Beatrix Part 27

Calyste, before I enter my convent cell I am permitted to cast a look upon the world I am now to leave for a life of prayer and solitude. That look is to you, who have been the whole world to me in these last months. My voice will reach you, if my calculations do not miscarry, at the moment of a ceremony I am unable to take part in.

On the day when you stand before the altar giving your hand and name to a young and charming girl who can love you openly before earth and heaven, I shall be before another altar in a convent at Nantes betrothed forever to Him who will neither fail nor betray me. But I do not write to sadden you,--only to entreat you not to hinder by false delicacy the service I have wished to do you since we first met. Do not contest my rights so dearly bought.

If love is suffering, ah! I have loved you indeed, my Calyste. But feel no remorse; the only happiness I have known in life I owe to you; the pangs were caused by my own self. Make me compensation, then, for all those pangs, those sorrows, by causing me an everlasting joy. Let the poor Camille, who _is_ no longer, still be something in the material comfort you enjoy. Dear, let me be like the fragrance of flowers in your life, mingling myself with it unseen and not importunate.

To you, Calyste, I shall owe my eternal happiness; will you not accept a few paltry and fleeting benefits from me? Surely you will not be wanting in generosity? Do you not see in this the last message of a renounced love? Calyste, the world without you had nothing more for me; you made it the most awful of solitudes; and you have thus brought Camille Maupin, the unbeliever, the writer of books, which I am soon to repudiate solemnly--you have cast her, daring and perverted, bound hand and foot, before G.o.d.

I am to-day what I might have been, what I was born to be, --innocent, and a child. I have washed my robes in the tears of repentance; I can come before the altar whither my guardian angel, my beloved Calyste, has led me. With what tender comfort I give you that name, which the step I now take sanctifies. I love you without self-seeking, as a mother loves her son, as the Church loves her children. I can pray for you and for yours without one thought or wish except for your happiness. Ah! if you only knew the sublime tranquillity in which I live, now that I have risen in thought above all petty earthly interests, and how precious is the thought of DOING (as your n.o.ble motto days) our duty, you would enter your beautiful new life with unfaltering step and never a glance behind you or about you. Above all, my earnest prayer to you is that you be faithful to yourself and to those belonging to you. Dear, society, in which you are to live, cannot exist without the religion of duty, and you will terribly mistake it, as I mistook it, if you allow yourself to yield to pa.s.sion and to fancy, as I did. Woman is the equal of man only in making her life a continual offering, as that of man is a perpetual action; my life has been, on the contrary, one long egotism. If may be that G.o.d placed you, toward evening, by the door of my house, as a messenger from Himself, bearing my punishment and my pardon.

Heed this confession of a woman to whom fame has been like a pharos, warning her of the only true path. Be wise, be n.o.ble; sacrifice your fancy to your duties, as head of your race, as husband, as father. Raise the fallen standard of the old du Guenics; show to this century of irreligion and want of principle what a gentleman is in all his grandeur and his honor. Dear child of my soul, let me play the part of a mother to you; your own mother will not be jealous of this voice from a tomb, these hands uplifted to heaven, imploring blessings on you. To-day, more than ever, does rank and n.o.bility need fortune. Calyste, accept a part of mine, and make a worthy use of it. It is not a gift; it is a trust I place in your hands. I have thought more of your children and of your old Breton house than of you in offering you the profits which time has brought to my property in Paris.

"Let us now sign the contract," said the young baron, returning to the a.s.sembled company.

The Abbe Grimont, to whom the honor of the conversion of this celebrated woman was attributed, became, soon after, vicar-general of the diocese.

The following week, after the marriage ceremony, which, according to the custom of many families of the faubourg Saint-Germain, was celebrated at seven in the morning at the church of Saint Thomas d'Aquin, Calyste and Sabine got into their pretty travelling-carriage, amid the tears, embraces, and congratulations of a score of friends, collected under the awning of the hotel de Grandlieu. The congratulations came from the four witnesses, and the men present; the tears were in the eyes of the d.u.c.h.esse de Grandlieu and her daughter Clotilde, who both trembled under the weight of the same thought,--

"She is launched upon the sea of life! Poor Sabine! at the mercy of a man who does not marry entirely of his own free will."

Marriage is not wholly made up of pleasures,--as fugitive in that relation as in all others; it involves compatibility of temper, physical sympathies, harmonies of character, which make of that social necessity an eternal problem. Marriageable daughters, as well as mothers, know the terms as well as the dangers of this lottery; and that is why women weep at a wedding while men smile; men believe that they risk nothing, while women know, or very nearly know, what they risk.

In another carriage, which preceded the married pair, was the Baronne du Guenic, to whom the d.u.c.h.ess had said at parting,--

"You are a mother, though you have only had one son; try to take my place to my dear Sabine."

On the box of the bridal carriage sat a _cha.s.seur_, who acted as courier, and in the rumble were two waiting-maids. The four postilions dressed in their finest uniforms, for each carriage was drawn by four horses, appeared with bouquets on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and ribbons on their hats, which the Duc de Grandlieu had the utmost difficulty in making them relinquish, even by bribing them with money. The French postilion is eminently intelligent, but he likes his fun. These fellows took their bribes and replaced their ribbons at the barrier.

"Well, good-bye, Sabine," said the d.u.c.h.ess; "remember your promise; write to me often. Calyste, I say nothing more to you, but you understand me."

Clotilde, leaning on the youngest sister Athenais, who was smiling to the Vicomte de Grandlieu, cast a reflecting look through her tears at the bride, and followed the carriage with her eyes as it disappeared to the clacking of four whips, more noisy than the shots of a pistol gallery. In a few minutes the gay convoy had reached the esplanade of the Invalides, the barrier of Pa.s.sy by the quay of the Pont d'Iena, and were fairly on the high-road to Brittany.

Is it not a singular thing that the artisans of Switzerland and Germany, and the great families of France and England should, one and all, follow the custom of setting out on a journey after the marriage ceremony?

The great people shut themselves in a box which rolls along; the little people gaily tramp the roads, sitting down in the woods, banqueting at the inns, as long as their joy, or rather their money lasts. A moralist is puzzled to decide on which side is the finer sense of modesty,--that which hides from the public eye and inaugurates the domestic hearth and bed in private, as to the worthy burghers of all lands, or that which withdraws from the family and exhibits itself publicly on the high-roads and in face of strangers. One would think that delicate souls might desire solitude and seek to escape both the world and their family. The love which begins a marriage is a pearl, a diamond, a jewel cut by the choicest of arts, a treasure to bury in the depths of the soul.

Who can relate a honeymoon, unless it be the bride? How many women reading this history will admit to themselves that this period of uncertain duration is the forecast of conjugal life? The first three letters of Sabine to her mother will depict a situation not surprising to some young brides and to many old women. All those who find themselves the sick-nurses, so to speak, of a husband's heart, do not, as Sabine did, discover this at once. But young girls of the faubourg Saint-Germain, if intelligent, are women in mind. Before marriage, they have received from their mothers and the world they live in the baptism of good manners; though women of rank, anxious to hand down their traditions, do not always see the bearing of their own lessons when they say to their daughters: "That is a motion that must not be made;" "Never laugh at such things;" "No lady ever flings herself on a sofa; she sits down quietly;" "Pray give up such detestable ways;" "My dear, that is a thing which is never done," etc.

Many bourgeois critics unjustly deny the innocence and virtue of young girls who, like Sabine, are truly virgin at heart, improved by the training of their minds, by the habit of n.o.ble bearing, by natural good taste, while, from the age of sixteen, they have learned how to use their opera-gla.s.ses. Sabine was a girl of this school, which was also that of Mademoiselle de Chaulieu. This inborn sense of the fitness of things, these gifts of race made Sabine de Grandlieu as interesting a young woman as the heroine of the "Memoirs of two young Married Women."

Her letters to her mother during the honeymoon, of which we here give three or four, will show the qualities of her mind and temperament.

Guerande, April, 1838.

To Madame la d.u.c.h.esse de Grandlieu:

Dear Mamma,--You will understand why I did not write to you during the journey,--our wits are then like wheels. Here I am, for the last two days, in the depths of Brittany, at the hotel du Guenic, --a house as covered with carving as a sandal-wood box. In spite of the affectionate devotion of Calyste's family, I feel a keen desire to fly to you, to tell you many things which can only be trusted to a mother.

Calyste married, dear mamma, with a great sorrow in his heart. We all knew that, and you did not hide from me the difficulties of my position; but alas! they are greater than you thought. Ah! my dear mother, what experience we acquire in the short s.p.a.ce of a few days--I might even say a few hours! All your counsels have proved fruitless; you will see why from one sentence: I love Calyste as if he were not my husband,--that is to say, if I were married to another, and were travelling with Calyste, I should love Calyste and hate my husband.

Now think of a man beloved so completely, involuntarily, absolutely, and all the other adverbs you may choose to employ, and you will see that my servitude is established in spite of your good advice. You told me to be grand, n.o.ble, dignified, and self-respecting in order to obtain from Calyste the feelings that are never subject to the chances and changes of life,--esteem, honor, and the consideration which sanctifies a woman in the bosom of her family. I remember how you blamed, I dare say justly, the young women of the present day, who, under pretext of living happily with their husbands, begin by compliance, flattery, familiarity, an abandonment, you called it, a little too wanton (a word I did not fully understand), all of which, if I must believe you, are relays that lead rapidly to indifference and possibly to contempt.

"Remember that you are a Grandlieu!" yes, I remember that you told me all that--

But oh! that advice, filled with the maternal eloquence of a female Daedelus has had the fate of all things mythological. Dear, beloved mother, could you ever have supposed it possible that I should begin by the catastrophe which, according to you, ends the honeymoon of the young women of the present day?

When Calyste and I were fairly alone in the travelling carriage, we felt rather foolish in each other's company, understanding the importance of the first word, the first look; and we both, bewildered by the solemnity, looked out of our respective windows.

It became so ridiculous that when we reached the barrier monsieur began, in a rather troubled tone of voice, a set discourse, prepared, no doubt, like other improvisations, to which I listened with a beating heart, and which I take the liberty of here abridging.

"My dear Sabine," he said, "I want you to be happy, and, above all, do I wish you to be happy in your own way. Therefore, in the situation in which we are, instead of deceiving ourselves mutually about our characters and our feelings by n.o.ble compliances, let us endeavor to be to each other at once what we should be years hence. Think always that you have a friend and a brother in me, as I shall feel I have a sister and a friend in you."

Though it was all said with the utmost delicacy, I found nothing in this first conjugal love-speech which responded to the feelings in my soul, and I remained pensive after replying that I was animated by the same sentiments. After this declaration of our rights to mutual coldness, we talked of weather, relays, and scenery in the most charming manner,--I with rather a forced little laugh, he absent-mindedly.

At last, as we were leaving Versailles, I turned to Calyste--whom I called my dear Calyste, and he called me my dear Sabine--and asked him plainly to tell me the events which had led him to the point of death, and to which I was aware that I owed the happiness of being his wife. He hesitated long. In fact, my request gave rise to a little argument between us, which lasted through three relays,--I endeavoring to maintain the part of an obstinate girl, and trying to sulk; he debating within himself the question which the newspapers used to put to Charles X.: "Must the king yield or not?" At last, after pa.s.sing Verneuil, and exchanging oaths enough to satisfy three dynasties never to reproach him for his folly, and never to treat him coldly, etc., etc., he related to me his love for Madame de Rochefide.

"I do not wish," he said, in conclusion, "to have any secrets between us."

Poor, dear Calyste, it seems, was ignorant that his friend, Mademoiselle des Touches, and you had thought it right to tell me the truth. Well, mother,--for I can tell all to a mother as tender as you,--I was deeply hurt by perceiving that he had yielded less to my request than to his own desire to talk of that strange pa.s.sion. Do you blame me, darling mother, for having wished to reconnoitre the extent of the grief, the open wound of the heart of which you warned me?

So, eight hours after receiving the rector's blessing at Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, your Sabine was in the rather false position of a young wife listening to a confidence, from the very lips of her husband, of his misplaced love for an unworthy rival. Yes, there I was, in the drama of a young woman learning, officially, as it were, that she owed her marriage to the disdainful rejection of an old and faded beauty!

Still, I gained what I sought. "What was that?" you will ask. Ah!

mother dear, I have seen too much of love going on around me not to know how to put a little of it into practice. Well, Calyste ended the poem of his miseries with the warmest protestations of an absolute forgetting of what he called his madness. All kinds of affirmations have to be signed, you know. The happy unhappy one took my hand, carried it to his lips, and, after that, he kept it for a long time clasped in his own. A declaration followed. _That one_ seemed to me more conformable than the first to the demands of our new condition, though our lips never said a word. Perhaps I owed it to the vigorous indignation I felt and showed at the bad taste of a woman foolish enough not to love my beautiful, my glorious Calyste.

They are calling me to play a game of cards, which I do not yet understand. I will finish my letter to-morrow. To leave you at this moment to make a fifth at _mouche_ (that is the name of the game) can only be done in the depths of Brittany--Adieu.

Your Sabine.

Guerande, May, 1838.

I take up my Odyssey. On the third day your children no longer used the ceremonious "you;" they thee'd and thou'd each other like lovers. My mother-in-law, enchanted to see us so happy, is trying to take your place to me, dear mother, and, as often happens when people play a part to efface other memories, she has been so charming that she is, _almost_, you to me.

I think she has guessed the heroism of my conduct, for at the beginning of our journey she tried to hide her anxiety with such care that it was visible from excessive precaution.

When I saw the towers of Guerande rising in the distance, I whispered in the ear of your son-in-law, "Have you really forgotten her?" My husband, now become _my angel_, can't know anything, I think, about sincere and simple love, for the words made him wild with happiness. Still, I think the desire to put Madame de Rochefide forever out of his mind led me too far. But how could I help it? I love, and I am half a Portuguese,--for I am much more like you, mamma, than like my father.

Calyste accepts all from me as spoilt children accept things, they think it their right; he is an only child, I remember that. But, between ourselves, I will not give my daughter (if I have any daughters) to an only son. I see a variety of tyrants in an only son. So, mamma, we have rather inverted our parts, and I am the devoted half of the pair. There are dangers, I know, in devotion, though we profit by it; we lose our dignity, for one thing. I feel bound to tell you of the wreck of that semi-virtue. Dignity, after all, is only a screen set up before pride, behind which we rage as we please; but how could I help it? you were not here, and I saw a gulf opening before me. Had I remained upon my dignity, I should have won only the cold joys (or pains) of a sort of brotherhood which would soon have drifted into indifference. What sort of future might that have led to? My devotion has, I know, made me Calyste's slave; but shall I regret it? We shall see.

As for the present, I am delighted with it. I love Calyste; I love him absolutely, with the folly of a mother, who thinks that all her son may do is right, even if he tyrannizes a trifle over her.

Guerande, May 15th.

Up to the present moment, dear mamma, I find marriage a delightful affair, I can spend all my tenderness on the n.o.blest of men whom a foolish woman disdained for a fiddler,--for that woman evidently was a fool, and a cold fool, the worst kind! I, in my legitimate love, am charitable; I am curing his wounds while I lay my heart open to incurable ones. Yes, the more I love Calyste, the more I feel that I should die of grief if our present happiness ever ceased.

I must tell you how the whole family and the circle which meets at the hotel de Guenic adore me. They are all personages born under tapestries of the highest warp; in fact, they seem to have stepped from those old tapestries as if to prove that the impossible may exist. Some day, when we are alone together, I will describe to you my Aunt Zephirine, Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel, the Chevalier du Halga, the Demoiselles de Kergarouet, and others. They all, even to the two servants, Ga.s.selin and Mariotte (whom I wish they would let me take to Paris), regard me as an angel sent from heaven; they tremble when I speak. Dear people! they ought to be preserved under gla.s.s.

My mother-in-law has solemnly installed us in the apartments formerly occupied by herself and her late husband. The scene was touching. She said to us,--

"I spent my whole married life, a happy woman, in these rooms; may the omen be a happy one for you, my children."

She has taken Calyste's former room for hers. Saintly soul! she seems intent on laying off her memories and all her conjugal dignities to invest us with them. The province of Brittany, this town, this family of ancient morals and ancient customs has, in spite of certain absurdities which strike the eye of a frivolous Parisian girl, something inexplicable, something grandiose even in its trifles, which can only be defined by the word _sacred_.