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.
“您先到花园去。”伯爵夫人说着，紧紧握了一下我的手。 我离开客厅，而伯爵并没觉察。我缓步走到平台上，还听见从餐室隔壁他的房间传出的喊叫和呻吟声。透过他那狂风暴雨般的吼叫，我间或听到天使的声音，宛似暴雨快停歇时黄莺的鸣啭。时值8月末，夜色极美，我在洋槐下漫步，等待伯爵夫人。她一定会来，她那动作就是对我的许诺。几天来，我们都有满腹话，仿佛只要一开口，就会像心泉喷射一样倾吐出来。碍于何种羞耻心，我们才一拖再拖，没有完全沟通心灵呢？人在自己的生活快要溢出而又矜持的时候，在要披露心曲而又迟疑的时候，就会像出阁的闺秀将要在心爱的夫君前露面那样，出于羞赧的心理，产生一种类似恐惧使感觉麻木的颤栗；也许伯爵夫人同我一样，也喜欢这种颤栗吧。相互交心势在必行，我们由于思想郁结，就越发把初次倾谈看得很重。一个小时过去了。我坐在砖砌的护墙上，她的脚步伴随着衣裙飘动的窸窣声，忽然打破静谧的夜晚。这类感觉，仅仅靠心是不够的。 “德·莫尔索先生睡着了，”伯爵夫人对我说，“碰到这种情况，我就用几个罂粟头泡一杯水给他喝；这种疗法尽管极为简单，但犯病间隔时间长，每次喝下去都见效。先生，”她换了口气，以最令人信服的坚定声音对我说，“仔细保守至今的秘密，不幸让您发现了。请答应我，您要把这个场面埋藏在心底。为了我，请您做到这一点。我并不要求您发誓，只需君子一言，说声好，我就满意了。” “这声好还有必要说吗？”我说道，“难道我们相互还始终不了解吗？” “德·莫尔索先生长期流亡，历尽艰辛，您看到了留下的病根，千万不要对他产生恶感，”她又说道，“他说过的话，明天就会忘得一干二净，您还会觉得他为人和善热情。” “不要替伯爵辩解了，夫人，”我答道，“您要求什么我全照办。若是投安德尔河自尽，就能使德·莫尔索先生脱胎换骨，使您重新过上幸福生活，我一刻也不会犹豫。然而，惟独我的看法不能改变；在我身上，什么也没有我的看法形成得牢固。我情愿把生命献给您，却不能把良心给您。我可以不听良心的声音，但我能阻止它讲话吗？而照我看，德·莫尔索先生是……”
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