last I said to him, “For heaven’s sake, Monsieur le
comte, let her manage your affairs if it pleases her, and don’t torment
her.”

“I have not long to live,” he said gravely; “she will not suffer long
through me; my head is giving way.”

He left me in a spasm of involuntary self-pity. After dinner I returned
for news of Madame de Mortsauf, who was already better. If such were the
joys of marriage, if such scenes were frequent, how could she survive
them long? What slow, unpunished murder was this? During that day I
understood the tortures by which the count was wearing out his wife.
Before what tribunal can we arraign such crimes? These thoughts stunned
me; I could say nothing to Henriette by word of mouth, but I spent the
night in writing to her. Of the three or four letters that I wrote I
have kept only the beginning of one, with which I was not satisfied.
Here it is, for though it seems to me to express nothing, and to speak
too much of myself when I ought only to have thought of her, it will
serve to show you the state my soul was in:--

  To Madame de Mortsauf:

  How many things I had to say to you when I reached the house! I
  thought of them on the way, but I forgot them in your presence.
  Yes, when I see you, dear Henriette, I find my thoughts no longer
  in keeping with the light from your soul which heightens your
  beauty; then, too, the happiness of being near you is so ineffable
  as to efface all other feelings. Each time we meet I am born into
  a broader life; I am like the traveller who climbs a rock and sees
  before him a new horizon. Each time you talk with me I add new
  treasures to my treasury. There lies, I think, the secret of long
  and inexhaustible affections. I can only speak to you of yourself
  when away from you. In your presence I am too dazzled to see, too
  happy to question my happiness, too full of you to be myself, too
  eloquent through you to speak, too eager in seizing the present
  moment to remember the past. You must think of this state of
  intoxication and forgive me its consequent mistakes.

  When near you I can only feel. Yet, I have courage to say, dear
  Henriette, that never, in all the many joys you have given me,
  never did I taste such joy as filled my soul when, after that
  dreadful storm through which you struggled with superhuman
  courage, you came to yourself alone with me, in the twilight of
  your chamber where that unhappy scene had brought me. I alone
  know the light that shines from a woman when through the portals
  of death she re-enters life with the dawn of a rebirth tinting her
  brow. What harmonies were in your voice! How words, even your
  words, seemed paltry when the sound of that adored voice--in
  itself the echo of past pains mingled with divine consolations
  --blessed me with the gift of your first thought. I knew you were
  brilliant with all human splendor, but yesterday I found a new
  Henriette, who might be mine if God so willed; I beheld a spirit
  freed from the bodily trammels which repress the ardors of the
  soul. Ah! thou wert beautiful indeed in thy weakness, majestic in
  thy prostration. Yesterday I found something more beautiful than
  thy beauty, sweeter than thy voice; lights more sparkling than the
  light of thine eyes, perfumes for which there are no words
  --yesterday thy soul was visible and palpable. Would I could have
  opened my heart and made thee live there! Yesterday I lost the
  respectful timidity with which thy presence inspires me; thy
  weakness brought us nearer together. Then, when the crisis passed
  and thou couldst bear our atmosphere once more, I knew what it was
  to breathe in unison with thy breath. How many prayers rose up to
  heaven in that moment! Since I did not die as I rushed through
  space to ask of God that he would leave thee with me, no human
  creature can die of joy nor yet of sorrow. That moment has left
  memories buried in my soul which never again will reappear upon
  its surface and leave me tearless. Yes, the fears with which my
  soul was tortured yesterday are incomparably greater than all
  sorrows that the future can bring upon me, just as the joys which
  thou hast given me, dear eternal thought of my life! will be
  forever greater than any future joy God may be pleased to grant
  me. Thou hast made me comprehend the love divine, that sure love,
  sure in strength and in duration, that knows no doubt or jealousy.

Deepest melancholy gnawed my soul; the glimpse into that hidden life was
agonizing to a young heart new to social emotions; it was an awful thing
to find this abyss at the opening of life,--a bottomless abyss, a Dead
Sea. This dreadful aggregation of misfortunes suggested many thoughts;
at my first step into social life I found a standard of comparison by
which all other events and circumstances must seem petty.

The next day when I entered the salon she was there alone. She looked at
me for a moment, held out her hand, and said, “My friend is always too
tender.” Her eyes grew moist; she rose, and then she added, in a tone of
desperate entreaty, “Never write thus to me again.”

Monsieur de Mortsauf was very kind. The countess had recovered her
courage and serenity; but her pallor betrayed the sufferings of the
previous night, which were calmed, but not extinguished. That evening
she said to me, as she paced among the autumn leaves which rustled
beneath our footsteps, “Sorrow is infinite; joys are limited,”--words
which betrayed her sufferings by the comparison she made with the
fleeting delights of the previous week.

“Do not slander life,” I said to her. “You are ignorant of love; love
gives happiness which shines in heaven.”

“Hush!” she said. “I wish to know nothing of it. The Icelander would
die in Italy. I am calm and happy beside you; I can tell you all my
thoughts; do not destroy my confidence. Why will you not combine the
virtue of the priest with the charm of a free man.”

“You make me drink the hemlock!” I cried, taking her hand and laying it
on my heart, which was beating fast.

“Again!” she said, withdrawing her hand as if it pained her. “Are you
determined to deny me the sad comfort of letting my wounds be stanched
by a friendly hand? Do not add to my sufferings; you do not know them
all; those that are hidden are the worst to bear. If you were a woman
you would know the melancholy disgust that fills her soul when she
sees herself the object of attentions which atone for nothing, but are
thought to atone for all. For the next few days I shall be courted and
caressed, that I may pardon the wrong that has been done. I could
then obtain consent to any wish of mine, however unreasonable. I am
humiliated by his humility, by caresses which will cease as soon as
he imagines that I have forgotten that scene. To owe our master’s good
graces to his faults--”

“His crimes!” I interrupted quickly.

“Is not that a frightful condition of existence?” she continued, with a
sad smile. “I cannot use this transient power. At such times I am like
the knights who could not strike a fallen adversary. To see in the dust
a man whom we ought to honor, to raise him only to enable him to
deal other blows, to suffer from his degradation more than he suffers
himself, to feel ourselves degraded if we profit by such influence for
even a useful end, to spend our strength, to waste the vigor of our
souls in struggles that have no grandeur, to have no power except for a
moment when a fatal crisis comes--ah, better death! If I had no children
I would let myself drift on the wretched current of this life; but if I
lose my courage, what will become of them? I must live for them, however
cruel this life may be. You talk to me of love. Ah! my dear friend,
think of the hell into which I should fling myself if I gave that
pitiless being, pitiless like all weak creatures, the right to despise
me. The purity of my conduct is my strength. Virtue, dear friend, is
holy water in which we gain fresh strength, from which we issue renewed
in the love of God.”

“Listen to me, dear Henriette; I have only another week to stay here,
and I wish--”

“Ah, you mean to leave us!” she exclaimed.

“You must know what my father intends to do with me,” I replied. “It is
now three months--”

“I have not counted the days,” she said, with momentary
self-abandonment. Then she checked herself and cried, “Come, let us go
to Frapesle.”

She called the count and the children, sent for a shawl, and when all
were ready she, usually so calm and slow in all her movements, became
as active as a Parisian, and we started in a body to pay a visit at
Frapesle which the countess did not owe. She forced herself to talk to
Madame de Chessel, who was fortunately discursive in her answers. The
count and Monsieur de Chessel conversed on business. I was afraid the
former might boast of his carriage and horses; but he committed no such
solecisms. His neighbor questioned him about his projected improvements
at the Cassine and the Rhetoriere. I looked at the count, wondering if
he would avoid a subject of conversation so full of painful memories
to all, so cruelly mortifying to him. On the contrary, he explained how
urgent a duty it was to better the agricultural condition of the canton,
to build good houses and make the premises salubrious; in short, he
glorified himself with his wife’s ideas. I blushed as I looked at
her. Such want of scruple in a man who, on certain occasions, could be
scrupulous enough, this oblivion of the dreadful scene, this adoption of
ideas against which he had fought so violently, this confident belief in
himself, petrified me.

When Monsieur de Chessel said to him, “Do you expect to recover your
outlay?”

“More than recover it!” he exclaimed, with a confident gesture.

Such contradictions can be explained only by the word “insanity.”
 Henriette, celestial creature, was radiant. The count was appearing
to be a man of intelligence, a good administrator, an excellent
agriculturist; she played with her boy’s curly head, joyous for him,
happy for herself. What a comedy of pain, what mockery in this drama;
I was horrified by it. Later in life, when the curtain of the world’s
stage was lifted before me, how many other Mortsaufs I saw without the
loyalty and the religious faith of this man. What strange, relentless
power is it that perpetually awards an angel to a madman; to a man of
heart, of true poetic passion, a base woman; to the petty, grandeur;
to this demented brain, a beautiful, sublime being; to Juana, Captain
Diard, whose history at Bordeaux I have told you; to Madame de
Beauseant, an Ajuda; to Madame d’Aiglemont, her husband; to the Marquis
d’Espard, his wife! Long have I sought the meaning of this enigma. I
have ransacked many mysteries, I have discovered the reason of many
natural laws, the purport of some divine hieroglyphics; of the meaning
of this dark secret I know nothing. I study it as I would the form of an
Indian weapon, the symbolic construction of which is known only to the
Brahmans. In this dread mystery the spirit of Evil is too visibly the
master; I dare not lay the blame to God. Anguish irremediable, what
power finds amusement in weaving you? Can Henriette and her mysterious
philosopher be right? Does their mysticism contain the explanation of
humanity?

The autumn leaves were falling during the last few days which I passed
in the valley, days of lowering clouds, which do sometimes obscure the
heaven of Touraine, so pure, so warm at that fine season. The evening
before my departure Madame de Mortsauf took me to the terrace before
dinner.

“My dear Felix,” she said, after we had taken a turn in silence under
the leafless trees, “you are about to enter the world, and I wish to go
with you in thought. Those who have suffered much have lived and known
much. Do not think that solitary souls know nothing of the world; on the
contrary, they are able to judge it. Hear me: If I am to live in and
for my friend I must do what I can for his heart and for his conscience.
When the conflict rages it is hard to remember rules; therefore let me
give you a few instructions, the warnings of a mother to her son. The
day you leave us I shall give you a letter, a long letter, in which you
will find my woman’s thoughts on the world, on society, on men, on
the right methods of meeting difficulty in this great clash of human
interests. Promise me not to read this letter till you reach Paris. I
ask it from a fanciful sentiment, one of those secrets of womanhood not
impossible to understand, but which we grieve to find deciphered; leave
me this covert way where as a woman I wish to walk alone.”

“Yes, I promise it,” I said, kissing her hand.

“Ah,” she added, “I have one more promise to ask of you; but grant it
first.”

“Yes, yes!” I cried, thinking it was surely a promise of fidelity.

“It does not concern myself,” she said smiling, with some bitterness.
“Felix, do not gamble in any house, no matter whose it be; I except
none.”

“I will never play at all,” I replied.

“Good,” she said. “I have found a better use for your time than to waste
it on cards. The end will be that where others must sooner or later be
losers you will invariably win.”

“How so?”

“The letter will tell you,” she said, with a playful smile, which took
from her advice the serious tone which might certainly have been that of
a grandfather.

The countess talked to me for an hour, and proved the depth of her
affection by the study she had made of my nature during the last three
months. She penetrated the recesses of my heart, entering it with her
own; the tones of her voice were changeful and convincing; the words
fell from maternal lips, showing by their tone as well as by their
meaning how many ties already bound us to each other.

“If you knew,” she said in conclusion, “with what anxiety I shall follow
your course, what joy I shall feel if you walk straight, what tears I
must shed if you strike against the angles! Believe that my affection
has no equal; it is involuntary and yet deliberate. Ah, I would that I
might see you happy, powerful, respected,--you who are to me a living
dream.”

She made me weep, so tender and so terrible was she. Her feelings came
boldly to the surface, yet they were too pure to give the slightest hope
even to a young man thirsting for pleasure. Ignoring my tortured flesh,
she shed the rays, undeviating, incorruptible, of the divine love,
which satisfies the soul only. She rose to heights whither the prismatic
pinions of a love like mine were powerless to bear me. To reach her a
man must needs have won the white wings of the seraphim.

“In all that happens to me I will ask myself,” I said, “‘What would my
Henriette say?’”

“Yes, I will be the star and the sanctuary both,” she said, alluding to
the dreams of my childhood.

“You are my light and my religion,” I cried; “you shall be my all.”

“No,” she answered; “I can never be the source of your pleasures.”

She sighed; the smile of secret pain was on her lips, the smile of the
slave who momentarily revolts. From that day forth she was to me, not
merely my beloved, but my only love; she was not IN my heart as a
woman who takes a place, who makes it hers by devotion or by excess
of pleasure given; but she was my heart itself,--it was all hers, a
something necessary to the play of my muscles. She became to me as
Beatrice to the Florentine, as the spotless Laura to the Venetian, the
mother of great thoughts, the secret cause of resolutions which saved
me, the support of my future, the light shining in the darkness like a
lily in a wood. Yes, she inspired those high resolves which pass through
flames, which save the thing in peril; she gave me a constancy like
Coligny’s to vanquish conquerors, to rise above defeat, to weary the
strongest wrestler.

The next day, having breakfasted at Frapesle and bade adieu to my kind
hosts, I went to Clochegourde. Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf had
arranged to drive with me to Tours, whence I was to start the same night
for Paris. During the drive the countess was silent; she pretended
at first to have a headache; then she blushed at the falsehood, and
expiated it by saying that she could not see me go without regret.
The count invited me to stay with them whenever, in the absence of the
Chessels, I might long to see the valley of the Indre once more. We
parted heroically, without apparent tears, but Jacques, who like other
delicate children was quickly touched, began to cry, while Madeleine,
already a woman, pressed her mother’s hand.

“Dear little one!” said the countess, kissing Jacques passionately.

When I was alone at Tours after dinner a wild, inexplicable desire known
only to young blood possessed me. I hired a horse and rode from Tours
to Pont-de-Ruan in an hour and a quarter. There, ashamed of my folly, I
dismounted, and went on foot along the road, stepping cautiously like
a spy till I reached the terrace. The countess was not there, and I
imagined her ill; I had kept the key of the little gate, by which I
now entered; she was coming down the steps of the portico with the two
children to breathe in sadly and slowly the tender melancholy of the
landscape, bathed at that moment in the setting sun.

“Mother, here is Felix,” said Madeleine.

“Yes,” I whispered; “it is I. I asked myself why I should stay at Tours
while I still could see you; why not indulge a desire that in a few days
more I could not gratify.”

“He won’t leave us again, mother,” cried Jacques, jumping round me.

“Hush!” said Madeleine; “if you make such a noise the general will
come.”

“It is not right,” she said. “What folly!”

The tears in her voice were the payment of what must be called a
usurious speculation of love.

“I had forgotten to return this key,” I said smiling.

“Then you will never return,” she said.

“Can we ever be really parted?” I asked, with a look which made her drop
her eyelids for all answer.

I left her after a few moments passed in that happy stupor of the spirit
where exaltation ends and ecstasy begins. I went with lagging step,
looking back at every minute. When, from the summit of the hill, I saw
the valley for the last time I was struck with the contrast it presented
to what it was when I first came there. Then it was verdant, then it
glowed, glowed and blossomed like my hopes and my desires. Initiated now
into the gloomy secrets of a family, sharing the anguish of a Christian
Niobe, sad with her sadness, my soul darkened, I saw the valley in the
tone of my own thoughts. The fields were bare, the leaves of the poplars
falling, the few that remained were rusty, the vine-stalks were burned,
the tops of the trees were tan-colored, like the robes in which royalty
once clothed itself as if to hide the purple of its power beneath the
brown of grief. Still in harmony with my thoughts, the valley, where the
yellow rays of the setting sun were coldly dying, seemed to me a living
image of my heart.

To leave a beloved woman is terrible or natural, according as the mind
takes it. For my part, I found myself suddenly in a strange land of
which I knew not the language. I was unable to lay hold of things to
which my soul no longer felt attachment. Then it was that the height
and the breadth of my love came before me; my Henriette rose in all her
majesty in this desert where I existed only through thoughts of her.
That form so worshipped made me vow to keep myself spotless before my
soul’s divinity, to wear ideally the white robe of the Levite, like
Petrarch, who never entered Laura’s presence unless clothed in white.
With what impatience I awaited the first night of my return to my
father’s roof, when I could read the letter which I felt of during the
journey as a miser fingers the bank-bills he carries about him. During
the night I kissed the paper on which my Henriette had manifested her
will; I sought to gather the mysterious emanations of her hand, to
recover the intonations of her voice in the hush of my being. Since then
I have never read her letters except as I read that first letter; in
bed, amid total silence. I cannot understand how the letters of our
beloved can be read in any other way; yet there are men, unworthy to
be loved, who read such letters in the turmoil of the day, laying them
aside and taking them up again with odious composure.

Here, Natalie, is the voice which echoed through the silence of that
night. Behold the noble figure which stood before me and pointed to the
right path among the cross-ways at which I stood.

  To Monsieur le Vicomte Felix de Vandenesse:

  What happiness for me, dear friend, to gather the scattered
  elements of my experience that I may arm you against the dangers
  of the world, through which I pray that you pass scatheless. I
  have felt the highest pleasures of maternal love as night after
  night I have thought of these things. While writing this letter,
  sentence by sentence, projecting my thoughts into the life you are
  about to lead, I went often to my window. Looking at the towers of
  Frapesle, visible in the moonlight, I said to myself, “He sleeps,
  I wake for him.” Delightful feelings! which recall the happiest of
  my life, when I watched Jacques sleeping in his cradle and waited
  till he wakened, to feed him with my milk. You are the man-child
  whose soul must now be strengthened by precepts never taught in
  schools, but which we women have the privilege of inculcating.
  These precepts will influence your success; they prepare the way
  for it, they will secure it. Am I not exercising a spiritual
  motherhood in giving you a standard by which to judge the actions
  of your life; a motherhood comprehended, is it not, by the child?
  Dear Felix, let me, even though I may make a few mistakes, let me
  give to our friendship a proof of the disinterestedness which
  sanctifies it.

  In yielding you to the world I am renouncing you; but I love you
  too well not to sacrifice my happiness to your welfare. For the
  last four months you have made me reflect deeply on the laws and
  customs which regulate our epoch. The conversations I have had
  with my aunt, well-known to you who have replaced her, the events
  of Monsieur de Mortsauf’s life, which he has told me, the tales
  related by my father, to whom society and the court are familiar
  in their greatest as well as in their smallest aspects, all these
  have risen in my memory for the benefit of my adopted child at the
  moment when he is about to be launched, well-nigh alone, among
  men; about to act without adviser in a world where many are
  wrecked by their own best qualities thoughtlessly displayed, while
  others succeed through a judicious use of their worst.

  I ask you to ponder this statement of my opinion of society as a
  whole; it is concise, for to you a few words are sufficient.

  I do not know whether societies are of divine origin or whether
  they were invented by man. I am equally ignorant of the direction
  in which they tend. What I do know certainly is the fact of their
  existence. No sooner therefore do you enter society, instead of
  living a life apart, than you are bound to consider its conditions
  binding; a contract is signed between you. Does society in these
  days gain more from a man than it returns to him? I think so; but
  as to whether the individual man finds more cost than profit, or
  buys too dear the advantages he obtains, concerns the legislator
  only; I have nothing to say to that. In my judgment you are bound
  to obey in all things the general law, without discussion, whether
  it injures or benefits your personal interests. This principle may
  seem to you a very simple one, but it is difficult of application;
  it is like sap, which must infiltrate the smallest of the
  capillary tubes to stir the tree, renew its verdure, develop its
  flowers, and ripen fruit. Dear, the laws of society are not all
  written in a book; manners and customs create laws, the more
  important of which are often the least known. Believe me, there
  are neither teachers, nor schools, nor text-books for the laws
  that are now to regulate your actions, your language, your visible
  life, the manner of your presentation to the world, and your quest
  of fortune. Neglect those secret laws or fail to understand them,
  and you stay at the foot of the social system instead of looking
  down upon it. Even though this letter may seem to you diffuse,
  telling you much that you have already thought, let me confide to
  you a woman’s ethics.

  To explain society on the theory of individual happiness adroitly
  won at the cost of the greater number is a monstrous doctrine,
  which in its strict application leads men to believe that all they
  can secretly lay hold of before the law or society or other
  individuals condemn it as a wrong is honestly and fairly theirs.
  Once admit that claim and the clever thief goes free; the woman
  who violates her marriage vow without the knowledge of the world
  is virtuous and happy; kill a man, leaving no proof for justice,
  and if, like Macbeth, you win a crown you have done wisely; your
  selfish interests become the higher law; the only question then is
  how to evade, without witnesses or proof, the obstacles which law
  and morality place between you and your self-indulgence. To those
  who hold this view of society, the problem of making their
  fortune, my dear friend, resolves itself into playing a game where
  the stakes are millions or the galleys, political triumphs or
  dishonor. Still, the green cloth is not long enough for all the
  players, and a certain kind of genius is required to play the
  game. I say nothing of religious beliefs, nor yet of feelings;
  what concerns us now is the running-gear of the great machine of
  gold and iron, and its practical results with which men’s lives
  are occupied. Dear child of my heart, if you share my horror at
  this criminal theory of the world, society will present to your
  mind, as it does to all sane minds, the opposite theory of duty.
  Yes, you will see that man owes himself to man in a thousand
  differing ways. To my mind, the duke and peer owe far more to the
  workman and the pauper than the pauper and the workman owe to the
  duke. The obligations of duty enlarge in proportion to the
  benefits which society bestows on men; in accordance with the
  maxim, as true in social politics as in business, that the burden
  of care and vigilance is everywhere in proportion to profits. Each
  man pays his debt in his own way. When our poor toiler at the
  Rhetoriere comes home weary with his day’s work has he not done
  his duty? Assuredly he has done it better than many in the ranks
  above him.

  If you take this view of society, in which you are about to seek a
  place in keeping with your intellect and your faculties, you must
  set before you as a generating principle and mainspring, this
  maxim: never permit yourself to act against either your own
  conscience or the public conscience. Though my entreaty may seem
  to you superfluous, yet I entreat, yes, your Henriette implores
  you to ponder the meaning of that rule. It seems simple but, dear,
  it means that integrity, loyalty, honor, and courtesy are the
  safest and surest instruments for your success. In this selfish
  world you will find many to tell you that a man cannot make his
  way by sentiments, that too much respect for moral considerations
  will hinder his advance. It is not so; you will see men
  ill-trained, ill-taught, incapable of measuring the future, who are
  rough to a child, rude to an old woman, unwilling to be irked by
  some worthy old man on the ground that they can do nothing for
  him; later, you will find the same men caught by the thorns which
  they might have rendered pointless, and missing their triumph for
  some trivial reason; whereas the man who is early trained to a
  sense of duty does not meet the same obstacles; he may attain
  success less rapidly, but when attained it is solid and does not
  crumble like that of others.

  When I show you that the application of this doctrine demands in
  the first place a mastery of the science of manners, you may think
  my jurisprudence has a flavor of the court and of the training I
  received as a Lenoncourt. My dear friend, I do attach great
  importance to that training, trifling as it seems. You will find
  that the habits of the great world are as important to you as the
  wide and varied knowledge that you possess. Often they take the
  place of such knowledge; for some really ignorant men, born with
  natural gifts and accustomed to give connection to their ideas,
  have been known to attain a grandeur never reached by others far
  more worthy of it. I have studied you thoroughly, Felix, wishing
  to know if your education, derived wholly from schools, has
  injured your nature. God knows the joy with which I find you fit
  for that further education of which I speak.

  The manners of many who are brought up in the traditions of the
  great world are purely external; true politeness, perfect manners,
  come from the heart, and from a deep sense of personal dignity.
  This is why some men of noble birth are, in spite of their
  training, ill-mannered, while others, among the middle classes,
  have instinctive good taste and only need a few lessons to give
  them excellent manners without any signs of awkward imitation.
  Believe a poor woman who no longer leaves her valley when she
  tells you that this dignity of tone, this courteous simplicity in
  words, in gesture, in bearing, and even in the character of the
  home, is a living and material poem, the charm of which is
  irresistible; imagine therefore what it is when it takes its
  inspiration from the heart. Politeness, dear, consists in seeming
  to forget ourselves for others; with many it is social cant, laid
  aside when personal self-interest shows its cloven-foot; a noble
  then becomes ignoble. But--and this is what I want you to
  practise, Felix--true politeness involves a Christian principle;
  it is the flower of Love, it requires that we forget ourselves
  really. In memory of your Henriette, for her sake, be not a
  fountain without water, have the essence and the form of true
  courtesy. Never fear to be the dupe and victim of this social
  virtue; you will some day gather the fruit of seeds scattered
  apparently to the winds.

  My father used to say that one of the great offences of sham
  politeness was the neglect of promises. When anything is demanded
  of you that you cannot do, refuse positively and leave no
  loopholes for false hopes; on the other hand, grant at once
  whatever you are willing to bestow. Your prompt refusal will make
  you friends as well as your prompt benefit, and your character
  will stand the higher; for it is hard to say whether a promise
  forgotten, a hope deceived does not make us more enemies than a
  favor granted brings us friends.

  Dear friend, there are certain little matters on which I may
  dwell, for I know them, and it comes within my province to impart
  them. Be not too confiding, nor frivolous, nor over enthusiastic,
  --three rocks on which youth often strikes. Too confiding a nature
  loses respect, frivolity brings contempt, and others take
  advantage of excessive enthusiasm. In the first place, Felix, you
  will never have more than two or three friends in the course of
  your life. Your entire confidence is their right; to give it to
  many is to betray your real friends. If you are more intimate with
  some men than with others keep guard over yourself; be as cautious
  as though you knew they would one day be your rivals, or your
  enemies; the chances and changes of life require this. Maintain an
  attitude which is neither cold nor hot; find the medium point at
  which a man can safely hold intercourse with others without
  compromising himself. Yes, believe me, the honest man is as far
  from the base cowardice of Philinte as he is from the harsh virtue
  of Alceste. The genius of the poet is displayed in the mind of
  this true medium; certainly all minds do enjoy more the ridicule
  of virtue than the sovereign contempt of easy-going selfishness
  which underlies that picture of it; but all, nevertheless, are
  prompted to keep themselves from either extreme.

  As to frivolity, if it causes fools to proclaim you a charming
  man, others who are accustomed to judge of men’s capacities and
  fathom character, will winnow out your tare and bring you to
  disrepute, for frivolity is the resource of weak natures, and
  weakness is soon appraised in a society which regards its members
  as nothing more than organs--and perhaps justly, for nature
  herself puts to death imperfect beings. A woman’s protecting
  instincts may be roused by the pleasure she feels in supporting
  the weak against the strong, and in leading the intelligence of
  the heart to victory over the brutality of matter; but society,
  less a mother than a stepmother, adores only the children who
  flatter her vanity.

  As to ardent enthusiasm, that first sublime mistake of youth,
  which finds true happiness in using its powers, and begins by
  being its own dupe before it is the dupe of others, keep it within
  the region of the heart’s communion, keep it for woman and for
  God. Do not hawk its treasures in the bazaars of society or of
  politics, where trumpery will be offered in exchange for them.
  Believe the voice which commands you to be noble in all things
  when it also prays you not to expend your forces uselessly.
  Unhappily, men will rate you according to your usefulness, and not
  according to your worth. To use an image which I think will strike
  your poetic mind, let a cipher be what it may, immeasurable in
  size, written in gold, or written in pencil, it is only a cipher
  after all. A man of our times has said, “No zeal, above all, no
  zeal!” The lesson may be sad, but it is true, and it saves the
  soul from wasting its bloom. Hide your pure sentiments, or put
  them in regions inaccessible, where their blossoms may be
  passionately admired, where the artist may dream amorously of his
  master-piece. But duties, my friend, are not sentiments. To do
  what we ought is by no means to do what we like. A man who would
  give his life enthusiastically for a woman must be ready to die
  coldly for his country.

  One of the most important rules in the science of manners is that
  of almost absolute silence about ourselves. Play a little comedy
  for your own instruction; talk of yourself to acquaintances, tell
  them about your sufferings, your pleasures, your business, and you
  will see how indifference succeeds pretended interest; then
  annoyance follows, and if the mistress of the house does not find
  some civil way of stopping you the company will disappear under
  various pretexts adroitly seized. Would you, on the other hand,
  gather sympathies about you and be spoken of as amiable and witty,
  and a true friend? talk to others of themselves, find a way to
  bring them forward, and brows will clear, lips will smile, and
  after you leave the room all present will praise you. Your
  conscience and the voice of your own heart will show you the line
  where the cowardice of flattery begins and the courtesy of
  intercourse ceases.

  One word more about a young man’s demeanor in public. My dear
  friend, youth is always inclined to a rapidity of judgment which
  does it honor, but also injury. This was why the old system of
  education obliged young people to keep silence and study life in a
  probationary period beside their elders. Formerly, as you know,
  nobility, like art, had its apprentices, its pages, devoted body
  and soul to the masters who maintained them. To-day youth is
  forced in a hot-house; it is trained to judge of thoughts,
  actions, and writings with biting severity; it slashes with a
  blade that has not been fleshed. Do not make this mistake. Such
  judgments will seem like censures to many about you, who would
  sooner pardon an open rebuke than a secret wound. Young people are
  pitiless because they know nothing of life and its difficulties.
  The old critic is kind and considerate, the young critic is
  implacable; the one knows nothing, the other knows all. Moreover,
  at the bottom of all human actions there is a labyrinth of
  determining reasons on which God reserves for himself the final
  judgment. Be severe therefore to none but yourself.

  Your future is before you; but no one in the world can make his
  way unaided. Therefore, make use of my father’s house; its doors
  are open to you; the connections that you will create for yourself
  under his roof will serve you in a hundred ways. But do not yield
  an inch of ground to my mother; she will crush any one who gives
  up to her, but she will admire the courage of whoever resists her.
  She is like iron, which if beaten, can be fused with iron, but
  when cold will break everything less hard than itself. Cultivate
  my mother; for if she thinks well of you she will introduce you
  into certain houses where you can acquire the fatal science of the
  world, the art of listening, speaking, answering, presenting
  yourself to the company and taking leave of it; the precise use of
  language, the something--how shall I explain it?--which is no more
  superiority than the coat is the man, but without which the
  highest talent in the world will never be admitted within those
  portals.

  I know you well enough to be quite sure I indulge no illusion when
  I imagine that I see you as I wish you to be; simple in manners,
  gentle in tone, proud without conceit, respectful to the old,
  courteous without servility, above all, discreet. Use your wit but
  never display it for the amusement of others; for be sure that if
  your brilliancy annoys an inferior man, he will retire from the
  field and say of you in a tone of contempt, “He is very amusing.”
   Let your superiority be leonine. Moreover, do not be always
  seeking to please others. I advise a certain coldness in your
  relations with men, which may even amount to indifference; this
  will not anger others, for all persons esteem those who slight
  them; and it will win you the favor of women, who will respect you
  for the little consequence that you attach to men. Never remain in
  company with those who have lost their reputation, even though
  they may not have deserved to do so; for society holds us
  responsible for our friendships as well as for our enmities. In
  this matter let your judgments be slowly and maturely weighed, but
  see that they are irrevocable. When the men whom you have repulsed
  justify the repulsion, your esteem and regard will be all the more
  sought after; you have inspired the tacit respect which raises a
  man among his peers. I behold you now armed with a youth that
  pleases, grace which attracts, and wisdom with which to preserve
  your conquests. All that I have now told you can be summed up in
  two words, two old-fashioned words, “Noblesse oblige.”

  Now apply these precepts to the management of life. You will hear
  many persons say that strategy is the chief element of success;
  that the best way to press through the crowd is to set some men
  against other men and so take their places. That was a good system
  for the Middle Ages, when princes had to destroy their rivals by
  pitting one against the other; but in these days, all things being
  done in open day, I am afraid it would do you ill-service. No, you
  must meet your competitors face to face, be they loyal and true
  men, or traitorous enemies whose weapons are calumny,
  evil-speaking, and fraud. But remember this, you have no more
  powerful auxiliaries than these men themselves; they are their own
  enemies; fight them with honest weapons, and sooner or later they
  are condemned. As to the first of them, loyal men and true, your
  straightforwardness will obtain their respect, and the differences
  between you once settled (for all things can be settled), these
  men will serve you. Do not be afraid of making enemies; woe to him
  who has none in the world you are about to enter; but try to give
  no handle for ridicule or disparagement. I say _try_, for in Paris a
  man cannot always belong solely to himself; he is sometimes at the
  mercy of circumstances; you will not always be able to avoid the
  mud in the gutter nor the tile that falls from the roof. The moral
  world has gutters where persons of no reputation endeavor to
  splash the mud in which they live upon men of honor. But you can
  always compel respect by showing that you are, under all
  circumstances, immovable in your principles. In the conflict of
  opinions, in the midst of quarrels and cross-purposes, go straight
  to the point, keep resolutely to the question; never fight except
  for the essential thing, and put your whole strength into that.
  You know how Monsieur de Mortsauf hates Napoleon, how he curses
  him and pursues him as justice does a criminal; demanding
  punishment day and night for the death of the Duc d’Enghien, the
  only death, the only misfortune, that ever brought the tears to
  his eyes; well, he nevertheless admired him as the greatest of
  captains, and has often explained to me his strategy. May not the
  same tactics be applied to the war of human interests; they would
  economize time as heretofore they economized men and space. Think
  this over, for as a woman I am liable to be mistaken on such
  points which my sex judges only by instinct and sentiment. One
  point, however, I may insist on; all trickery, all deception, is
  certain to be discovered and to result in doing harm; whereas
  every situation presents less danger if a man plants himself
  firmly on his own truthfulness. If I may cite my own case, I can
  tell you that, obliged as I am by Monsieur de Mortsauf’s condition
  to avoid litigation and to bring to an immediate settlement all
  difficulties which arise in the management of Clochegourde, and
  which would otherwise cause him an excitement under which his mind
  would succumb, I have invariably settled matters promptly by
  taking hold of the knot of the difficulty and saying to our
  opponents: “We will either untie it or cut it!”

  It will often happen that you do a service to others and find
  yourself ill-rewarded; I beg you not to imitate those who complain
  of men and declare them to be all ungrateful. That is putting
  themselves on a pedestal indeed! and surely it is somewhat silly
  to admit their lack of knowledge of the world. But you, I trust,
  will not do good as a usurer lends his money; you will do it--will
  you not?--for good’s sake. Noblesse oblige. Nevertheless, do not
  bestow such services as to force others to ingratitude, for if you
  do, they will become your most implacable enemies; obligations
  sometimes lead to despair, like the despair of ruin itself, which
  is capable of very desperate efforts. As for yourself, accept as
  little as you can from others. Be no man’s vassal; and bring
  yourself out of your own difficulties.

  You see, dear friend, I am advising you only on the lesser points
  of life. In the world of politics things wear a different aspect;
  the rules which are to guide your individual steps give way before
  the national interests. If you reach that sphere where great men
  revolve you will be, like God himself, the sole arbiter of your
  determinations. You will no longer be a man, but law, the living
  law; no longer an individual, you are then the Nation incarnate.
  But remember this, though you judge, you will yourself be judged;
  hereafter you will be summoned before the ages, and you know
  history well enough to be fully informed as to what deeds and what
  sentiments have led to true grandeur.

  I now come to a serious matter, your conduct towards women.
  Wherever you visit make it a principle not to fritter yourself
  away in a petty round of gallantry. A man of the last century who
  had great social success never paid attention to more than one
  woman of an evening, choosing the one who seemed the most
  neglected. That man, my dear child, controlled his epoch. He
  wisely reckoned that by a given time all women would speak well of
  him. Many young men waste their most precious possession, namely,
  the time necessary to create connections which contribute more
  than all else to social success. Your springtime is short,
  endeavor to make the most of it. Cultivate influential women.
  Influential women are old women; they will teach you the
  intermarriages and the secrets of all the families of the great
  world; they will show you the cross-roads which will bring you
  soonest to your goal. They will be fond of you. The bestowal of
  protection is their last form of love--when they are not devout.
  They will do you innumerable good services; sing your praises and
  make you desirable to society. Avoid young women. Do not think I
  say this from personal self-interest. The woman of fifty will do
  all for you, the woman of twenty will do nothing; she wants your
  whole life while the other asks only a few attentions. Laugh with
  the young women, meet them for pastime merely; they are incapable
  of serious thought. Young women, dear friend, are selfish, vain,
  petty, ignorant of true friendship; they love no one but
  themselves; they would sacrifice you to an evening’s success.
  Besides, they all want absolute devotion, and your present
  situation requires that devotion be shown to you; two
  irreconcilable needs! None of these young women would enter into
  your interests; they would think of themselves and not of you;
  they would injure you more by their emptiness and frivolity than
  they could serve you by their love; they will waste your time
  unscrupulously, hinder your advance to fortune, and end by
  destroying your future with the best grace possible. If you
  complain, the silliest of them will make you think that her glove
  is more precious than fortune, and that nothing is so glorious as
  to be her slave. They will all tell you that they bestow
  happiness, and thus lull you to forget your nobler destiny.
  Believe me, the happiness they give is transitory; your great
  career will endure. You know not with what perfidious cleverness
  they contrive to satisfy their caprices, nor the art with which
  they will convert your passing fancy into a love which ought to be
  eternal. The day when they abandon you they will tell you that the
  words, “I no longer love you,” are a full justification of their
  conduct, just as the words, “I love,” justified their winning you;
  they will declare that love is involuntary and not to be coerced.
  Absurd! Believe me, dear, true love is eternal, infinite, always
  like unto itself; it is equable, pure, without violent
  demonstration; white hair often covers the head but the heart that
  holds it is ever young. No such love is found among the women of
  the world; all are playing comedy; this one will interest you by
  her misfortunes; she seems the gentlest and least exacting of her
  sex, but when once she is necessary to you, you will feel the
  tyranny of weakness and will do her will; you may wish to be a
  diplomat, to go and come, and study men and interests,--no, you
  must stay in Paris, or at her country-place, sewn to her
  petticoat, and the more devotion you show the more ungrateful and
  exacting she will be. Another will attract you by her
  submissiveness; she will be your attendant, follow you
  romantically about, compromise herself to keep you, and be the
  millstone about your neck. You will drown yourself some day, but
  the woman will come to the surface.

  The least manoeuvring of these women of the world have many nets.
  The silliest triumph because too foolish to excite distrust. The
  one to be feared least may be the woman of gallantry whom you love
  without exactly knowing why; she will leave you for no motive and
  go back to you out of vanity. All these women will injure you,
  either in the present or the future. Every young woman who enters
  society and lives a life of pleasure and of gratified vanity is
  semi-corrupt and will corrupt you. Among them you will not find
  the chaste and tranquil being in whom you may forever reign. Ah!
  she who loves you will love solitude; the festivals of her heart
  will be your glances; she will live upon your words. May she be
  all the world to you, for you will be all in all to her. Love her
  well; give her neither griefs nor rivals; do not rouse her
  jealousy. To be loved, dear, to be comprehended, is the greatest
  of all joys; I pray that you may taste it! But run no risk of
  injuring the flower of your soul; be sure, be very sure of the
  heart in which you place your affections. That woman will never be
  her own self; she will never think of herself, but of you. She
  will never oppose you, she will have no interests of her own; for
  you she will see a danger where you can see none and where she
  would be oblivious of her own. If she suffers it will be in
  silence; she will have no personal vanity, but deep reverence for
  whatever in her has won your love. Respond to such a love by
  surpassing it. If you are fortunate enough to find that which I,
  your poor friend, must ever be without, I mean a love mutually
  inspired, mutually felt, remember that in a valley lives a mother
  whose heart is so filled with the feelings you have put there that
  you can never sound its depths. Yes, I bear you an affection which
  you will never know to its full extent; before it could show
  itself for what it is you would have to lose your mind and
  intellect, and then you would be unable to comprehend the length
  and breadth of my devotion.

  Shall I be misunderstood in bidding you avoid young women (all
  more or less artful, satirical, vain, frivolous, and extravagant)
  and attach yourself to influential women, to those imposing
  dowagers full of excellent good-sense, like my aunt, who will help
  your career, defend you from attacks, and say for you the things
  that you cannot say for yourself? Am I not, on the contrary,
  generous in bidding you reserve your love for the coming angel
  with the guileless heart? If the motto Noblesse oblige sums up the
  advice I gave you just now, my further advice on your relations to
  women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, “Serve all, love
  one!”

  Your educational knowledge is immense; your heart, saved by early
  suffering, is without a stain; all is noble, all is well with you.
  Now, Felix, WILL! Your future lies in that one word, that word of
  great men. My child, you will obey your Henriette, will you not?
  You will permit her to tell you from time to time the thoughts
  that are in her mind of you and of your relations to the world? I
  have an eye in my soul which sees the future for you as for my
  children; suffer me to use that faculty for your benefit; it is a
  faculty, a mysterious gift bestowed by my lonely life; far from
  its growing weaker, I find it strengthened and exalted by solitude
  and silence.

  I ask you in return to bestow a happiness on me; I desire to see
  you becoming more and more important among men, without one single
  success that shall bring a line of shame upon my brow; I desire
  that you may quickly bring your fortunes to the level of your
  noble name, and be able to tell me I have contributed to your
  advancement by something better than a wish. This secret
  co-operation in your future is the only pleasure I can allow
  myself. For it, I will wait and hope.

  I do not say farewell. We are separated; you cannot put my hand to
  your lips, but you must surely know the place you hold in the
  heart of your

Henriette.


As I read this letter I felt the maternal heart beating beneath my
fingers which held the paper while I was still cold from the harsh
greeting of my own mother. I understood why the countess had forbidden
me to open it in Touraine; no doubt she feared that I would fall at her
feet and wet them with my tears.

I now made the acquaintance of my brother Charles, who up to this
time had been a stranger to me. But in all our intercourse he showed
a haughtiness which kept us apart and prevented brotherly affection.
Kindly feelings depend on similarity of soul, and there was no point of
touch between us. He preached to me dogmatically those social trifles
which head or heart can see without instruction; he seemed to mistrust
me. If I had not had the inward support of my great love he would have
made me awkward and stupid by affecting to believe that I knew nothing
of life. He presented me in society under the expectation that my
dulness would be a foil to his qualities. Had I not remembered the
sorrows of my childhood I might have taken his protecting vanity for
brotherly affection; but inward solitude produces the same effects
as outward solitude; silence within our souls enables us to hear the
faintest sound; the habit of taking refuge within ourselves develops
a perception which discerns every quality of the affections about us.
Before I knew Madame de Mortsauf a hard look grieved me, a rough word
wounded me to the heart; I bewailed these things without as yet knowing
anything of a life of tenderness; whereas now, since my return from
Clochegourde, I could make comparisons which perfected my instinctive
perceptions. All deductions derived only from sufferings endured are
incomplete. Happiness has a light to cast. I now allowed myself the more
willingly to be kept under the heel of primogeniture because I was not
my brother’s dupe.

I always went alone to the Duchesse de Lenoncourt’s, where Henriette’s
name was never mentioned; no one, except the good old duke, who was
simplicity itself, ever spoke of her to me; but by the way he welcomed
me I guessed that his daughter had privately commended me to his care.
At the moment when I was beginning to overcome the foolish wonder and
shyness which besets a young man at his first entrance into the great
world, and to realize the pleasures it could give through the resources
it offers to ambition, just, too, as I was beginning to make use of
Henriette’s maxims, admiring their wisdom, the events of the 20th of
March took place.

My brother followed the court to Ghent; I, by Henriette’s advice (for I
kept up a correspondence with her, active on my side only), went there
also with the Duc de Lenoncourt. The natural kindness of the old duke
turned to a hearty and sincere protection as soon as he saw me attached,
body and soul, to the Bourbons. He himself presented me to his Majesty.
Courtiers are not numerous when misfortunes are rife; but youth is
gifted with ingenuous admiration and uncalculating fidelity. The king
had the faculty of judging men; a devotion which might have passed
unobserved in Paris counted for much at Ghent, and I had the happiness
of pleasing Louis XVIII.

A letter from Madame de Mortsauf to her father, brought with despatches
by an emissary of the Vendeens, enclosed a note to me by which I learned
that Jacques was ill. Monsieur de Mortsauf, in despair at his son’s
ill-health, and also at the news of a second emigration, added a few
words which enabled me to guess the situation of my dear one. Worried by
him, no doubt, when she passed all her time at Jacques’ bedside, allowed
no rest either day or night, superior to annoyance, yet unable always to
control herself when her whole soul was given to the care of her child,
Henriette needed the support of a friendship which might lighten the
burden of her life, were it only by diverting her husband’s mind. Though
I was now most impatient to rival the career of my brother, who had
lately been sent to the Congress of Vienna, and was anxious at any risk
to justify Henriette’s appeal and become a man myself, freed from all
vassalage, nevertheless my ambition, my desire for independence, the
great interest I had in not leaving the king, all were of no account
before the vision of Madame de Mortsauf’s sad face. I resolved to leave
the court at Ghent and serve my true sovereign. God rewarded me. The
emissary sent by the Vendeens was unable to return. The king wanted a
messenger who would faithfully carry back his instructions. The Duc de
Lenoncourt knew that the king would never forget the man who undertook
so perilous an enterprise; he asked for the mission without consulting
me, and I gladly accepted it, happy indeed to be able to return to
Clochegourde employed in the good cause.

After an audience with the king I returned to France, where, both in
Paris and in Vendee, I was fortunate enough to carry out his Majesty’s
instructions. Towards the end of May, being tracked by the Bonapartist
authorities to whom I was denounced, I was obliged to fly from place to
place in the character of a man endeavoring to get back to his estate.
I went on foot from park to park, from wood to wood, across the whole
of upper Vendee, the Bocage and Poitou, changing my direction as danger
threatened.

I reached Saumur, from Saumur I went to Chinon, and from Chinon I
reached, in a single night, the woods of Nueil, where I met the count on
horseback; he took me up behind him and we reached Clochegourde without
passing any one who recognized me.

“Jacques is better,” were the first words he said to me.

I explained to him my position of diplomatic postman, hunted like a wild
beast, and the brave gentleman in his quality of royalist claimed the
danger over Chessel of receiving me. As we came in sight of Clochegourde
the past eight months rolled away like a dream. When we entered the
salon the count said: “Guess whom I bring you?--Felix!”

“Is it possible!” she said, with pendant arms and a bewildered face.

I showed myself and we both remained motionless; she in her armchair, I
on the threshold of the door; looking at each other with that hunger
of the soul which endeavors to make up in a single glance for the lost
months. Then, recovering from a surprise which left her heart unveiled,
she rose and I went up to her.

“I have prayed for your safety,” she said, giving me her hand to kiss.

She asked news of her father; then she guessed my weariness and went
to prepare my room, while the count gave me something to eat, for I was
dying of hunger. My room was the one above hers, her aunt’s room; she
requested the count to take me there, after setting her foot on the
first step of the staircase, deliberating no doubt whether to accompany
me; I turned my head, she blushed, bade me sleep well, and went away.
When I came down to dinner I heard for the first time of the disasters
at Waterloo, the flight of Napoleon, the march of the Allies to Paris,
and the probable return of the Bourbons. These events were all in all to
the count; to us they were nothing. What think you was the great event
I was to learn, after kissing the children?--for I will not dwell on the
alarm I felt at seeing the countess pale and shrunken; I knew the injury
I might do by showing it and was careful to express only joy at seeing
her. But the great event for us was told in the words, “You shall have
ice to-day!” She had often fretted the year before that the water was
not cold enough for me, who, never drinking anything else, liked it
iced. God knows how many entreaties it had cost her to get an ice-house
built. You know better than any one that a word, a look, an inflection
of the voice, a trifling attention, suffices for love; love’s noblest
privilege is to prove itself by love. Well, her words, her look, her
pleasure, showed me her feelings, as I had formerly shown her mine by
that first game of backgammon. These ingenuous proofs of her affection
were many; on the seventh day after my arrival she recovered her
freshness, she sparkled with health and youth and happiness; my lily
expanded in beauty just as the treasures of my heart increased. Only in
petty minds or in common hearts can absence lessen love or efface the
features or diminish the beauty of our dear one. To ardent imaginations,
to all beings through whose veins enthusiasm passes like a crimson tide,
and in whom passion takes the form of constancy, absence has the same
effect as the sufferings of the early Christians, which strengthened
their faith and made God visible to them. In hearts that abound in love
are there not incessant longings for a desired object, to which the
glowing fire of our dreams gives higher value and a deeper tint? Are
we not conscious of instigations which give to the beloved features the
beauty of the ideal by inspiring them with thought? The past, dwelt on
in all its details becomes magnified; the future teems with hope. When
two hearts filled with these electric clouds meet each other, their
interview is like the welcome storm which revives the earth and
stimulates it with the swift lightnings of the thunderbolt. How many
tender pleasures came to me when I found these thoughts and these
sensations reciprocal! With what glad eyes I followed the development
of happiness in Henriette! A woman who renews her life from that of her
beloved gives, perhaps, a greater proof of feeling than she who dies
killed by a doubt, withered on her stock for want of sap; I know not
which of the two is the more touching.

The revival of Madame de Mortsauf was wholly natural, like the effects
of the month of May upon the meadows, or those of the sun and of the
brook upon the drooping flowers. Henriette, like our dear valley of
love, had had her winter; she revived like the valley in the springtime.
Before dinner we went down to the beloved terrace. There, with one hand
stroking the head of her son, who walked feebly beside her, silent, as
though he were breeding an illness, she told me of her nights beside his
pillow.

For three months, she said, she had lived wholly within herself,
inhabiting, as it were, a dark palace; afraid to enter sumptuous rooms
where the light shone, where festivals were given, to her denied, at the
door of which she stood, one glance turned upon her child, another to
a dim and distant figure; one ear listening for moans, another for a
voice. She told me poems, born of solitude, such as no poet ever
sang; but all ingenuously, without one vestige of love, one trace of
voluptuous thought, one echo of a poesy orientally soothing as the rose
of Frangistan. When the count joined us she continued in the same tone,
like a woman secure within herself, able to look proudly at her husband
and kiss the forehead of her son without a blush. She had prayed much;
she had clasped her hands for nights together over her child, refusing
to let him die.

“I went,” she said, “to the gate of the sanctuary and asked his life of
God.”

She had had visions, and she told them to me; but when she said, in that
angelic voice of hers, these exquisite words, “While I slept my heart
watched,” the count harshly interrupted her.

“That is to say, you were half crazy,” he cried.

She was silent, as deeply hurt as though it were a first wound;
forgetting that for thirteen years this man had lost no chance to shoot
his arrows into her heart. Like a soaring bird struck on the wing by
vulgar shot, she sank into a dull depression; then she roused herself.

“How is it, monsieur,” she said, “that no word of mine ever finds favor
in your sight? Have you no indulgence for my weakness,--no comprehension
of me as a woman?”

She stopped short. Already she regretted the murmur, and measured the
future by the past; how could she expect comprehension? Had she not
drawn upon herself some virulent attack? The blue veins of her temples
throbbed; she shed no tears, but the color of her eyes faded. Then she
looked down, that she might not see her pain reflected on my face, her
feelings guessed, her soul wooed by my soul; above all, not see the
sympathy of young love, ready like a faithful dog to spring at the
throat of whoever threatened his mistress, without regard to the
assailant’s strength or quality. At such cruel moments the count’s air
of superiority was supreme. He thought he had triumphed over his wife,
and he pursued her with a hail of phrases which repeated the one idea,
and were like the blows of an axe which fell with unvarying sound.

“Always the same?” I said, when the count left us to follow the huntsman
who came to speak to him.

“Always,” answered Jacques.

“Always excellent, my son,” she said, endeavoring to withdraw Monsieur
de Mortsauf from the judgment of his children. “You see only the
present, you know nothing of the past; therefore you cannot criticise
your father without doing him injustice. But even if you had the pain of
seeing that your father was to blame, family honor requires you to bury
such secrets in silence.”

“How have the changes at the Cassine and the Rhetoriere answered?” I
asked, to divert her mind from bitter thoughts.

“Beyond my expectations,” she replied. “As soon as the buildings were
finished we found two excellent farmers ready to hire them; one at four
thousand five hundred francs, taxes paid; the other at five thousand;
both leases for fifteen years. We have already planted three thousand
young trees on the new farms. Manette’s cousin is delighted to get the
Rabelaye; Martineau has taken the Baude. All _our_ efforts have been
crowned with success. Clochegourde, without the reserved land which
we call the home-farm, and without the timber and vineyards, brings
in nineteen thousand francs a year, and the plantations are becoming
valuable. I am battling to let the home-farm to Martineau, the keeper,
whose eldest son can now take his place. He offers three thousand francs
if Monsieur de Mortsauf will build him a farm-house at the Commanderie.
We might then clear the approach to Clochegourde, finish the proposed
avenue to the main road, and have only the woodland and the vineyards
to take care of ourselves. If the king returns, _our_ pension will be
restored; WE shall consent after clashing a little with _our_ wife’s
common-sense. Jacques’ fortune will then be permanently secured. That
result obtained, I shall leave monsieur to lay by as much as he likes
for Madeleine, though the king will of course dower her, according to
custom. My conscience is easy; I have all but accomplished my task. And
you?” she said.

I explained to her the mission on which the king had sent me, and showed
her how her wise counsel had borne fruit. Was she endowed with second
sight thus to foretell events?

“Did I not write it to you?” she answered. “For you and for my children
alone I possess a remarkable faculty, of which I have spoken only to my
confessor, Monsieur de la Berge; he explains it by divine intervention.
Often, after deep meditation induced by fears about the health of my
children, my eyes close to the things of earth and see into another
region; if Jacques and Madeleine there appear to me as two luminous
figures they are sure to have good health for a certain period of time;
if wrapped in mist they are equally sure to fall ill soon after. As
for you, I not only see you brilliantly illuminated, but I hear a voice
which explains to me without words, by some mental communication, what
you ought to do. Does any law forbid me to use this wonderful gift for
my children and for you?” she asked, falling into a reverie. Then,
after a pause, she added, “Perhaps God wills to take the place of their
father.”

“Let me believe that my obedience is due to none but you,” I cried.

She gave me one of her exquisitely gracious smiles, which so exalted my
heart that I should not have felt a death-blow if given at that moment.

“As soon as the king returns to Paris, go there; leave Clochegourde,”
 she said. “It may be degrading to beg for places and favors, but it
would be ridiculous to be out of the way of receiving them. Great
changes will soon take place. The king needs capable and trustworthy
men; don’t fail him. It is well for you to enter young into the affairs
of the nation and learn your way; for statesmen, like actors, have a
routine business to acquire, which genius does not reveal, it must be
learnt. My father heard the Duc de Choiseul say this. Think of me,” she
said, after a pause; “let me enjoy the pleasures of superiority in a
soul that is all my own; for are you not my son?”

“Your son?” I said, sullenly.

“Yes, my son!” she cried, mocking me; “is not that a good place in my
heart?”

The bell rang for dinner; she took my arm and leaned contentedly upon
it.

“You have grown,” she said, as we went up the steps. When we reached the
portico she shook my arm a little, as if my looks were importunate;
for though her eyes were lowered she knew that I saw only her. Then she
said, with a charming air of pretended impatience, full of grace and
coquetry, “Come, why don’t you look at our dear valley?”

She turned, held her white silk sun-shade over our heads and drew
Jacques closely to her side. The motion of her head as she looked
towards the Indre, the punt, the meadows, showed me that in my absence
she had come to many an understanding with those misty horizons
and their vaporous outline. Nature was a mantle which sheltered her
thoughts. She now knew what the nightingale was sighing the livelong
night, what the songster of the sedges hymned with his plaintive note.

At eight o’clock that evening I was witness of a scene which touched me
deeply, and which I had never yet witnessed, for in my former visits I
had played backgammon with the count while his wife took the children
into the dining-room before their bedtime. The bell rang twice, and all
the servants of the household entered the room.

“You are now our guest and must submit to convent rule,” said the
countess, leading me by the hand with that air of innocent gaiety which
distinguishes women who are naturally pious.

The count followed. Masters, children, and servants knelt down, all
taking their regular places. It was Madeleine’s turn to read the
prayers. The dear child said them in her childish voice, the ingenuous
tones of which rose clear in the harmonious silence of the country, and
gave to the words the candor of holy innocence, the grace of angels.
It was the most affecting prayer I ever heard. Nature replied to the
child’s voice with the myriad murmurs of the coming night, like the low
accompaniment of an organ lightly touched, Madeleine was on the right
of the countess, Jacques on her left. The graceful curly heads, between
which rose the smooth braids of the mother, and above all three the
perfectly white hair and yellow cranium of the father, made a picture
which repeated, in some sort, the ideas aroused by the melody of the
prayer. As if to fulfil all conditions of the unity which marks the
sublime, this calm and collected group were bathed in the fading light
of the setting sun; its red tints coloring the room, impelling the
soul--be it poetic or superstitious--to believe that the fires of heaven
were visiting these faithful servants of God as they knelt there without
distinction of rank, in the equality which heaven demands. Thinking
back to the days of the patriarchs my mind still further magnified this
scene, so grand in its simplicity.

The children said good-night, the servants bowed, the countess went
away holding a child by each hand, and I returned to the salon with the
count.

“We provide you with salvation there, and hell here,” he said, pointing
to the backgammon-board.

The countess returned in half an hour, and brought her frame near the
table.

“This is for you,” she said, unrolling the canvas; “but for the last
three months it has languished. Between that rose and this heartsease my
poor child was ill.”

“Come, come,” said Monsieur de Mortsauf, “don’t talk of that any more.
Six--five, emissary of the king!”

When alone in my room I hushed my breathing that I might hear her
passing to and fro in hers. She was calm and pure, but I was lashed with
maddening ideas. “Why should she not be mine?” I thought; “perhaps she
is, like me, in this whirlwind of agitation.” At one o’clock, I went
down, walking noiselessly, and lay before her door. With my ear pressed
to a chink I could hear her equable, gentle breathing, like that of a
child. When chilled to the bone I went back to bed and slept tranquilly
till morning. I know not what prenatal influence, what nature within me,
causes the delight I take in going to the brink of precipices, sounding
the gulf of evil, seeking to know its depths, feeling its icy chill, and
retreating in deep emotion. That hour of night passed on the threshold
of her door where I wept with rage,--though she never knew that on the
morrow her foot had trod upon my tears and kisses, on her virtue first
destroyed and then respected, cursed and adored,--that hour, foolish in
the eyes of many, was nevertheless an inspiration of the same mysterious
impulse which impels the soldier. Many have told me they have played
their lives upon it, flinging themselves before a battery to know if
they could escape the shot, happy in thus galloping into the abyss of
probabilities, and smoking like Jean Bart upon the gunpowder.

The next day I went to gather flowers and made two bouquets. The count
admired them, though generally nothing of the kind appealed to him. The
clever saying of Champcenetz, “He builds dungeons in Spain,” seemed to
have been made for him.

I spent several days at Clochegourde, going but seldom to Frapesle,
where, however, I dined three times. The French army now occupied Tours.
Though my presence was health and strength to Madame de Mortsauf, she
implored me to make my way to Chateauroux, and so round by Issoudun and
Orleans to Paris with what haste I could. I tried to resist; but
she commanded me, saying that my guardian angel spoke. I obeyed. Our
farewell was, this time, dim with tears; she feared the allurements of
the life I was about to live. Is it not a serious thing to enter the
maelstrom of interests, passions, and pleasures which make Paris a
dangerous ocean for chaste love and purity of conscience? I promised to
write to her every night, relating the events and thoughts of the day,
even the most trivial. When I gave the promise she laid her head on my
shoulder and said: “Leave nothing out; everything will interest me.”

She gave me letters for the duke and duchess, which I delivered the
second day after my return.

“You are in luck,” said the duke; “dine here to-day, and go with me this
evening to the Chateau; your fortune is made. The king spoke of you this
morning, and said, ‘He is young, capable, and trustworthy.’ His Majesty
added that he wished he knew whether you were living or dead, and in
what part of France events had thrown you after you had executed your
mission so ably.”

That night I was appointed master of petitions to the council of State,
and I also received a private and permanent place in the employment
of Louis XVIII. himself,--a confidential position, not highly
distinguished, but without any risks, a position which put me at
the very heart of the government and has been the source of all my
subsequent prosperity. Madame de Mortsauf had judged rightly. I now owed
everything to her; power and wealth, happiness and knowledge; she guided
and encouraged me, purified my heart, and gave to my will that unity
of purpose without which the powers of youth are wasted. Later I had
a colleague; we each served six months. We were allowed to supply each
other’s place if necessary; we had rooms at the Chateau, a carriage,
and large allowances for travelling when absent on missions. Strange
position! We were the secret disciples of a monarch in a policy to which
even his enemies have since done signal justice; alone with us he gave
judgment on all things, foreign and domestic, yet we had no legitimate
influence; often we were consulted like Laforet by Moliere, and made to
feel that the hesitations of long experience were confirmed or removed
by the vigorous perceptions of youth.

In other respects my future was secured in a manner to satisfy ambition.
Beside my salary as master of petitions, paid by the budget of the
council of State, the king gave me a thousand francs a month from his
privy purse, and often himself added more to it. Though the king knew
well that no young man of twenty-three could long bear up under the
labors with which he loaded me, my colleague, now a peer of France, was
not appointed till August, 1817. The choice was a difficult one; our
functions demanded so many capabilities that the king was long in coming
to a decision. He did me the honor to ask which of the young men among
whom he was hesitating I should like for an associate. Among them was
one who had been my school-fellow at Lepitre’s; I did not select him.
His Majesty asked why.

“The king,” I replied, “chooses men who are equally faithful, but
whose capabilities differ. I choose the one whom I think the most able,
certain that I shall always be able to get on with him.”

My judgment coincided with that of the king, who was pleased with the
sacrifice I had made. He said on this occasion, “You are to be the
chief”; and he related these circumstances to my colleague, who
became, in return for the service I had done him, my good friend. The
consideration shown to me by the Duc de Lenoncourt set the tone of
that which I met with in society. To have it said, “The king takes an
interest in the young man; that young man has a future, the king likes
him,” would have served me in place of talents; and it now gave to the
kindly welcome accorded to youth a certain respect that is only given to
power. In the salon of the Duchesse de Lenoncourt and also at the house
of my sister who had just married the Marquis de Listomere, son of the
old lady in the Ile St. Louis, I gradually came to know the influential
personages of the Faubourg St. Germain.

Henriette herself put me at the heart of the circle then called
“le Petit Chateau” by the help of her great-aunt, the Princesse de
Blamont-Chauvry, to whom she wrote so warmly in my behalf that the
princess immediately sent for me. I cultivated her and contrived to
please her, and she became, not my protectress but a friend, in whose
kindness there was something maternal. The old lady took pains to make
me intimate with her daughter Madame d’Espard, with the Duchesse de
Langeais, the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse,
women who held the sceptre of fashion, and who were all the more
gracious to me because I made no pretensions and was always ready to be
useful and agreeable to them. My brother Charles, far from avoiding me,
now began to lean upon me; but my rapid success roused a secret jealousy
in his mind which in after years caused me great vexation. My father
and mother, surprised by a triumph so unexpected, felt their vanity
flattered, and received me at last as a son. But their feeling was too
artificial, I might say false, to let their present treatment have much
influence upon a sore heart. Affectations stained with selfishness win
little sympathy; the heart abhors calculations and profits of all kinds.

I wrote regularly to Henriette, who answered by two letters a month.
Her spirit hovered over me, her thoughts traversed space and made the
atmosphere around me pure. No woman could captivate me. The king noticed
my reserve, and as, in this respect, he belonged to the school of Louis
XV., he called me, in jest, Mademoiselle de Vandenesse; but my conduct
pleased him. I am convinced that the habit of patience I acquired in my
childhood and practised at Clochegourde had much to do in my winning the
favor of the king, who was always most kind to me. He no doubt took a
fancy to read my letters, for he soon gave up his notion of my life
as that of a young girl. One day when the duke was on duty, and I was
writing at the king’s dictation, the latter suddenly remarked, in that
fine, silvery voice of his, to which he could give, when he chose, the
biting tone of epigram:--

“So that poor devil of a Mortsauf persists in living?”

“Yes,” replied the duke.

“Madame de Mortsauf is an angel, whom I should like to see at my court,”
 continued the king; “but if I cannot manage it, my chancellor here,”
 turning to me, “may be more fortunate. You are to have six months’
leave; I have decided on giving you the young man we spoke of yesterday
as colleague. Amuse yourself at Clochegourde, friend Cato!” and he
laughed as he had himself wheeled out of the room.

I flew like a swallow to Touraine. For the first time I was to show
myself to my beloved, not merely a little less insignificant, but
actually in the guise of an elegant young man, whose manners had been
formed in the best salons, his education finished by gracious women; who
had found at last a compensation for all his sufferings, and had put to
use the experience given to him by the purest angel to whom heaven had
ever committed the care of a child. You know how my mother had equipped
me for my three months’ visit at Frapesle. When I reached Clochegourde
after fulfilling my mission in Vendee, I was dressed like a huntsman;
I wore a jacket with white and red buttons, striped trousers, leathern
gaiters and shoes. Tramping through underbrush had so injured my clothes
that the count was obliged to lend me linen. On the present occasion,
two years’ residence in Paris, constant intercourse with the king, the
habits of a life at ease, my completed growth, a youthful countenance,
which derived a lustre from the placidity of the soul within
magnetically united with the pure soul that beamed on me from
Clochegourde,--all these things combined had transformed me. I was
self-possessed without conceit, inwardly pleased to find myself, in
spite of my years, at the summit of affairs; above all, I had the
consciousness of being secretly the support and comfort of the dearest
woman on earth, and her unuttered hope. Perhaps I felt a flutter of
vanity as the postilions cracked their whips along the new avenue
leading from the main road to Clochegourde and through an iron gate I
had never seen before, which opened into a circular enclosure recently
constructed. I had not written to the countess of my coming, wishing to
surprise her. For this I found myself doubly in fault: first, she was
overwhelmed with the excitement of a pleasure long desired, but
supposed to be impossible; and secondly, she proved to me that all such
deliberate surprises are in bad taste.

When Henriette saw a young man in him who had hitherto seemed but a
child to her, she lowered her eyes with a sort of tragic slowness.
She allowed me to take and kiss her hand without betraying her inward
pleasure, which I nevertheless felt in her sensitive shiver. When she
raised her face to look at me again, I saw that she was pale.

“Well, you don’t forget your old friends?” said Monsieur de Mortsauf,
who had neither changed nor aged.

The children sprang upon me. I saw them behind the grave face of the
Abbe Dominis, Jacques’ tutor.

“No,” I replied, “and in future I am to have six months’ leave, which
will always be spent here--Why, what is the matter?” I said to the
countess, putting my arm round her waist and holding her up in presence
of them all.

“Oh, don’t!” she said, springing away from me; “it is nothing.”

I read her mind, and answered to its secret thought by saying, “Am I not
allowed to be your faithful slave?”

She took my arm, left the count, the children, and the abbe, and led
me to a distance on the lawn, though still within sight of the others;
then, when sure that her voice could not be heard by them, she spoke.

“Felix, my dear friend,” she said, “forgive my fears; I have but one
thread by which to guide me in the labyrinth of life, and I dread to see
it broken. Tell me that I am more than ever Henriette to you, that you
will never abandon me, that nothing shall prevail against me, that you
will ever be my devoted friend. I have suddenly had a glimpse into my
future, and you were not there, as hitherto, your eyes shining and fixed
upon me--”

“Henriette! idol whose worship is like that of the Divine,--lily, flower
of my life, how is it that you do not know, you who are my conscience,
that my being is so fused with yours that my soul is here when my body
is in Paris? Must I tell you that I have come in seventeen hours, that
each turn of the wheels gathered thoughts and desires in my breast,
which burst forth like a tempest when I saw you?”

“Yes, tell me! tell me!” she cried; “I am so sure of myself that I can
hear you without wrong. God does not will my death. He sends you to me
as he sends his breath to his creatures; as he pours the rain of
his clouds upon a parched earth,--tell me! tell me! Do you love me
sacredly?”

“Sacredly.”

“For ever?”

“For ever.”

“As a virgin Mary, hidden behind her veil, beneath her white crown.”

“As a virgin visible.”

“As a sister?”

“As a sister too dearly loved.”

“With chivalry and without hope?”

“With chivalry and with hope.”

“As if you were still twenty years of age, and wearing that absurd blue
coat?”

“Oh better far! I love you thus, and I also love you”--she looked at me
with keen apprehension--“as you loved your aunt.”

“I am happy! You dispel my terrors,” she said, returning towards the
family, who were surprised at our private conference. “Be still a child
at Clochegourde--for you are one still. It may be your policy to be a
man with the king, but here, let me tell you, monsieur, your best policy
is to remain a child. As a child you shall be loved. I can resist a man,
but to a child I can refuse nothing, nothing! He can ask for nothing I
will not give him.--Our secrets are all told,” she said, looking at
the count with a mischievous air, in which her girlish, natural self
reappeared. “I leave you now; I must go and dress.”

Never for three years had I heard her voice so richly happy. For the
first time I heard those swallow cries, the infantile notes of which I
told you. I had brought Jacques a hunting outfit, and for Madeleine a
work-box--which her mother afterwards used. The joy of the two children,
delighted to show their presents to each other, seemed to annoy the
count, always dissatisfied when attention was withdrawn from himself. I
made a sign to Madeleine and followed her father, who wanted to talk to
me of his ailments.

“My poor Felix,” he said, “you see how happy and well they all are. I am
the shadow on the picture; all their ills are transferred to me, and
I bless God that it is so. Formerly I did not know what was the matter
with me; now I know. The orifice of my stomach is affected; I can digest
nothing.”

“How do you come to be as wise as the professor of a medical school?”
 I asked, laughing. “Is your doctor indiscreet enough to tell you such
things?”

“God forbid I should consult a doctor,” he cried, showing the aversion
most imaginary invalids feel for the medical profession.

I now listened to much crazy talk, in the course of which he made the
most absurd confidences,--complained of his wife, of the servants, of
the children, of life, evidently pleased to repeat his daily speeches to
a friend who, not having heard them daily, might be alarmed, and who
at any rate was forced to listen out of politeness. He must have been
satisfied, for I paid him the utmost attention, trying to penetrate
his inconceivable nature, and to guess what new tortures he had been
inflicting on his wife, of which she had not written to me. Henriette
presently put an end to the monologue by appearing in the portico. The
count saw her, shook his head, and said to me: “You listen to me, Felix;
but here no one pities me.”

He went away, as if aware of the constraint he imposed on my intercourse
with Henriette, or perhaps from a really chivalrous consideration
for her, knowing he could give her pleasure by leaving us alone. His
character exhibited contradictions that were often inexplicable; he was
jealous, like all weak beings, but his confidence in his wife’s sanctity
was boundless. It may have been the sufferings of his own self-esteem,
wounded by the superiority of that lofty virtue, which made him so eager
to oppose every wish of the poor woman, whom he braved as children brave
their masters or their mothers.

Jacques was taking his lessons, and Madeleine was being dressed; I had
therefore a whole hour to walk with the countess alone on the terrace.

“Dear angel!” I said, “the chains are heavier, the sands hotter, the
thorns grow apace.”

“Hush!” she said, guessing the thoughts my conversation with the count
had suggested. “You are here, and all is forgotten! I don’t suffer; I
have never suffered.”

She made a few light steps as if to shake her dress and give to the
breeze its ruches of snowy tulle, its floating sleeves and fresh
ribbons, the laces of her pelerine, and the flowing curls of her
coiffure a la Sevigne; I saw her for the first time a young girl,--gay
with her natural gaiety, ready to frolic like a child. I knew then the
meaning of tears of happiness; I knew the joy a man feels in bringing
happiness to another.

“Sweet human flower, wooed by my thought, kissed by my soul, oh my
lily!” I cried, “untouched, untouchable upon thy stem, white, proud,
fragrant, and solitary--”

“Enough, enough,” she said, smiling. “Speak to me of yourself; tell me
everything.”

Then, beneath the swaying arch of quivering leaves, we had a long
conversation, filled with interminable parentheses, subjects taken,
dropped, and retaken, in which I told her my life and my occupations; I
even described my apartment in Paris, for she wished to know everything;
and (happiness then unappreciated) I had nothing to conceal. Knowing
thus my soul and all the details of a daily life full of incessant toil,
learning the full extent of my functions, which to any one not sternly
upright offered opportunities for deception and dishonest gains, but
which I had exercised with such rigid honor that the king, I told her,
called me Mademoiselle de Vandenesse, she seized my hand and kissed it,
and dropped a tear, a tear of joy, upon it.

This sudden transposition of our roles, this homage, coupled with the
thought--swiftly expressed but as swiftly comprehended--“Here is the
master I have sought, here is my dream embodied!” all that there was of
avowal in the action, grand in its humility, where love betrayed itself
in a region forbidden to the senses,--this whirlwind of celestial things
fell on my heart and crushed it. I felt myself too small; I wished to
die at her feet.

“Ah!” I said, “you surpass us in all things. Can you doubt me?--for you
did doubt me just now, Henriette.”

“Not now,” she answered, looking at me with ineffable tenderness, which,
for a moment, veiled the light of her eyes. “But seeing you so changed,
so handsome, I said to myself, ‘Our plans for Madeleine will be defeated
by some woman who will guess the treasures in his heart; she will steal
our Felix, and destroy all happiness here.’”

“Always Madeleine!” I replied. “Is it Madeleine to whom I am faithful?”

We fell into a silence which Monsieur de Mortsauf inconveniently
interrupted. I was forced to keep up a conversation bristling with
difficulties, in which my honest replies as to the king’s policy jarred
with the count’s ideas, and he forced me to explain again and again the
king’s intentions. In spite of all my questions as to his horses, his
agricultural affairs, whether he was satisfied with his five farms,
whether he meant to cut the timber of the old avenue, he returned to the
subject of politics with the pestering faculty of an old maid and the
persistency of a child. Minds like his prefer to dash themselves against
the light; they return again and again and hum about it without ever
getting into it, like those big flies which weary our ears as they buzz
upon the glass.

Henriette was silent. To stop the conversation, in which I feared
my young blood might take fire, I answered in monosyllables, mostly
acquiescent, avoiding discussion; but Monsieur de Mortsauf had too much
sense not to perceive the meaning of my politeness. Presently he was
angry at being always in the right; he grew refractory, his eyebrows and
the wrinkles of his forehead worked, his yellow eyes blazed, his rufous
nose grew redder, as it did on the day I first witnessed an attack of
madness. Henriette gave me a supplicating look, making me understand
that she could not employ on my behalf an authority to which she
had recourse to protect her children. I at once answered the count
seriously, taking up the political question, and managing his peevish
spirit with the utmost care.

“Poor dear! poor dear!” she murmured two or three times; the words
reaching my ear like a gentle breeze. When she could intervene with
success she said, interrupting us, “Let me tell you, gentlemen, that you
are very dull company.”

Recalled by this conversation to his chivalrous sense of what was due to
a woman, the count ceased to talk politics, and as we bored him in our
turn by commonplace matters, he presently left us to continue our walk,
declaring that it made his head spin to go round and round on the same
path.

My sad conjectures were true. The soft landscape, the warm atmosphere,
the cloudless skies, the soothing poetry of this valley, which for
fifteen years had calmed the stinging fancies of that diseased mind,
were now impotent. At a period of life when the asperities of other
men are softened and their angles smoothed, the disposition of this man
became more and more aggressive. For the last few months he had taken
a habit of contradicting for the sake of contradiction, without reason,
without even trying to justify his opinions; he insisted on knowing the
why and the wherefore of everything; grew restless under a delay or
an omission; meddled with every item of the household affairs, and
compelled his wife and the servants to render him the most minute
and fatiguing account of all that was done; never allowing them the
slightest freedom of action. Formerly he did not lose his temper except
for some special reason; now his irritation was constant. Perhaps the
care of his farms, the interests of agriculture, an active out-door life
had formerly soothed his atrabilious temper by giving it a field for its
uneasiness, and by furnishing employment for his activity. Possibly the
loss of such occupation had allowed his malady to prey upon itself; no
longer exercised on matters without, it was showing itself in more fixed
ideas; the moral being was laying hold of the physical being. He had
lately become his own doctor; he studied medical books, fancied he had
the diseases he read of, and took the most extraordinary and unheard of
precautions about his health,--precautions never the same, impossible to
foresee, and consequently impossible to satisfy. Sometimes he wanted no
noise; then, when the countess had succeeded in establishing absolute
silence, he would declare he was in a tomb, and blame her for not
finding some medium between incessant noise and the stillness of La
Trappe. Sometimes he affected a perfect indifference for all earthly
things. Then the whole household breathed freely; the children played;
family affairs went on without criticism. Suddenly he would cry out
lamentably, “They want to kill me!--My dear,” he would say to his wife,
increasing the injustice of his words by the aggravating tones of his
sharp voice, “if it concerned your children you would know very well
what was the matter with them.”

He dressed and re-dressed himself incessantly, watching every change
of temperature, and doing nothing without consulting the barometer.
Notwithstanding his wife’s attentions, he found no food to suit him, his
stomach being, he said, impaired, and digestion so painful as to keep
him awake all night. In spite of this he ate, drank, digested, and
slept, in a manner to satisfy any doctor. His capricious will exhausted
the patience of the servants, accustomed to the beaten track of domestic
service and unable to conform to the requirements of his conflicting
orders. Sometimes he bade them keep all the windows open, declaring that
his health required a current of fresh air; a few days later the
fresh air, being too hot or too damp, as the case might be, became
intolerable; then he scolded, quarrelled with the servants, and in order
to justify himself, denied his former orders. This defect of memory, or
this bad faith, call it which you will, always carried the day against
his wife in the arguments by which she tried to pit him against himself.
Life at Clochegourde had become so intolerable that the Abbe Dominis, a
man of great learning, took refuge in the study of scientific problems,
and withdrew into the shelter of pretended abstraction. The countess had
no longer any hope of hiding the secret of these insane furies within
the circle of her own home; the servants had witnessed scenes of
exasperation without exciting cause, in which the premature old man
passed the bounds of reason. They were, however, so devoted to the
countess that nothing so far had transpired outside; but she dreaded
daily some public outburst of a frenzy no longer controlled by respect
for opinion.

Later I learned the dreadful details of the count’s treatment of his
wife. Instead of supporting her when the children were ill, he assailed
her with dark predictions and made her responsible for all future
illnesses, because she refused to let the children take the crazy doses
which he prescribed. When she went to walk with them the count would
predict a storm in the face of a clear sky; if by chance the prediction
proved true, the satisfaction he felt made him quite indifferent to
any harm to the children. If one of them was ailing, the count gave
his whole mind to fastening the cause of the illness upon the system
of nursing adopted by his wife, whom he carped at for every trifling
detail, always ending with the cruel words, “If your children fall ill
again you have only yourself to thank for it.”

He behaved in the same way in the management of the household, seeing
the worst side of everything, and making himself, as his old coachman
said, “the devil’s own advocate.” The countess arranged that Jacques
and Madeleine should take their meals alone at different hours from the
family, so as to save them from the count’s outbursts and draw all the
storms upon herself. In this way the children now saw but little of
their father. By one of the hallucinations peculiar to selfish persons,
the count had not the slightest idea of the misery he caused. In the
confidential communication he made to me on my arrival he particularly
dwelt on his goodness to his family. He wielded the flail, beat,
bruised, and broke everything about him as a monkey might have done.
Then, having half-destroyed his prey, he denied having touched it. I now
understood the lines on Henriette’s forehead,--fine lines, traced as it
were with the edge of a razor, which I had noticed the moment I saw her.
There is a pudicity in noble minds which withholds them from speaking
of their personal sufferings; proudly they hide the extent of their
woes from hearts that love them, feeling a merciful joy in doing so.
Therefore in spite of my urgency, I did not immediately obtain the truth
from Henriette. She feared to grieve me; she made brief admissions,
and then blushed for them; but I soon perceived myself the increase of
trouble which the count’s present want of regular occupation had brought
upon the household.

“Henriette,” I said, after I had been there some days, “don’t you think
you have made a mistake in so arranging the estate that the count has no
longer anything to do?”

“Dear,” she said, smiling, “my situation is critical enough to take all
my attention; believe me, I have considered all my resources, and they
are now exhausted. It is true that the bickerings are getting worse
and worse. As Monsieur de Mortsauf and I are always together, I cannot
lessen them by diverting his attention in other directions; in fact the
pain would be the same to me in any case. I did think of advising him
to start a nursery for silk-worms at Clochegourde, where we have many
mulberry-trees, remains of the old industry of Touraine. But I reflected
that he would still be the same tyrant at home, and I should have
many more annoyances through the enterprise. You will learn, my dear
observer, that in youth a man’s ill qualities are restrained by society,
checked in their swing by the play of passions, subdued under the fear
of public opinion; later, a middle-aged man, living in solitude, shows
his native defects, which are all the more terrible because so long
repressed. Human weaknesses are essentially base; they allow of neither
peace nor truce; what you yield to them to-day they exact to-morrow, and
always; they fasten on concessions and compel more of them. Power, on
the other hand, is merciful; it conforms to evidence, it is just and it
is peaceable. But the passions born of weakness are implacable. Monsieur
de Mortsauf takes an absolute pleasure in getting the better of me; and
he who would deceive no one else, deceives me with delight.”

One morning as we left the breakfast table, about a month after my
arrival, the countess took me by the arm, darted through an iron gate
which led into the vineyard, and dragged me hastily among the vines.

“He will kill me!” she cried. “And I want to live--for my children’s
sake. But oh! not a day’s respite! Always to walk among thorns! to
come near falling every instant! every instant to have to summon all my
strength to keep my balance! No human being can long endure such strain
upon the system. If I were certain of the ground I ought to take, if my
resistance could be a settled thing, then my mind might concentrate upon
it--but no, every day the attacks change character and leave me without
defence; my sorrows are not one, they are manifold. Ah! my friend--”
 she cried, leaning her head upon my shoulder, and not continuing her
confidence. “What will become of me? Oh, what shall I do?” she said
presently, struggling with thoughts she did not express. “How can I
resist? He will kill me! No, I will kill myself--but that would be
a crime! Escape? yes, but my children! Separate from him? how, after
fifteen years of marriage, how could I ever tell my parents that I will
not live with him? for if my father and mother came here he would be
calm, polite, intelligent, judicious. Besides, can married women look to
fathers or mothers? Do they not belong body and soul to their husbands?
I could live tranquil if not happy--I have found strength in my chaste
solitude, I admit it; but if I am deprived of this negative happiness
I too shall become insane. My resistance is based on powerful reasons
which are not personal to myself. It is a crime to give birth to poor
creatures condemned to endless suffering. Yet my position raises serious
questions, so serious that I dare not decide them alone; I cannot be
judge and party both. To-morrow I will go to Tours and consult my new
confessor, the Abbe Birotteau--for my dear and virtuous Abbe de la Berge
is dead,” she said, interrupting herself. “Though he was severe, I miss
and shall always miss his apostolic power. His successor is an angel of
goodness, who pities but does not reprimand. Still, all courage draws
fresh life from the heart of religion; what soul is not strengthened by
the voice of the Holy Spirit? My God,” she said, drying her tears
and raising her eyes to heaven, “for what sin am I thus punished?--I
believe, yes, Felix, I believe it, we must pass through a fiery furnace
before we reach the saints, the just made perfect of the upper spheres.
Must I keep silence? Am I forbidden, oh, my God, to cry to the heart of
a friend? Do I love him too well?” She pressed me to her heart as though
she feared to lose me. “Who will solve my doubts? My conscience does not
reproach me. The stars shine from above on men; may not the soul, the
human star, shed its light upon a friend, if we go to him with pure
thoughts?”

I listened to this dreadful cry in silence, holding her moist hand
in mine that was still more moist. I pressed it with a force to which
Henriette replied with an equal pressure.

“Where are you?” cried the count, who came towards us, bareheaded.

Ever since my return he had insisted on sharing our interviews,--either
because he wanted amusement, or feared the countess would tell me her
sorrows and complain to me, or because he was jealous of a pleasure he
did not share.

“How he follows me!” she cried, in a tone of despair. “Let us go into
the orchard, we shall escape him. We can stoop as we run by the hedge,
and he will not see us.”

We made the hedge a rampart and reached the enclosure, where we were
soon at a good distance from the count in an alley of almond-trees.

“Dear Henriette,” I then said to her, pressing her arm against my heart
and stopping to contemplate her in her sorrow, “you have guided me with
true knowledge along the perilous ways of the great world; let me in
return give you some advice which may help you to end this duel without
witnesses, in which you must inevitably be worsted, for you are fighting
with unequal weapons. You must not struggle any longer with a madman--”

“Hush!” she said, dashing aside the tears that rolled from her eyes.

“Listen to me, dear,” I continued. “After a single hour’s talk with the
count, which I force myself to endure for love of you, my thoughts are
bewildered, my head heavy; he makes me doubtful of my own intellect; the
same ideas repeated over and over again seem to burn themselves on
my brain. Well-defined monomanias are not communicated; but when the
madness consists in a distorted way of looking at everything, and when
it lurks under all discussions, then it can and does injure the minds of
those who live with it. Your patience is sublime, but will it not end in
disordering you? For your sake, for that of your children, change your
system with the count. Your adorable kindness has made him selfish; you
have treated him as a mother treats the child she spoils; but now, if
you want to live--and you do want it,” I said, looking at her, “use
the control you have over him. You know what it is; he loves you and
he fears you; make him fear you more; oppose his erratic will with your
firm will. Extend your power over him, confine his madness to a moral
sphere just as we lock maniacs in a cell.”

“Dear child,” she said, smiling bitterly, “a woman without a heart
might do it. But I am a mother; I should make a poor jailer. Yes, I can
suffer, but I cannot make others suffer. Never!” she said, “never! not
even to obtain some great and honorable result. Besides, I should
have to lie in my heart, disguise my voice, lower my head, degrade my
gesture--do not ask of me such falsehoods. I can stand between Monsieur
de Mortsauf and his children, I willingly receive his blows that they
may not fall on others; I can do all that, and will do it to conciliate
conflicting interests, but I can do no more.”

“Let me worship thee, O saint, thrice holy!” I exclaimed, kneeling at
her feet and kissing her robe, with which I wiped my tears. “But if he
kills you?” I cried.

She turned pale and said, lifting her eyes to heaven:

“God’s will be done!”

“Do you know that the king said to your father, ‘So that devil of a
Mortsauf is still living’?”

“A jest on the lips of the king,” she said, “is a crime when repeated
here.”

In spite of our precautions the count had tracked us; he now arrived,
bathed in perspiration, and sat down under a walnut-tree where the
countess had stopped to give me that rebuke. I began to talk about the
vintage; the count was silent, taking no notice of the dampness under
the tree. After a few insignificant remarks, interspersed with pauses
that were very significant, he complained of nausea and headache; but he
spoke gently, and did not appeal to our pity, or describe his sufferings
in his usual exaggerated way. We paid no attention to him. When we
reached the house, he said he felt worse and should go to bed; which he
did, quite naturally and with much less complaint than usual. We took
advantage of the respite and went down to our dear terrace accompanied
by Madeleine.

“Let us get that boat and go upon the river,” said the countess after
we had made a few turns. “We might go and look at the fishing which is
going on to-day.”

We went out by the little gate, found the punt, jumped into it and
were presently paddling up the Loire. Like three children amused with
trifles, we looked at the sedges along the banks and the blue and green
dragon-flies; the countess wondered perhaps that she was able to
enjoy such peaceful pleasures in the midst of her poignant griefs;
but Nature’s calm, indifferent to our struggles, has a magic gift of
consolation. The tumults of a love full of restrained desires harmonize
with the wash of the water; the flowers that the hand of man has never
wilted are the voice of his secret dreams; the voluptuous swaying of the
boat vaguely responds to the thoughts that are floating in his soul.
We felt the languid influence of this double poesy. Words, tuned to the
diapason of nature, disclosed mysterious graces; looks were impassioned
rays sharing the light shed broadcast by the sun on the glowing meadows.
The river was a path along which we flew. Our spirit, no longer kept
down by the measured tread of our footsteps, took possession of the
universe. The abounding joy of a child at liberty, graceful in its
motions, enticing in its play, is the living expression of two freed
souls, delighting themselves by becoming ideally the wondrous being
dreamed of by Plato and known to all whose youth has been filled with
a blessed love. To describe to you that hour, not in its indescribable
details but in its essence, I must say to you that we loved each other
in all the creations animate and inanimate which surrounded us; we felt
without us the happiness our own hearts craved; it so penetrated our
being that the countess took off her gloves and let her hands float in
the water as if to cool an inward ardor. Her eyes spoke; but her mouth,
opening like a rose to the breeze, gave voice to no desire. You know the
harmony of deep tones mingling perfectly with high ones? Ever, when I
hear it now, it recalls to me the harmony of our two souls in this one
hour, which never came again.

“Where do you fish?” I asked, “if you can only do so from the banks you
own?”

“Near Pont-de-Ruan,” she replied. “Ah! we now own the river from
Pont-de-Ruan to Clochegourde; Monsieur de Mortsauf has lately bought
forty acres of the meadow lands with the savings of two years and the
arrearage of his pension. Does that surprise you?”

“Surprise me?” I cried; “I would that all the valley were yours.” She
answered me with a smile. Presently we came below the bridge to a place
where the Indre widens and where the fishing was going on.

“Well, Martineau?” she said.

“Ah, Madame la comtesse, such bad luck! We have fished up from the mill
the last three hours, and have taken nothing.”

We landed near them to watch the drawing in of the last net, and all
three of us sat down in the shade of a “bouillard,” a sort of poplar
with a white bark, which grows on the banks of the Danube and the Loire
(probably on those of other large rivers), and sheds, in the spring
of the year, a white and silky fluff, the covering of its flower. The
countess had recovered her august serenity; she half regretted the
unveiling of her griefs, and mourned that she had cried aloud like Job,
instead of weeping like the Magdalen,--a Magdalen without loves, or
galas, or prodigalities, but not without beauty and fragrance. The net
came in at her feet full of fish; tench, barbels, pike, perch, and an
enormous carp, which floundered about on the grass.

“Madame brings luck!” exclaimed the keeper.

All the laborers opened their eyes as they looked with admiration at the
woman whose fairy wand seemed to have touched the nets. Just then the
huntsman was seen urging his horse over the meadows at a full gallop.
Fear took possession of her. Jacques was not with us, and the mother’s
first thought, as Virgil so poetically says, is to press her children to
her breast when danger threatens.

“Jacques! Where is Jacques? What has happened to my boy?”

She did not love me! If she had loved me I should have seen upon her
face when confronted with my sufferings that expression of a lioness in
despair.

“Madame la comtesse, Monsieur le comte is worse.”

She breathed more freely and started to run towards Clochegourde,
followed by me and by Madeleine.

“Follow me slowly,” she said, looking back; “don’t let the dear child
overheat herself. You see how it is; Monsieur de Mortsauf took that
walk in the sun which put him into a perspiration, and sitting under the
walnut-tree may be the cause of a great misfortune.”

The words, said in the midst of her agitation, showed plainly the
purity of her soul. The death of the count a misfortune! She reached
Clochegourde with great rapidity, passing through a gap in the wall and
crossing the fields. I returned slowly. Henriette’s words lighted my
mind, but as the lightning falls and blasts the gathered harvest. On
the river I had fancied I was her chosen one; now I felt bitterly the
sincerity of her words. The lover who is not everything is nothing. I
loved with the desire of a love that knows what it seeks; which feeds in
advance on coming transports, and is content with the pleasures of
the soul because it mingles with them others which the future keeps
in store. If Henriette loved, it was certain that she knew neither the
pleasures of love nor its tumults. She lived by feelings only, like a
saint with God. I was the object on which her thoughts fastened as
bees swarm upon the branch of a flowering tree. In my mad jealousy I
reproached myself that I had dared nothing, that I had not tightened
the bonds of a tenderness which seemed to me at that moment more subtile
than real, by the chains of positive possession.

The count’s illness, caused perhaps by a chill under the walnut-tree,
became alarming in a few hours. I went to Tours for a famous doctor
named Origet, but was unable to find him until evening. He spent that
night and the next day at Clochegourde. We had sent the huntsman in
quest of leeches, but the doctor, thinking the case urgent, wished to
bleed the count immediately, but had brought no lancet with him. I
at once started for Azay in the midst of a storm, roused a surgeon,
Monsieur Deslandes, and compelled him to come with the utmost celerity
to Clochegourde. Ten minutes later and the count would have died; the
bleeding saved him. But in spite of this preliminary success the doctor
predicted an inflammatory fever of the worst kind. The countess was
overcome by the fear that she was the secret cause of this crisis. Two
weak to thank me for my exertions, she merely gave me a few smiles, the
equivalent of the kiss she had once laid upon my hand. Fain would I have
seen in those haggard smiles the remorse of illicit love; but no, they
were only the act of contrition of an innocent repentance, painful to
see in one so pure, the expression of admiring tenderness for me whom
she regarded as noble while reproaching herself for an imaginary wrong.
Surely she loved as Laura loved Petrarch, and not as Francesca da Rimini
loved Paolo,--a terrible discovery for him who had dreamed the union of
the two loves.

The countess half lay, her body bent forwards, her arms hanging, in a
soiled armchair in a room that was like the lair of a wild boar. The
next evening before the doctor departed he said to the countess, who had
sat up the night before, that she must get a nurse, as the illness would
be a long one.

“A nurse!” she said; “no, no! We will take care of him,” she added,
looking at me; “we owe it to ourselves to save him.”

The doctor gave us both an observing look full of astonishment. The
words were of a nature to make him suspect an atonement. He promised
to come twice a week, left directions for the treatment with Monsieur
Deslandes, and pointed out the threatening symptoms that might oblige
us to send for him. I asked the countess to let me sit up the alternate
nights and then, not without difficulty, I persuaded her to go to bed on
the third night. When the house was still and the count sleeping I heard
a groan from Henriette’s room. My anxiety was so keen that I went to
her. She was kneeling before the crucifix bathed in tears. “My God!” she
cried; “if this be the cost of a murmur, I will never complain again.”

“You have left him!” she said on seeing me.

“I heard you moaning, and I was frightened.”

“Oh, I!” she said; “I am well.”

Wishing to be certain that Monsieur de Mortsauf was asleep she came
down with me; by the light of the lamp we looked at him. The count was
weakened by the loss of blood and was more drowsy than asleep; his hands
picked the counterpane and tried to draw it over him.

“They say the dying do that,” she whispered. “Ah! if he were to die of
this illness, that I have caused, never will I marry again, I swear it,”
 she said, stretching her hand over his head with a solemn gesture.

“I have done all I could to save him,” I said.

“Oh, you!” she said, “you are good; it is I who am guilty.”

She stooped to that discolored brow, wiped the perspiration from it and
laid a kiss there solemnly; but I saw, not without joy, that she did it
as an expiation.

“Blanche, I am thirsty,” said the count in a feeble voice.

“You see he knows me,” she said giving him to drink.

Her accent, her affectionate manner to him seemed to me to take the
feelings that bound us together and immolate them to the sick man.

“Henriette,” I said, “go and rest, I entreat you.”

“No more Henriette,” she said, interrupting me with imperious haste.

“Go to bed if you would not be ill. Your children, _he himself_ would
order you to be careful; it is a case where selfishness becomes a
virtue.”

“Yes,” she said.

She went away, recommending her husband to my care by a gesture which
would have seemed like approaching delirium if childlike grace had not
been mingled with the supplicating forces of repentance. But the scene
was terrible, judged by the habitual state of that pure soul; it alarmed
me; I feared the exaltation of her conscience. When the doctor
came again, I revealed to him the nature of my pure Henriette’s
self-reproach. This confidence, made discreetly, removed Monsieur
Origet’s suspicions, and enabled him to quiet the distress of that noble
soul by telling her that in any case the count had to pass through this
crisis, and that as for the nut-tree, his remaining there had done more
good than harm by developing the disease.

For fifty-two days the count hovered between life and death. Henriette
and I each watched twenty-six nights. Undoubtedly, Monsieur de Mortsauf
owed his life to our nursing and to the careful exactitude with which
we carried out the orders of Monsieur Origet. Like all philosophical
physicians, whose sagacious observation of what passes before them
justifies many a doubt of noble actions when they are only the
accomplishment of a duty, this man, while assisting the countess and
me in our rivalry of devotion, could not help watching us, with
scrutinizing glances, so afraid was he of being deceived in his
admiration.

“In diseases of this nature,” he said to me at his third visit, “death
has a powerful auxiliary in the moral nature when that is seriously
disturbed, as it is in this case. The doctor, the family, the nurses
hold the patient’s life in their hands; sometimes a single word, a fear
expressed by a gesture, has the effect of poison.”

As he spoke Origet studied my face and expression; but he saw in my eyes
the clear look of an honest soul. In fact during the whole course of
this distressing illness there never passed through my mind a single one
of the involuntary evil thoughts which do sometimes sear the consciences
of the innocent. To those who study nature in its grandeur as a
whole all tends to unity through assimilation. The moral world must
undoubtedly be ruled by an analogous principle. In an pure sphere all
is pure. The atmosphere of heaven was around my Henriette; it seemed as
though an evil desire must forever part me from her. Thus she not only
stood for happiness, but for virtue; she _was_ virtue. Finding us always
equally careful and attentive, the doctor’s words and manners took a
tone of respect and even pity; he seemed to say to himself, “Here
are the real sufferers; they hide their ills, and forget them.” By a
fortunate change, which, according to our excellent doctor, is common
enough in men who are completely shattered, Monsieur de Mortsauf
was patient, obedient, complained little, and showed surprising
docility,--he, who when well never did the simplest thing without
discussion. The secret of this submission to medical care, which he
formerly so derided, was an innate dread of death; another contradiction
in a man of tried courage. This dread may perhaps explain several
other peculiarities in the character which the cruel years of exile had
developed.

Shall I admit to you, Natalie, and will you believe me? these fifty days
and the month that followed them were the happiest moments of my life.
Love, in the celestial spaces of the soul is like a noble river flowing
through a valley; the rains, the brooks, the torrents hie to it, the
trees fall upon its surface, so do the flowers, the gravel of its
shores, the rocks of the summits; storms and the loitering tribute of
the crystal streams alike increase it. Yes, when love comes all comes to
love!

The first great danger over, the countess and I grew accustomed to
illness. In spite of the confusion which the care of the sick entails,
the count’s room, once so untidy, was now clean and inviting. Soon
we were like two beings flung upon a desert island, for not only do
anxieties isolate, but they brush aside as petty the conventions of the
world. The welfare of the sick man obliged us to have points of contact
which no other circumstances would have authorized. Many a time our
hands, shy or timid formerly, met in some service that we rendered to
the count--was I not there to sustain and help my Henriette? Absorbed
in a duty comparable to that of a soldier at the pickets, she forgot
to eat; then I served her, sometimes on her lap, a hasty meal which
necessitated a thousand little attentions. We were like children at a
grave. She would order me sharply to prepare whatever might ease the
sick man’s suffering; she employed me in a hundred petty ways. During
the time when actual danger obscured, as it does during the battle, the
subtile distinctions which characterize the facts of ordinary life,
she necessarily laid aside the reserve which all women, even the most
unconventional, preserve in their looks and words and actions before the
world or their own family. At the first chirping of the birds she would
come to relieve my watch, wearing a morning garment which revealed to
me once more the dazzling treasures that in my folly I had treated as my
own. Always dignified, nay imposing, she could still be familiar.

Thus it came to pass that we found ourselves unconsciously intimate,
half-married as it were. She showed herself nobly confiding, as sure of
me as she was of herself. I was thus taken deeper and deeper into her
heart. The countess became once more my Henriette, Henriette constrained
to love with increasing strength the friend who endeavored to be her
second soul. Her hand unresistingly met mine at the least solicitation;
my eyes were permitted to follow with delight the lines of her beauty
during the long hours when we listened to the count’s breathing, without
driving her from their sight. The meagre pleasures which we allowed
ourselves--sympathizing looks, words spoken in whispers not to wake
the count, hopes and fears repeated and again repeated, in short, the
thousand incidents of the fusion of two hearts long separated--stand
out in bright array upon the sombre background of the actual scene. Our
souls knew each other to their depths under this test, which many a warm
affection is unable to bear, finding life too heavy or too flimsy in the
close bonds of hourly intercourse.

You know what disturbance follows the illness of a master; how the
affairs of life seem to come to a standstill. Though the real care of
the family and estate fell upon Madame de Mortsauf, the count was useful
in his way; he talked with the farmers, transacted business with his
bailiff, and received the rents; if she was the soul, he was the body.
I now made myself her steward so that she could nurse the count without
neglecting the property. She accepted this as a matter of course, in
fact without thanking me. It was another sweet communion to share her
family cares, to transmit her orders. In the evenings we often met in
her room to discuss these interests and those of her children. Such
conversations gave one semblance the more to our transitory marriage.
With what delight she encouraged me to take a husband’s place, giving me
his seat at table, sending me to talk with the bailiff,--all in perfect
innocence, yet not without that inward pleasure the most virtuous woman
in the world will feel when she finds a course where strict obedience to
duty and the satisfaction of her wishes are combined.

Nullified, as it were, by illness, the count no longer oppressed his
wife or his household, the countess then became her natural self; she
busied herself with my affairs and showed me a thousand kindnesses. With
what joy I discovered in her mind a thought, vaguely conceived perhaps,
but exquisitely expressed, namely, to show me the full value of her
person and her qualities and make me see the change that would come over
her if she lived understood. This flower, kept in the cold atmosphere
of such a home, opened to my gaze, and to mine only; she took as much
delight in letting me comprehend her as I felt in studying her with the
searching eyes of love. She proved to me in all the trifling things
of daily life how much I was in her thoughts. When, after my turn of
watching, I went to bed and slept late, Henriette would keep the house
absolutely silent near me; Jacques and Madeleine played elsewhere,
though never ordered to do so; she invented excuses to serve my
breakfast herself--ah, with what sparkling pleasure in her movements,
what swallow-like rapidity, what lynx-eyed perception! and then! what
carnation on her cheeks, what quiverings in her voice!

Can such expansions of the soul be described in words?

Often she was wearied out; but if, at such moments of lassitude my
welfare came in question, for me, as for her children, she found fresh
strength and sprang up eagerly and joyfully. How she loved to shed her
tenderness like sunbeams in the air! Ah, Natalie, some women share
the privileges of angels here below; they diffuse that light which
Saint-Martin, the mysterious philosopher, declared to be intelligent,
melodious, and perfumed. Sure of my discretion, Henriette took pleasure
in raising the curtain which hid the future and in showing me two women
in her,--the woman bound hand and foot who had won me in spite of her
severity, and the woman freed, whose sweetness should make my love
eternal! What a difference. Madame de Mortsauf was the skylark of
Bengal, transported to our cold Europe, mournful on its perch, silent
and dying in the cage of a naturalist; Henriette was the singing bird of
oriental poems in groves beside the Ganges, flying from branch to branch
like a living jewel amid the roses of a volkameria that ever blooms. Her
beauty grew more beautiful, her mind recovered strength. The continual
sparkle of this happiness was a secret between ourselves, for she
dreaded the eye of the Abbe Dominis, the representative of the world;
she masked her contentment with playfulness, and covered the proofs of
her tenderness with the banner of gratitude.

“We have put your friendship to a severe test, Felix; we may give you
the same rights we give to Jacques, may we not, Monsieur l’abbe?” she
said one day.

The stern abbe answered with the smile of a man who can read the human
heart and see its purity; for the countess he always showed the respect
mingled with adoration which the angels inspire. Twice during those
fifty days the countess passed beyond the limits in which we held our
affection. But even these infringements were shrouded in a veil, never
lifted until the final hour when avowal came. One morning, during the
first days of the count’s illness, when she repented her harsh treatment
in withdrawing the innocent privileges she had formerly granted me, I
was expecting her to relieve my watch. Much fatigued, I fell asleep, my
head against the wall. I wakened suddenly at the touch of something
cool upon my forehead which gave me a sensation as if a rose had rested
there. I opened my eyes and saw the countess, standing a few steps
distant, who said, “I have just come.” I rose to leave the room, but as
I bade her good-bye I took her hand; it was moist and trembling.

“Are you ill?” I said.

“Why do you ask that question?” she replied.

I looked at her blushing and confused. “I was dreaming,” I replied.

Another time, when Monsieur Origet had announced positively that the
count was convalescent, I was lying with Jacques and Madeleine on the
step of the portico intent on a game of spillikins which we were playing
with bits of straw and hooks made of pins; Monsieur de Mortsauf was
asleep. The doctor, while waiting for his horse to be harnessed, was
talking with the countess in the salon. Monsieur Origet went away
without my noticing his departure. After he left, Henriette leaned
against the window, from which she watched us for some time without
our seeing her. It was one of those warm evenings when the sky is
copper-colored and the earth sends up among the echoes a myriad mingling
noises. A last ray of sunlight was leaving the roofs, the flowers in
the garden perfumed the air, the bells of the cattle returning to their
stalls sounded in the distance. We were all conforming to the silence
of the evening hour and hushing our voices that we might not wake
the count. Suddenly, I heard the guttural sound of a sob violently
suppressed; I rushed into the salon and found the countess sitting by
the window with her handkerchief to her face. She heard my step and made
me an imperious gesture, commanding me to leave her. I went up to her,
my heart stabbed with fear, and tried to take her handkerchief away by
force. Her face was bathed in tears and she fled into her room, which
she did not leave again until the hour for evening prayer. When that was
over, I led her to the terrace and asked the cause of her emotion; she
affected a wild gaiety and explained it by the news Monsieur Origet had
given her.

“Henriette, Henriette, you knew that news when I saw you weeping.
Between you and me a lie is monstrous. Why did you forbid me to dry your
tears? were they mine?”

“I was thinking,” she said, “that for me this illness has been a halt
in pain. Now that I no longer fear for Monsieur de Mortsauf I fear for
myself.”

She was right. The count’s recovery was soon attested by the return of
his fantastic humor. He began by saying that neither the countess, nor
I, nor the doctor had known how to take care of him; we were ignorant
of his constitution and also of his disease; we misunderstood his
sufferings and the necessary remedies. Origet, infatuated with his own
doctrines, had mistaken the case, he ought to have attended only to
the pylorus. One day he looked at us maliciously, with an air of having
guessed our thoughts, and said to his wife with a smile, “Now, my dear,
if I had died you would have regretted me, no doubt, but pray admit you
would have been quite resigned.”

“Yes, I should have mourned you in pink and black, court mourning,” she
answered laughing, to change the tone of his remarks.

But it was chiefly about his food, which the doctor insisted on
regulating, that scenes of violence and wrangling now took place, unlike
any that had hitherto occurred; for the character of the count was all
the more violent for having slumbered. The countess, fortified by the
doctor’s orders and the obedience of her servants, stimulated too by
me, who thought this struggle a good means to teach her to exercise
authority over the count, held out against his violence. She showed
a calm front to his demented cries, and even grew accustomed to his
insulting epithets, taking him for what he was, a child. I had the
happiness of at last seeing her take the reins in hand and govern that
unsound mind. The count cried out, but he obeyed; and he obeyed all the
better when he had made an outcry. But in spite of the evidence of good
results, Henriette often wept at the spectacle of this emaciated, feeble
old man, with a forehead yellower than the falling leaves, his eyes wan,
his hands trembling. She blamed herself for too much severity, and could
not resist the joy she saw in his eyes when, in measuring out his food,
she gave him more than the doctor allowed. She was even more gentle and
gracious to him than she had been to me; but there were differences
here which filled my heart with joy. She was not unwearying, and she
sometimes called her servants to wait upon the count when his caprices
changed too rapidly, and he complained of not being understood.

The countess wished to return thanks to God for the count’s recovery;
she directed a mass to be said, and asked if I would take her to church.
I did so, but I left her at the door, and went to see Monsieur and
Madame Chessel. On my return she reproached me.

“Henriette,” I said, “I cannot be false. I will throw myself into the
water to save my enemy from drowning, and give him my coat to keep him
warm; I will forgive him, but I cannot forget the wrong.”

She was silent, but she pressed my arm.

“You are an angel, and you were sincere in your thanksgiving,” I said,
continuing. “The mother of the Prince of the Peace was saved from the
hands of an angry populace who sought to kill her, and when the queen
asked, ‘What did you do?’ she answered, ‘I prayed for them.’ Women are
ever thus. I am a man, and necessarily imperfect.”

“Don’t calumniate yourself,” she said, shaking my arm, “perhaps you are
more worthy than I.”

“Yes,” I replied, “for I would give eternity for a day of happiness, and
you--”

“I!” she said haughtily.

I was silent and lowered my eyes to escape the lightning of hers.

“There is many an I in me,” she said. “Of which do you speak? Those
children,” pointing to Jacques and Madeleine, “are one--Felix,” she
cried in a heartrending voice, “do you think me selfish? Ought I to
sacrifice eternity to reward him who devotes to me his life? The thought
is dreadful; it wounds every sentiment of religion. Could a woman so
fallen rise again? Would her happiness absolve her? These are questions
you force me to consider.--Yes, I betray at last the secret of my
conscience; the thought has traversed my heart; often do I expiate it by
penance; it caused the tears you asked me to account for yesterday--”

“Do you not give too great importance to certain things which common
women hold at a high price, and--”

“Oh!” she said, interrupting me; “do you hold them at a lower?”

This logic stopped all argument.

“Know this,” she continued. “I might have the baseness to abandon
that poor old man whose life I am; but, my friend, those other feeble
creatures there before us, Madeleine and Jacques, would remain with
their father. Do you think, I ask you do you think they would be alive
in three months under the insane dominion of that man? If my failure of
duty concerned only myself--” A noble smile crossed her face. “But shall
I kill my children! My God!” she exclaimed. “Why speak of these things?
Marry, and let me die!”

She said the words in a tone so bitter, so hollow, that they stifled the
remonstrances of my passion.

“You uttered cries that day beneath the walnut-tree; I have uttered my
cries here beneath these alders, that is all,” I said; “I will be silent
henceforth.”

“Your generosity shames me,” she said, raising her eyes to heaven.

We reached the terrace and found the count sitting in a chair, in the
sun. The sight of that sunken face, scarcely brightened by a feeble
smile, extinguished the last flames that came from the ashes. I leaned
against the balustrade and considered the picture of that poor wreck,
between his sickly children and his wife, pale with her vigils, worn
out by extreme fatigue, by the fears, perhaps also by the joys of these
terrible months, but whose cheeks now glowed from the emotions she had
just passed through. At the sight of that suffering family beneath the
trembling leafage through which the gray light of a cloudy autumn sky
came dimly, I felt within me a rupture of the bonds which hold the body
to the spirit. There came upon me then that moral spleen which, they
say, the strongest wrestlers know in the crisis of their combats, a
species of cold madness which makes a coward of the bravest man, a bigot
of an unbeliever, and renders those it grasps indifferent to all things,
even to vital sentiments, to honor, to love--for the doubt it brings
takes from us the knowledge of ourselves and disgusts us with life
itself. Poor, nervous creatures, whom the very richness of your
organization delivers over to this mysterious, fatal power, who are your
peers and who your judges? Horrified by the thoughts that rose within
me, and demanding, like the wicked man, “Where is now thy God?” I could
not restrain the tears that rolled down my cheeks.

“What is it, dear Felix?” said Madeleine in her childish voice.

Then Henriette put to flight these dark horrors of the mind by a look of
tender solicitude which shone into my soul like a sunbeam. Just then the
old huntsman brought me a letter from Tours, at sight of which I made a
sudden cry of surprise, which made Madame de Mortsauf tremble. I saw the
king’s signet and knew it contained my recall. I gave her the letter and
she read it at a glance.

“What will become of me?” she murmured, beholding her desert sunless.

We fell into a stupor of thought which oppressed us equally; never
had we felt more strongly how necessary we were to one another. The
countess, even when she spoke indifferently of other things, seemed to
have a new voice, as if the instrument had lost some chords and others
were out of tune. Her movements were apathetic, her eyes without light.
I begged her to tell me her thoughts.

“Have I any?” she replied in a dazed way.

She drew me into her chamber, made me sit upon the sofa, took a package
from the drawer of her dressing-table, and knelt before me, saying:
“This hair has fallen from my head during the last year; take it, it is
yours; you will some day know how and why.”

Slowly I bent to meet her brow, and she did not avoid my lips. I kissed
her sacredly, without unworthy passion, without one impure impulse, but
solemnly, with tenderness. Was she willing to make the sacrifice; or did
she merely come, as I did once, to the verge of the precipice? If love
were leading her to give herself could she have worn that calm, that
holy look; would she have asked, in that pure voice of hers, “You are
not angry with me, are you?”

I left that evening; she wished to accompany me on the road to Frapesle;
and we stopped under my walnut-tree. I showed it to her, and told her
how I had first seen her four years earlier from that spot. “The valley
was so beautiful then!” I cried.

“And now?” she said quickly.

“You are beneath my tree, and the valley is ours!”

She bowed her head and that was our farewell; she got into her carriage
with Madeleine, and I into mine alone.

On my return to Paris I was absorbed in pressing business which took
all my time and kept me out of society, which for a while forgot me.
I corresponded with Madame de Mortsauf, and sent her my journal once a
week. She answered twice a month. It was a life of solitude yet teeming,
like those sequestered spots, blooming unknown, which I had sometimes
found in the depths of woods when gathering the flowers for my poems.

Oh, you who love! take these obligations on you; accept these daily
duties, like those the Church imposes upon Christians. The rigorous
observances of the Roman faith contain a great idea; they plough the
furrow of duty in the soul by the daily repetition of acts which keep
alive the sense of hope and fear. Sentiments flow clearer in furrowed
channels which purify their stream; they refresh the heart, they
fertilize the life from the abundant treasures of a hidden faith, the
source divine in which the single thought of a single love is multiplied
indefinitely.

My love, an echo of the Middle Ages and of chivalry, was known, I know
not how; possibly the king and the Duc de Lenoncourt had spoken of it.
From that upper sphere the romantic yet simple story of a young man
piously adoring a beautiful woman remote from the world, noble in her
solitude, faithful without support to duty, spread, no doubt quickly,
through the faubourg St. Germain. In the salons I was the object of
embarrassing notice; for retired life has advantages which if
once experienced make the burden of a constant social intercourse
insupportable. Certain minds are painfully affected by violent
contrasts, just as eyes accustomed to soft colors are hurt by glaring
light. This was my condition then; you may be surprised at it now, but
have patience; the inconsistencies of the Vandenesse of to-day will be
explained to you.

I found society courteous and women most kind. After the marriage of the
Duc de Berry the court resumed its former splendor and the glory of
the French fetes revived. The Allied occupation was over, prosperity
reappeared, enjoyments were again possible. Noted personages,
illustrious by rank, prominent by fortune, came from all parts of Europe
to the capital of the intellect, where the merits and the vices of
other countries were found magnified and whetted by the charms of French
intellect.

Five months after leaving Clochegourde my good angel wrote me, in the
middle of the winter, a despairing letter, telling me of the serious
illness of her son. He was then out of danger, but there were many fears
for the future; the doctor said that precautions were necessary for
his lungs--the suggestion of a terrible idea which had put the mother’s
heart in mourning. Hardly had Jacques begun to convalesce, and she could
breathe again, when Madeleine made them all uneasy. That pretty plant,
whose bloom had lately rewarded the mother’s culture, was now frail
and pallid and anemic. The countess, worn-out by Jacques’ long illness,
found no courage, she said, to bear this additional blow, and the
ever present spectacle of these two dear failing creatures made her
insensible to the redoubled torment of her husband’s temper. Thus the
storms were again raging; tearing up by the roots the hopes that were
planted deepest in her bosom. She was now at the mercy of the count;
weary of the struggle, she allowed him to regain all the ground he had
lost.

“When all my strength is employed in caring for my children,” she wrote,
“how is it possible to employ it against Monsieur de Mortsauf; how can
I struggle against his aggressions when I am fighting against death?
Standing here to-day, alone and much enfeebled, between these two young
images of mournful fate, I am overpowered with disgust, invincible
disgust for life. What blow can I feel, to what affection can I answer,
when I see Jacques motionless on the terrace, scarcely a sign of life
about him, except in those dear eyes, large by emaciation, hollow as
those of an old man and, oh, fatal sign, full of precocious intelligence
contrasting with his physical debility. When I look at my pretty
Madeleine, once so gay, so caressing, so blooming, now white as death,
her very hair and eyes seem to me to have paled; she turns a languishing
look upon me as if bidding me farewell; nothing rouses her, nothing
tempts her. In spite of all my efforts I cannot amuse my children; they
smile at me, but their smile is only in answer to my endearments, it
does not come from them. They weep because they have no strength to play
with me. Suffering has enfeebled their whole being, it has loosened even
the ties that bound them to me.

“Thus you can well believe that Clochegourde is very sad. Monsieur de
Mortsauf now rules everything--Oh my friend! you, my glory!” she wrote,
farther on, “you must indeed love me well to love me still; to love me
callous, ungrateful, turned to stone by grief.”



CHAPTER III. THE TWO WOMEN

It was at this time, when I was never more deeply moved in my whole
being, when I lived in that soul to which I strove to send the luminous
breeze of the mornings and the hope of the crimsoned evenings, that
I met, in the salons of the Elysee-Bourbon, one of those illustrious
ladies who reign as sovereigns in society. Immensely rich, born of a
family whose blood was pure from all misalliance since the Conquest,
married to one of the most distinguished old men of the British peerage,
it was nevertheless evident that these advantages were mere accessories
heightening this lady’s beauty, graces, manners, and wit, all of which
had a brilliant quality which dazzled before it charmed. She was the
idol of the day; reigning the more securely over Parisian society
because she possessed the quality most necessary to success,--the hand
of iron in the velvet glove spoken of by Bernadotte.

You know the singular characteristics of English people, the distance
and coldness of their own Channel which they put between them and
whoever has not been presented to them in a proper manner. Humanity
seems to be an ant-hill on which they tread; they know none of their
species except the few they admit into their circle; they ignore even
the language of the rest; tongues may move and eyes may see in their
presence but neither sound nor look has reached them; to them, the
people are as if they were not. The British present an image of their
own island, where law rules everything, where all is automatic in
every station of life, where the exercise of virtue appears to be the
necessary working of a machine which goes by clockwork. Fortifications
of polished steel rise around the Englishwoman behind the golden wires
of her household cage (where the feed-box and the drinking-cup, the
perches and the food are exquisite in quality), but they make her
irresistibly attractive. No people ever trained married women so
carefully to hypocrisy by holding them rigidly between the two extremes
of death or social station; for them there is no middle path between
shame and honor; either the wrong is completed or it does not exist;
it is all or nothing,--Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” This alternative,
coupled with the scorn to which the customs of her country have trained
her, make an Englishwoman a being apart in the world. She is a helpless
creature, forced to be virtuous yet ready to yield, condemned to live
a lie in her heart, yet delightful in outward appearance--for these
English rest everything on appearances. Hence the special charms of
their women: the enthusiasm for a love which is all their life; the
minuteness of their care for their persons; the delicacy of their
passion, so charmingly rendered in the famous scene of Romeo and
Juliet in which, with one stroke, Shakespeare’s genius depicted his
country-women.

You, who envy them so many things, what can I tell you that you do not
know of these white sirens, impenetrable apparently but easily fathomed,
who believe that love suffices love, and turn enjoyments to satiety
by never varying them; whose soul has one note only, their voice one
syllable--an ocean of love in themselves, it is true, and he who has
never swum there misses part of the poetry of the senses, as he who has
never seen the sea has lost some strings of his lyre. You know the
why and wherefore of these words. My relations with the Marchioness
of Dudley had a disastrous celebrity. At an age when the senses have
dominion over our conduct, and when in my case they had been violently
repressed by circumstances, the image of the saint bearing her slow
martyrdom at Clochegourde shone so vividly before my mind that I was
able to resist all seductions. It was the lustre of this fidelity which
attracted Lady Dudley’s attention. My resistance stimulated her passion.
What she chiefly desired, like many Englishwoman, was the spice of
singularity; she wanted pepper, capsicum, with her heart’s food, just
as Englishmen need condiments to excite their appetite. The dull languor
forced into the lives of these women by the constant perfection of
everything about them, the methodical regularity of their habits, leads
them to adore the romantic and to welcome difficulty. I was wholly
unable to judge of such a character. The more I retreated to a cold
distance the more impassioned Lady Dudley became. The struggle, in
which she gloried, excited the curiosity of several persons, and this in
itself was a form of happiness which to her mind made ultimate triumph
obligatory. Ah! I might have been saved if some good friend had
then repeated to me her cruel comment on my relations with Madame de
Mortsauf.

“I am wearied to death,” she said, “of these turtle-dove sighings.”

Without seeking to justify my crime, I ask you to observe, Natalie, that
a man has fewer means of resisting a woman than she has of escaping him.
Our code of manners forbids the brutality of repressing a woman, whereas
repression with your sex is not only allurement to ours, but is imposed
upon you by conventions. With us, on the contrary, some unwritten law
of masculine self-conceit ridicules a man’s modesty; we leave you the
monopoly of that virtue, that you may have the privilege of granting us
favors; but reverse the case, and man succumbs before sarcasm.

Though protected by my love, I was not of an age to be wholly insensible
to the triple seductions of pride, devotion, and beauty. When Arabella
laid at my feet the homage of a ball-room where she reigned a queen,
when she watched by glance to know if my taste approved of her dress,
and when she trembled with pleasure on seeing that she pleased me, I was
affected by her emotion. Besides, she occupied a social position where
I could not escape her; I could not refuse invitations in the diplomatic
circle; her rank admitted her everywhere, and with the cleverness all
women display to obtain what pleases them, she often contrived that
the mistress of the house should place me beside her at dinner. On such
occasions she spoke in low tones to my ear. “If I were loved like Madame
de Mortsauf,” she said once, “I should sacrifice all.” She did submit
herself with a laugh in many humble ways; she promised me a discretion
equal to any test, and even asked that I would merely suffer her to
love me. “Your friend always, your mistress when you will,” she said. At
last, after an evening when she had made herself so beautiful that she
was certain to have excited my desires, she came to me. The scandal
resounded through England, where the aristocracy was horrified like
heaven itself at the fall of its highest angel. Lady Dudley abandoned
her place in the British empyrean, gave up her wealth, and endeavored to
eclipse by her sacrifices _her_ whose virtue had been the cause of this
great disaster. She took delight, like the devil on the pinnacle of the
temple, in showing me all the riches of her passionate kingdom.

Read me, I pray you, with indulgence. The matter concerns one of the
most interesting problems of human life,--a crisis to which most men
are subjected, and which I desire to explain, if only to place a warning
light upon the reef. This beautiful woman, so slender, so fragile, this
milk-white creature, so yielding, so submissive, so gentle, her brow so
endearing, the hair that crowns it so fair and fine, this tender woman,
whose brilliancy is phosphorescent and fugitive, has, in truth, an
iron nature. No horse, no matter how fiery he may be, can conquer her
vigorous wrist, or strive against that hand so soft in appearance, but
never tired. She has the foot of a doe, a thin, muscular little foot,
indescribably graceful in outline. She is so strong that she fears
no struggle; men cannot follow her on horseback; she would win a
steeple-chase against a centaur; she can bring down a stag without
stopping her horse. Her body never perspires; it inhales the fire of the
atmosphere, and lives in water under pain of not living at all. Her
love is African; her desires are like the whirlwinds of the desert--the
desert, whose torrid expanse is in her eyes, the azure, love-laden
desert, with its changeless skies, its cool and starry nights. What a
contrast to Clochegourde! the east and the west! the one drawing into
her every drop of moisture for her own nourishment, the other exuding
her soul, wrapping her dear ones in her luminous atmosphere; the one
quick and slender; the other slow and massive.

Have you ever reflected on the actual meaning of the manners and
customs and morals of England? Is it not the deification of matter? a
well-defined, carefully considered Epicureanism, judiciously applied?
No matter what may be said against the statement, England is
materialist,--possibly she does not know it herself. She lays claim to
religion and morality, from which, however, divine spirituality, the
catholic soul, is absent; and its fructifying grace cannot be replaced
by any counterfeit, however well presented it may be. England possesses
in the highest degree that science of existence which turns to account
every particle of materiality; the science that makes her women’s
slippers the most exquisite slippers in the world, gives to their
linen ineffable fragrance, lines their drawers with cedar, serves tea
carefully drawn, at a certain hour, banishes dust, nails the carpets
to the floors in every corner of the house, brushes the cellar walls,
polishes the knocker of the front door, oils the springs of the
carriage,--in short, makes matter a nutritive and downy pulp, clean and
shining, in the midst of which the soul expires of enjoyment and the
frightful monotony of comfort in a life without contrasts, deprived of
spontaneity, and which, to sum all in one word, makes a machine of you.

Thus I suddenly came to know, in the bosom of this British luxury, a
woman who is perhaps unique among her sex; who caught me in the nets of
a love excited by my indifference, and to the warmth of which I opposed
a stern continence,--one of those loves possessed of overwhelming charm,
an electricity of their own, which lead us to the skies through the
ivory gates of slumber, or bear us thither on their powerful pinions.
A love monstrously ungrateful, which laughs at the bodies of those it
kills; love without memory, a cruel love, resembling the policy of the
English nation; a love to which, alas, most men yield. You understand
the problem? Man is composed of matter and spirit; animality comes to
its end in him, and the angel begins in him. There lies the struggle we
all pass through, between the future destiny of which we are conscious
and the influence of anterior instincts from which we are not wholly
detached,--carnal love and divine love. One man combines them, another
abstains altogether; some there are who seek the satisfaction of their
anterior appetites from the whole sex; others idealize their love in one
woman who is to them the universe; some float irresolutely between the
delights of matter and the joys of soul, others spiritualize the body,
requiring of it that which it cannot give.

If, thinking over these leading characteristics of love, you take into
account the dislikes and the affinities which result from the diversity
of organisms, and which sooner or later break all ties between those who
have not fully tried each other; if you add to this the mistakes arising
from the hopes of those who live more particularly either by their
minds, or by their hearts, or by action, who either think, or feel, or
act, and whose tendency is misunderstood in the close association in
which two persons, equal counterparts, find themselves, you will have
great indulgence for sorrows to which the world is pitiless. Well, Lady
Dudley gratified the instincts, organs, appetites, the vices and virtues
of the subtile matter of which we are made; she was the mistress of the
body; Madame de Mortsauf was the wife of the soul. The love which
the mistress satisfies has its limits; matter is finite, its inherent
qualities have an ascertained force, it is capable of saturation; often
I felt a void even in Paris, near Lady Dudley. Infinitude is the region
of the heart, love had no limits at Clochegourde. I loved Lady Dudley
passionately; and certainly, though the animal in her was magnificent,
she was also superior in mind; her sparkling and satirical conversation
had a wide range. But I adored Henriette. At night I wept with
happiness, in the morning with remorse.

Some women have the art to hide their jealousy under a tone of angelic
kindness; they are, like Lady Dudley, over thirty years of age. Such
women know how to feel and how to calculate; they press out the juices
of to-day and think of the future also; they can stifle a moan, often a
natural one, with the will of a huntsman who pays no heed to a wound
in the ardor of the chase. Without ever speaking of Madame de Mortsauf,
Arabella endeavored to kill her in my soul, where she ever found her,
her own passion increasing with the consciousness of that invincible
love. Intending to triumph by comparisons which would turn to her
advantage, she was never suspicious, or complaining, or inquisitive, as
are most young women; but, like a lioness who has seized her prey
and carries it to her lair to devour, she watched that nothing should
disturb her feast, and guarded me like a rebellious captive. I wrote to
Henriette under her very eyes, but she never read a line of my letters;
she never sought in any way to know to whom they were addressed. I had
my liberty; she seemed to say to herself, “If I lose him it shall be my
own fault,” and she proudly relied on a love that would have given me
her life had I asked for it,--in fact she often told me that if I left
her she would kill herself. I have heard her praise the custom of Indian
widows who burn themselves upon their husband’s grave. “In India that is
a distinction reserved for the higher classes,” she said, “and is very
little understood by Europeans, who are incapable of understanding the
grandeur of the privilege; you must admit, however, that on the dead
level of our modern customs aristocracy can rise to greatness only
through unparalleled devotions. How can I prove to the middle classes
that the blood in my veins is not the same as theirs, unless I show them
that I can die as they cannot? Women of no birth can have diamonds and
satins and horses--even coats-of-arms, which ought to be sacred to us,
for any one can buy a name. But to love, with our heads up, in defiance
of law; to die for the idol we have chosen, with the sheets of our bed
for a shroud; to lay earth and heaven at his feet, robbing the Almighty
of his right to make a god, and never to betray that man, never, never,
even for virtue’s sake,--for, to refuse him anything in the name of
duty is to devote ourselves to something that is not _he_, and let that
something be a man or an idea, it is betrayal all the same,--these
are heights to which common women cannot attain; they know but two
matter-of-fact ways; the great high-road of virtue, or the muddy path of
the courtesan.”

Pride, you see, was her instrument; she flattered all vanities by
deifying them. She put me so high that she might live at my feet;
in fact, the seductions of her spirit were literally expressed by an
attitude of subserviency and her complete submission. In what words
shall I describe those first six months when I was lost in enervating
enjoyments, in the meshes of a love fertile in pleasures and knowing how
to vary them with a cleverness learned by long experience, yet hiding
that knowledge beneath the transports of passion. These pleasures, the
sudden revelation of the poetry of the senses, constitute the powerful
tie which binds young men to women older than they. It is the chain of
the galley-slave; it leaves an ineffaceable brand upon the soul, filling
it with disgust for pure and innocent love decked with flowers only,
which serves no alcohol in curiously chased cups inlaid with jewels and
sparkling with unquenchable fires.

Recalling my early dreams of pleasures I knew nothing of, expressed at
Clochegourde in my “selams,” the voice of my flowers, pleasures which
the union of souls renders all the more ardent, I found many sophistries
by which I excused to myself the delight with which I drained that
jewelled cup. Often, when, lost in infinite lassitude, my soul
disengaged itself from the body and floated far from earth, I thought
that these pleasures might be the means of abolishing matter and of
rendering to the spirit its power to soar. Sometimes Lady Dudley, like
other women, profited by the exaltation in which I was to bind me by
promises; under the lash of a desire she wrung blasphemies from my lips
against the angel at Clochegourde. Once a traitor I became a scoundrel.
I continued to write to Madame de Mortsauf, in the tone of the lad she
had first known in his strange blue coat; but, I admit it, her gift of
second-sight terrified me when I thought what ruin the indiscretion of a
word might bring to the dear castle of my hopes. Often, in the midst
of my pleasure a sudden horror seized me; I heard the name of Henriette
uttered by a voice above me, like that in the Scriptures, demanding:
“Cain, where is thy brother Abel?”

At last my letters remained unanswered. I was seized with horrible
anxiety and wished to leave for Clochegourde. Arabella did not oppose
it, but she talked of accompanying me to Touraine. Her woman’s wit told
her that the journey might be a means of finally detaching me from her
rival; while I, blind with fear and guilelessly unsuspicious, did not
see the trap she set for me. Lady Dudley herself proposed the humblest
concessions. She would stay near Tours, at a little country-place,
alone, disguised; she would refrain from going out in the day-time, and
only meet me in the evening when people were not likely to be about.
I left Tours on horseback. I had my reasons for this; my evening
excursions to meet her would require a horse, and mine was an Arab which
Lady Hester Stanhope had sent to the marchioness, and which she had
lately exchanged with me for that famous picture of Rembrandt which I
obtained in so singular a way, and which now hangs in her drawing-room
in London. I took the road I had traversed on foot six years earlier and
stopped beneath my walnut-tree. From there I saw Madame de Mortsauf in
a white dress standing at the edge of the terrace. Instantly I rode
towards her with the speed of lightning, in a straight line and across
country. She heard the stride of the swallow of the desert and when I
pulled him up suddenly at the terrace, she said to me: “Oh, you here!”

Those three words blasted me. She knew my treachery. Who had told her?
her mother, whose hateful letter she afterwards showed me. The feeble,
indifferent voice, once so full of life, the dull pallor of its tones
revealed a settled grief, exhaling the breath of flowers cut and left
to wither. The tempest of infidelity, like those freshets of the Loire
which bury the meadows for all time in sand, had torn its way through
her soul, leaving a desert where once the verdure clothed the fields.
I led my horse through the little gate; he lay down on the grass at my
command and the countess, who came forward slowly, exclaimed, “What a
fine animal!” She stood with folded arms lest I should try to take her
hand; I guessed her meaning.

“I will let Monsieur de Mortsauf know you are here,” she said, leaving
me.

I stood still, confounded, letting her go, watching her, always noble,
slow, and proud,--whiter than I had ever seen her; on her brow the
yellow imprint of bitterest melancholy, her head bent like a lily heavy
with rain.

“Henriette!” I cried in the agony of a man about to die.

She did not turn or pause; she disdained to say that she withdrew from
me that name, but she did not answer to it and continued on. I may feel
paltry and small in this dreadful vale of life where myriads of human
beings now dust make the surface of the globe, small indeed among that
crowd, hurrying beneath the luminous spaces which light them; but what
sense of humiliation could equal that with which I watched her calm
white figure inflexibly mounting with even steps the terraces of her
chateau of Clochegourde, the pride and the torture of that Christian
Dido? I cursed Arabella in a single imprecation which might have killed
her had she heard it, she who had left all for me as some leave all for
God. I remained lost in a world of thought, conscious of utter misery
on all sides. Presently I saw the whole family coming down; Jacques,
running with the eagerness of his age. Madeleine, a gazelle with
mournful eyes, walked with her mother. Monsieur de Mortsauf came to me
with open arms, pressed me to him and kissed me on both cheeks crying
out, “Felix, I know now that I owed you my life.”

Madame de Mortsauf stood with her back towards me during this little
scene, under pretext of showing the horse to Madeleine.

“Ha, the devil! that’s what women are,” cried the count; “admiring your
horse!”

Madeleine turned, came up to me, and I kissed her hand, looking at the
countess, who colored.

“Madeleine seems much better,” I said.

“Poor little girl!” said the countess, kissing her on her forehead.

“Yes, for the time being they are all well,” answered the count. “Except
me, Felix; I am as battered as an old tower about to fall.”

“The general is still depressed,” I remarked to Madame de Mortsauf.

“We all have our blue devils--is not that the English term?” she
replied.

The whole party walked on towards the vineyard with the feeling that
some serious event had happened. She had no wish to be alone with me.
Still, I was her guest.

“But about your horse? why isn’t he attended to?” said the count.

“You see I am wrong if I think of him, and wrong if I do not,” remarked
the countess.

“Well, yes,” said her husband; “there is a time to do things, and a time
not to do them.”

“I will attend to him,” I said, finding this sort of greeting
intolerable. “No one but myself can put him into his stall; my groom is
coming by the coach from Chinon; he will rub him down.”

“I suppose your groom is from England,” she said.

“That is where they all come from,” remarked the count, who grew
cheerful in proportion as his wife seemed depressed. Her coldness
gave him an opportunity to oppose her, and he overwhelmed me with
friendliness.

“My dear Felix,” he said, taking my hand, and pressing it
affectionately, “pray forgive Madame de Mortsauf; women are so
whimsical. But it is owing to their weakness; they cannot have the
evenness of temper we owe to our strength of character. She really loves
you, I know it; only--”

While the count was speaking Madame de Mortsauf gradually moved away
from us so as to leave us alone.

“Felix,” said the count, in a low voice, looking at his wife, who was
now going up to the house with her two children, “I don’t know what is
going on in Madame de Mortsauf’s mind, but for the last six weeks her
disposition has completely changed. She, so gentle, so devoted hitherto,
is now extraordinarily peevish.”

Manette told me later that the countess had fallen into a state of
depression which made her indifferent to the count’s provocations. No
longer finding a soft substance in which he could plant his arrows, the
man became as uneasy as a child when the poor insect it is tormenting
ceases to move. He now needed a confidant, as the hangman needs a
helper.

“Try to question Madame de Mortsauf,” he said after a pause, “and find
out what is the matter. A woman always has secrets from her husband;
but perhaps she will tell you what troubles her. I would sacrifice
everything to make her happy, even to half my remaining days or half my
fortune. She is necessary to my very life. If I have not that angel at
my side as I grow old I shall be the most wretched of men. I do desire
to die easy. Tell her I shall not be here long to trouble her. Yes,
Felix, my poor friend, I am going fast, I know it. I hide the fatal
truth from every one; why should I worry them beforehand? The trouble is
in the orifice of the stomach, my friend. I have at last discovered the
true cause of this disease; it is my sensibility that is killing me.
Indeed, all our feelings affect the gastric centre.”

“Then do you mean,” I said, smiling, “that the best-hearted people die
of their stomachs?”

“Don’t laugh, Felix; nothing is more absolutely true. Too keen
a sensibility increases the play of the sympathetic nerve; these
excitements of feeling keep the mucous membrane of the stomach in a
state of constant irritation. If this state continues it deranges, at
first insensibly, the digestive functions; the secretions change, the
appetite is impaired, and the digestion becomes capricious; sharp
pains are felt; they grow worse day by day, and more frequent; then
the disorder comes to a crisis, as if a slow poison were passing the
alimentary canal; the mucous membrane thickens, the valve of the pylorus
becomes indurated and forms a scirrhus, of which the patient dies. Well,
I have reached that point, my dear friend. The induration is proceeding
and nothing checks it. Just look at my yellow skin, my feverish eyes,
my excessive thinness. I am withering away. But what is to be done?
I brought the seeds of the disease home with me from the emigration;
heaven knows what I suffered then! My marriage, which might have
repaired the wrong, far from soothing my ulcerated mind increased the
wound. What did I find? ceaseless fears for the children, domestic jars,
a fortune to remake, economies which required great privations, which
I was obliged to impose upon my wife, but which I was the one to suffer
from; and then,--I can tell this to none but you, Felix,--I have a worse
trouble yet. Though Blanche is an angel, she does not understand me; she
knows nothing of my sufferings and she aggravates them; but I forgive
her. It is a dreadful thing to say, my friend, but a less virtuous woman
might have made me more happy by lending herself to consolations which
Blanche never thinks of, for she is as silly as a child. Moreover my
servants torment me; blockheads who take my French for Greek! When our
fortune was finally remade inch by inch, and I had some relief from
care, it was too late, the harm was done; I had reached the period when
the appetite is vitiated. Then came my severe illness, so ill-managed by
Origet. In short, I have not six months to live.”

I listened to the count in terror. On meeting the countess I had been
struck with her yellow skin and the feverish brilliancy of her eyes.
I led the count towards the house while seeming to listen to his
complaints and his medical dissertations; but my thoughts were all with
Henriette, and I wanted to observe her. We found her in the salon, where
she was listening to a lesson in mathematics which the Abbe Dominis
was giving Jacques, and at the same time showing Madeleine a stitch of
embroidery. Formerly she would have laid aside every occupation the day
of my arrival to be with me. But my love was so deeply real that I drove
back into my heart the grief I felt at this contrast between the past
and the present, and thought only of the fatal yellow tint on that
celestial face, which resembled the halo of divine light Italian
painters put around the faces of their saints. I felt the icy wind of
death pass over me. Then when the fire of her eyes, no longer softened
by the liquid light in which in former times they moved, fell upon me,
I shuddered; I noticed several changes, caused by grief, which I had not
seen in the open air. The slender lines which, at my last visit, were
so lightly marked upon her forehead had deepened; her temples with their
violet veins seemed burning and concave; her eyes were sunk beneath the
brows, their circles browned;--alas! she was discolored like a fruit
when decay is beginning to show upon the surface, or a worm is at the
core. I, whose whole ambition had been to pour happiness into her soul,
I it was who embittered the spring from which she had hoped to refresh
her life and renew her courage. I took a seat beside her and said in a
voice filled with tears of repentance, “Are you satisfied with your own
health?”

“Yes,” she answered, plunging her eyes into mine. “My health is there,”
 she added, motioning to Jacques and Madeleine.

The latter, just fifteen, had come victoriously out of her struggle with
anaemia, and was now a woman. She had grown tall; the Bengal roses were
blooming in her once sallow cheeks. She had lost the unconcern of a
child who looks every one in the face, and now dropped her eyes; her
movements were slow and infrequent, like those of her mother; her figure
was slim, but the gracefulness of the bust was already developing;
already an instinct of coquetry had smoothed the magnificent black hair
which lay in bands upon her Spanish brow. She was like those pretty
statuettes of the Middle Ages, so delicate in outline, so slender in
form that the eye as it seizes their charm fears to break them. Health,
the fruit of untold efforts, had made her cheeks as velvety as a peach
and given to her throat the silken down which, like her mother’s,
caught the light. She was to live! God had written it, dear bud of the
loveliest of human flowers, on the long lashes of her eyelids, on the
curve of those shoulders which gave promise of a development as superb
as her mother’s! This brown young girl, erect as a poplar, contrasted
with Jacques, a fragile youth of seventeen, whose head had grown
immensely, causing anxiety by the rapid expansion of the forehead, while
his feverish, weary eyes were in keeping with a voice that was deep and
sonorous. The voice gave forth too strong a volume of tone, the eye too
many thoughts. It was Henriette’s intellect and soul and heart that were
here devouring with swift flames a body without stamina; for Jacques
had the milk-white skin and high color which characterize young English
women doomed sooner or later to the consumptive curse,--an appearance of
health that deceives the eye. Following a sign by which Henriette,
after showing me Madeleine, made me look at Jacques drawing geometrical
figures and algebraic calculations on a board before the Abbe Dominis,
I shivered at the sight of death hidden beneath the roses, and was
thankful for the self-deception of his mother.

“When I see my children thus, happiness stills my griefs--just as
those griefs are dumb, and even disappear, when I see them failing. My
friend,” she said, her eyes shining with maternal pleasure, “if other
affections fail us, the feelings rewarded here, the duties done and
crowned with success, are compensation enough for defeat elsewhere.
Jacques will be, like you, a man of the highest education, possessed of
the worthiest knowledge; he will be, like you, an honor to his country,
which he may assist in governing, helped by you, whose standing will be
so high; but I will strive to make him faithful to his first affections.
Madeleine, dear creature, has a noble heart; she is pure as the snows
on the highest Alps; she will have a woman’s devotion and a woman’s
graceful intellect. She is proud; she is worthy of being a Lenoncourt.
My motherhood, once so tried, so tortured, is happy now, happy with an
infinite happiness, unmixed with pain. Yes, my life is full, my life
is rich. You see, God makes my joy to blossom in the heart of these
sanctified affections, and turns to bitterness those that might have led
me astray--”

“Good!” cried the abbe, joyfully. “Monsieur le vicomte begins to know as
much as I--”

Just then Jacques coughed.

“Enough for to-day, my dear abbe,” said the countess, “above all, no
chemistry. Go for a ride on horseback, Jacques,” she added, letting her
son kiss her with the tender and yet dignified pleasure of a mother.
“Go, dear, but take care of yourself.”

“But,” I said, as her eyes followed Jacques with a lingering look, “you
have not answered me. Do you feel ill?”

“Oh, sometimes, in my stomach. If I were in Paris I should have the
honors of gastritis, the fashionable disease.”

“My mother suffers very much and very often,” said Madeleine.

“Ah!” she said, “does my health interest you?”

Madeleine, astonished at the irony of these words, looked from one to
the other; my eyes counted the roses on the cushion of the gray and
green sofa which was in the salon.

“This situation is intolerable,” I whispered in her ear.

“Did I create it?” she asked. “Dear child,” she said aloud, with one of
those cruel levities by which women point their vengeance, “don’t
you read history? France and England are enemies, and ever have been.
Madeleine knows that; she knows that a broad sea, and a cold and stormy
one, separates them.”

The vases on the mantelshelf had given place to candelabra, no doubt to
deprive me of the pleasure of filling them with flowers; I found them
later in my own room. When my servant arrived I went out to give him
some orders; he had brought me certain things I wished to place in my
room.

“Felix,” said the countess, “do not make a mistake. My aunt’s old room
is now Madeleine’s. Yours is over the count’s.”

Though guilty, I had a heart; those words were dagger thrusts coldly
given at its tenderest spot, for which she seemed to aim. Moral
sufferings are not fixed quantities; they depend on the sensitiveness of
souls. The countess had trod each round of the ladder of pain; but, for
that very reason, the kindest of women was now as cruel as she was once
beneficent. I looked at Henriette, but she averted her head. I went to
my new room, which was pretty, white and green. Once there I burst into
tears. Henriette heard me as she entered with a bunch of flowers in her
hand.

“Henriette,” I said, “will you never forgive a wrong that is indeed
excusable?”

“Do not call me Henriette,” she said. “She no longer exists, poor soul;
but you may feel sure of Madame de Mortsauf, a devoted friend, who will
listen to you and who will love you. Felix, we will talk of these things
later. If you have still any tenderness for me let me grow accustomed
to seeing you. Whenever words will not rend my heart, if the day should
ever come when I recover courage, I will speak to you, but not till
then. Look at the valley,” she said, pointing to the Indre, “it hurts
me, I love it still.”

“Ah, perish England and all her women! I will send my resignation to the
king; I will live and die here, pardoned.”

“No, love her; love that woman! Henriette is not. This is no play, and
you should know it.”

She left the room, betraying by the tone of her last words the extent of
her wounds. I ran after her and held her back, saying, “Do you no longer
love me?”

“You have done me more harm than all my other troubles put together.
To-day I suffer less, therefore I love you less. Be kind; do not
increase my pain; if you suffer, remember that--I--live.”

She withdrew her hand, which I held, cold, motionless, but moist, in
mine, and darted like an arrow through the corridor in which this scene
of actual tragedy took place.

At dinner, the count subjected me to a torture I had little expected.
“So the Marchioness of Dudley is not in Paris?” he said.

I blushed excessively, but answered, “No.”

“She is not in Tours,” continued the count.

“She is not divorced, and she can go back to England. Her husband would
be very glad if she would return to him,” I said, eagerly.

“Has she children?” asked Madame de Mortsauf, in a changed voice.

“Two sons,” I replied.

“Where are they?”

“In England, with their father.”

“Come, Felix,” interposed the count; “be frank; is she as handsome as
they say?”

“How can you ask him such a question?” cried the countess. “Is not the
woman you love always the handsomest of women?”

“Yes, always,” I said, firmly, with a glance which she could not
sustain.

“You are a happy fellow,” said the count; “yes, a very happy one. Ha! in
my young days, I should have gone mad over such a conquest--”

“Hush!” said Madame de Mortsauf, reminding the count of Madeleine by a
look.

“I am not a child,” he said.

When we left the table I followed the countess to the terrace. When
we were alone she exclaimed, “How is it possible that some women can
sacrifice their children to a man? Wealth, position, the world, I can
conceive of; eternity? yes, possibly; but children! deprive one’s self
of one’s children!”

“Yes, and such women would give even more if they had it; they sacrifice
everything.”

The world was suddenly reversed before her, her ideas became confused.
The grandeur of that thought struck her; a suspicion entered her mind
that sacrifice, immolation justified happiness; the echo of her own
inward cry for love came back to her; she stood dumb in presence of her
wasted life. Yes, for a moment horrible doubts possessed her; then she
rose, grand and saintly, her head erect.

“Love her well, Felix,” she said, with tears in her eyes; “she shall
be my happy sister. I will forgive her the harm she has done me if she
gives you what you could not have here. You are right; I have never told
you that I loved you, and I never have loved you as the world loves. But
if she is a mother how can she love you so?”

“Dear saint,” I answered, “I must be less moved than I am now, before I
can explain to you how it is that you soar victoriously above her. She
is a woman of earth, the daughter of decaying races; you are the child
of heaven, an angel worthy of worship; you have my heart, she my flesh
only. She knows this and it fills her with despair; she would change
parts with you even though the cruellest martyrdom were the price of the
change. But all is irremediable. To you the soul, to you the thoughts,
the love that is pure, to you youth and old age; to her the desires and
joys of passing passion; to you remembrance forever, to her oblivion--”

“Tell me, tell me that again, oh, my friend!” she turned to a bench and
sat down, bursting into tears. “If that be so, Felix, virtue, purity
of life, a mother’s love, are not mistakes. Oh, pour that balm upon
my wounds! Repeat the words which bear me back to heaven, where once
I longed to rise with you. Bless me by a look, by a sacred word,--I
forgive you for the sufferings you have caused me the last two months.”

“Henriette, there are mysteries in the life of men of which you know
nothing. I met you at an age when the feelings of the heart stifle the
desires implanted in our nature; but many scenes, the memory of which
will kindle my soul to the hour of death, must have told you that this
age was drawing to a close, and it was your constant triumph still to
prolong its mute delights. A love without possession is maintained
by the exasperation of desire; but there comes a moment when all is
suffering within us--for in this we have no resemblance to you. We
possess a power we cannot abdicate, or we cease to be men. Deprived
of the nourishment it needs, the heart feeds upon itself, feeling an
exhaustion which is not death, but which precedes it. Nature cannot long
be silenced; some trifling accident awakens it to a violence that seems
like madness. No, I have not loved, but I have thirsted in the desert.”

“The desert!” she said bitterly, pointing to the valley. “Ah!” she
exclaimed, “how he reasons! what subtle distinctions! Faithful hearts
are not so learned.”

“Henriette,” I said, “do not quarrel with me for a chance expression.
No, my soul has not vacillated, but I have not been master of my senses.
That woman is not ignorant that you are the only one I ever loved. She
plays a secondary part in my life; she knows it and is resigned. I have
the right to leave her as men leave courtesans.”

“And then?”

“She tells me that she will kill herself,” I answered, thinking that
this resolve would startle Henriette. But when she heard it a disdainful
smile, more expressive than the thoughts it conveyed, flickered on her
lips. “My dear conscience,” I continued, “if you would take into
account my resistance and the seductions that led to my fall you would
understand the fatal--”

“Yes, fatal!” she cried. “I believed in you too much. I believed you
capable of the virtue a priest practises. All is over,” she continued,
after a pause. “I owe you much, my friend; you have extinguished in me
the fires of earthly life. The worst of the way is over; age is coming
on. I am ailing now, soon I may be ill; I can never be the brilliant
fairy who showers you with favors. Be faithful to Lady Dudley.
Madeleine, whom I was training to be yours, ah! who will have her now?
Poor Madeleine, poor Madeleine!” she repeated, like the mournful burden
of a song. “I would you had heard her say to me when you came: ‘Mother,
you are not kind to Felix!’ Dear creature!”

She looked at me in the warm rays of the setting sun as they glided
through the foliage. Seized with compassion for the shipwreck of
our lives she turned back to memories of our pure past, yielding to
meditations which were mutual. We were silent, recalling past scenes;
our eyes went from the valley to the fields, from the windows of
Clochegourde to those of Frapesle, peopling the dream with my bouquets,
the fragrant language of our desires. It was her last hour of pleasure,
enjoyed with the purity of her Catholic soul. This scene, so grand to
each of us, cast its melancholy on both. She believed my words, and saw
where I placed her--in the skies.

“My friend,” she said, “I obey God, for his hand is in all this.”

I did not know until much later the deep meaning of her words. We slowly
returned up the terraces. She took my arm and leaned upon it resignedly,
bleeding still, but with a bandage on her wound.

“Human life is thus,” she said. “What had Monsieur de Mortsauf done to
deserve his fate? It proves the existence of a better world. Alas, for
those who walk in happier ways!”

She went on, estimating life so truly, considering its diverse aspects
so profoundly that these cold judgments revealed to me the disgust that
had come upon her for all things here below. When we reached the portico
she dropped my arm and said these last words: “If God has given us
the sentiment and the desire for happiness ought he not to take charge
himself of innocent souls who have found sorrow only in this low world?
Either that must be so, or God is not, and our life is no more than a
cruel jest.”

She entered and turned the house quickly; I found her on the sofa,
crouching, as though blasted by the voice which flung Saul to the
ground.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

“I no longer know what is virtue,” she replied; “I have no consciousness
of my own.”

We were silent, petrified, listening to the echo of those words which
fell like a stone cast into a gulf.

“If I am mistaken in my life _she_ is right in _hers_,” Henriette said
at last.

Thus her last struggle followed her last happiness. When the count came
in she complained of illness, she who never complained. I conjured her
to tell me exactly where she suffered; but she refused to explain and
went to bed, leaving me a prey to unending remorse. Madeleine went with
her mother, and the next day I heard that the countess had been seized
with nausea, caused, she said, by the violent excitements of that day.
Thus I, who longed to give my life for hers, I was killing her.

“Dear count,” I said to Monsieur de Mortsauf, who obliged me to play
backgammon, “I think the countess very seriously ill. There is still
time to save her; pray send for Origet, and persuade her to follow his
advice.”

“Origet, who half killed me?” cried the count. “No, no; I’ll consult
Carbonneau.”

During this week, especially the first days of it, everything was
anguish to me--the beginning of paralysis of the heart--my vanity was
mortified, my soul rent. One must needs have been the centre of all
looks and aspirations, the mainspring of the life about him, the torch
from which all others drew their light, to understand the horror of the
void that was now about me. All things were there, the same, but the
spirit that gave life to them was extinct, like a blown-out flame. I now
understood the desperate desire of lovers never to see each other again
when love has flown. To be nothing where we were once so much! To find
the chilling silence of the grave where life so lately sparkled!
Such comparisons are overwhelming. I came at last to envy the dismal
ignorance of all happiness which had darkened my youth. My despair
became so great that the countess, I thought, felt pity for it. One day
after dinner as we were walking on the meadows beside the river I made
a last effort to obtain forgiveness. I told Jacques to go on with his
sister, and leaving the count to walk alone, I took Henriette to the
punt.

“Henriette,” I said; “one word of forgiveness, or I fling myself into
the Indre! I have sinned,--yes, it is true; but am I not like a dog in
his faithful attachments? I return like him, like him ashamed. If he
does wrong he is struck, but he loves the hand that strikes him; strike
me, bruise me, but give me back your heart.”

“Poor child,” she said, “are you not always my son?”

She took my arm and silently rejoined her children, with whom she
returned to Clochegourde, leaving me to the count, who began to talk
politics apropos of his neighbors.

“Let us go in,” I said; “you are bare-headed, and the dew may do you an
injury.”

“You pity me, my dear Felix,” he answered; “you understand me, but my
wife never tries to comfort me,--on principle, perhaps.”

Never would she have left me to walk home with her husband; it was now
I who had to find excuses to join her. I found her with her children,
explaining the rules of backgammon to Jacques.

“See there,” said the count, who was always jealous of the affection she
showed for her children; “it is for them that I am neglected. Husbands,
my dear Felix, are always suppressed. The most virtuous woman in the
world has ways of satisfying her desire to rob conjugal affection.”

She said nothing and continued as before.

“Jacques,” he said, “come here.”

Jacques objected slightly.

“Your father wants you; go at once, my son,” said his mother, pushing
him.

“They love me by order,” said the old man, who sometimes perceived his
situation.

“Monsieur,” she answered, passing her hand over Madeleine’s smooth
tresses, which were dressed that day “a la belle Ferronniere”; “do not
be unjust to us poor women; life is not so easy for us to bear. Perhaps
the children are the virtues of a mother.”

“My dear,” said the count, who took it into his head to be logical,
“what you say signifies that women who have no children would have no
virtue, and would leave their husbands in the lurch.”

The countess rose hastily and took Madeleine to the portico.

“That’s marriage, my dear fellow,” remarked the count to me. “Do you
mean to imply by going off in that manner that I am talking nonsense?”
 he cried to his wife, taking his son by the hand and going to the
portico after her with a furious look in his eyes.

“On the contrary, Monsieur, you frightened me. Your words hurt me
cruelly,” she added, in a hollow voice. “If virtue does not consist in
sacrificing everything to our children and our husband, what is virtue?”

“Sac-ri-ficing!” cried the count, making each syllable the blow of a
sledge-hammer on the heart of his victim. “What have you sacrificed to
your children? What do you sacrifice to me? Speak! what means all this?
Answer. What is going on here? What did you mean by what you said?”

“Monsieur,” she replied, “would you be satisfied to be loved for love of
God, or to know your wife virtuous for virtue’s sake?”

“Madame is right,” I said, interposing in a shaken voice which vibrated
in two hearts; “yes, the noblest privilege conferred by reason is to
attribute our virtues to the beings whose happiness is our work, and
whom we render happy, not from policy, nor from duty, but from an
inexhaustible and voluntary affection--”

A tear shone in Henriette’s eyes.

“And, dear count,” I continued, “if by chance a woman is involuntarily
subjected to feelings other than those society imposes on her, you must
admit that the more irresistible that feeling is, the more virtuous she
is in smothering it, in sacrificing herself to her husband and children.
This theory is not applicable to me who unfortunately show an example to
the contrary, nor to you whom it will never concern.”

“You have a noble soul, Felix,” said the count, slipping his arm, not
ungracefully, round his wife’s waist and drawing her towards him to
say: “Forgive a poor sick man, dear, who wants to be loved more than he
deserves.”

“There are some hearts that are all generosity,” she said, resting her
head upon his shoulder. The scene made her tremble to such a degree that
her comb fell, her hair rolled down, and she turned pale. The count,
holding her up, gave a sort of groan as he felt her fainting; he caught
her in his arms as he might a child, and carried her to the sofa in the
salon, where we all surrounded her. Henriette held my hand in hers as if
to tell me that we two alone knew the secret of that scene, so simple in
itself, so heart-rending to her.

“I do wrong,” she said to me in a low voice, when the count left the
room to fetch a glass of orange-flower water. “I have many wrongs to
repent of towards you; I wished to fill you with despair when I ought to
have received you mercifully. Dear, you are kindness itself, and I alone
can appreciate it. Yes, I know there is a kindness prompted by passion.
Men have various ways of being kind; some from contempt, others from
impulse, from calculation, through indolence of nature; but you, my
friend, you have been absolutely kind.”

“If that be so,” I replied, “remember that all that is good or great in
me comes through you. You know well that I am of your making.”

“That word is enough for any woman’s happiness,” she said, as the count
re-entered the room. “I feel better,” she said, rising; “I want air.”

We went down to the terrace, fragrant with the acacias which were still
in bloom. She had taken my right arm, and pressed it against her heart,
thus expressing her sad thoughts; but they were, she said, of a sadness
dear to her. No doubt she would gladly have been alone with me; but her
imagination, inexpert in women’s wiles, did not suggest to her any way
of sending her children and the count back to the house. We therefore
talked on indifferent subjects, while she pondered a means of pouring a
few last thoughts from her heart to mine.

“It is a long time since I have driven out,” she said, looking at the
beauty of the evening. “Monsieur, will you please order the carriage
that I may take a turn?”

She knew that after evening prayer she could not speak with me, for the
count was sure to want his backgammon. She might have returned to the
warm and fragrant terrace after her husband had gone to bed, but she
feared, perhaps, to trust herself beneath those shadows, or to walk by
the balustrade where our eyes could see the course of the Indre through
the dear valley. As the silent and sombre vaults of a cathedral lift
the soul to prayer, so leafy ways, lighted by the moon, perfumed with
penetrating odors, alive with the murmuring noises of the spring-tide,
stir the fibres and weaken the resolves of those who love. The country
calms the old, but excites the young. We knew it well. Two strokes of
the bell announced the hour of prayer. The countess shivered.

“Dear Henriette, are you ill?”

“There is no Henriette,” she said. “Do not bring her back. She was
capricious and exacting; now you have a friend whose courage has been
strengthened by the words which heaven itself dictated to you. We will
talk of this later. We must be punctual at prayers, for it is my day to
lead them.”

As Madame de Mortsauf said the words in which she begged the help of God
through all the adversities of life, a tone came into her voice which
struck all present. Did she use her gift of second sight to foresee the
terrible emotion she was about to endure through my forgetfulness of an
engagement made with Arabella?

“We have time to make three kings before the horses are harnessed,” said
the count, dragging me back to the salon. “You can go and drive with my
wife, and I’ll go to bed.”

The game was stormy, like all others. The countess heard the count’s
voice either from her room or from Madeleine’s.

“You show a strange hospitality,” she said, re-entering the salon.

I looked at her with amazement; I could not get accustomed to the change
in her; formerly she would have been most careful not to protect
me against the count; then it gladdened her that I should share her
sufferings and bear them with patience for love of her.

“I would give my life,” I whispered in her ear, “if I could hear you say
again, as you once said, ‘Poor dear, poor dear!’”

She lowered her eyes, remembering the moment to which I alluded, yet her
glance turned to me beneath her eyelids, expressing the joy of a
woman who finds the mere passing tones from her heart preferred to the
delights of another love. The count was losing the game; he said he was
tired, as an excuse to give it up, and we went to walk on the lawn while
waiting for the carriage. When the count left us, such pleasure shone on
my face that Madame de Mortsauf questioned me by a look of surprise and
curiosity.

“Henriette does exist,” I said. “You love me still. You wound me with an
evident intention to break my heart. I may yet be happy!”

“There was but a fragment of that poor woman left, and you have now
destroyed even that,” she said. “God be praised; he gives me strength
to bear my righteous martyrdom. Yes, I still love you, and I might have
erred; the English woman shows me the abyss.”

We got into the carriage and the coachman asked for orders.

“Take the road to Chinon by the avenue, and come back by the Charlemagne
moor and the road to Sache.”

“What day is it?” I asked, with too much eagerness.

“Saturday.”

“Then don’t go that way, madame, the road will be crowded with
poultry-men and their carts returning from Tours.”

“Do as I told you,” she said to the coachman. We knew the tones of our
voices too well to be able to hide from each other our least emotion.
Henriette understood all.

“You did not think of the poultry-men when you appointed this evening,”
 she said with a tinge of irony. “Lady Dudley is at Tours, and she
is coming here to meet you; do not deny it. ‘What day is it?--the
poultry-men--their carts!’ Did you ever take notice of such things in
our old drives?”

“It only shows that at Clochegourde I forget everything,” I answered,
simply.

“She is coming to meet you?”

“Yes.”

“At what hour?”

“Half-past eleven.”

“Where?”

“On the moor.”

“Do not deceive me; is it not at the walnut-tree?”

“On the moor.”

“We will go there,” she said, “and I shall see her.”

When I heard these words I regarded my future life as settled. I at once
resolved to marry Lady Dudley and put an end to the miserable struggle
which threatened to exhaust my sensibilities and destroy by these
repeated shocks the delicate delights which had hitherto resembled the
flower of fruits. My sullen silence wounded the countess, the grandeur
of whose mind I misjudged.

“Do not be angry with me,” she said, in her golden voice. “This,
dear, is my punishment. You can never be loved as you are here,” she
continued, laying my hand upon her heart. “I now confess it; but Lady
Dudley has saved me. To her the stains,--I do not envy them,--to me the
glorious love of angels! I have traversed vast tracts of thought since
you returned here. I have judged life. Lift up the soul and you rend it;
the higher we go the less sympathy we meet; instead of suffering in the
valley, we suffer in the skies, as the soaring eagle bears in his heart
the arrow of some common herdsman. I comprehend at last that earth and
heaven are incompatible. Yes, to those who would live in the celestial
sphere God must be all in all. We must love our friends as we love our
children,--for them, not for ourselves. Self is the cause of misery and
grief. My soul is capable of soaring higher than the eagle; there is
a love which cannot fail me. But to live for this earthly life is too
debasing,--here the selfishness of the senses reigns supreme over the
spirituality of the angel that is within us. The pleasures of passion
are stormy, followed by enervating anxieties which impair the vigor of
the soul. I came to the shores of the sea where such tempests rage;
I have seen them too near; they have wrapped me in their clouds; the
billows did not break at my feet, they caught me in a rough embrace
which chilled my heart. No! I must escape to higher regions; I should
perish on the shores of this vast sea. I see in you, as in all others
who have grieved me, the guardian of my virtue. My life has been mingled
with anguish, fortunately proportioned to my strength; it has thus been
kept free from evil passions, from seductive peace, and ever near to
God. Our attachment was the mistaken attempt, the innocent effort of
two children striving to satisfy their own hearts, God, and men--folly,
Felix! Ah,” she said quickly, “what does that woman call you?”

“‘Amedee,’” I answered, “‘Felix’ is a being apart, who belongs to none
but you.”

“‘Henriette’ is slow to die,” she said, with a gentle smile, “but
die she will at the first effort of the humble Christian, the
self-respecting mother; she whose virtue tottered yesterday and is
firm to-day. What may I say to you? This. My life has been, and is,
consistent with itself in all its circumstances, great and small. The
heart to which the rootlets of my first affection should have clung, my
mother’s heart, was closed to me, in spite of my persistence in seeking
a cleft through which they might have slipped. I was a girl; I came
after the death of three boys; and I vainly strove to take their place
in the hearts of my parents; the wound I gave to the family pride was
never healed. When my gloomy childhood was over and I knew my aunt,
death took her from me all too soon. Monsieur de Mortsauf, to whom I
vowed myself, has repeatedly, nay without respite, smitten me, not being
himself aware of it, poor man! His love has the simple-minded egotism
our children show to us. He has no conception of the harm he does me,
and he is heartily forgiven for it. My children, those dear children
who are bound to my flesh through their sufferings, to my soul by their
characters, to my nature by their innocent happiness,--those children
were surely given to show me how much strength and patience a mother’s
breast contains. Yes, my children are my virtues. You know how my heart
has been harrowed for them, by them, in spite of them. To be a mother
was, for me, to buy the right to suffer. When Hagar cried in the desert
an angel came and opened a spring of living water for that poor slave;
but I, when the limpid stream to which (do you remember?) you tried to
guide me flowed past Clochegourde, its waters changed to bitterness for
me. Yes, the sufferings you have inflicted on my soul are terrible. God,
no doubt, will pardon those who know affection only through its pains.
But if the keenest of these pains has come to me through you, perhaps I
deserved them. God is not unjust. Ah, yes, Felix, a kiss furtively taken
may be a crime. Perhaps it is just that a woman should harshly expiate
the few steps taken apart from husband and children that she might walk
alone with thoughts and memories that were not of them, and so walking,
marry her soul to another. Perhaps it is the worst of crimes when the
inward being lowers itself to the region of human kisses. When a woman
bends to receive her husband’s kiss with a mask upon her face, that is
a crime! It is a crime to think of a future springing from a death, a
crime to imagine a motherhood without terrors, handsome children playing
in the evening with a beloved father before the eyes of a happy mother.
Yes, I sinned, sinned greatly. I have loved the penances inflicted by
the Church,--which did not redeem the faults, for the priest was too
indulgent. God has placed the punishment in the faults themselves,
committing the execution of his vengeance to the one for whom the faults
were committed. When I gave my hair, did I not give myself? Why did I so
often dress in white? because I seemed the more your lily; did you not
see me here, for the first time, all in white? Alas! I have loved my
children less, for all intense affection is stolen from the natural
affections. Felix, do you not see that all suffering has its meaning.
Strike me, wound me even more than Monsieur de Mortsauf and my
children’s state have wounded me. That woman is the instrument of God’s
anger; I will meet her without hatred; I will smile upon her; under pain
of being neither Christian, wife, nor mother, I ought to love her. If,
as you tell me, I contributed to keep your heart unsoiled by the world,
that Englishwoman ought not to hate me. A woman should love the mother
of the man she loves, and I am your mother. What place have I sought in
your heart? that left empty by Madame de Vandenesse. Yes, yes, you have
always complained of my coldness; yes, I am indeed your mother only.
Forgive me therefore the involuntary harshness with which I met you on
your return; a mother ought to rejoice that her son is so well loved--”

She laid her head for a moment on my breast, repeating the words,
“Forgive me! oh, forgive me!” in a voice that was neither her girlish
voice with its joyous notes, nor the woman’s voice with despotic
endings; not the sighing sound of the mother’s woe, but an agonizing new
voice for new sorrows.

“You, Felix,” she presently continued, growing animated; “you are the
friend who can do no wrong. Ah! you have lost nothing in my heart; do
not blame yourself, do not feel the least remorse. It was the height
of selfishness in me to ask you to sacrifice the joys of life to an
impossible future; impossible, because to realize it a woman must
abandon her children, abdicate her position, and renounce eternity. Many
a time I have thought you higher than I; you were great and noble, I,
petty and criminal. Well, well, it is settled now; I can be to you no
more than a light from above, sparkling and cold, but unchanging. Only,
Felix, let me not love the brother I have chosen without return. Love
me, cherish me! The love of a sister has no dangerous to-morrow, no
hours of difficulty. You will never find it necessary to deceive the
indulgent heart which will live in future within your life, grieve for
your griefs, be joyous with your joys, which will love the women who
make you happy, and resent their treachery. I never had a brother to
love in that way. Be noble enough to lay aside all self-love and turn
our attachment, hitherto so doubtful and full of trouble, into this
sweet and sacred love. In this way I shall be enabled to still live. I
will begin to-night by taking Lady Dudley’s hand.”

She did not weep as she said these words so full of bitter knowledge,
by which, casting aside the last remaining veil which hid her soul from
mine, she showed by how many ties she had linked herself to me, how many
chains I had hewn apart. Our emotions were so great that for a time we
did not notice it was raining heavily.

“Will Madame la comtesse wait here under shelter?” asked the coachman,
pointing to the chief inn of Ballan.

She made a sign of assent, and we stayed nearly half an hour under the
vaulted entrance, to the great surprise of the inn-people who wondered
what brought Madame de Mortsauf on that road at eleven o’clock at night.
Was she going to Tours? Had she come from there? When the storm ceased
and the rain turned to what is called in Touraine a “brouee,” which does
not hinder the moon from shining through the higher mists as the wind
with its upper currents whirls them away, the coachman drove from our
shelter, and, to my great delight, turned to go back the way we came.

“Follow my orders,” said the countess, gently.

We now took the road across the Charlemagne moor, where the rain began
again. Half-way across I heard the barking of Arabella’s dog; a horse
came suddenly from beneath a clump of oaks, jumped the ditch which
owners of property dig around their cleared lands when they consider
them suitable for cultivation, and carried Lady Dudley to the moor to
meet the carriage.

“What pleasure to meet a love thus if it can be done without sin,” said
Henriette.

The barking of the dog had told Lady Dudley that I was in the carriage.
She thought, no doubt, that I had brought it to meet her on account of
the rain. When we reached the spot where she was waiting, she urged her
horse to the side of the road with the equestrian dexterity for which
she was famous, and which to Henriette seemed marvellous.

“Amedee,” she said, and the name in her English pronunciation had a
fairy-like charm.

“He is here, madame,” said the countess, looking at the fantastic
creature plainly visible in the moonlight, whose impatient face was
oddly swathed in locks of hair now out of curl.

You know with what swiftness two women examine each other. The
Englishwoman recognized her rival, and was gloriously English; she gave
us a look full of insular contempt, and disappeared in the underbrush
with the rapidity of an arrow.

“Drive on quickly to Clochegourde,” cried the countess, to whom that
cutting look was like the blow of an axe upon her heart.

The coachman turned to get upon the road to Chinon which was better than
that to Sache. As the carriage again approached the moor we heard the
furious galloping of Arabella’s horse and the steps of her dog. All
three were skirting the wood behind the bushes.

“She is going; you will lose her forever,” said Henriette.

“Let her go,” I answered, “and without a regret.”

“Oh, poor woman!” cried the countess, with a sort of compassionate
horror. “Where will she go?”

“Back to La Grenadiere,--a little house near Saint-Cyr,” I said, “where
she is staying.”

Just as we were entering the avenue of Clochegourde Arabella’s dog
barked joyfully and bounded up to the carriage.

“She is here before us!” cried the countess; then after a pause she
added, “I have never seen a more beautiful woman. What a hand and what
a figure! Her complexion outdoes the lily, her eyes are literally bright
as diamonds. But she rides too well; she loves to display her strength;
I think her violent and too active,--also too bold for our conventions.
The woman who recognizes no law is apt to listen only to her caprices.
Those who seek to shine, to make a stir, have not the gift of constancy.
Love needs tranquillity; I picture it to myself like a vast lake in
which the lead can find no bottom; where tempests may be violent, but
are rare and controlled within certain limits; where two beings live on
a flowery isle far from the world whose luxury and display offend them.
Still, love must take the imprint of the character. Perhaps I am wrong.
If nature’s elements are compelled to take certain forms determined by
climate, why is it not the same with the feelings of individuals? No
doubt sentiments, feelings, which hold to the general law in the mass,
differ in expression only. Each soul has its own method. Lady Dudley is
the strong woman who can traverse distances and act with the vigor of a
man; she would rescue her lover and kill jailers and guards; while other
women can only love with their whole souls; in moments of danger they
kneel down to pray, and die. Which of the two women suits you best? That
is the question. Yes, yes, Lady Dudley must surely love; she has made
many sacrifices. Perhaps she will love you when you have ceased to love
her!”

“Dear angel,” I said, “let me ask the question you asked me; how is it
that you know these things?”

“Every sorrow teaches a lesson, and I have suffered on so many points
that my knowledge is vast.”

My servant had heard the order given, and thinking we should return by
the terraces he held my horse ready for me in the avenue. Arabella’s
dog had scented the horse, and his mistress, drawn by very natural
curiosity, had followed the animal through the woods to the avenue.

“Go and make your peace,” said Henriette, smiling without a tinge of
sadness. “Say to Lady Dudley how much she mistakes my intention; I
wished to show her the true value of the treasure which has fallen to
her; my heart holds none but kind feelings, above all neither anger nor
contempt. Explain to her that I am her sister, and not her rival.”

“I shall not go,” I said.

“Have you never discovered,” she said with lofty pride, “that certain
propitiations are insulting? Go!”

I rode towards Lady Dudley wishing to know the state of her mind. “If
she would only be angry and leave me,” I thought, “I could return to
Clochegourde.”

The dog led me to an oak, from which, as I came up, Arabella galloped
crying out to me, “Come! away! away!” All that I could do was to follow
her to Saint Cyr, which we reached about midnight.

“That lady is in perfect health,” said Arabella as she dismounted.

Those who know her can alone imagine the satire contained in that
remark, dryly said in a tone which meant, “I should have died!”

“I forbid you to utter any of your sarcasms about Madame de Mortsauf,” I
said.

“Do I displease your Grace in remarking upon the perfect health of one
so dear to your precious heart? Frenchwomen hate, so I am told, even
their lover’s dog. In England we love all that our masters love; we hate
all they hate, because we are flesh of their flesh. Permit me therefore
to love this lady as much as you yourself love her. Only, my dear
child,” she added, clasping me in her arms which were damp with rain,
“if you betray me, I shall not be found either lying down or standing
up, not in a carriage with liveried lackeys, nor on horseback on the
moors of Charlemagne, nor on any other moor beneath the skies, nor in my
own bed, nor beneath a roof of my forefathers; I shall not be anywhere,
for I will live no longer. I was born in Lancashire, a country where
women die for love. Know you, and give you up? I will yield you to none,
not even to Death, for I should die with you.”

She led me to her rooms, where comfort had already spread its charms.

“Love her, dear,” I said warmly. “She loves you sincerely, not in jest.”

“Sincerely! you poor child!” she said, unfastening her habit.

With a lover’s vanity I tried to exhibit Henriette’s noble character to
this imperious creature. While her waiting-woman, who did not understand
a word of French, arranged her hair I endeavored to picture Madame de
Mortsauf by sketching her life; I repeated many of the great thoughts
she had uttered at a crisis when nearly all women become either petty or
bad. Though Arabella appeared to be paying no attention she did not lose
a single word.

“I am delighted,” she said when we were alone, “to learn your taste
for pious conversation. There’s an old vicar on one of my estates
who understands writing sermons better than any one I know; the
country-people like him, for he suits his prosing to his hearers. I’ll
write to my father to-morrow and ask him to send the good man here by
steamboat; you can meet him in Paris, and when once you have heard him
you will never wish to listen to any one else,--all the more because his
health is perfect. His moralities won’t give you shocks that make you
weep; they flow along without tempests, like a limpid stream, and
will send you to sleep. Every evening you can if you like satisfy your
passion for sermons by digesting one with your dinner. English morality,
I do assure you, is as superior to that of Touraine as our cutlery,
our plate, and our horses are to your knives and your turf. Do me
the kindness to listen to my vicar; promise me. I am only a woman, my
dearest; I can love, I can die for you if you will; but I have never
studied at Eton, or at Oxford, or in Edinburgh. I am neither a doctor of
laws nor a reverend; I can’t preach morality; in fact, I am altogether
unfit for it, I should be awkward if I tried. I don’t blame your tastes;
you might have others more depraved, and I should still endeavor
to conform to them, for I want you to find near me all you like
best,--pleasures of love, pleasures of food, pleasures of piety, good
claret, and virtuous Christians. Shall I wear hair-cloth to-night? She
is very lucky, that woman, to suit you in morality. From what college
did she graduate? Poor I, who can only give you myself, who can only be
your slave--”

“Then why did you rush away when I wanted to bring you together?”

“Are you crazy, Amedee? I could go from Paris to Rome disguised as a
valet; I would do the most unreasonable thing for your sake; but how can
you expect me to speak to a woman on the public roads who has never
been presented to me,--and who, besides, would have preached me a sermon
under three heads? I speak to peasants, and if I am hungry I would ask a
workman to share his bread with me and pay him in guineas,--that is all
proper enough; but to stop a carriage on the highway, like the gentlemen
of the road in England, is not at all within my code of manners. You
poor child, you know only how to love; you don’t know how to live.
Besides, I am not like you as yet, dear angel; I don’t like morality.
Still, I am capable of great efforts to please you. Yes, I will go to
work; I will learn how to preach; you shall have no more kisses without
verses of the Bible interlarded.”

She used her power and abused it as soon as she saw in my eyes the
ardent expression which was always there when she began her sorceries.
She triumphed over everything, and I complacently told myself that the
woman who loses all, sacrifices the future, and makes love her only
virtue, is far above Catholic polemics.

“So she loves herself better than she loves you?” Arabella went on. “She
sets something that is not you above you. Is that love? how can we women
find anything to value in ourselves except that which you value in us?
No woman, no matter how fine a moralist she may be, is the equal of a
man. Tread upon us, kill us; never embarrass your lives on our account.
It is for us to die, for you to live, great and honored. For us the
dagger in your hand; for you our pardoning love. Does the sun think of
the gnats in his beams, that live by his light? they stay as long as
they can and when he withdraws his face they die--”

“Or fly somewhere else,” I said interrupting her.

“Yes, somewhere else,” she replied, with an indifference that would have
piqued any man into using the power with which she invested him. “Do
you really think it is worthy of womanhood to make a man eat his bread
buttered with virtue, and to persuade him that religion is incompatible
with love? Am I a reprobate? A woman either gives herself or she
refuses. But to refuse and moralize is a double wrong, and is contrary
to the rule of the right in all lands. Here, you will get only excellent
sandwiches prepared by the hand of your servant Arabella, whose sole
morality is to imagine caresses no man has yet felt and which the angels
inspire.”

I know nothing more destructive than the wit of an Englishwoman; she
gives it the eloquent gravity, the tone of pompous conviction with which
the British hide the absurdities of their life of prejudice. French wit
and humor, on the other hand, is like a lace with which our women adorn
the joys they give and the quarrels they invent; it is a mental jewelry,
as charming as their pretty dresses. English wit is an acid which
corrodes all those on whom it falls until it bares their bones, which it
scrapes and polishes. The tongue of a clever Englishwoman is like that
of a tiger tearing the flesh from the bone when he is only in play.
All-powerful weapon of a sneering devil, English satire leaves a deadly
poison in the wound it makes. Arabella chose to show her power like the
sultan who, to prove his dexterity, cut off the heads of unoffending
beings with his own scimitar.

“My angel,” she said, “I can talk morality too if I choose. I have asked
myself whether I commit a crime in loving you; whether I violate the
divine laws; and I find that my love for you is both natural and pious.
Why did God create some beings handsomer than others if not to show us
that we ought to adore them? The crime would be in not loving you. This
lady insults you by confounding you with other men; the laws of morality
are not applicable to you; for God has created you above them. Am I
not drawing nearer to divine love in loving you? will God punish a poor
woman for seeking the divine? Your great and luminous heart so resembles
the heavens that I am like the gnats which flutter about the torches
of a fete and burn themselves; are they to be punished for their error?
besides, is it an error? may it not be pure worship of the light? They
perish of too much piety,--if you call it perishing to fling one’s self
on the breast of him we love. I have the weakness to love you, whereas
that woman has the strength to remain in her Catholic shrine. Now, don’t
frown. You think I wish her ill. No, I do not. I adore the morality
which has led her to leave you free, and enables me to win you and hold
you forever--for you are mine forever, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Forever and ever?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! I have found favor in my lord! I alone have understood his worth!
She knows how to cultivate her estate, you say. Well, I leave that to
farmers; I cultivate your heart.”

I try to recall this intoxicating babble, that I may picture to you the
woman as she is, confirm all I have said of her, and let you into
the secret of what happened later. But how shall I describe the
accompaniment of the words? She sought to annihilate by the passion of
her impetuous love the impressions left in my heart by the chaste and
dignified love of my Henriette. Lady Dudley had seen the countess as
plainly as the countess had seen her; each had judged the other. The
force of Arabella’s attack revealed to me the extent of her fear, and
her secret admiration for her rival. In the morning I found her with
tearful eyes, complaining that she had not slept.

“What troubles you?” I said.

“I fear that my excessive love will ruin me,” she answered; “I have
given all. Wiser than I, that woman possesses something that you still
desire. If you prefer her, forget me; I will not trouble you with my
sorrows, my remorse, my sufferings; no, I will go far away and die, like
a plant deprived of the life-giving sun.”

She was able to wring protestations of love from my reluctant lips,
which filled her with joy.

“Ah!” she exclaimed, drying her eyes, “I am happy. Go back to her; I do
not choose to owe you to the force of my love, but to the action of your
own will. If you return here I shall know that you love me as much as I
love you, the possibility of which I have always doubted.”

She persuaded me to return to Clochegourde. The false position in which
I thus placed myself did not strike me while still under the influence
of her wiles. Yet, had I refused to return I should have given Lady
Dudley a triumph over Henriette. Arabella would then have taken me
to Paris. To go now to Clochegourde was an open insult to Madame de
Mortsauf; in that case Arabella was sure of me. Did any woman ever
pardon such crimes against love? Unless she were an angel descended
from the skies, instead of a purified spirit ascending to them, a loving
woman would rather see her lover die than know him happy with another.
Thus, look at it as I would, my situation, after I had once left
Clochegourde for the Grenadiere, was as fatal to the love of my choice
as it was profitable to the transient love that held me. Lady Dudley had
calculated all this with consummate cleverness. She owned to me later
that if she had not met Madame de Mortsauf on the moor she had intended
to compromise me by haunting Clochegourde until she did so.

When I met the countess that morning, and found her pale and depressed
like one who has not slept all night, I was conscious of exercising the
instinctive perception given to hearts still fresh and generous to show
them the true bearing of actions little regarded by the world at large,
but judged as criminal by lofty spirits. Like a child going down a
precipice in play and gathering flowers, who sees with dread that it
can never climb that height again, feels itself alone, with night
approaching, and hears the howls of animals, so I now knew that she and
I were separated by a universe. A wail arose within our souls like an
echo of that woeful “Consummatum est” heard in the churches on Good
Friday at the hour the Saviour died,--a dreadful scene which awes young
souls whose first love is religion. All Henriette’s illusions were
killed at one blow; her heart had endured its passion. She did not look
at me; she refused me the light that for six long years had shone upon
my life. She knew well that the spring of the effulgent rays shed by our
eyes was in our souls, to which they served as pathways to reach
each other, to blend them in one, meeting, parting, playing, like two
confiding women who tell each other all. Bitterly I felt the wrong of
bringing beneath this roof, where pleasure was unknown, a face on which
the wings of pleasure had shaken their prismatic dust. If, the night
before, I had allowed Lady Dudley to depart alone, if I had then
returned to Clochegourde, where, it may be, Henriette awaited me,
perhaps--perhaps Madame de Mortsauf might not so cruelly have
resolved to be my sister. But now she paid me many ostentatious
attentions,--playing her part vehemently for the very purpose of not
changing it. During breakfast she showed me a thousand civilities,
humiliating attentions, caring for me as though I were a sick man whose
fate she pitied.

“You were out walking early,” said the count; “I hope you have brought
back a good appetite, you whose stomach is not yet destroyed.”

This remark, which brought the smile of a sister to Henriette’s lips,
completed my sense of the ridicule of my position. It was impossible to
be at Clochegourde by day and Saint-Cyr by night. During the day I felt
how difficult it was to become the friend of a woman we have long loved.
The transition, easy enough when years have brought it about, is like an
illness in youth. I was ashamed; I cursed the pleasure Lady Dudley gave
me; I wished that Henriette would demand my blood. I could not tear her
rival in pieces before her, for she avoided speaking of her; indeed,
had I spoken of Arabella, Henriette, noble and sublime to the inmost
recesses of her heart, would have despised my infamy. After five years
of delightful intercourse we now had nothing to say to each other; our
words had no connection with our thoughts; we were hiding from each
other our intolerable pain,--we, whose mutual sufferings had been our
first interpreter.

Henriette assumed a cheerful look for me as for herself, but she was
sad. She spoke of herself as my sister, and yet found no ground on
which to converse; and we remained for the greater part of the time
in constrained silence. She increased my inward misery by feigning to
believe that she was the only victim.

“I suffer more than you,” I said to her at a moment when my self-styled
sister was betrayed into a feminine sarcasm.

“How so?” she said haughtily.

“Because I am the one to blame.”

At last her manner became so cold and indifferent that I resolved to
leave Clochegourde. That evening, on the terrace, I said farewell to the
whole family, who were there assembled. They all followed me to the lawn
where my horse was waiting. The countess came to me as I took the bridle
in my hand.

“Let us walk down the avenue together, alone,” she said.

I gave her my arm, and we passed through the courtyard with slow and
measured steps, as though our rhythmic movement were consoling to us.
When we reached the grove of trees which forms a corner of the boundary
she stopped.

“Farewell, my friend,” she said, throwing her head upon my breast and
her arms around my neck, “Farewell, we shall never meet again. God has
given me the sad power to look into the future. Do you remember
the terror that seized me the day you first came back, so young, so
handsome! and I saw you turn your back on me as you do this day when
you are leaving Clochegourde and going to Saint-Cyr? Well, once again,
during the past night I have seen into the future. Friend, we are
speaking together for the last time. I can hardly now say a few words
to you, for it is but a part of me that speaks at all. Death has already
seized on something in me. You have taken the mother from her children,
I now ask you to take her place to them. You can; Jacques and Madeleine
love you--as if you had always made them suffer.”

“Death!” I cried, frightened as I looked at her and beheld the fire of
her shining eyes, of which I can give no idea to those who have never
known their dear ones struck down by her fatal malady, unless I compare
those eyes to balls of burnished silver. “Die!” I said. “Henriette, I
command you to live. You used to ask an oath of me, I now ask one
of you. Swear to me that you will send for Origet and obey him in
everything.”

“Would you oppose the mercy of God?” she said, interrupting me with a
cry of despair at being thus misunderstood.

“You do not love me enough to obey me blindly, as that miserable Lady
Dudley does?”

“Yes, yes, I will do all you ask,” she cried, goaded by jealousy.

“Then I stay,” I said, kissing her on the eyelids.

Frightened at the words, she escaped from my arms and leaned against a
tree; then she turned and walked rapidly homeward without looking back.
But I followed her; she was weeping and praying. When we reached the
lawn I took her hand and kissed it respectfully. This submission touched
her.

“I am yours--forever, and as you will,” I said; “for I love you as your
aunt loved you.”

She trembled and wrung my hand.

“One look,” I said, “one more, one last of our old looks! The woman who
gives herself wholly,” I cried, my soul illumined by the glance she gave
me, “gives less of life and soul than I have now received. Henriette,
thou art my best-beloved--my only love.”

“I shall live!” she said; “but cure yourself as well.”

That look had effaced the memory of Arabella’s sarcasms. Thus I was the
plaything of the two irreconcilable passions I have now described to
you; I was influenced by each alternately. I loved an angel and a demon;
two women equally beautiful,--one adorned with all the virtues which we
decry through hatred of our own imperfections, the other with all the
vices which we deify through selfishness. Returning along that avenue,
looking back again and again at Madame de Mortsauf, as she leaned
against a tree surrounded by her children who waved their handkerchiefs,
I detected in my soul an emotion of pride in finding myself the arbiter
of two such destinies; the glory, in ways so different, of women so
distinguished; proud of inspiring such great passions that death must
come to whichever I abandoned. Ah! believe me, that passing conceit has
been doubly punished!

I know not what demon prompted me to remain with Arabella and await
the moment when the death of the count might give me Henriette; for she
would ever love me. Her harshness, her tears, her remorse, her Christian
resignation, were so many eloquent signs of a sentiment that could no
more be effaced from her heart than from mine. Walking slowly down that
pretty avenue and making these reflections, I was no longer twenty-five,
I was fifty years old. A man passes in a moment, even more quickly than
a woman, from youth to middle age. Though long ago I drove these evil
thoughts away from me, I was then possessed by them, I must avow it.
Perhaps I owed their presence in my mind to the Tuileries, to the king’s
cabinet. Who could resist the polluting spirit of Louis XVIII.?

When I reached the end of the avenue I turned and rushed back in the
twinkling of an eye, seeing that Henriette was still there, and alone! I
went to bid her a last farewell, bathed in repentant tears, the cause
of which she never knew. Tears sincere indeed; given, although I knew it
not, to noble loves forever lost, to virgin emotions--those flowers
of our life which cannot bloom again. Later, a man gives nothing, he
receives; he loves himself in his mistress; but in youth he loves his
mistress in himself. Later, we inoculate with our tastes, perhaps our
vices, the woman who loves us; but in the dawn of life she whom we love
conveys to us her virtues, her conscience. She invites us with a
smile to the noble life; from her we learn the self-devotion which she
practises. Woe to the man who has not had his Henriette. Woe to that
other one who has never known a Lady Dudley. The latter, if he marries,
will not be able to keep his wife; the other will be abandoned by his
mistress. But joy to him who can find the two women in one woman; happy
the man, dear Natalie, whom you love.

After my return to Paris Arabella and I became more intimate than ever.
Soon we insensibly abandoned all the conventional restrictions I had
carefully imposed, the strict observance of which often makes the world
forgive the false position in which Lady Dudley had placed herself.
Society, which delights in looking behind appearances, sanctions much as
soon as it knows the secrets they conceal. Lovers who live in the great
world make a mistake in flinging down these barriers exacted by the law
of salons; they do wrong not to obey scrupulously all conventions which
the manners and customs of a community impose,--less for the sake of
others than for their own. Outward respect to be maintained, comedies to
play, concealments to be managed; all such strategy of love occupies the
life, renews desire, and protects the heart against the palsy of
habit. But all young passions, being, like youth itself, essentially
spendthrift, raze their forests to the ground instead of merely cutting
the timber. Arabella adopted none of these bourgeois ideas, and yielded
to them only to please me; she wished to exhibit me to the eyes of all
Paris as her “sposo.” She employed her powers of seduction to keep me
under her roof, for she was not content with a rumored scandal which,
for want of proof, was only whispered behind the fans. Seeing her so
happy in committing an imprudence which frankly admitted her position,
how could I help believing in her love?

But no sooner was I plunged into the comforts of illegal marriage
than despair seized upon me; I saw my life bound to a course in direct
defiance of the ideas and the advice given me by Henriette. Thenceforth
I lived in the sort of rage we find in consumptive patients who, knowing
their end is near, cannot endure that their lungs should be examined.
There was no corner in my heart where I could fly to escape suffering;
an avenging spirit filled me incessantly with thoughts on which I dared
not dwell. My letters to Henriette depicted this moral malady and did
her infinite harm. “At the cost of so many treasures lost, I wished you
to be at least happy,” she wrote in the only answer I received. But
I was not happy. Dear Natalie, happiness is absolute; it allows of
no comparisons. My first ardor over, I necessarily compared the two
women,--a contrast I had never yet studied. In fact, all great passions
press so strongly on the character that at first they check its
asperities and cover the track of habits which constitute our defects
and our better qualities. But later, when two lovers are accustomed to
each other, the features of their moral physiognomies reappear; they
mutually judge each other, and it often happens during this reaction
of the character after passion, that natural antipathies leading to
disunion (which superficial people seize upon to accuse the human heart
of instability) come to the surface. This period now began with me.
Less blinded by seductions, and dissecting, as it were, my pleasure, I
undertook, without perhaps intending to do so, a critical examination of
Lady Dudley which resulted to her injury.

In the first place, I found her wanting in the qualities of mind which
distinguish Frenchwomen and make them so delightful to love; as all
those who have had the opportunity of loving in both countries declare.
When a Frenchwoman loves she is metamorphosed; her noted coquetry is
used to deck her love; she abandons her dangerous vanity and lays no
claim to any merit but that of loving well. She espouses the interests,
the hatreds, the friendships, of the man she loves; she acquires in
a day the experience of a man of business; she studies the code, she
comprehends the mechanism of credit, and could manage a banker’s office;
naturally heedless and prodigal, she will make no mistakes and waste not
a single louis. She becomes, in turn, mother, adviser, doctor, giving to
all her transformations a grace of happiness which reveals, in its every
detail, her infinite love. She combines the special qualities of the
women of other countries and gives unity to the mixture by her wit, that
truly French product, which enlivens, sanctions, justifies, and varies
all, thus relieving the monotony of a sentiment which rests on a single
tense of a single verb. The Frenchwoman loves always, without abatement
and without fatigue, in public or in solitude. In public she uses a tone
which has meaning for one only; she speaks by silence; she looks at you
with lowered eyelids. If the occasion prevents both speech and look she
will use the sand and write a word with the point of her little foot;
her love will find expression even in sleep; in short, she bends the
world to her love. The Englishwoman, on the contrary, makes her love
bend to the world. Educated to maintain the icy manners, the Britannic
and egotistic deportment which I described to you, she opens and
shuts her heart with the ease of a British mechanism. She possesses
an impenetrable mask, which she puts on or takes off phlegmatically.
Passionate as an Italian when no eye sees her, she becomes coldly
dignified before the world. A lover may well doubt his empire when he
sees the immobility of face, the aloofness of countenance, and hears
the calm voice, with which an Englishwoman leaves her boudoir. Hypocrisy
then becomes indifference; she has forgotten all.

Certainly the woman who can lay aside her love like a garment may be
thought to be capable of changing it. What tempests arise in the heart
of a man, stirred by wounded self-love, when he sees a woman taking and
dropping and again picking up her love like a piece of embroidery. These
women are too completely mistresses of themselves ever to belong wholly
to you; they are too much under the influence of society ever to let you
reign supreme. Where a Frenchwoman comforts by a look, or betrays her
impatience with visitors by witty jests, an Englishwoman’s silence is
absolute; it irritates the soul and frets the mind. These women are so
constantly, and, under all circumstances, on their dignity, that to
most of them fashion reigns omnipotent even over their pleasures. An
Englishwoman forces everything into form; though in her case the love of
form does not produce the sentiment of art. No matter what may be said
against it, Protestantism and Catholicism explain the differences
which make the love of Frenchwomen so far superior to the calculating,
reasoning love of Englishwomen. Protestantism doubts, searches, and
kills belief; it is the death of art and love. Where worldliness is all
in all, worldly people must needs obey; but passionate hearts flee from
it; to them its laws are insupportable.

You can now understand what a shock my self-love received when I found
that Lady Dudley could not live without the world, and that the English
system of two lives was familiar to her. It was no sacrifice she felt
called upon to make; on the contrary she fell naturally into two forms
of life that were inimical to each other. When she loved she loved
madly,--no woman of any country could be compared to her; but when the
curtain fell upon that fairy scene she banished even the memory of
it. In public she never answered to a look or a smile; she was neither
mistress nor slave; she was like an ambassadress, obliged to round her
phrases and her elbows; she irritated me by her composure, and outraged
my heart with her decorum. Thus she degraded love to a mere need,
instead of raising it to an ideal through enthusiasm. She expressed
neither fear, nor regrets, nor desire; but at a given hour her
tenderness reappeared like a fire suddenly lighted.

In which of these two women ought I to believe? I felt, as it were by
a thousand pin-pricks, the infinite differences between Henriette and
Arabella. When Madame de Mortsauf left me for a while she seemed to
leave to the air the duty of reminding me of her; the folds of her gown
as she went away spoke to the eye, as their undulating sound to the ear
when she returned; infinite tenderness was in the way she lowered her
eyelids and looked on the ground; her voice, that musical voice, was a
continual caress; her words expressed a constant thought; she was always
like unto herself; she did not halve her soul to suit two atmospheres,
one ardent, the other icy. In short, Madame de Mortsauf reserved her
mind and the flower of her thought to express her feelings; she was
coquettish in ideas with her children and with me. But Arabella’s mind
was never used to make life pleasant; it was never used at all for my
benefit; it existed only for the world and by the world, and it was
spent in sarcasm. She loved to rend, to bite, as it were,--not for
amusement but to satisfy a craving. Madame de Mortsauf would have hidden
her happiness from every eye, Lady Dudley chose to exhibit hers to
all Paris; and yet with her impenetrable English mask she kept within
conventions even while parading in the Bois with me. This mixture of
ostentation and dignity, love and coldness, wounded me constantly; for
my soul was both virgin and passionate, and as I could not pass from one
temperature to the other, my temper suffered. When I complained (never
without precaution), she turned her tongue with its triple sting against
me; mingling boasts of her love with those cutting English sarcasms. As
soon as she found herself in opposition to me, she made it an amusement
to hurt my feelings and humiliate my mind; she kneaded me like dough. To
any remark of mine as to keeping a medium in all things, she replied by
caricaturing my ideas and exaggerating them. When I reproached her for
her manner to me, she asked if I wished her to kiss me at the opera
before all Paris; and she said it so seriously that I, knowing her
desire to make people talk, trembled lest she should execute her threat.
In spite of her real passion she was never meditative, self-contained,
or reverent, like Henriette; on the contrary she was insatiable as a
sandy soil. Madame de Mortsauf was always composed, able to feel my soul
in an accent or a glance. Lady Dudley was never affected by a look, or
a pressure of the hand, nor yet by a tender word. No proof of love
surprised her. She felt so strong a necessity for excitement, noise,
celebrity, that nothing attained to her ideal in this respect; hence her
violent love, her exaggerated fancy,--everything concerned herself and
not me.

The letter you have read from Madame de Mortsauf (a light which still
shone brightly on my life), a proof of how the most virtuous of women
obeyed the genius of a Frenchwoman, revealing, as it did, her perpetual
vigilance, her sound understanding of all my prospects--that letter
must have made you see with what care Henriette had studied my material
interests, my political relations, my moral conquests, and with what
ardor she took hold of my life in all permissible directions. On
such points as these Lady Dudley affected the reticence of a mere
acquaintance. She never informed herself about my affairs, nor of my
likings or dislikings as a man. Prodigal for herself without being
generous, she separated too decidedly self-interest and love. Whereas
I knew very well, without proving it, that to save me a pang Henriette
would have sought for me that which she would never seek for herself. In
any great and overwhelming misfortune I should have gone for counsel to
Henriette, but I would have let myself be dragged to prison sooner than
say a word to Lady Dudley.

Up to this point the contrast relates to feelings; but it was the same
in outward things. In France, luxury is the expression of the man,
the reproduction of his ideas, of his personal poetry; it portrays the
character, and gives, between lovers, a precious value to every little
attention by keeping before them the dominant thought of the being
loved. But English luxury, which at first allured me by its choiceness
and delicacy, proved to be mechanical also. The thousand and one
attentions shown me at Clochegourde Arabella would have considered the
business of servants; each one had his own duty and speciality. The
choice of the footman was the business of her butler, as if it were a
matter of horses. She never attached herself to her servants; the death
of the best of them would not have affected her, for money could replace
the one lost by another equally efficient. As to her duty towards her
neighbor, I never saw a tear in her eye for the misfortunes of another;
in fact her selfishness was so naively candid that it absolutely created
a laugh. The crimson draperies of the great lady covered an iron nature.
The delightful siren who sounded at night every bell of her amorous
folly could soon make a young man forget the hard and unfeeling
Englishwoman, and it was only step by step that I discovered the stony
rock on which my seeds were wasted, bringing no harvest. Madame
de Mortsauf had penetrated that nature at a glance in their brief
encounter. I remembered her prophetic words. She was right; Arabella’s
love became intolerable to me. I have since remarked that most women who
ride well on horseback have little tenderness. Like the Amazons, they
lack a breast; their hearts are hard in some direction, but I do not
know in which.

At the moment when I begin to feel the burden of the yoke, when
weariness took possession of soul and body too, when at last I
comprehended the sanctity that true feeling imparts to love, when
memories of Clochegourde were bringing me, in spite of distance, the
fragrance of the roses, the warmth of the terrace, and the warble of
the nightingales,--at this frightful moment, when I saw the stony bed
beneath me as the waters of the torrent receded, I received a blow which
still resounds in my heart, for at every hour its echo wakes.

I was working in the cabinet of the king, who was to drive out at four
o’clock. The Duc de Lenoncourt was on service. When he entered the room
the king asked him news of the countess. I raised my head hastily in too
eager a manner; the king, offended by the action, gave me the look which
always preceded the harsh words he knew so well how to say.

“Sire, my poor daughter is dying,” replied the duke.

“Will the king deign to grant me leave of absence?” I cried, with tears
in my eyes, braving the anger which I saw about to burst.

“Go, _my lord_,” he answered, smiling at the satire in his words, and
withholding his reprimand in favor of his own wit.

More courtier than father, the duke asked no leave but got into the
carriage with the king. I started without bidding Lady Dudley good-bye;
she was fortunately out when I made my preparations, and I left a note
telling her I was sent on a mission by the king. At the Croix de Berny I
met his Majesty returning from Verrieres. He threw me a look full of his
royal irony, always insufferable in meaning, which seemed to say: “If
you mean to be anything in politics come back; don’t parley with the
dead.” The duke waved his hand to me sadly. The two pompous equipages
with their eight horses, the colonels and their gold lace, the escort
and the clouds of dust rolled rapidly away, to cries of “Vive le Roi!”
 It seemed to me that the court had driven over the dead body of Madame
de Mortsauf with the utter insensibility which nature shows for our
catastrophes. Though the duke was an excellent man he would no doubt
play whist with Monsieur after the king had retired. As for the duchess,
she had long ago given her daughter the first stab by writing to her of
Lady Dudley.

My hurried journey was like a dream,--the dream of a ruined gambler;
I was in despair at having received no news. Had the confessor
pushed austerity so far as to exclude me from Clochegourde? I accused
Madeleine, Jacques, the Abbe Dominis, all, even Monsieur de Mortsauf.
Beyond Tours, as I came down the road bordered with poplars which leads
to Poncher, which I so much admired that first day of my search for
mine Unknown, I met Monsieur Origet. He guessed that I was going to
Clochegourde; I guessed that he was returning. We stopped our carriages
and got out, I to ask for news, he to give it.

“How is Madame de Mortsauf?” I said.

“I doubt if you find her living,” he replied. “She is dying a frightful
death--of inanition. When she called me in, last June, no medical
power could control the disease; she had the symptoms which Monsieur
de Mortsauf has no doubt described to you, for he thinks he has them
himself. Madame la comtesse was not in any transient condition of
ill-health, which our profession can direct and which is often the cause
of a better state, nor was she in the crisis of a disorder the effects
of which can be repaired; no, her disease had reached a point where
science is useless; it is the incurable result of grief, just as a
mortal wound is the result of a stab. Her physical condition is produced
by the inertia of an organ as necessary to life as the action of
the heart itself. Grief has done the work of a dagger. Don’t deceive
yourself; Madame de Mortsauf is dying of some hidden grief.”

“Hidden!” I exclaimed. “Her children have not been ill?”

“No,” he said, looking at me significantly, “and since she has been so
seriously attacked Monsieur de Mortsauf has ceased to torment her. I am
no longer needed; Monsieur Deslandes of Azay is all-sufficient; nothing
can be done; her sufferings are dreadful. Young, beautiful, and rich, to
die emaciated, shrunken with hunger--for she dies of hunger! During the
last forty days the stomach, being as it were closed up, has rejected
all nourishment, under whatever form we attempt to give it.”

Monsieur Origet pressed my hand with a gesture of respect.

“Courage, monsieur,” he said, lifting his eyes to heaven.

The words expressed his compassion for sufferings he thought shared;
he little suspected the poisoned arrow which they shot into my heart.
I sprang into the carriage and ordered the postilion to drive on,
promising a good reward if I arrived in time.

Notwithstanding my impatience I seemed to do the distance in a few
minutes, so absorbed was I in the bitter reflections that crowded upon
my soul. Dying of grief, yet her children were well? then she died
through me! My conscience uttered one of those arraignments which echo
throughout our lives and sometimes beyond them. What weakness, what
impotence in human justice, which avenges none but open deeds! Why shame
and death to the murderer who kills with a blow, who comes upon you
unawares in your sleep and makes it last eternally, who strikes without
warning and spares you a struggle? Why a happy life, an honored life, to
the murderer who drop by drop pours gall into the soul and saps the body
to destroy it? How many murderers go unpunished! What indulgence for
fashionable vice! What condoning of the homicides caused by moral
wrongs! I know not whose avenging hand it was that suddenly, at that
moment, raised the painted curtain that reveals society. I saw before
me many victims known to you and me,--Madame de Beauseant, dying, and
starting for Normandy only a few days earlier; the Duchesse de Langeais
lost; Lady Brandon hiding herself in Touraine in the little house where
Lady Dudley had stayed two weeks, and dying there, killed by a frightful
catastrophe,--you know it. Our period teems with such events. Who does
not remember that poor young woman who poisoned herself, overcome by
jealousy, which was perhaps killing Madame de Mortsauf? Who has not
shuddered at the fate of that enchanting young girl who perished after
two years of marriage, like a flower torn by the wind, the victim of
her chaste ignorance, the victim of a villain with whom Ronquerolles,
Montriveau, and de Marsay shake hands because he is useful to their
political projects? What heart has failed to throb at the recital of the
last hours of the woman whom no entreaties could soften, and who would
never see her husband after nobly paying his debts? Madame d’Aiglemont
saw death beside her and was saved only by my brother’s care. Society
and science are accomplices in crimes for which there are no assizes.
The world declares that no one dies of grief, or of despair; nor yet of
love, of anguish hidden, of hopes cultivated yet fruitless, again and
again replanted yet forever uprooted. Our new scientific nomenclature
has plenty of words to explain these things; gastritis, pericarditis,
all the thousand maladies of women the names of which are whispered in
the ear, all serve as passports to the coffin followed by hypocritical
tears that are soon wiped by the hand of a notary. Can there be at
the bottom of this great evil some law which we do not know? Must the
centenary pitilessly strew the earth with corpses and dry them to dust
about him that he may raise himself, as the millionaire battens on a
myriad of little industries? Is there some powerful and venomous life
which feasts on these gentle, tender creatures? My God! do I belong to
the race of tigers?

Remorse gripped my heart in its scorching fingers, and my cheeks were
furrowed with tears as I entered the avenue of Clochegourde on a damp
October morning, which loosened the dead leaves of the poplars planted
by Henriette in the path where once she stood and waved her handkerchief
as if to recall me. Was she living? Why did I feel her two white hands
upon my head laid prostrate in the dust? In that moment I paid for all
the pleasures that Arabella had given me, and I knew that I paid dearly.
I swore not to see her again, and a hatred of England took possession of
me. Though Lady Dudley was only a variety of her species, I included all
Englishwomen in my judgment.

I received a fresh shock as I neared Clochegourde. Jacques, Madeleine,
and the Abbe Dominis were kneeling at the foot of a wooden cross placed
on a piece of ground that was taken into the enclosure when the iron
gate was put up, which the count and countess had never been willing
to remove. I sprang from the carriage and went towards them, my heart
aching at the sight of these children and that grave old man imploring
the mercy of God. The old huntsman was there too, with bared head,
standing a little apart.

I stooped to kiss Jacques and Madeleine, who gave me a cold look and
continued praying. The abbe rose from his knees; I took him by the arm
to support myself, saying, “Is she still alive?” He bowed his head
sadly and gently. “Tell me, I implore you for Christ’s sake, why are you
praying at the foot of this cross? Why are you here, and not with her?
Why are the children kneeling here this chilly morning? Tell me all,
that I may do no harm through ignorance.”

“For the last few days Madame le comtesse has been unwilling to see her
children except at stated times.--Monsieur,” he continued after a
pause, “perhaps you had better wait a few hours before seeing Madame
de Mortsauf; she is greatly changed. It is necessary to prepare her for
this interview, or it might cause an increase in her sufferings--death
would be a blessed release from them.”

I wrung the hand of the good man, whose look and voice soothed the pangs
of others without sharpening them.

“We are praying God to help her,” he continued; “for she, so saintly, so
resigned, so fit to die, has shown during the last few weeks a horror of
death; for the first time in her life she looks at others who are full
of health with gloomy, envious eyes. This aberration comes less, I
think, from the fear of death than from some inward intoxication,--from
the flowers of her youth which ferment as they wither. Yes, an evil
angel is striving against heaven for that glorious soul. She is passing
through her struggle on the Mount of Olives; her tears bathe the white
roses of her crown as they fall, one by one, from the head of this
wedded Jephtha. Wait; do not see her yet. You would bring to her the
atmosphere of the court; she would see in your face the reflection of
the things of life, and you would add to the bitterness of her regret.
Have pity on a weakness which God Himself forgave to His Son when He
took our nature upon Him. What merit would there be in conquering if we
had no adversary? Permit her confessor or me, two old men whose worn-out
lives cause her no pain, to prepare her for this unlooked-for meeting,
for emotions which the Abbe Birotteau has required her to renounce.
But, in the things of this world there is an invisible thread of divine
purpose which religion alone can see; and since you have come perhaps
you are led by some celestial star of the moral world which leads to the
tomb as to the manger--”

He then told me, with that tempered eloquence which falls like dew upon
the heart, that for the last six months the countess had suffered daily
more and more, in spite of Monsieur Origet’s care. The doctor had come
to Clochegourde every evening for two months, striving to rescue her
from death; for her one cry had been, “Oh, save me!” “To heal the body
the heart must first be healed,” the doctor had exclaimed one day.

“As the illness increased, the words of this poor woman, once so gentle,
have grown bitter,” said the Abbe. “She calls on earth to keep her,
instead of asking God to take her; then she repents these murmurs
against the divine decree. Such alternations of feeling rend her heart
and make the struggle between body and soul most horrible. Often the
body triumphs. ‘You have cost me dear,’ she said one day to Jacques and
Madeleine; but in a moment, recalled to God by the look on my face, she
turned to Madeleine with these angelic words, ‘The happiness of others
is the joy of those who cannot themselves be happy,’--and the tone with
which she said them brought tears to my eyes. She falls, it is true, but
each time that her feet stumble she rises higher towards heaven.”

Struck by the tone of the successive intimations chance had sent me,
and which in this great concert of misfortunes were like a prelude of
mournful modulations to a funereal theme, the mighty cry of expiring
love, I cried out: “Surely you believe that this pure lily cut from
earth will flower in heaven?”

“You left her still a flower,” he answered, “but you will find her
consumed, purified by the forces of suffering, pure as a diamond buried
in the ashes. Yes, that shining soul, angelic star, will issue glorious
from the clouds and pass into the kingdom of the Light.”

As I pressed the hand of the good evangelist, my heart overflowing with
gratitude, the count put his head, now entirely white, out of the door
and immediately sprang towards me with signs of surprise.

“She was right! He is here! ‘Felix, Felix, Felix has come!’ she kept
crying. My dear friend,” he continued, beside himself with terror,
“death is here. Why did it not take a poor madman like me with one foot
in the grave?”

I walked towards the house summoning my courage, but on the threshold
of the long antechamber which crossed the house and led to the lawn, the
Abbe Birotteau stopped me.

“Madame la comtesse begs you will not enter at present,” he said to me.

Giving a glance within the house I saw the servants coming and going,
all busy, all dumb with grief, surprised perhaps by the orders Manette
gave them.

“What has happened?” cried the count, alarmed by the commotion, as much
from fear of the coming event as from the natural uneasiness of his
character.

“Only a sick woman’s fancy,” said the abbe. “Madame la comtesse does
not wish to receive monsieur le vicomte as she now is. She talks of
dressing; why thwart her?”

Manette came in search of Madeleine, whom I saw leave the house a few
moments after she had entered her mother’s room. We were all, Jacques
and his father, the two abbes and I, silently walking up and down the
lawn in front of the house. I looked first at Montbazon and then at
Azay, noticing the seared and yellow valley which answered in its
mourning (as it ever did on all occasions) to the feelings of my heart.
Suddenly I beheld the dear “mignonne” gathering the autumn flowers, no
doubt to make a bouquet at her mother’s bidding. Thinking of all which
that signified, I was so convulsed within me that I staggered, my sight
was blurred, and the two abbes, between whom I walked, led me to the
wall of a terrace, where I sat for some time completely broken down but
not unconscious.

“Poor Felix,” said the count, “she forbade me to write to you. She knew
how much you loved her.”

Though prepared to suffer, I found I had no strength to bear a scene
which recalled my memories of past happiness. “Ah!” I thought, “I see
it still, that barren moor, dried like a skeleton, lit by a gray sky, in
the centre of which grew a single flowering bush, which again and again
I looked at with a shudder,--the forecast of this mournful hour!”

All was gloom in the little castle, once so animated, so full of life.
The servants were weeping; despair and desolation everywhere. The paths
were not raked, work was begun and left undone, the workmen standing
idly about the house. Though the grapes were being gathered in the
vineyard, not a sound reached us. The place seemed uninhabited, so deep
the silence! We walked about like men whose grief rejects all ordinary
topics, and we listened to the count, the only one of us who spoke.

After a few words prompted by the mechanical love he felt for his wife
he was led by the natural bent of his mind to complain of her. She had
never, he said, taken care of herself or listened to him when he gave
her good advice. He had been the first to notice the symptoms of her
illness, for he had studied them in his own case; he had fought them and
cured them without other assistance than careful diet and the avoidance
of all emotion. He could have cured the countess, but a husband ought
not to take so much responsibility upon himself, especially when he
has the misfortune of finding his experience, in this as in everything,
despised. In spite of all he could say, the countess insisted on seeing
Origet,--Origet, who had managed his case so ill, was now killing his
wife. If this disease was, as they said, the result of excessive grief,
surely he was the one who had been in a condition to have it. What
griefs could the countess have had? She was always happy; she had never
had troubles or annoyances. Their fortune, thanks to his care and to his
sound ideas, was now in a most satisfactory state; he had always allowed
Madame de Mortsauf to reign at Clochegourde; her children, well trained
and now in health, gave her no anxiety,--where, then, did this grief
they talked of come from?

Thus he argued and discussed the matter, mingling his expressions of
despair with senseless accusations. Then, recalled by some sudden memory
to the admiration which he felt for his wife, tears rolled from his eyes
which had been dry so long.

Madeleine came to tell me that her mother was ready. The Abbe Birotteau
followed me. Madeleine, now a grave young girl, stayed with her father,
saying that the countess desired to be alone with me, and also that the
presence of too many persons would fatigue her. The solemnity of
this moment gave me that sense of inward heat and outward cold which
overcomes us often in the great events of life. The Abbe Birotteau, one
of those men whom God marks for his own by investing them with sweetness
and simplicity, together with patience and compassion, took me aside.

“Monsieur,” he said, “I wish you to know that I have done all in my
power to prevent this meeting. The salvation of this saint required it.
I have considered her only, and not you. Now that you are about to see
her to whom access ought to have been denied you by the angels, let me
say that I shall be present to protect you against yourself and perhaps
against her. Respect her weakness. I do not ask this of you as a priest,
but as a humble friend whom you did not know you had, and who would fain
save you from remorse. Our dear patient is dying of hunger and thirst.
Since morning she is a victim to the feverish irritation which precedes
that horrible death, and I cannot conceal from you how deeply she
regrets life. The cries of her rebellious flesh are stifled in my
heart--where they wake echoes of a wound still tender. But Monsieur de
Dominis and I accept this duty that we may spare the sight of this moral
anguish to her family; as it is, they no longer recognize their star by
night and by day in her; they all, husband, children, servants, all
are asking, ‘Where is she?’--she is so changed! When she sees you, her
regrets will revive. Lay aside your thoughts as a man of the world,
forget its vanities, be to her the auxiliary of heaven, not of earth.
Pray God that this dear saint die not in a moment of doubt, giving voice
to her despair.”

I did not answer. My silence alarmed the poor confessor. I saw, I heard,
I walked, and yet I was no longer on the earth. The thought, “In what
state shall I find her? Why do they use these precautions?” gave rise to
apprehensions which were the more cruel because so indefinite; all forms
of suffering crowded my mind.

We reached the door of the chamber and the abbe opened it. I then saw
Henriette, dressed in white, sitting on her little sofa which was placed
before the fireplace, on which were two vases filled with flowers;
flowers were also on a table near the window. The expression of the
abbe’s face, which was that of amazement at the change in the room, now
restored to its former state, showing me that the dying woman had sent
away the repulsive preparations which surround a sick-bed. She had spent
the last waning strength of fever in decorating her room to receive him
whom in that final hour she loved above all things else. Surrounded by
clouds of lace, her shrunken face, which had the greenish pallor of a
magnolia flower as it opens, resembled the first outline of a cherished
head drawn in chalks upon the yellow canvas of a portrait. To feel how
deeply the vulture’s talons now buried themselves in my heart, imagine
the eyes of that outlined face finished and full of life,--hollow
eyes which shone with a brilliancy unusual in a dying person. The calm
majesty given to her in the past by her constant victory over sorrow
was there no longer. Her forehead, the only part of her face which still
kept its beautiful proportions, wore an expression of aggressive will
and covert threats. In spite of the waxy texture of her elongated face,
inward fires were issuing from it like the fluid mist which seems to
flame above the fields of a hot day. Her hollow temples, her sunken
cheeks showed the interior formation of the face, and the smile upon her
whitened lips vaguely resembled the grin of death. Her robe, which was
folded across her breast, showed the emaciation of her beautiful figure.
The expression of her head said plainly that she knew she was changed,
and that the thought filled her with bitterness. She was no longer the
arch Henriette, nor the sublime and saintly Madame de Mortsauf, but the
nameless something of Bossuet struggling against annihilation, driven to
the selfish battle of life against death by hunger and balked desire. I
took her hand, which was dry and burning, to kiss it, as I seated myself
beside her. She guessed my sorrowful surprise from the very effort that
I made to hide it. Her discolored lips drew up from her famished teeth
trying to form a smile,--the forced smile with which we strive to
hide either the irony of vengeance, the expectation of pleasure, the
intoxication of our souls, or the fury of disappointment.

“Ah, my poor Felix, this is death,” she said, “and you do not like
death; odious death, of which every human creature, even the boldest
lover, feels a horror. This is the end of love; I knew it would be so.
Lady Dudley will never see you thus surprised at the change in her. Ah!
why have I so longed for you, Felix? You have come at last, and I reward
your devotion by the same horrible sight that made the Comte de Rance
a Trappist. I, who hoped to remain ever beautiful and noble in your
memory, to live there eternally a lily, I it is who destroy your
illusions! True love cannot calculate. But stay; do not go, stay.
Monsieur Origet said I was much better this morning; I shall recover.
Your looks will bring me back to life. When I regain a little strength,
when I can take some nourishment, I shall be beautiful again. I
am scarcely thirty-five, there are many years of happiness before
me,--happiness renews our youth; yes, I must know happiness! I have made
delightful plans,--we will leave Clochegourde and go to Italy.”

Tears filled my eyes and I turned to the window as if to look at the
flowers. The abbe followed me hastily, and bending over the bouquet
whispered, “No tears!”

“Henriette, do you no longer care for our dear valley,” I said, as if to
explain my sudden movement.

“Oh, yes!” she said, turning her forehead to my lips with a fond motion.
“But without you it is fatal to me,--without _thee_,” she added, putting
her burning lips to my ear and whispering the words like a sigh.

I was horror-struck at the wild caress, and my will was not strong
enough to repress the nervous agitation I felt throughout this scene. I
listened without reply; or rather I replied by a fixed smile and signs
of comprehension; wishing not to thwart her, but to treat her as a
mother does a child. Struck at first with the change in her person, I
now perceived that the woman, once so dignified in her bearing, showed
in her attitude, her voice, her manners, in her looks and her ideas, the
naive ignorance of a child, its artless graces, its eager movements,
its careless indifference to everything that is not its own desire,--in
short all the weaknesses which commend a child to our protection. Is it
so with all dying persons? Do they strip off social disguises till
they are like children who have never put them on? Or was it that the
countess feeling herself on the borders of eternity, rejected every
human feeling except love?

“You will bring me health as you used to do, Felix,” she said, “and our
valley will still be my blessing. How can I help eating what you will
give me? You are such a good nurse. Besides, you are so rich in health
and vigor that life is contagious beside you. My friend, prove to me
that I need not die--die blighted. They think my worst suffering is
thirst. Oh, yes, my thirst is great, dear friend. The waters of the
Indre are terrible to see; but the thirst of my heart is greater far.
I thirsted for thee,” she said in a smothered voice, taking my hands in
hers, which were burning, and drawing me close that she might whisper
in my ear. “My anguish has been in not seeing thee! Did you not bid
me live? I will live; I too will ride on horseback; I will know life,
Paris, fetes, pleasures, all!”

Ah! Natalie, that awful cry--which time and distance render cold--rang
in the ears of the old priest and in mine; the tones of that glorious
voice pictured the battles of a lifetime, the anguish of a true love
lost. The countess rose with an impatient movement like that of a child
which seeks a plaything. When the confessor saw her thus the poor man
fell upon his knees and prayed with clasped hands.

“Yes, to live!” she said, making me rise and support her; “to live with
realities and not with delusions. All has been delusions in my life; I
have counted them up, these lies, these impostures! How can I die, I
who have never lived? I who have never roamed a moor to meet him!” She
stopped, seemed to listen, and to smell some odor through the walls.
“Felix, the vintagers are dining, and I, I,” she said, in the voice of
a child, “I, the mistress, am hungry. It is so in love,--they are happy,
they, they!--”

“Kyrie eleison!” said the poor abbe, who with clasped hands and eyes
raised to heaven was reciting his litanies.

She flung an arm around my neck, kissed me violently, and pressed me to
her, saying, “You shall not escape me now!” She gave the little nod with
which in former days she used, when leaving me for an instant, to say
she would return. “We will dine together,” she said; “I will go and tell
Manette.” She turned to go, but fainted; and I laid her, dressed as she
was, upon the bed.

“You carried me thus before,” she murmured, opening her eyes.

She was very light, but burning; as I took her in my arms I felt the
heat of her body. Monsieur Deslandes entered and seemed surprised at the
decoration of the room; but seeing me, all was explained to him.

“We must suffer much to die,” she said in a changed voice.

The doctor sat down and felt her pulse, then he rose quickly and said a
few words in a low voice to the priest, who left the room beckoning me
to follow him.

“What are you going to do?” I said to the doctor.

“Save her from intolerable agony,” he replied. “Who could have believed
in so much strength? We cannot understand how she can have lived in this
state so long. This is the forty-second day since she has either eaten
or drunk.”

Monsieur Deslandes called for Manette. The Abbe Birotteau took me to the
gardens.

“Let us leave her to the doctor,” he said; “with Manette’s help he will
wrap her in opium. Well, you have heard her now--if indeed it is she
herself.”

“No,” I said, “it is not she.”

I was stupefied with grief. I left the grounds by the little gate of the
lower terrace and went to the punt, in which I hid to be alone with my
thoughts. I tried to detach myself from the being in which I lived,--a
torture like that with which the Tartars punish adultery by fastening a
limb of the guilty man in a piece of wood and leaving him with a knife
to cut it off if he would not die of hunger. My life was a failure, too!
Despair suggested many strange ideas to me. Sometimes I vowed to die
beside her; sometimes to bury myself at Meilleraye among the Trappists.
I looked at the windows of the room where Henriette was dying, fancying
I saw the light that was burning there the night I betrothed my soul to
hers. Ah! ought I not to have followed the simple life she had created
for me, keeping myself faithfully to her while I worked in the world?
Had she not bidden me become a great man expressly that I might be
saved from base and shameful passions? Chastity! was it not a sublime
distinction which I had not know how to keep? Love, as Arabella
understood it, suddenly disgusted me. As I raised my humbled head asking
myself where, in future, I could look for light and hope, what interest
could hold me to life, the air was stirred by a sudden noise. I turned
to the terrace and there saw Madeleine walking alone, with slow steps.
During the time it took me to ascend the terrace, intending to ask the
dear child the reason of the cold look she had given me when kneeling at
the foot of the cross, she had seated herself on the bench. When she saw
me approach her, she rose, pretending not to have seen me, and returned
towards the house in a significantly hasty manner. She hated me; she
fled from her mother’s murderer.

When I reached the portico I saw Madeleine like a statue, motionless and
erect, evidently listening to the sound of my steps. Jacques was sitting
in the portico. His attitude expressed the same insensibility to what
was going on about him that I had noticed when I first saw him; it
suggested ideas such as we lay aside in some corner of our mind to take
up and study at our leisure. I have remarked that young persons who
carry death within them are usually unmoved at funerals. I longed to
question that gloomy spirit. Had Madeleine kept her thoughts to herself,
or had she inspired Jacques with her hatred?

“You know, Jacques,” I said, to begin the conversation, “that in me you
have a most devoted brother.”

“Your friendship is useless to me; I shall follow my mother,” he said,
giving me a sullen look of pain.

“Jacques!” I cried, “you, too, against me?”

He coughed and walked away; when he returned he showed me his
handkerchief stained with blood.

“Do you understand that?” he said.

Thus they had each of them a fatal secret. I saw before long that the
brother and sister avoided each other. Henriette laid low, all was in
ruins at Clochegourde.

“Madame is asleep,” Manette came to say, quite happy in knowing that the
countess was out of pain.

In these dreadful moments, though each person knows the inevitable end,
strong affections fasten on such minor joys. Minutes are centuries which
we long to make restorative; we wish our dear ones to lie on roses,
we pray to bear their sufferings, we cling to the hope that their last
moment may be to them unexpected.

“Monsieur Deslandes has ordered the flowers taken away; they excited
Madame’s nerves,” said Manette.

Then it was the flowers that caused her delirium; she herself was not a
part of it.

“Come, Monsieur Felix,” added Manette, “come and see Madame; she is
beautiful as an angel.”

I returned to the dying woman just as the setting sun was gilding the
lace-work on the roofs of the chateau of Azay. All was calm and pure.
A soft light lit the bed on which my Henriette was lying, wrapped in
opium. The body was, as it were, annihilated; the soul alone reigned
on that face, serene as the skies when the tempest is over. Blanche and
Henriette, two sublime faces of the same woman, reappeared; all the more
beautiful because my recollection, my thought, my imagination, aiding
nature, repaired the devastation of each dear feature, where now the
soul triumphant sent its gleams through the calm pulsations of her
breathing. The two abbes were sitting at the foot of the bed. The count
stood, as though stupefied by the banners of death which floated above
that adored being. I took her seat on the sofa. We all four turned to
each other looks in which admiration for that celestial beauty mingled
with tears of mourning. The lights of thought announced the return of
the Divine Spirit to that glorious tabernacle.

The Abbe Dominis and I spoke in signs, communicating to each other our
mutual ideas. Yes, the angels were watching her! yes, their flaming
swords shone above that noble brow, which the august expression of her
virtue made, as it were, a visible soul conversing with the spirits of
its sphere. The lines of her face cleared; all in her was exalted and
became majestic beneath the unseen incense of the seraphs who guarded
her. The green tints of bodily suffering gave place to pure white tones,
the cold wan pallor of approaching death. Jacques and Madeleine entered.
Madeleine made us quiver by the adoring impulse which flung her on her
knees beside the bed, crying out, with clasped hand: “My mother! here is
my mother!” Jacques smiled; he knew he would follow her where she went.

“She is entering the haven,” said the Abbe Birotteau.

The Abbe Dominis looked at me as if to say: “Did I not tell you the star
would rise in all its glory?”

Madeleine knelt with her eyes fixed on her mother, breathing when she
breathed, listening to the soft breath, the last thread by which she
held to life, and which we followed in terror, fearing that every effort
of respiration might be the last. Like an angel at the gates of the
sanctuary, the young girl was eager yet calm, strong but reverent. At
that moment the Angelus rang from the village clock-tower. Waves of
tempered air brought its reverberations to remind us that this was the
sacred hour when Christianity repeats the words said by the angel to the
woman who has redeemed the faults of her sex. “Ave Maria!”--surely, at
this moment the words were a salutation from heaven. The prophecy was so
plain, the event so near that we burst into tears. The murmuring sounds
of evening, melodious breezes in the leafage, last warbling of the
birds, the hum and echo of the insects, the voices of the waters,
the plaintive cry of the tree-frog,--all country things were bidding
farewell to the loveliest lily of the valley, to her simple, rural life.
The religious poesy of the hour, now added to that of Nature, expressed
so vividly the psalm of the departing soul that our sobs redoubled.

Though the door of the chamber was open we were all so plunged in
contemplation of the scene, as if to imprint its memories forever on our
souls, that we did not notice the family servants who were kneeling as
a group and praying fervently. These poor people, living on hope, had
believed their mistress might be spared, and this plain warning overcame
them. At a sign from the Abbe Birotteau the old huntsman went to fetch
the curate of Sache. The doctor, standing by the bed, calm as science,
and holding the hand of the still sleeping woman, had made the confessor
a sign to say that this sleep was the only hour without pain which
remained for the recalled angel. The moment had come to administer the
last sacraments of the Church. At nine o’clock she awoke quietly, looked
at us with surprised but gentle eyes, and we beheld our idol once more
in all the beauty of former days.

“Mother! you are too beautiful to die--life and health are coming back
to you!” cried Madeleine.

“Dear daughter, I shall live--in thee,” she answered, smiling.

Then followed heart-rending embraces of the mother and her children.
Monsieur de Mortsauf kissed his wife upon her brow. She colored when she
saw me.

“Dear Felix,” she said, “this is, I think, the only grief that I shall
ever have caused you. Forget all that I may have said,--I, a poor
creature much beside myself.” She held out her hand; I took it and
kissed it. Then she said, with her chaste and gracious smile, “As in the
old days, Felix?”

We all left the room and went into the salon during the last confession.
I approached Madeleine. In presence of others she could not escape me
without a breach of civility; but, like her mother, she looked at
no one, and kept silence without even once turning her eyes in my
direction.

“Dear Madeleine,” I said in a low voice, “What have you against me?
Why do you show such coldness in the presence of death, which ought to
reconcile us all?”

“I hear in my heart what my mother is saying at this moment,” she
replied, with a look which Ingres gave to his “Mother of God,”--that
virgin, already sorrowful, preparing herself to protect the world for
which her son was about to die.

“And you condemn me at the moment when your mother absolves me,--if
indeed I am guilty.”

“You, _you_,” she said, “always _your self_!”

The tones of her voice revealed the determined hatred of a Corsican,
implacable as the judgments of those who, not having studied life, admit
of no extenuation of faults committed against the laws of the heart.

An hour went by in deepest silence. The Abbe Birotteau came to us after
receiving the countess’s general confession, and we followed him back to
the room where Henriette, under one of those impulses which often come
to noble minds, all sisters of one intent, had made them dress her in
the long white garment which was to be her shroud. We found her sitting
up; beautiful from expiation, beautiful in hope. I saw in the fireplace
the black ashes of my letters which had just been burned, a sacrifice
which, as her confessor afterwards told me, she had not been willing to
make until the hour of her death. She smiled upon us all with the smile
of other days. Her eyes, moist with tears, gave evidence of inward
lucidity; she saw the celestial joys of the promised land.

“Dear Felix,” she said, holding out her hand and pressing mine, “stay
with us. You must be present at the last scene of my life, not the least
painful among many such, but one in which you are concerned.”

She made a sign and the door was closed. At her request the count sat
down; the Abbe Birotteau and I remained standing. Then with Manette’s
help the countess rose and knelt before the astonished count, persisting
in remaining there. A moment after, when Manette had left the room, she
raised her head which she had laid upon her husband’s knees.

“Though I have been a faithful wife to you,” she said, in a faint voice,
“I have sometimes failed in my duty. I have just prayed to God to give
me strength to ask your pardon. I have given to a friendship outside
of my family more affectionate care than I have shown to you. Perhaps
I have sometimes irritated you by the comparisons you may have made
between these cares, these thoughts, and those I gave to you. I have
had,” she said, in a sinking voice, “a deep friendship, which no one,
not even he who has been its object, has fully known. Though I have
continued virtuous according to all human laws, though I have been
a irreproachable wife to you, still other thoughts, voluntary or
involuntary, have often crossed my mind and, in this hour, I fear I
have welcomed them too warmly. But as I have tenderly loved you, and
continued to be your submissive wife, and as the clouds passing beneath
the sky do not alter its purity, I now pray for your blessing with a
clean heart. I shall die without one bitter thought if I can hear
from your lips a tender word for your Blanche, for the mother of your
children,--if I know that you forgive her those things for which she did
not forgive herself till reassured by the great tribunal which pardons
all.”

“Blanche, Blanche!” cried the broken man, shedding tears upon his wife’s
head, “Would you kill me?” He raised her with a strength unusual to him,
kissed her solemnly on the forehead, and thus holding her continued:
“Have I no forgiveness to ask of you? Have I never been harsh? Are you
not making too much of your girlish scruples?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But, dear friend, indulge the weakness of a dying
woman; tranquillize my mind. When you reach this hour you will remember
that I left you with a blessing. Will you grant me permission to leave
to our friend now here that pledge of my affection?” she continued,
showing a letter that was on the mantelshelf. “He is now my adopted son,
and that is all. The heart, dear friend, makes its bequests; my last
wishes impose a sacred duty on that dear Felix. I think I do not put
too great a burden on him; grant that I do not ask too much of you in
desiring to leave him these last words. You see, I am always a woman,”
 she said, bending her head with mournful sweetness; “after obtaining
pardon I ask a gift--Read this,” she added, giving me the letter; “but
not until after my death.”

The count saw her color change: he lifted her and carried her himself to
the bed, where we all surrounded her.

“Felix,” she said, “I may have done something wrong to you. Often I gave
you pain by letting you hope for that I could not give you; but see,
it was that very courage of wife and mother that now enables me to die
forgiven of all. You will forgive me too; you who have so often blamed
me, and whose injustice was so dear--”

The Abbe Birotteau laid a finger on his lips. At that sign the dying
woman bowed her head, faintness overcame her; presently she waved her
hands as if summoning the clergy and her children and the servants to
her presence, and then, with an imploring gesture, she showed me the
desolate count and the children beside him. The sight of that father,
the secret of whose insanity was known to us alone, now to be left sole
guardian of those delicate beings, brought mute entreaties to her face,
which fell upon my heart like sacred fire. Before receiving extreme
unction she asked pardon of her servants if by a hasty word she had
sometimes hurt them; she asked their prayers and commended each one,
individually, to the count; she nobly confessed that during the last two
months she had uttered complaints that were not Christian and might
have shocked them; she had repulsed her children and clung to life
unworthily; but she attributed this failure of submission to the will
of God to her intolerable sufferings. Finally, she publicly thanked the
Abbe Birotteau with heartfelt warmth for having shown her the illusion
of all earthly things.

When she ceased to speak, prayers were said again, and the curate of
Sache gave her the viaticum. A few moments later her breathing became
difficult; a film overspread her eyes, but soon they cleared again; she
gave me a last look and died to the eyes of earth, hearing perhaps the
symphony of our sobs. As her last sigh issued from her lips,--the effort
of a life that was one long anguish,--I felt a blow within me that
struck on all my faculties. The count and I remained beside the bier all
night with the two abbes and the curate, watching, in the glimmer of the
tapers, the body of the departed, now so calm, laid upon the mattress of
her bed, where once she had suffered cruelly. It was my first communion
with death. I remained the whole of that night with my eyes fixed
on Henriette, spell-bound by the pure expression that came from the
stilling of all tempests, by the whiteness of that face where still I
saw the traces of her innumerable affections, although it made no answer
to my love. What majesty in that silence, in that coldness! How many
thoughts they expressed! What beauty in that cold repose, what power in
that immobility! All the past was there and futurity had begun. Ah! I
loved her dead as much as I had loved her living. In the morning the
count went to bed; the three wearied priests fell asleep in that heavy
hour of dawn so well known to those who watch. I could then, without
witnesses, kiss that sacred brow with all the love I had never been
allowed to utter.

The third day, in a cool autumn morning, we followed the countess to her
last home. She was carried by the old huntsman, the two Martineaus, and
Manette’s husband. We went down by the road I had so joyously ascended
the day I first returned to her. We crossed the valley of the Indre to
the little cemetery of Sache--a poor village graveyard, placed behind
the church on the slope of the hill, where with true humility she had
asked to be buried beneath a simple cross of black wood, “like a poor
country-woman,” she said. When I saw, from the centre of the valley,
the village church and the place of the graveyard a convulsive shudder
seized me. Alas! we have all our Golgothas, where we leave the first
thirty-three years of our lives, with the lance-wound in our side, the
crown of thorns and not of roses on our brow--that hill-slope was to me
the mount of expiation.

We were followed by an immense crowd, seeking to express the grief of
the valley where she had silently buried so many noble actions. Manette,
her faithful woman, told me that when her savings did not suffice to
help the poor she economized upon her dress. There were babes to be
provided for, naked children to be clothed, mothers succored in their
need, sacks of flour brought to the millers in winter for helpless
old men, a cow sent to some poor home,--deeds of a Christian woman,
a mother, and the lady of the manor. Besides these things, there were
dowries paid to enable loving hearts to marry; substitutes bought for
youths to whom the draft had brought despair, tender offerings of the
loving woman who had said: “The happiness of others is the consolation
of those who cannot themselves be happy.” Such things, related at the
“veillees,” made the crowd immense. I walked with Jacques and the two
abbes behind the coffin. According to custom neither the count nor
Madeleine were present; they remained alone at Clochegourde. But Manette
insisted in coming with us. “Poor madame! poor madame! she is happy
now,” I heard her saying to herself amid her sobs.

As the procession left the road to the mills I heard a simultaneous moan
and a sound of weeping as though the valley were lamenting for its soul.
The church was filled with people. After the service was over we went to
the graveyard where she wished to be buried near the cross. When I heard
the pebbles and the gravel falling upon the coffin my courage gave way;
I staggered and asked the two Martineaus to steady me. They took me,
half-dead, to the chateau of Sache, where the owners very kindly invited
me to stay, and I accepted. I will own to you that I dreaded a return
to Clochegourde, and it was equally repugnant to me to go to Frapesle,
where I could see my Henriette’s windows. Here, at Sache, I was near
her. I lived for some days in a room which looked on the tranquil,
solitary valley I have mentioned to you. It is a deep recess among the
hills, bordered by oaks that are doubly centenarian, through which a
torrent rushes after rain. The scene was in keeping with the stern and
solemn meditations to which I desired to abandon myself.

I had perceived, during the day which followed the fatal night, how
unwelcome my presence might be at Clochegourde. The count had gone
through violent emotions at the death of his wife; but he had expected
the event; his mind was made up to it in a way that was something like
indifference. I had noticed this several times, and when the countess
gave me that letter (which I still dared not read) and when she spoke
of her affection for me, I remarked that the count, usually so quick
to take offence, made no sign of feeling any. He attributed Henriette’s
wording to the extreme sensitiveness of a conscience which he knew to be
pure. This selfish insensibility was natural to him. The souls of these
two beings were no more married than their bodies; they had never
had the intimate communion which keeps feeling alive; they had shared
neither pains nor pleasures, those strong links which tear us by a
thousand edges when broken, because they touch on all our fibers, and
are fastened to the inmost recesses of our hearts.

Another consideration forbade my return to Clochegourde,--Madeleine’s
hostility. That hard young girl was not disposed to modify her hatred
beside her mother’s coffin. Between the count, who would have talked to
me incessantly of himself, and the new mistress of the house, who would
have shown me invincible dislike, I should have found myself horribly
annoyed. To be treated thus where once the very flowers welcomed me,
where the steps of the portico had a voice, where my memory clothed with
poetry the balconies, the fountains, the balustrades, the trees, the
glimpses of the valleys! to be hated where I once was loved--the thought
was intolerable to me. So, from the first, my mind was made up.

Alas! alas! was this the end of the keenest love that ever entered
the heart of man? To the eyes of strangers my conduct might be
reprehensible, but it had the sanction of my own conscience. It is thus
that the noblest feelings, the sublimest dramas of our youth must end.
We start at dawn, as I from Tours to Clochegourde, we clutch the world,
our hearts hungry for love; then, when our treasure is in the crucible,
when we mingle with men and circumstances, all becomes gradually debased
and we find but little gold among the ashes. Such is life! life as it
is; great pretensions, small realities. I meditated long about myself,
debating what I could do after a blow like this which had mown down
every flower of my soul. I resolved to rush into the science of
politics, into the labyrinth of ambition, to cast woman from my life and
to make myself a statesman, cold and passionless, and so remain true to
the saint I loved. My thoughts wandered into far-off regions while my
eyes were fastened on the splendid tapestry of the yellowing oaks, the
stern summits, the bronzed foothills. I asked myself if Henriette’s
virtue were not, after all, that of ignorance, and if I were indeed
guilty of her death. I fought against remorse. At last, in the sweetness
of an autumn midday, one of those last smiles of heaven which are so
beautiful in Touraine, I read the letter which at her request I was not
to open before her death. Judge of my feelings as I read it.

  Madame de Mortsauf to the Vicomte Felix de Vandenesse:

  Felix, friend, loved too well, I must now lay bare my heart to
  you,--not so much to prove my love as to show you the weight of
  obligation you have incurred by the depth and gravity of the
  wounds you have inflicted on it. At this moment, when I sink
  exhausted by the toils of life, worn out by the shocks of its
  battle, the woman within me is, mercifully, dead; the mother alone
  survives. Dear, you are now to see how it was that you were the
  original cause of all my sufferings. Later, I willingly received
  your blows; to-day I am dying of the final wound your hand has
  given,--but there is joy, excessive joy in feeling myself
  destroyed by him I love.

  My physical sufferings will soon put an end to my mental strength;
  I therefore use the last clear gleams of intelligence to implore
  you to befriend my children and replace the heart of which you
  have deprived them. I would solemnly impose this duty upon you if
  I loved you less; but I prefer to let you choose it for yourself
  as an act of sacred repentance, and also in faithful continuance
  of your love--love, for us, was ever mingled with repentant
  thoughts and expiatory fears! but--I know it well--we shall
  forever love each other. Your wrong to me was not so fatal an act
  in itself as the power which I let it have within me. Did I not
  tell you I was jealous, jealous unto death? Well, I die of it.
  But, be comforted, we have kept all human laws. The Church has
  told me, by one of her purest voices, that God will be forgiving
  to those who subdue their natural desires to His commandments. My
  beloved, you are now to know all, for I would not leave you in
  ignorance of any thought of mine. What I confide to God in my last
  hour you, too, must know,--you, king of my heart as He is King of
  Heaven.

  Until the ball given to the Duc d’Angouleme (the only ball at
  which I was ever present), marriage had left me in that ignorance
  which gives to the soul of a young girl the beauty of the angels.
  True, I was a mother, but love had never surrounded me with its
  permitted pleasures. How did this happen? I do not know; neither
  do I know by what law everything within me changed in a moment.
  You remember your kisses? they have mastered my life, they have
  furrowed my soul; the ardor of your blood awoke the ardor of mine;
  your youth entered my youth, your desires my soul. When I rose and
  left you proudly I was filled with an emotion for which I know no
  name in any language--for children have not yet found a word to
  express the marriage of their eyes with light, nor the kiss of
  life laid upon their lips. Yes, it was sound coming in the echo,
  light flashing through the darkness, motion shaking the universe;
  at least, it was rapid like all these things, but far more
  beautiful, for it was the birth of the soul! I comprehended then
  that something, I knew not what, existed for me in the world,--a
  force nobler than thought; for it was all thoughts, all forces, it
  was the future itself in a shared emotion. I felt I was but half a
  mother. Falling thus upon my heart this thunderbolt awoke desires
  which slumbered there without my knowledge; suddenly I divined all
  that my aunt had meant when she kissed my forehead, murmuring,
  “Poor Henriette!”

  When I returned to Clochegourde, the springtime, the first leaves,
  the fragrance of the flowers, the white and fleecy clouds, the
  Indre, the sky, all spoke to me in a language till then unknown.
  If you have forgotten those terrible kisses, I have never been
  able to efface them from my memory,--I am dying of them! Yes, each
  time that I have met you since, their impress is revived. I was
  shaken from head to foot when I first saw you; the mere
  presentiment of your coming overcame me. Neither time nor my firm
  will has enabled me to conquer that imperious sense of pleasure. I
  asked myself involuntarily, “What must be such joys?” Our mutual
  looks, the respectful kisses you laid upon my hand, the pressure
  of my arm on yours, your voice with its tender tones,--all, even
  the slightest things, shook me so violently that clouds obscured
  my sight; the murmur of rebellious senses filled my ears. Ah! if
  in those moments when outwardly I increased my coldness you had
  taken me in your arms I should have died of happiness. Sometimes I
  desired it, but prayer subdued the evil thought. Your name uttered
  by my children filled my heart with warmer blood, which gave color
  to my cheeks; I laid snares for my poor Madeleine to induce her to
  say it, so much did I love the tumults of that sensation. Ah! what
  shall I say to you? Your writing had a charm; I gazed at your
  letters as we look at a portrait.

  If on that first day you obtained some fatal power over me,
  conceive, dear friend, how infinite that power became when it was
  given to me to read your soul. What delights filled me when I
  found you so pure, so absolutely truthful, gifted with noble
  qualities, capable of noblest things, and already so tried! Man
  and child, timid yet brave! What joy to find we both were
  consecrated by a common grief! Ever since that evening when we
  confided our childhoods to each other, I have known that to lose
  you would be death,--yes, I have kept you by me selfishly. The
  certainty felt by Monsieur de la Berge that I should die if I lost
  you touched him deeply, for he read my soul. He knew how necessary
  I was to my children and the count; he did not command me to
  forbid you my house, for I promised to continue pure in deed and
  thought. “Thought,” he said to me, “is involuntary, but it can be
  watched even in the midst of anguish.” “If I think,” I replied,
  “all will be lost; save me from myself. Let him remain beside me
  and keep me pure!” The good old man, though stern, was moved by my
  sincerity. “Love him as you would a son, and give him your
  daughter,” he said. I accepted bravely that life of suffering that
  I might not lose you, and I suffered joyfully, seeing that we were
  called to bear the same yoke--My God! I have been firm, faithful
  to my husband; I have given you no foothold, Felix, in your
  kingdom. The grandeur of my passion has reacted on my character; I
  have regarded the tortures Monsieur de Mortsauf has inflicted on
  me as expiations; I bore them proudly in condemnation of my faulty
  desires. Formerly I was disposed to murmur at my life, but since
  you entered it I have recovered some gaiety, and this has been the
  better for the count. Without this strength, which I derived
  through you, I should long since have succumbed to the inward life
  of which I told you.

  If you have counted for much in the exercise of my duty so have my
  children also. I felt I had deprived them of something, and I
  feared I could never do enough to make amends to them; my life was
  thus a continual struggle which I loved. Feeling that I was less a
  mother, less an honest wife, remorse entered my heart; fearing to
  fail in my obligations, I constantly went beyond them. Often have
  I put Madeleine between you and me, giving you to each other,
  raising barriers between us,--barriers that were powerless! for
  what could stifle the emotions which you caused me? Absent or
  present, you had the same power. I preferred Madeleine to Jacques
  because Madeleine was sometime to be yours. But I did not yield
  you to my daughter without a struggle. I told myself that I was
  only twenty-eight when I first met you, and you were nearly
  twenty-two; I shortened the distance between us; I gave myself up
  to delusive hopes. Oh, Felix! I tell you these things to save you
  from remorse; also, perhaps, to show you that I was not cold and
  insensible, that our sufferings were cruelly mutual; that Arabella
  had no superiority of love over mine. I too am the daughter of a
  fallen race, such as men love well.

  There came a moment when the struggle was so terrible that I wept
  the long nights through; my hair fell off,--you have it! Do you
  remember the count’s illness? Your nobility of soul far from
  raising my soul belittled it. Alas! I dreamed of giving myself to
  you some day as the reward of so much heroism; but the folly was a
  brief one. I laid it at the feet of God during the mass that day
  when you refused to be with me. Jacques’ illness and Madeleine’s
  sufferings seemed to me the warnings of God calling back to Him
  His lost sheep.

  Then your love--which is so natural--for that Englishwoman
  revealed to me secrets of which I had no knowledge. I loved you
  better than I knew. The constant emotions of this stormy life, the
  efforts that I made to subdue myself with no other succor than
  that religion gave me, all, all has brought about the malady of
  which I die. The terrible shocks I have undergone brought on
  attacks about which I kept silence. I saw in death the sole
  solution of this hidden tragedy. A lifetime of anger, jealousy,
  and rage lay in those two months between the time my mother told
  me of your relations with Lady Dudley, and your return to
  Clochegourde. I wished to go to Paris; murder was in my heart; I
  desired that woman’s death; I was indifferent to my children.
  Prayer, which had hitherto been to me a balm, was now without
  influence on my soul. Jealousy made the breach through which death
  has entered. And yet I have kept a placid brow. Yes, that period
  of struggle was a secret between God and myself. After your return
  and when I saw that I was loved, even as I loved you, that nature
  had betrayed me and not your thought, I wished to live,--it was
  then too late! God had taken me under His protection, filled no
  doubt with pity for a being true with herself, true with Him,
  whose sufferings had often led her to the gates of the sanctuary.

  My beloved! God has judged me, Monsieur de Mortsauf will pardon
  me, but you--will you be merciful? Will you listen to this voice
  which now issues from my tomb? Will you repair the evils of which
  we are equally guilty?--you, perhaps, less than I. You know what I
  wish to ask of you. Be to Monsieur de Mortsauf what a sister of
  charity is to a sick man; listen to him, love him--no one loves
  him. Interpose between him and his children as I have done. Your
  task will not be a long one. Jacques will soon leave home to be in
  Paris near his grandfather, and you have long promised me to guide
  him through the dangers of that life. As for Madeleine, she will
  marry; I pray that you may please her. She is all myself, but
  stronger; she has the will in which I am lacking; the energy
  necessary for the companion of a man whose career destines him to
  the storms of political life; she is clever and perceptive. If
  your lives are united she will be happier than her mother. By
  acquiring the right to continue my work at Clochegourde you will
  blot out the faults I have not sufficiently expiated, though they
  are pardoned in heaven and also on earth, for _he_ is generous and
  will forgive me. You see I am ever selfish; is it not the proof of
  a despotic love? I wish you to still love me in mine. Unable to be
  yours in life, I bequeath to you my thoughts and also my duties.
  If you do not wish to marry Madeleine you will at least seek the
  repose of my soul by making Monsieur de Mortsauf as happy as he
  ever can be.

  Farewell, dear child of my heart; this is the farewell of a mind
  absolutely sane, still full of life; the farewell of a spirit on
  which thou hast shed too many and too great joys to suffer thee to
  feel remorse for the catastrophe they have caused. I use that word
  “catastrophe” thinking of you and how you love me; as for me, I
  reach the haven of my rest, sacrificed to duty and not without
  regret--ah! I tremble at that thought. God knows better than I
  whether I have fulfilled his holy laws in accordance with their
  spirit. Often, no doubt, I have tottered, but I have not fallen;
  the most potent cause of my wrong-doing lay in the grandeur of the
  seductions that encompassed me. The Lord will behold me trembling
  when I enter His presence as though I had succumbed. Farewell
  again, a long farewell like that I gave last night to our dear
  valley, where I soon shall rest and where you will often--will you
  not?--return.


Henriette.

I fell into an abyss of terrible reflections, as I perceived the depths
unknown of the life now lighted up by this expiring flame. The clouds of
my egotism rolled away. She had suffered as much as I--more than I, for
she was dead. She believed that others would be kind to her friend;
she was so blinded by love that she had never so much as suspected the
enmity of her daughter. That last proof of her tenderness pained
me terribly. Poor Henriette wished to give me Clochegourde and her
daughter.

Natalie, from that dread day when first I entered a graveyard following
the remains of my noble Henriette, whom now you know, the sun has been
less warm, less luminous, the nights more gloomy, movement less agile,
thought more dull. There are some departed whom we bury in the
earth, but there are others more deeply loved for whom our souls are
winding-sheets, whose memory mingles daily with our heart-beats; we
think of them as we breathe; they are in us by the tender law of a
metempsychosis special to love. A soul is within my soul. When some good
thing is done by me, when some true word is spoken, that soul acts
and speaks. All that is good within me issues from that grave, as the
fragrance of a lily fills the air; sarcasm, bitterness, all that you
blame in me is mine. Natalie, when next my eyes are darkened by a cloud
or raised to heaven after long contemplation of earth, when my lips make
no reply to your words or your devotion, do not ask me again, “Of what
are you thinking?”

              *     *     *     *     *

Dear Natalie, I ceased to write some days ago; these memories were too
bitter for me. Still, I owe you an account of the events which followed
this catastrophe; they need few words. When a life is made up of action
and movement it is soon told, but when it passes in the higher regions
of the soul its story becomes diffuse. Henriette’s letter put the star
of hope before my eyes. In this great shipwreck I saw an isle on which
I might be rescued. To live at Clochegourde with Madeleine, consecrating
my life to hers, was a fate which satisfied the ideas of which my
heart was full. But it was necessary to know the truth as to her
real feelings. As I was bound to bid the count farewell, I went to
Clochegourde to see him, and met him on the terrace. We walked up and
down for some time. At first he spoke of the countess like a man who
knew the extent of his loss, and all the injury it was doing to his
inner self. But after the first outbreak of his grief was over he
seemed more concerned about the future than the present. He feared his
daughter, who, he told me, had not her mother’s gentleness. Madeleine’s
firm character, in which there was something heroic blending with her
mother’s gracious nature, alarmed the old man, used to Henriette’s
tenderness, and he now foresaw the power of a will that never yielded.
His only consolation for his irreparable loss, he said, was the
certainty of soon rejoining his wife; the agitations, the griefs of
these last few weeks had increased his illness and brought back all his
former pains; the struggle which he foresaw between his authority as a
father and that of his daughter, now mistress of the house, would end
his days in bitterness; for though he should have struggled against
his wife, he should, he knew, be forced to give way before his child.
Besides, his son was soon to leave him; his daughter would marry, and
what sort of son-in-law was he likely to have? Though he thus talked of
dying, his real distress was in feeling himself alone for many years to
come without sympathy.

During this hour when he spoke only of himself, and asked for my
friendship in his wife’s name, he completed a picture in my mind of the
remarkable figure of the Emigre,--one of the most imposing types of
our period. In appearance he was frail and broken, but life seemed
persistent in him because of his sober habits and his country
avocations. He is still living.

Though Madeleine could see me on the terrace, she did not come down.
Several times she came out upon the portico and went back in again, as
if to signify her contempt. I seized a moment when she appeared to beg
the count to go to the house and call her, saying I had a last wish of
her mother to convey to her, and this would be my only opportunity
of doing so. The count brought her, and left us alone together on the
terrace.

“Dear Madeleine,” I said, “if I am to speak to you, surely it should be
here where your mother listened to me when she felt she had less
reason to complain of me than of the circumstances of life. I know
your thoughts; but are you not condemning me without a knowledge of the
facts? My life and happiness are bound up in this place; you know that,
and yet you seek to banish me by the coldness you show, in place of the
brotherly affection which has always united us, and which death should
have strengthened by the bonds of a common grief. Dear Madeleine, you
for whom I would gladly give my life without hope of recompense, without
your even knowing it,--so deeply do we love the children of those who
have succored us,--you are not aware of the project your adorable mother
cherished during the last seven years. If you knew it your feelings
would doubtless soften towards me; but I do not wish to take advantage
of you now. All that I ask is that you do not deprive me of the right
to come here, to breathe the air on this terrace, and to wait until time
has changed your ideas of social life. At this moment I desire not to
ruffle them; I respect a grief which misleads you, for it takes even
from me the power of judging soberly the circumstances in which I find
myself. The saint who now looks down upon us will approve the reticence
with which I simply ask that you stand neutral between your present
feelings and my wishes. I love you too well, in spite of the aversion
you are showing me, to say one word to the count of a proposal he would
welcome eagerly. Be free. Later, remember that you know no one in
the world as you know me, that no man will ever have more devoted
feelings--”

Up to this moment Madeleine had listened with lowered eyes; now she
stopped me by a gesture.

“Monsieur,” she said, in a voice trembling with emotion. “I know all
your thoughts; but I shall not change my feelings towards you. I would
rather fling myself into the Indre than ally myself to you. I will not
speak to you of myself, but if my mother’s name still possesses any
power over you, in her name I beg you never to return to Clochegourde
so long as I am in it. The mere sight of you causes me a repugnance I
cannot express, but which I shall never overcome.”

She bowed to me with dignity, and returned to the house without looking
back, impassible as her mother had been for one day only, but more
pitiless. The searching eye of that young girl had discovered, though
tardily, the secrets of her mother’s heart, and her hatred to the man
whom she fancied fatal to her mother’s life may have been increased by a
sense of her innocent complicity.

All before me was now chaos. Madeleine hated me, without considering
whether I was the cause or the victim of these misfortunes. She might
have hated us equally, her mother and me, had we been happy. Thus it was
that the edifice of my happiness fell in ruins. I alone knew the life of
that unknown, noble woman. I alone had entered every region of her
soul; neither mother, father, husband, nor children had ever known
her.--Strange truth! I stir this heap of ashes and take pleasure in
spreading them before you; all hearts may find something in them of
their closest experience. How many families have had their Henriette!
How many noble feelings have left this earth with no historian to fathom
their hearts, to measure the depth and breadth of their spirits. Such is
human life in all its truth! Often mothers know their children as little
as their children know them. So it is with husbands, lovers, brothers.
Did I imagine that one day, beside my father’s coffin, I should contend
with my brother Charles, for whose advancement I had done so much? Good
God! how many lessons in the simplest history.

When Madeleine disappeared into the house, I went away with a broken
heart. Bidding farewell to my host at Sache, I started for Paris,
following the right bank of the Indre, the one I had taken when I
entered the valley for the first time. Sadly I drove through the pretty
village of Pont-de-Ruan. Yet I was rich, political life courted me;
I was not the weary plodder of 1814. Then my heart was full of eager
desires, now my eyes were full of tears; once my life was all before
me to fill as I could, now I knew it to be a desert. I was still
young,--only twenty-nine,--but my heart was withered. A few years had
sufficed to despoil that landscape of its early glory, and to disgust
me with life. You can imagine my feelings when, on turning round, I saw
Madeleine on the terrace.

A prey to imperious sadness, I gave no thought to the end of my journey.
Lady Dudley was far, indeed, from my mind, and I entered the courtyard
of her house without reflection. The folly once committed, I was forced
to carry it out. My habits were conjugal in her house, and I went
upstairs thinking of the annoyances of a rupture. If you have fully
understood the character and manners of Lady Dudley, you can imagine
my discomfiture when her majordomo ushered me, still in my travelling
dress, into a salon where I found her sumptuously dressed and surrounded
by four persons. Lord Dudley, one of the most distinguished old
statesmen of England, was standing with his back to the fireplace,
stiff, haughty, frigid, with the sarcastic air he doubtless wore in
parliament; he smiled when he heard my name. Arabella’s two children,
who were amazingly like de Marsay (a natural son of the old lord), were
near their mother; de Marsay himself was on the sofa beside her. As
soon as Arabella saw me she assumed a distant air, and glanced at my
travelling cap as if to ask what brought me there. She looked me
over from head to foot, as though I were some country gentlemen just
presented to her. As for our intimacy, that eternal passion, those vows
of suicide if I ceased to love her, those visions of Armida, all had
vanished like a dream. I had never clasped her hand; I was a stranger;
she knew me not. In spite of the diplomatic self-possession to which
I was gradually being trained, I was confounded; and all others in my
place would have felt the same. De Marsay smiled at his boots, which
he examined with remarkable interest. I decided at once upon my course.
From any other woman I should modestly have accepted my defeat; but,
outraged at the glowing appearance of the heroine who had vowed to
die for love, and who had scoffed at the woman who was really dead,
I resolved to meet insolence with insolence. She knew very well the
misfortunes of Lady Brandon; to remind her of them was to send a dagger
to her heart, though the weapon might be blunted by the blow.

“Madame,” I said, “I am sure you will pardon my unceremonious entrance,
when I tell you that I have just arrived from Touraine, and that Lady
Brandon has given me a message for you which allows of no delay. I
feared you had already started for Lancashire, but as you are still
in Paris I will await your orders at any hour you may be pleased to
appoint.”

She bowed, and I left the room. Since that day I have only met her in
society, where we exchange a friendly bow, and occasionally a sarcasm. I
talk to her of the inconsolable women of Lancashire; she makes allusion
to Frenchwomen who dignify their gastric troubles by calling them
despair. Thanks to her, I have a mortal enemy in de Marsay, of whom she
is very fond. In return, I call her the wife of two generations.

So my disaster was complete; it lacked nothing. I followed the plan I
had laid out for myself during my retreat at Sache; I plunged into work
and gave myself wholly to science, literature, and politics. I entered
the diplomatic service on the accession of Charles X., who suppressed
the employment I held under the late king. From that moment I was
firmly resolved to pay no further attention to any woman, no matter how
beautiful, witty, or loving she might be. This determination succeeded
admirably; I obtained a really marvellous tranquillity of mind, and
great powers of work, and I came to understand how much these women
waste our lives, believing, all the while, that a few gracious words
will repay us.

But--all my resolutions came to naught; you know how and why. Dear
Natalie, in telling you my life, without reserve, without concealment,
precisely as I tell it to myself, in relating to you feelings in which
you have had no share, perhaps I have wounded some corner of your
sensitive and jealous heart. But that which might anger a common woman
will be to you--I feel sure of it--an additional reason for loving me.
Noble women have indeed a sublime mission to fulfil to suffering and
sickened hearts,--the mission of the sister of charity who stanches the
wound, of the mother who forgives a child. Artists and poets are not
the only ones who suffer; men who work for their country, for the future
destiny of the nations, enlarging thus the circle of their passions and
their thoughts, often make for themselves a cruel solitude. They need
a pure, devoted love beside them,--believe me, they understand its
grandeur and its worth.

To-morrow I shall know if I have deceived myself in loving you.

Felix.


  ANSWER TO THE ENVOI

  Madame la Comtesse Natalie de Manerville to Monsieur le Comte
  Felix de Vandenesse.

  Dear Count,--You received a letter from poor Madame de Mortsauf,
  which, you say, was of use in guiding you through the world,--a
  letter to which you owe your distinguished career. Permit me to
  finish your education.

  Give up, I beg of you, a really dreadful habit; do not imitate
  certain widows who talk of their first husband and throw the
  virtues of the deceased in the face of their second. I am a
  Frenchwoman, dear count; I wish to marry the whole of the man I
  love, and I really cannot marry Madame de Mortsauf too. Having
  read your tale with all the attention it deserves,--and you know
  the interest I feel in you,--it seems to me that you must have
  wearied Lady Dudley with the perfections of Madame de Mortsauf,
  and done great harm to the countess by overwhelming her with the
  experiences of your English love. Also you have failed in tact to
  me, poor creature without other merit than that of pleasing you;
  you have given me to understand that I cannot love as Henriette or
  Arabella loved you. I acknowledge my imperfections; I know them;
  but why so roughly make me feel them?

  Shall I tell you whom I pity?--the fourth woman whom you love. She
  will be forced to struggle against three others. Therefore, in
  your interests as well as in hers, I must warn you against the
  dangers of your tale. For myself, I renounce the laborious glory
  of loving you,--it needs too many virtues, Catholic or Anglican,
  and I have no fancy for rivalling phantoms. The virtues of the
  virgin of Clochegourde would dishearten any woman, however sure of
  herself she might be, and your intrepid English amazon discourages
  even a wish for that sort of happiness. No matter what a poor
  woman may do, she can never hope to give you the joys she will
  aspire to give. Neither heart nor senses can triumph against these
  memories of yours. I own that I have never been able to warm the
  sunshine chilled for you by the death of your sainted Henriette. I
  have felt you shuddering beside me.

  My friend,--for you will always be my friend,--never make such
  confidences again; they lay bare your disillusions; they
  discourage love, and compel a woman to feel doubtful of herself.
  Love, dear count, can only live on trustfulness. The woman who
  before she says a word or mounts her horse, must ask herself
  whether a celestial Henriette might not have spoken better,
  whether a rider like Arabella was not more graceful, that woman
  you may be very sure, will tremble in all her members. You
  certainly have given me a desire to receive a few of those
  intoxicating bouquets--but you say you will make no more. There
  are many other things you dare no longer do; thoughts and
  enjoyments you can never reawaken. No woman, and you ought to know
  this, will be willing to elbow in your heart the phantom whom you
  hold there.

  You ask me to love you out of Christian charity. I could do much,
  I candidly admit, for charity; in fact I could do all--except
  love. You are sometimes wearisome and wearied; you call your
  dulness melancholy. Very good,--so be it; but all the same it is
  intolerable, and causes much cruel anxiety to one who loves you. I
  have often found the grave of that saint between us. I have
  searched my own heart, I know myself, and I own I do not wish to
  die as she did. If you tired out Lady Dudley, who is a very
  distinguished woman, I, who have not her passionate desires,
  should, I fear, turn coldly against you even sooner than she did.
  Come, let us suppress love between us, inasmuch as you can find
  happiness only with the dead, and let us be merely friends--I wish
  it.

  Ah! my dear count, what a history you have told me! At your
  entrance into life you found an adorable woman, a perfect
  mistress, who thought of your future, made you a peer, loved you
  to distraction, only asked that you would be faithful to her, and
  you killed her! I know nothing more monstrous. Among all the
  passionate and unfortunate young men who haunt the streets of
  Paris, I doubt if there is one who would not stay virtuous ten
  years to obtain one half of the favors you did not know how to
  value! When a man is loved like that how can he ask more? Poor
  woman! she suffered indeed; and after you have written a few
  sentimental phrases you think you have balanced your account with
  her coffin. Such, no doubt, is the end that awaits my tenderness
  for you. Thank you, dear count, I will have no rival on either
  side of the grave. When a man has such a crime upon his
  conscience, at least he ought not to tell of it. I made you an
  imprudent request; but I was true to my woman’s part as a daughter
  of Eve,--it was your part to estimate the effect of the answer.
  You ought to have deceived me; later I should have thanked you. Is
  it possible that you have never understood the special virtue of
  lovers? Can you not feel how generous they are in swearing that
  they have never loved before, and love at last for the first time?

  No, your programme cannot be carried out. To attempt to be both
  Madame de Mortsauf and Lady Dudley,--why, my dear friend, it would
  be trying to unite fire and water within me! Is it possible that
  you don’t know women? Believe me, they are what they are, and they
  have therefore the defects of their virtues. You met Lady Dudley
  too early in life to appreciate her, and the harm you say of her
  seems to me the revenge of your wounded vanity. You understood
  Madame de Mortsauf too late; you punished one for not being the
  other,--what would happen to me if I were neither the one nor the
  other? I love you enough to have thought deeply about your future;
  in fact, I really care for you a great deal. Your air of the
  Knight of the Sad Countenance has always deeply interested me; I
  believed in the constancy of melancholy men; but I little thought
  that you had killed the loveliest and the most virtuous of women
  at the opening of your life.

  Well, I ask myself, what remains for you to do? I have thought it
  over carefully. I think, my friend, that you will have to marry a
  Mrs. Shandy, who will know nothing of love or of passion, and will
  not trouble herself about Madame de Mortsauf or Lady Dudley; who
  will be wholly indifferent to those moments of ennui which you
  call melancholy, during which you are as lively as a rainy day,--a
  wife who will be to you, in short, the excellent sister of charity
  whom you are seeking. But as for loving, quivering at a word,
  anticipating happiness, giving it, receiving it, experiencing all
  the tempests of passion, cherishing the little weaknesses of a
  beloved woman--my dear count, renounce it all! You have followed
  the advice of your good angel about young women too closely; you
  have avoided them so carefully that now you know nothing about
  them. Madame de Mortsauf was right to place you high in life at
  the start; otherwise all women would have been against you, and
  you never would have risen in society.

  It is too late now to begin your training over again; too late to
  learn to tell us what we long to hear; to be superior to us at the
  right moment, or to worship our pettiness when it pleases us to be
  petty. We are not so silly as you think us. When we love we place
  the man of our choice above all else. Whatever shakes our faith in
  our supremacy shakes our love. In flattering us men flatter
  themselves. If you intend to remain in society, to enjoy an
  intercourse with women, you must carefully conceal from them all
  that you have told me; they will not be willing to sow the flowers
  of their love upon the rocks or lavish their caresses to soothe a
  sickened spirit. Women will discover the barrenness of your heart
  and you will be ever more and more unhappy. Few among them would
  be frank enough to tell you what I have told you, or sufficiently
  good-natured to leave you without rancor, offering their
  friendship, like the woman who now subscribes herself

  Your devoted friend,

  Natalie de Manerville.



ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

     Birotteau, Abbe Francois
       Cesar Birotteau
       The Vicar of Tours

     Blamont-Chauvry, Princesse de
       The Thirteen
       Madame Firmiani

     Brandon, Lady Marie Augusta
       The Member for Arcis
       La Grenadiere

     Chessel, Madame de
       The Government Clerks

     Dudley, Lord
       The Thirteen
       A Man of Business
       Another Study of Woman
       A Daughter of Eve

     Dudley, Lady Arabella
       The Ball at Sceaux
       The Magic Skin
       The Secrets of a Princess
       A Daughter of Eve
       Letters of Two Brides

     Givry
       Letters of Two Brides
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

     Lenoncourt, Duc de
       Cesar Birotteau
       Jealousies of a Country Town
       The Gondreville Mystery
       Beatrix

     Lenoncourt-Givry, Duchesse de
       Letters of Two Brides
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

     Listomere, Marquis de
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       A Study of Woman

     Listomere, Marquise de
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       A Study of Woman
       A Daughter of Eve

     Louis XVIII., Louis-Stanislas-Xavier
       The Chouans
       The Seamy Side of History
       The Gondreville Mystery
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       The Ball at Sceaux
       Colonel Chabert
       The Government Clerks

     Manerville, Comtesse Paul de
       A Marriage Settlement
       A Daughter of Eve

     Marsay, Henri de
       The Thirteen
       The Unconscious Humorists
       Another Study of Woman
       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

     Stanhope, Lady Esther
       Lost Illusions

     Vandenesse, Comte Felix de
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Cesar Birotteau
       Letters of Two Brides
       A Start in Life
       The Marriage Settlement
       The Secrets of a Princess
       Another Study of Woman
       The Gondreville Mystery
       A Daughter of Eve





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