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.
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