The distance was too great for a delicate suffering woman to walk, and after knocking fruitlessly at the doors of one or two cottages in the vicinity of the lake, the boatmen proposed carrying the lady to Aix. They cheerfully slipped their oars from the rings which fastened them to the boat, and tied them together with the ropes of their nets; then they placed one of the cushions of the boat on these ropes, and thus formed a soft and flexible kind of litter for the stranger. Four of them then took up the oars, and each placing one end on his shoulder, they set off with the palanquin, to which they imparted no other motion than that of their steps. I would have wished to have my share in the pleasure of bearing their precious burden, but was repulsed by them with jealous eagerness. I walked beside the litter with my right hand in hers, so that she might cling to me when the movement of her conveyance was too rough. I thus prevented her slipping off the narrow cushion on which she was stretched. We walked in this manner slowly and silently in the moonlight down the long avenue of poplars. Oh, how short that avenue seemed to me, and how I wished that it could have led us on thus to the last step of both our lives! She did not speak, and I said nothing, but I felt the whole weight of her body trustingly suspended to my arm; I felt both her cold hands clasp mine, and from time to time an involuntary pressure, or a warmer breath upon them, made me feel that she had approached her lips to my hand to warm it. Never was silence so eloquent in its mute revealings. We enjoyed the happiness of a century in one hour. By the time we arrived at the old doctor’s house, and had deposited the invalid at her chamber door, the whole world that lay between us had disappeared. My hand was wet with her tears; I dried them with my lips, and threw myself without undressing on my bed.
XXIV.
In vain I tossed and turned on my pillow; I could not sleep. The thousand impressions of the preceding days were traced so vividly on my mind that I could not believe they were past, and I seemed to hear and see over again all I had seen or heard the previous day. The fever of my soul had extended to my body. I rose and laid down again without finding repose. At last I gave it up. I tried by bodily motion to calm the agitation of my mind; I opened the window, turned over the leaves of books which I did not understand as I read them, paced up and down, and changed the position of my table and my chair a dozen times, without finding a place where I could bear to spend the night. All this noise was heard in the adjoining room; and my steps disturbed the poor invalid, who, doubtless, was as wakeful as I was. I heard a light step on the creaking floor approach the bolted oak door which separated her sitting-room from my bedroom; I listened with my ear close to the door, and heard a suppressed breathing, and the rustle of a silk gown against the wall. The light of a lamp shone through the chinks of the door, and streamed from beneath it on my floor. It was she! she was there listening too, with her ear perhaps close to my brow; she might have heard my heart beat. “Are you ill?” whispered a voice, which I should have recognized by a single sigh. “No,” I answered, “but I am too happy! Excess of joy is as exciting as excess of anguish. The fever I feel is one of life; I do not wish to dispel it, or to fly from it, but I am sitting up to enjoy it.” “Child that you are!” she said, “go and sleep while I watch; it is now my turn to watch over you.” “But you,” whispered I, “why are you not sleeping?” “I never wish to sleep more,” she replied; “I would not lose one minute of the consciousness of my overwhelming bliss. I have but little time in which to enjoy my happiness, and do not like to give any portion of it to forgetfulness in sleep. I came to sit here in the hopes of hearing you, or at any rate to feel nearer to you.” “Oh, why still so far?” I murmured. “Why so far? Why is this wall between us?” “Is there only this door between us then,” she said, “and not our will and our vow? There! if you are only restrained by this material obstacle, it is removed!” and I heard her withdraw the bolt on her side. “Yes,” she continued, “if there be not in you some feeling stronger than love itself to subdue and master your passion, you can pass. Yes,” she added with an accent at once more solemn and more impassioned, “I will owe nothing but to yourself,–you may pass; you will meet with love equal to your own, but such love would be my death….”
I was overcome by the violence of my feelings, the impetuous impulse of my heart that impelled me towards that voice, and the moral violence that repulsed me; and I fell as one mortally wounded on the threshold of that closed door. As to her, I heard her sit down on a cushion which she had taken from a sofa, and thrown on the floor. During the greater part of the night we continued to converse in a low tone, through the intervals between the floor and the rough wood-work of the door. Who can describe the outpourings of our hearts, the words unused in the ordinary language of men that seemed to be wafted like night-dreams between heaven and earth, and were interrupted by silence in which our hearts and not our lips communed revealed their unutterable thoughts? At length the intervals of silence became longer, the voices grew faster and, overcome with fatigue, I fell asleep, with my hand clasped on my knees, and my cheek leaning against the wall.
XXV.
The sun was already high in the heavens when I woke, and my room was flooded with light. The redbreasts were chirping and pecking at the vines and currant bushes beneath my windows; all nature seemed to be illumined and adorned and to have awakened before me, to usher in and welcome this first day of my new life. All the sounds and noises in the house seemed joyful as I was. I heard the light steps of the maid who went and came in the passage to carry breakfast to her mistress, the childish voices of the little girls of the mountains who brought flowers from the edge of the glaciers, and the tinkling bells and stamping hoofs of the mules which were waiting in the yard to carry her to the lake or to the mountain. I changed my soiled and dusty clothes, I bathed my red and swollen eyes, smoothed my disordered hair, put on my leather gaiters, like a chamois hunter of the Alps, and taking my gun in hand, I went down to join the old doctor and his family at the breakfast-table.
At breakfast they talked of the storm on the lake, of the danger in which the stranger had been, her fainting at Haute-Combe, her absence during two days, and my good fortune in having met with her and brought her home. I begged the doctor to request for me the favor of inquiring in person after her health, and accompanying her in her excursions. He came down again with her; she looked lovelier and more interesting than ever, and happiness seemed to have given her fresh youth. She enchanted every one, but she looked only at me. I alone understood her looks and words with their double meaning. The guides lifted her joyfully on the seat with the swinging foot-board, which serves as a saddle for the women of Savoy; and I walked beside the mule with the tinkling bells which was that day to carry her to the highest chalets of the mountain.
We passed the whole day there, but we scarcely spoke, so well did we already understand each other without words. Sometimes we stood contemplating the cheerful valley of Chambery which appeared to widen as we mounted higher; or we loitered on the edge of cascades, whose sun-tinted vapors enveloped us in watery rainbows that seemed to be the mysterious halo of our love; or we would gather the latest flowers of earth on the sloping meadows before the chalets, and exchange them between us, as the letters of the fragrant alphabet of Nature, intelligible to us alone; or we gathered chestnuts which we brought home to roast at night by her fire; or we sat under shelter of the highest chalets which were already abandoned by their owners, and thought how happy two beings like ourselves might be, confined by fate to one of these deserted huts, made from rough boards and trunks of trees,–so near the stars, so near the murmuring winds, the snows and glaciers, but divided from man by solitude, and sufficing to each other during a life filled with one thought and but one feeling!
XXVI.
In the evening we came down slowly from the mountain with saddened looks, as though we had been leaving our domains and happiness behind us. She retired to her apartment, and I remained below to sup with our host and his guests. After supper I knocked, as had been agreed upon, at her door; she received me as she might a friend of childhood after a long absence. Henceforward I spent all my days and all my evenings in the same manner; I generally found her reclining on a sofa with a white cover, which was placed in a corner between the fireplace and the window; upon a small table on which stood a brass lamp there were some books, the letters she had received or commenced during the day, a little common tea-pot,–which she gave me when she went away, and which has always stood upon my chimney since,–and two cups of blue and pink china, in which we used to take tea at midnight. The old doctor would sometimes go up with me, to chat with his fair patient; but after half an hour’s conversation, the good old man would find out that my presence went further than his advice or his baths to re-establish the health that was so precious to us all, and would leave us to our books and conversation. At midnight, I kissed the hand she extended to me across the table, and went to my own room; but I never retired to rest until all was silent in hers.
XXVII.
We led this delightful, twofold life during six long or short weeks; long, when I call to mind the numberless palpitations of joy in our hearts, but short, when I remember the imperceptible rapidity of the hours that filled them. By a miracle of Providence, which does not occur once in ten years, the season seemed to connive at our happiness, and to conspire with us to prolong it. The whole month of October, and half of November, seemed like a new but leafless spring; the air was still soft, the waters blue, the clouds were rosy, and the sun shone brightly. The days were shorter, it is true, but the long evenings spent beside her fire drew us closer together; they made us more exclusively present to each other, and prevented our looks and hearts from evaporating amid the splendor of external nature. We loved them better than the long summer days. Our light was within us, and it shone more brightly when we confined ourselves to the house during the long darkness of November evenings, with the moaning of the autumnal winds around us, and the first rattling of the sleet and hail against the windows. The wintry rain seemed to throw us back upon ourselves, and to cry aloud: Hasten to say all that is yet untold in your hearts, and all that must be spoken before man and woman die, for I am the voice of the evil days that are near at hand to part you!
XXVIII.
We visited together, in succession, every creek and cove, or sandy beach of the lake, every mountain pass or ridge; every grotto or remote valley; every cascade hidden among the rocks of Savoy. We saw more sublime or smiling landscapes, more mysterious solitudes, more enchanted deserts, more cottages hanging on the mountain brow half-way between the clouds and the abyss, more foaming waters in the sloping meadows, more forests of dark pines disclosing their gloomy colonnades and echoing our steps beneath their domes, than might have hidden a whole world of lovers. To each of these we gave a sigh, a rapture, or a blessing; we implored them to preserve the memory of the hours we had passed together, of the thoughts they had inspired, the air they had given us, the drop of water we had drunk in the hollow of our hands, the leaf or flower we had gathered, the print of our footsteps on the dewy grass, and to give them back to us one day with the particle of existence that we had left there as we passed; so that nought might be lost of the bliss that overflowed within us, and that we might receive back each minute of ecstasy, or emanation of ourselves, in that faithful treasure house of Eternity, where nothing is lost, not even the breath we have just exhaled, or the minute we think we have lost. Never, perhaps, since the creation of these lakes, these torrents, and these rocks, did such tender and fervent hymns ascend from these mountains to Heaven! There was in our souls life and love enough to animate all nature, earth, air, and water, rocks and trees, cedar and hyssop, and to make them give forth sighs, aspirations, voice, perfume, and flame enough to fill the whole sanctuary of Nature, even if more vast and mute than the desert in which we wandered. Had a globe been created for ourselves alone, we alone would have sufficed to people and to quicken it, to give it voice and language, praise and love for all eternity! And who shall say that the human soul is not infinite? Who, beside the woman he adores, before the face of Nature, and beneath the eye of God, e’er felt the limits of existence, or of his power of life and love? O Love! the base may fear thee, and the wicked proscribe thee! Thou art the high priest of this world, the revealer of Immortality, the fire of the altar; and without thy ray man would not even dimly comprehend Eternity!
XXIX.
These six weeks were to me as a baptism of fire which transfigured my soul, and cleansed it of all the impurities with which it had been stained. Love was the torch which, while it fired my heart, enlightened all nature, heaven, and earth, and showed me to myself. I understood the nothingness of this world when I felt how it vanished before a single spark of true life. I loathed myself as I looked back into the past, and compared it with the purity and perfection of the one I loved. I entered into the heaven of my soul, as my heart and eyes fathomed the ocean of beauty, tenderness, and purity which expanded hourly in the eyes, in the voice, and in the discourse, of the heavenly creature who had manifested herself to me. How often did I kneel before her, my head bowed to the earth in the attitude and with the feeling of adoration! How often did I beseech her, as I would a being of another order, to cleanse me in her tears, absorb me in her flame, or to inhale me in her breath,–so that nothing of myself should be left in me, save the purifying water with which she had cleansed me, the flame that had consumed me, or the new breath that she had infused into my new being; so that I might become her, or she might become me, and that God himself in calling us to him should not distinguish or divide what the miracle of love had transformed and mingled!… Oh, if you have a brother or a son, who has never understood virtue, pray that he may love as I did! As long as he loves thus, he will be capable of every sacrifice or heroic devotion to equal the ideal of his love; and when he no longer loves, he will still retain in his soul a remembrance of celestial delights, which will make him turn with disgust from the waters of vice, and his eye will be often secretly uplifted towards the pure spring at which he once knelt to drink. I cannot tell the feeling of salutary shame which oppressed me in the presence of the one I loved; but her reproaches were so tender, her looks so gentle, though penetrating, her pardon so divine, that in humbling myself before her I did not feel myself abased, but rather raised and dignified. I almost mistook for my own and inward light, what was only the reverberation in me of her splendor and purity. Involuntarily I compared her to all the other women I had approached, except Antonina, who appeared to me like Julie in her artless infancy; and save my mother, whom she resembled in her virtue and maturity, no woman in my eyes could bear the slightest comparison. A single look of hers seemed to throw all my past life into shade. Her discourse revealed to me depths of feelings and refinements of passion, which transported me into unknown regions, where I seemed to breathe for the first time the native air of my own thoughts. All the levity, fickleness, and vanity, the aridity, irony, and bitterness, of the evil days of my youth, disappeared, and I scarcely recognized myself. When I left her presence I felt myself good, and thought myself pure. Once more I felt enthusiasm, prayer, inward piety, and the warm tears which flow not from the eyes, but well out like a secret spring from beneath our apparent aridity, and cleanse the heart without enervating it. I vowed never to descend from the celestial but by no means giddy heights to which I had been raised by her tender reproaches, her voice, her single presence. It was as a second innocence of my soul, imparted by the rays of the eternal innocence of her love.
I could not say whether there was most piety, or fascination in the impression I received, so much did passion and adoration mingle in equal portions, and in my thoughts change, a thousand times in one minute, love into worship, or worship into love. Oh, is not that the height, the very pinnacle of love,–enthusiasm in the possession of perfect beauty, and rapture in supreme adoration?… All she had said seemed to me eternal; all she had looked on appeared to me sacred. I envied the earth on which she had trodden; the sunshine which had enveloped her during our walks appeared to me happy to have touched her. I would have wished to abstract and separate forever from the liquid plains of air, the air that she had sanctified in breathing it; I would have enclosed the empty place that she had just ceased to fill in space, so that no inferior creature should occupy it, so long as the world should last. In a word, I saw and felt, I worshipped God himself, through the medium of my love. If life were to last in such a condition of the soul, Nature would stand still, the blood would cease to circulate, the heart forget to beat, or rather, there would be neither motion, precipitation, nor lassitude, neither life, nor death, in our senses; there would be only one endless and living absorption of our being in another’s, such as must be the state of the soul at once annihilated and living in God.
XXX.
Oh, joy! the vile desires of sensual passion were annulled (as she had wished) in the full possession of each other’s soul, and happiness, as happiness ever does, made me feel better and more pious than I had ever been. God and my love were so mingled in my heart, that my adoration of her became a perpetual adoration of the Supreme Being who had created her. During the day, when we loitered on the sloping hills or on the borders of the lake, or sat on the root of some tree in a sunny lawn, to rest, to gaze, and to admire, our conversation would often, from the natural overflowing of two full hearts, tend towards that fathomless abyss of all thought,–the Infinite! and towards Him who alone can fill infinite space,–God! When I pronounced this last word, with the heartfelt gratitude which reveals so much in one single accent, I was surprised to see her averted looks, or remark on her brow and in the corners of her mouth a trace of sad and painful incredulity, which seemed to me in contradiction with our enthusiasm. One day, I asked her, timidly, the reason. “It is that that word gives me pain,” she answered. “And how,” said I, “how can the word that comprehends all life, all love, and all goodness give pain to the most perfect of God’s creations?” “Alas!” she said with the tone of a despairing soul, “that word represents the idea of a Being, whose existence I have passionately desired might not be a dream; and yet that Being,” she added in a low and mournful tone, “in my eyes, and in those of the sages whose lessons I have received, is but the most marvellous and unreal delusion of our thoughts.” “What!” said I, “your teachers do not believe there is a God? But you, who love, how can you disbelieve? Does not every throb of our hearts proclaim Him?” “Oh,” she answered hastily, “do not interpret as folly the wisdom of those men who have uplifted for me the veils of philosophy, and have caused the broad day of reason and of science to shine before my eyes, instead of the pale and glimmering lamp with which Superstition lights the voluntary darkness, that she wilfully casts around her childish divinity. It is in the God of your mother and my nurse that I no longer believe, and not the God of Nature and of Science. I believe in a Being who is the Principle and Cause, spring and end of all other beings, or rather, who is himself the eternity, form, and law of all those beings, visible or invisible, intelligent or unintelligent, animate or inanimate, quick or dead, of which is composed the only real name of this Being of beings, the Infinite. But the idea of the incommensurable greatness, the sovereign fatality, the inflexible and absolute necessity of all the acts of this Being, whom you call God and we term Law, excludes from our thoughts all precise intelligibility, exact denomination, reasonable imagining, personal manifestation, revelation, or incarnation, and the idea of any possible relation between that Being and ourselves, even of homage and of prayer. Wherefore should the Consequence pray to the Cause?
“It is a cruel thought,” she added; “for how many blessings, prayers, and tears I should have poured out at His feet since I have loved you! But,” she resumed, “I surprise and pain you; pray forgive me. Is not truth the first of virtues, if virtue there be? On this single point we cannot agree; let us never speak of it. You have been brought up by a pious mother, in the midst of a Christian family, and have inhaled with your first breath the holy credulity of your home. You have been led by the hand into the temples; you have been shown images, mysteries, and altars; you have been taught prayers and told, God is here, who listens and will answer you; and you believed, for you were not of an age to inquire. Since then, you have discarded these baubles of your childhood, to conceive a less feminine and less puerile God, than this God of the Christian tabernacles; but the first dazzling glare has not departed from your eyes; the real light that you have thought to see has been blended, unknown to yourself, with that false brightness which fascinated you on your entrance into life; you have retained two weaknesses of intelligence,–mystery and prayer. There is no mystery” she said, in a more solemn tone; “there is only reason, which dispels all mystery! It is man, crafty or credulous man, who invented mystery,–God made reason! And prayer does not exist,” she continued mournfully, “for an inflexible law will not relent, and a necessary law cannot be changed.
“The ancients, with that profound wisdom which was often hidden beneath their popular ignorance, knew that full well,” she added; “for they prayed to all the gods of their invention, but they never implored the supreme law,–Destiny.”
She was silent. “It appears to me,” I said after a long pause, “that the teachers who have instilled their wisdom into you have too much subordinated the feeling to the reasoning Being, in their theory of the relation of God to man; in a word, they have overlooked the heart in man,–the heart which is the organ of love, as intelligence is the organ of thought. The imaginings of man in respect of God may be puerile and mistaken, but his instincts, which are his unwritten law, must be sometimes right; if not, Nature would have lied in creating him. You do not think Nature a lie,” I said smiling,–“you, who said just now that truth was perhaps the only virtue? Now, whatever may have been the intention of God in giving those two instincts, mystery and prayer, whether he meant thereby to show that he was the incomprehensible God, and that his name was Mystery; or that he desired that all creatures should give him honor and praise, and that prayer should be the universal incense of nature,–it is most certain that man, when he thinks on God, feels within him two instincts, mystery and adoration. Reason’s province,” I pursued, “is to enlighten and disperse mystery, more and more every day, but never to dispel it entirely. Prayer is the natural desire of the heart to pour forth unceasingly its supplications, efficacious or not, heard or unheard, as a precious perfume on the feet of God. What matters it if the perfume fall to the ground, or whether it anoint the feet of God? It is always a tribute of weakness, humility, and adoration.
“But who can say that it is ever lost?” I added in the tone of one whose hopes triumph over his doubts; “who can say that prayer, the mysterious communication with invisible Omnipotence, is not in reality the greatest of all the natural or supernatural powers of man? Who can say that the supreme and immortal Will has not ordained from all eternity that prayer should be continually inspired and heard, and that man should thus, by his invocations, participate in the ordering of his own destiny? Who knows whether God, in his love, and perpetual blessing on the beings which emanate from him, has not established this bond with them, as the invisible chain which links the thoughts of all worlds to his? Who knows but that, in his majestic solitude which he peoples alone, he has willed that this living murmur, this continual communing with nature, should ascend and descend continually in all space from him to all the beings that he vivifies and loves, and from those beings to him? At all events, prayer is the highest privilege of man, since it allows him to speak to God. If God were deaf to our prayers, we should still pray; for if in his majesty he would not hear us, still prayer would dignify man.”
I saw that my reasonings touched without convincing her, and that the springs of her soul, which science had dried up, had not yet flowed towards God. But love was to soften her religion as it had softened her heart; the delights and anguish of passion were soon to bring forth adoration and prayer, those two perfumes of the souls that burn and languish. The one is full of rapture; the other full of tears,–both are divine!
XXXI.
In the meantime her health improved daily. Happiness, solitude with a beloved companion (that paradise of tender souls), and the daily discovery on her part of some new mystery of thought in me which corresponded to her own nature; the autumnal air in the mountains, which, like stoves heated during summer, preserve the warmth of the sun until the winter snows; our distant excursions to the chalets, or on the waters; the motion of the boat, or the gentle pace of the mules; the milk brought frothing from the pastures in the wooden cups the shepherds carve; and above all, the gentle excitement, the peaceful revery, the continual infatuation of a heart which first love upheld as with wings and led on from thought to thought, from dream to dream, through a new-found heaven,–all seemed to contribute visibly to her recovery. Every day seemed to bring fresh youth; it was as a convalescence of the soul which showed itself on the features. Her face, which had been at first slightly marked round the eyes with those dark and bluish tints which seem like the impress of the fingers of Death, gradually recovered the roundness of the cheek, the mantling blood, the soft down, and blooming complexion of a young girl who has been on the mountains, and whose cheek has been visited by the first cold bracing winds from the glaciers. Her lips had recovered their fulness, her eyes their brightness; the lid no longer drooped, and the eye itself seemed to swim in that continual and luminous mist which rises like a vapor from the burning heart, and is condensed into tears on the eye, whose fire absorbs these tears, that always rise, and never flow. There was more strength in her attitudes, more pliancy in her movements; her step was light and lively as a child’s. Whenever we entered the yard of the house on our return from our rambles, the old doctor and his family would express their surprise at the prodigious change that a day had wrought in her appearance, and wonder at the life and light that she seemed to shed around her.
In truth, happiness seemed to encompass her with a radiant atmosphere, in which she not only walked herself, but enveloped all those who looked upon her. This radiance of beauty, this atmosphere of love, are not, as many think, only the fancies of a poet; the poet merely sees more distinctly what escapes the blind or indifferent eye of other men. It has often been said of a lovely woman, that she illumines the darkness of night; it might be said of Julie that she warmed the surrounding air. I lived and moved, enveloped in this warm emanation of her reviving beauty; others but felt it as they passed.
XXXII.
When I was obliged to leave her for a short time, and returned to my room, I felt, even at mid-day, as if I had been immured in a dungeon without air or light. The brightest sun afforded me no light, unless its rays were reflected by her eyes. I admired her more, the more I saw her; and could not believe she was a being of the same order as myself. The divine nature of her love had become a part of the creed of my imagination; and in spirit I was ever prostrate before the being who appeared to me too tender to be a divinity–too divine to be a woman! I sought a name for her, and found none. I called her Mystery, and under that vague and indefinite title, offered her worship which partook of earth by its tenderness, of a dream by its enthusiasm, of reality by her presence, and of heaven by my adoration.
She had obliged me to confess that I had sometimes written verses, but I had never shown her any. She did not much like that artificial and set form of speech, which, when it does not idealize, generally impairs the simplicity of feeling and expression. Her nature was too full of impulse, too feeling, and too serious, to bend itself to all the precision, form, and delay of written poetry. She was Poetry without a lyre–true as the heart, simple as the untutored thought, dreamy as night, brilliant as day, swift as lightning, boundless as space! No rules of harmony could have bounded the infinite music of her mind; her very voice was a perpetual melody, that no cadence of verse could have equalled. Had I lived long with her, I should never have read or written poetry. She was the living poem of Nature and of myself; my thoughts were in her heart, my imagery in her eyes, and my harmony in her voice.
She had in her room a few volumes of the principal poets of the end of the eighteenth century, and of the Empire, such as Delille and Fontanes; but their high-sounding and material poetry was not suited to us. She had been lulled by the melodious murmur of the waves of the tropic, and her soul contained treasures of love, imagination, and melancholy, which all the voices of the air and waters could not have expressed. She would sometimes attempt with me to read these books, on the strength of their reputation, but would throw them down again impatiently; they gave no sound beneath her touch, like those broken chords which remain voiceless when we strike the keys. The music of her heart was in mine, but I could never give it forth to the world; and the verses she was one day to inspire were destined to sound only on her grave. She never knew before she died whom she had loved. In her eyes I was her brother, and it would have mattered little to her that I had been a poet for the rest of the world. Her love saw nothing in me but myself.
Only once I involuntarily betrayed before her the poor gift of poetry that I possessed, and which she neither suspected nor desired in me. My friend Louis–had come to stay a few days with us. The evening had been spent till midnight in reading, in confidential talk, in musing, in sadness, and in smiles. We wondered to see three young lives, which a short time before were unknown to each other, now united and identified beneath the same roof, at the same fireside, with the same murmur of autumnal winds around, in a cottage of the mountains of Savoy; we strove to foresee by what sport of Providence, or Chance, the stormy winds of life might scatter or reunite us once more. These distant vistas of the horizon of our future lives had saddened us, and we remained silent round the little tea-table on which we were leaning. At last Louis, who was a poet, felt a mournful inspiration rising in his heart, and wished to write it down. She gave him paper and a pencil, and he leaned on the marble chimney-piece and wrote a few stanzas, plaintive and tearful as the funeral strophes of Gilbert. He resembled Gilbert, and he might have written those lines of his, which will live as long as the lamentations of Job, in the language of men:
Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive, J’apparus un jour et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, ou lentement j’arrive, Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs!
Louis’s verses had affected me; I took the pencil from him, and, withdrawing for an instant to the end of the room, I wrote in my turn the following verses, which will die with me unknown to all; they were the first verses that sprung from my heart, and not from my imagination. I read them out without daring to raise my eyes to her, to whom they were addressed. They ran thus–
* * * * *
but, no! I efface them! My love was all my genius, and they have departed together.
As I finished reading the verses, I saw on Julie’s face, on which the light of the lamp fell, such a tender expression of surprise and such superhuman beauty, that I stood uncertain, as my verses had expressed it, between the woman and the angel,–between love and adoration. This latter feeling predominated at last in my heart, and in that of my friend. We fell on our knees before the sofa, and kissed the end of the black shawl which enveloped her feet. The verses seemed to her merely an instantaneous and solitary expression of my feelings towards her; she praised them, but never mentioned them again. She much preferred our familiar discourse, or even our pensive silence in each other’s company, to these exercises of the mind which profane our feelings rather than reveal them, Louis left us after a few days.
XXXIII.
In consequence of these first verses of mine, which were but one feeble strophe of the perpetual hymn of my heart, she requested me to write an ode for her, which she would address as a tribute of admiration, and as a specimen of my talents, to one of the men of her Paris acquaintance, for whom she felt the greatest respect and attachment, M. de Bonald. I knew nothing of him but his name, and the well-deserved renown that attached to it as that of a Christian, a philosopher, and a legislator. I fancied that I was to address a modern Moses, who derived from the rays of another Mount Sinai the divine light which he shed upon human laws. I wrote the ode in one night, and read it the next morning, beneath a spreading chestnut-tree, to her who had inspired it. She made me read it three times over, and in the evening she copied it with her light and steady hand. Her writing flew upon the paper like the shadow of the wings of thought, with the swiftness, elegance, and freedom of a bird on the wing. The next day she sent it to Paris. M. de Bonald replied by many obliging auguries respecting my talents. This was the beginning of my acquaintance with that most excellent man, whose character I have always admired and loved since, without sharing his theocratical doctrines. My approval of his creed, of which I knew nothing, was at that time a concession to my love; at a later period it would have been an homage rendered to his virtues. M. de Bonald was, like M. de Maistre, a prophet of the past, one of those men whose ideas were of bygone days, and to whom we bow with veneration, as we see them seated on the threshold of futurity; they will not pass onward, but tarry to listen to the sublime lament of all that dies in the human mind.
XXXIV.
Autumn was already gone; but the sun shone out now and then between the clouds and lighted and warmed the mild winter which had succeeded. We tried to deceive ourselves, and to say that it was still autumn, so much did we dread to recognize winter, that was to separate us. The snow sometimes fell in the morning in light flakes on the roses and everlastings in the garden, like the white down of the swans which we often saw traversing the air. At noon the snow melted, and then there were delightful hours on the lake. The last rays of the sun seemed to be warmer when they played on the waters. The fig-trees which hung from the rocks exposed to the south, in the sheltered coves, had kept their wide-spreading leaves; and the reflection of the sun on the rocks imparted to them the splendid coloring and the warmth of summer evenings. But these hours glided as swiftly by as the stroke of the oars which served to take us round the foam-covered rocks that form the southern border of the lake. The glancing rays of the sun on the fire-trees; the green moss; the winter birds, more fully feathered and more familiar than those of summer; the mountain streams, whose white and frothing waters dashed down the sides of the sloping meadows, and meeting in some ravine fell with sonorous and splashing murmurs from the black and shining rocks into the lake; the cadenced sound of the oar, which seemed to accompany us with its mysterious and plaintive regrets, like some friendly voice hidden beneath the waters; the perfect repose we felt in this warm and luminous atmosphere, so near each other, and separated from the world by an abyss of waters,–gave us at times so great an enjoyment in the sense of existence, such fulness of inward joy, such an overflowing of peace and love, that we might have defied Heaven itself to add to our felicity. But with this happiness was mixed the consciousness that it was soon to end; each stroke of the oar resounded in our hearts as one step of the day that brought us nearer to separation. Who knows whether these trembling leaves may not to-morrow have fallen in the waters? If this moss on which we still can sit may not to-morrow be covered with a thick mantle of snow; if this blue sky, these illumined rocks and sparkling waves, may not, during the mists of this next night, be enveloped and confounded in one dim and wintry ocean?
A long sigh would escape our lips at thoughts like these; but we never communicated them to each other, for fear of arousing misfortune by naming it. Oh, who, in the course of his life, has not felt some joy without security and without a morrow; when life seems concentrated in one short hour which we would wish to make eternal, and which we feel slipping away minute by minute, while we listen to the pendulum which counts the seconds, or look at the hand that seems to gallop o’er the dial, or watch a carriage-wheel, of which each turn abridges distance, or hearken to the splashing of a prow that distances the waves, and brings us nearer to the shore where we must descend from the heaven of our dreams on the bleak and barren strand of harsh reality.
XXXV.
[Illustration: THE LOVERS’ COMPACT.]
One sunny evening when our boat lay in a calm and sheltered creek, formed by the Mont du Chat, and we were delightfully lulled by the distant sound of a cascade which perpetually murmurs in the grottos through which it filtrates before losing itself in the abyss of water, our boatmen landed to draw some nets they had set the day before. We remained alone in the boat which was moored to the branch of a fig-tree by a slender rope; the motion of the boat caused the branch to bend and break without our being aware of it, and we drifted out to the middle of the bay, nearly three hundred yards from the perpendicular rocks with which it is surrounded. The waters of the lake in this part were of that bronzed color and had that molten appearance and look of heavy immobility which the shade of overhanging cliffs always gives; and the perpendicular rocks which surrounded it indicated the unfathomable depth of its waters. I might have taken up the oars and returned to shore, but we felt a thrill of pleasure at our loneliness and the absence of any form of living nature. We would have wished to wander thus on a boundless firmament, instead of on a sea with shores. We no longer heard the voices of the boatmen who had gone along the Savoy shore, and were now hidden from our view by some projecting rocks; we only heard the distant trickling of the cascade, the harmonious sighs of the pines when some playful breeze swept for an instant through the still and heavy air, and the low ripple of the water against the sides of the boat which gently undulated at our slightest movement.
Our boat lay half in shade and half in sunshine,–the head in sunshine, and the stern in shade. I was sitting at Julie’s feet in the bottom of the boat, as on the first day when I brought her back from Haute-Combe. We took delight in calling to remembrance every circumstance of that first day, that mysterious era from which the world commenced for us,–for that day was the date of our meeting and of our love! She was half reclining with one arm hanging over the side of the boat, the other leaned upon my shoulder, and her hand played with a lock of my long hair; my head was thrown back, so that I could only see the heavens above and her face, which stood out on the blue background of the sky. She bent over me, as if to contemplate her sun on my brow, her light in my eyes; an expression of deep, calm, and ineffable happiness was diffused over her features, and gave to her beauty a radiance and splendor which was in harmony with the surrounding glory of the sky. Suddenly I saw her turn pale and withdraw her arms from the side of the boat and from my shoulder; she started up as if awaked from sleep, covered for one instant her face with her two hands, and remained in deep and silent thought; then withdrawing her hands, which were wet with tears, she said, in a tone of calm and serene determination, “Oh, let us die! …”
After these words she remained silent for an instant, then resumed: “Yes, let us die, for earth has nothing more to give, and Heaven nothing more to promise!” She gazed at the sky and mountain, the lake and its translucid waves around us. “Seest thou,” she said (it was the first and the last time that she ever used that form of speech which is tender or solemn, according as we address God or man),–“seest thou that all is ready around us for the blessed close of our two lives? Seest thou the sun of the brightest of our days which sets, not to rise for us perhaps to-morrow? Seest thou the mountains glass themselves for the last time in the lake? They stretch out their long shadows towards us, as if to say, Wrap yourselves in this shroud which I extend towards you! See! the deep and clear, the silent waves have prepared for us a sandy couch from which no man shall wake us and tell us to be gone! No human eye can see us. None will know from what mysterious cause the empty bark has been washed ashore upon some rock. No ripple on these waters will betray to the curious or the indifferent the spot where our two bodies slid beneath the wave, in one embrace; where our two souls rose mingled in the surrounding ether; no sound of earth will follow us, but the slight ripple of the closing wave!… Oh, let us die in this delight of soul, and feel of death only its entrancing joy. One day we shall wish to die, and we shall die less happy. I am a few years older than you, and this difference which is unfelt now will increase with time. The little beauty which has attracted you will early fade, and you will only recall with wonder the memory of your departed enthusiasm. Besides, I am to you but as a spirit; … you will seek another happiness; … I should die of jealousy if you found it with another, … and I should die of grief, if I saw you unhappy through me!… Oh, let us die, let us die! Let us efface the dark or doubtful future with one last sigh, which will only leave on our lips the unallayed taste of complete felicity.”
At the same moment my heart spoke to me as forcibly as she did, and said what her voice said to my ear, what her looks said to my eyes, what solemn, mute, funereal Nature in the splendor of her last hour, said to all my senses. The two voices that I heard, the inward and the outer voice, said the same words, as if one had been the echo or translation of the other. I forgot the universe, and I answered, “Let us die!”
* * * * *
I wound the fisherman’s ropes which I found in the boat several times round her body and mine, which were bound as in the same winding sheet. I took her up in my arms, which I had left disengaged in order to precipitate her with me into the lake.
At the very instant that I was taking the spring which would forever have buried us in the waters, I saw her turn pale, her head drooped, its lifeless weight sank upon my shoulder, and I felt her knees give way beneath her body. Excessive emotion and the joy of dying together had forestalled death. She had fainted in my arms. The idea of taking advantage of her insensible state to hurry her, unknown to herself, and perhaps against her will, into my grave, struck me with horror. I fell back into the boat with my burden; I loosed the ropes that bound us, and laid her on the seat; I dipped my hands into the lake and sprinkled the cold drops of water on her lips and forehead. I know not how long she remained thus without color, voice, or motion. When she first opened her eyes and regained consciousness, night was coming on, and the slow drift of the boat had carried us into the middle of the lake.
“God wills it not,” I said. “We live; what we thought the privilege of our love was a double crime. Is there no one to whom we belong on earth? No one in heaven?” I added looking upwards reverentially, as though I had seen in the firmament the sovereign Judge and Lord of our destinies. “Speak no more of it,” she said in a low and hurried tone; “never speak of it again! You have chosen that I should live; I will live; my crime was not in dying, but in taking you with me!” There was something of bitterness and tender reproach in her tone and in her look. “It may be,” said I, replying to her thoughts,–“it may be that heaven itself has no such hours as those we have just passed; but life has,–that is enough to make me love it.” She soon recovered her bloom and her serenity. I seized the oars, and slowly rowed back to the little sandy beach, where we heard the voices of the boatmen, who had lighted a fire beneath a projecting rock. We recrossed the lake, and returned home silently and thoughtfully.
XXXVI.
In the evening, when I went into her room, I found her seated in tears before her little table, where several open letters were lying scattered among the tea things. “We had better have died at once, for here is the lingering death of separation, which begins for me,” she said, pointing to some letters which bore the postmark of Paris and Geneva.
Her husband wrote that he began to be very anxious at her long absence at a season of the year when the weather might become inclement from day to day; that he felt himself gradually declining and that he wished to embrace and bless her before he died. His mournful entreaties were intermingled with many expressions of paternal fondness, and some sportive allusions to the fair young brother, who made her forget her other friends. The other letter was from the Genevese doctor, who was to have come to take her back to Paris. He wrote to say that he was obliged unexpectedly to leave home to attend a German prince who required his care, and that he sent in his stead a respectable, trustworthy man, who would accompany her to Paris and act as her courier on the road. This man had arrived, and her departure was fixed for the day after the morrow.
Although this news had been long foreseen, it affected us as though it had been quite unexpected. We passed a long evening and nearly half the night in silence, leaning opposite to one another on the little table, and neither daring to look at each other, or to speak, for fear of bursting into tears. We strove to interrupt the speechless agony of our hearts by a few unconnected words, but these were said in a deep and hollow voice, which resounded in the room like tear-drops on a coffin. I had instantly determined to go also.
XXXVII.
The next day was the eve of our separation. The morning, as if to mock us, rose more bright and warm than in the fairest days of October.
While the trunks were being packed, and the carriage got ready, we started with the mules and guides. We visited both hill and valley, to say farewell, and to make, as it were, a pilgrimage of love to all the spots where we had first seen each other, then met and walked; where we had sat, and talked, and loved, during the long and heavenly intercourse between ourselves and lonely Nature. We began by the lovely hill of Tresserves which rises like a verdant cliff between the valley of Aix and the lake; its sides, that rise almost perpendicularly from the water’s edge, are covered with chestnut-trees, rivalling those of Sicily, through their branches, which overhang the water, one sees snatches of the blue lake or of the sky, according as one looks high or low. It was on the velvet of the moss-covered roots of these noble trees, which have seen successive generations of young men and women pass like ants beneath their shade, that we in our contemplative hours had dreamed our fairest dreams. From thence we descended by a steep declivity to a small solitary chateau called Bon Port. This little castle is so embosomed in the chestnut-trees of Tresserves on the land side, and so well hidden on the water side in the deep windings of a sheltered bay, that it is difficult to see it either from the mountain or from the little sea of Bourget. A terrace with a few fig-trees divides the chateau from the sandy beach, where the gentle waves continually come rippling in, to lick the shore and murmuringly expire. Oh, how we envied the fortunate possessors of this retreat unknown to men, hidden in the trees and waters, and only visited by the birds of the lake, the sunshine and the soft south wind. We blessed it a thousand times in its repose, and prayed that it might shelter hearts like ours.
XXXVIII.
From Bon Port we proceeded towards the high mountains which overlook the valley between Chambery and Geneva, going round by the northern side of the hill of Tresserves. We saw once more the meadows, the pastures, the cottages hidden beneath the walnut-trees, and the grassy slopes, where the young heifers play, their little bell tinkles continually, to give notice of their wandering march through the grass to the shepherd, who tends them at a distance. We ascended to the highest chalets; the winter wind had already scorched the tips of the grass. We remembered the delightful hours we had spent there, the words we had spoken, the fond delusion we had entertained of an entire separation from the world, the sighs we had confided to the mountain winds and rays to waft them to heaven. We recalled all our hours of peace and happiness so swiftly flown, all our words, dreams, gestures, looks and wishes, as one strips a dwelling that one leaves of all that is most precious. We mentally buried all these treasures of memory and hope within the walls of these wooden chalets which would remain closed until the spring, to find them entire on our return, if ever we returned.
XXXIX.
We came down by the wooded slopes to the foaming bed of a cascade. There we saw a small funereal monument erected to the memory of a young and lovely woman, Madame de Broc; she fell some years ago into this whirl-pool, whose foaming waters gave up a long while after a part of her white dress, and thus caused her body to be found in the deep grotto in which it had been ingulfed. Lovers often come and visit this watery tomb; their hearts feel heavy, and they draw closer to each other as they think how their fragile felicity may be dashed to atoms by one false step on the slippery rock.
From this cascade, which bears the name of Madame de Broc, we walked in silence towards the Chateau de Saint Innocent, from whence one commands an extensive view of the whole lake. We got down from our mules beneath the shade of some lofty oaks, which were interspersed here and there with a few patches of heath. It was a lonely place at that time, but since then a rich planter, on his return to his native land, has built himself a country house, and planted a garden in these, his paternal acres. Our mules were turned loose, and left to graze in the wood under the care of the children who acted as our guides. We walked on alone from tree to tree, from one glade to another on the narrow neck of land, until we reached the extreme point, where we saw the shining lake, and heard its splashing waters. This wood of Saint Innocent is a promontory that stretches out into the lake at the wildest and most lonely part of its shores; it ends in some rocks of gray granite, which are sometimes washed by the foam of the wind-tossed waves, but are dry and shining when the waters subside into repose. We sat down on two stones close to each other. Before us, the dark pile of the Abbey of Haute-Combe rose on the opposite shore of the lake. Our eyes were fixed on a little white speck that seemed to shine at the foot of the gloomy terraces of the monastery. It was the fisherman’s house, where we had been thrown together by the waves, and united forever by that chance meeting; it was the room where we had spent that heavenly and yet funereal night which had decided the fate of both our lives. “It was there!” she said, stretching out her arm, and pointing to the bright speck, which was scarcely visible in the distance and darkness of the opposite shore. “Will there come a day and a place,” she added mournfully, “in which the memory of all we felt there during those deathless hours will appear to you, in the remoteness of the past, but as that little speck on the dark background of yonder shore?”
I could not reply to these words; her tone, her doubts, the prospect of death, inconstancy, and frailty, and the possibility of forgetfulness, had struck me to the heart, and filled me with sad forebodings. I burst into tears. I hid my face in my hands, and turned towards the evening breeze, that it might dry my tears in my eyes; but she had seen them.
“Raphael,” she resumed with greater tenderness, “no, you will never forget me. I know it, I feel it; but love is short, and life is slow. You will live many years beyond me. You will drain all that is sweet, or powerful, or bitter in the cup that Nature offers to the lips of man. You will be a man! I know it by your sensibility, which is at once manly and feminine. You will be a man to the full extent of all the wretchedness and dignity of that name by which God has called one of his strangest creatures! In one of your aspirations there is breath for a thousand lives! You will live with all the energy and in the full meaning of the word–life! I …” she stopped for an instant, and raised her eyes and arms to Heaven as if in thank fulness: “I–I have lived!–I have lived enough,” she resumed in a contented tone, “since I have inhaled, to bear it forever within me, the spirit of the soul that I waited for on earth, and which would vivify me even in death, from whence you once recalled me…. I shall die young, and without regret now, for I have drained at a single draught the life that you will not exhaust before your dark hair has become as white as the spray that dashes over your feet.
“This sky, this lake, these shores, these mountains, have been the scene of my only real life here below. Swear to me to blend so completely in your remembrance this sky, this lake, these shores, these mountains, with my memory, that their image and mine may henceforward be inseparable for you; that this landscape in your eyes, and I in your heart, may make but one … so that,” she added, “when you return after long days, to see once more this lonely spot, to wander beneath these trees, on the margin of these waves, to listen to the breeze and murmuring winds, you may see me once more, as living, as present, and as loving as I am here!…”
She could say no more and burst into tears. Oh, how we wept! how long we wept! The sound of our stifled sobs mingled with the sobbing of the water on the sand. Our tears fell trickling in the water at our feet. After a lapse of fifteen years, I cannot write it without tears, even now.
O man! fear not for thy affections, and feel no dread lest time should efface them. There is neither to-day nor yesterday in the powerful echoes of memory; there is only always. He who no longer feels has never felt. There are two memories,–the memory of the senses, which wears out with the senses, and in which perishable things decay; and the memory of the soul, for which time does not exist, and which lives over at the same instant every moment of its past and present existence; it is a faculty of the soul, which, like the soul, enjoys ubiquity, universality, and immortality of spirit. Fear not, ye who love! Time has power over hours, none over the soul.
XL.
I strove to speak, but could not. My sobs spoke, and my tears promised. We got up to join the muleteers, and returned at sunset by the long avenue of leafless poplars, where we had passed before, when she held my hand so long in the palanquin. As we went through the straggling faubourg of cottages, at the entrance of the town, and crossed the Place to enter the steep street of Aix, sad faces were seen greeting us at the windows and at the doors; as kind souls watch the departure of two belated swallows, who are the last to leave the walls which have sheltered them. Poor women rose from the stone bench where they were spinning before their houses; children left the goats and donkeys which they were driving home; all came to address a word, a look, or even a silent bow of recognition to the young lady, and the one they supposed to be her brother. She was so beautiful, so gracious to all, so loved, it seemed as though the last ray of the year was retiring from the valley.
When we had reached the top of the town, we got down from our mules and dismissed the children. As we did not wish to lose an hour of this last day that still shone on the rose-tinted snows of the Alps, we climbed slowly, and alone, up a narrow path which leads to the garden terrace of a house called the Maison Chevalier. From this terrace, which seems like a platform erected in the centre of a panorama, the eye embraces the town, the lake, the passes of the Rhone, and all the peaks of the Alpine landscape. We sat down on the fallen trunk of a tree, and leaned on the parapet wall of the terrace; we remained mute and motionless, looking by turns at all the different spots, that for the last six weeks had witnessed our looks and steps, our twofold dreams, and our sighs. When all these had one by one faded away in the dim shade of twilight; when there was only one corner of the horizon, to westward, where a faint light remained,–we started up with one accord, and fled precipitately, casting vain and sorrowing looks behind as if some invisible hand had driven us out of this Eden, and pitilessly effaced on our steps all the scene of our happiness and love.
XLI.
We returned home and spent a sad evening, although I was to accompany Julie as far as Lyons on the box of her carriage. When the hand of her little portable clock marked midnight, I retired, to let her take some rest before morning. She accompanied me to the door; I opened it, and said as I kissed her hand in the passage, “Good-bye, till the morrow!” She did not answer, but I heard her murmur, with a sob, behind the closing door, “There is no morrow for us!”
There were a few days more, but they were short and bitter, as the last dregs of a drained cup. We started for Chambery very early in the morning, not to show our pale cheeks and swollen eyelids in broad daylight, and passed the day there in a small inn of the Italian faubourg. The wooden galleries of the inn overlooked a garden with a stream running through it, and for a few hours we cheated ourselves into the belief that we were once more in our home at Aix, with its galleries, its silence, and its solitude.
XLII.
We wished before we left Chambery and the valley we so much loved to visit together the humble dwelling of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Warens, at Les Charmettes. A landscape is but a man or a woman. What is Vaucluse without Petrarch? Sorrento without Tasso? What is Sicily without Theocritus, or the Paraclet without Heloise? What is Annecy without Madame de Warens? What is Chambery without Jean Jacques Rousseau? A sky without rays, a voice without echo, a landscape without life! Man does not only animate his fellow-men, he animates all nature. He carries his own immortality with him into heaven, but bequeaths another to the spots that he has consecrated by his presence; it is only there we can trace his course, and really converse with his memory. We took with us the volume of the “Confessions” in which the poet of Les Charmettes describes this rustic retreat. Rousseau was wrecked there by the first storms of his fate, and was rescued by a woman, young, lovely, and adventurous, wrecked and lost like himself. This woman seems to have been a compound of virtues and weaknesses, sensibility and license, piety and independence of thought, formed expressly by Nature to cherish and develop the strange youth, whose mind comprehended that of a sage, a lover, a philosopher, a legislator, and a madman. Another woman might perhaps have produced another life. In a man we can always trace the woman whom he first loved. Happy would he have been who had met Madame de Warens before her profanation! She was an idol to be adored, but the idol had been polluted. She herself debased the worship that a young and loving heart tendered her. The amours of this woman and Rousseau appear like a leaf torn from the loves of Daphnis and Chloe, and found soiled and defiled on the bed of a courtesan. It’ matters not; it was the first love, or the first delirium, if you will, of the young man. The birthplace of that love, the arbor where Rousseau made his first avowal, the room where he blushed at his first emotions, the yard where he gloried in the most humble offices to serve his beloved protectress, the spreading chestnut-trees beneath which they sat together to speak of God, and intermingled their sportive theology with bursts of merriment and childish caresses, the landscape, mysterious and wild as they, which seems so well adapted to them,–have all, for the lover, the poet, or the philosopher, a deep and hidden attraction. They yield to it without knowing why. For poets this was the first page of that life which was a poem; for philosophers it was the cradle of a revolution; for lovers it is the birthplace of first love.
XLIII.
We followed the stony path at the bottom of the ravine which leads to Les Charmettes, still talking of this love. We were alone. The goat-herds even had forsaken the dried-up pastures and the leafless hedges. The sun shone now and then between the passing clouds, and its concentrated rays were warmer within the sheltered sides of the ravine. The redbreasts hopped about the bushes almost within our reach. Every now and then we would sit on the southern bank of the road to read a page or two of the “Confessions,” and identify ourselves with the place.
We fancied we saw the young vagrant in his tattered clothes, knocking at the gate and delivering, with a blush, his letter of recommendation to the fair recluse, in the lonely path that leads from the house to the church. They were so present to our fancy, that it seemed as though they were expecting us, and that we should see them at the window or in the garden walks of Les Charmettes. We would walk on, then stop again; the spot seemed to attract and to repel us by turns, as a place where love had been revealed, but where love had been profaned also. It presented no such perils to us. We were destined to carry away our love from thence as pure and as divine as we had brought it there within us.
“Oh,” I inwardly exclaimed, “were I a Rousseau, what might not this other Madame de Warens have made me; she who is as superior to her of Les Charmettes as I am inferior to Rousseau, not in feeling, but in genius.”
Absorbed in these thoughts, we walked up a shelving greensward upon which a few walnut-trees were scattered here and there. These trees had seen the lovers beneath their shade. To the right, where the pass narrows so as to appear to form a barrier to the traveller, stands the house of Madame de Warens on a high terrace of rough and ill-cemented stones. It is a little square building of gray stone, with two windows and a door opening on the terrace, and the same on the garden side; there are three low rooms on the upper story, and a large room on the ground floor with no other furniture than a portrait of Madame de Warens in her youth. Her lovely face beams forth from the dust-covered and dingy canvas with beauty, sportiveness, and pensive grace. Poor charming woman! Had she not met that wandering boy on the highway; had she not opened to him her house and heart, his sensitive and suffering genius might have been extinguished in the mire. The meeting seemed like the effect of chance, but it was predestination meeting the great man under the form of his first love. That woman saved him; she cultivated him; she excited him in solitude, in liberty, and in love, as the houris of the East through pleasure raise up martyrs in their young votaries. She gave him his dreamy imagination, his almost feminine soul, his tender accents, his passion for nature. Her pensive fancy imparted to him enthusiasm,–the enthusiasm of women, of young men, of lovers, of all the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy of his day. She gave him the world, and he proved ungrateful…. She gave him fame, and he bequeathed opprobrium…. But posterity should be grateful to them, and forgive a weakness that gave us the prophet of liberty. When Rousseau wrote those odious pages against his benefactress, he was no longer Rousseau, he was a poor madman. Who knows if his morbid and disordered imagination, which made him at that time see an insult in every benefit and hatred in all friendship, did not show him likewise the courtesan in the loving woman, and wantonness instead of love? I have always suspected it. I defy any rational man to recompose, with a semblance of probability, the character Rousseau gives to the woman he loved, from the contradictory elements which he describes in her. Those elements exclude each other: if she had soul enough to adore Rousseau, she did not at the same time love Claude Anet; if she grieved for Claude Anet and Rousseau, she did not love the young hair-dresser. If she was pious she did not glory in her weakness, but must have deplored it; if engaging, handsome, and frail, as Rousseau depicts her, she could not be reduced to look for admirers among the vagrants of the streets, or on the highways. If she affected devotion with such a life, she was a calculating hypocrite; and if a hypocrite, she was not the frank, open, and unreserved creature of the “Confessions.” The likeness cannot be true; it is a fancy head and a fancy heart. There is some hidden mystery here, which must be attributed rather to the misguided hand of the artist than to the nature of the woman whom he wished to represent. We must neither accuse the painter whose discernment was at that time impaired, nor believe in the portrait which has disfigured the sketch he at first made of an adorable creature.
For my part I never could believe that Madame de Warens would have recognized herself in the questionable pages of Rousseau’s old age. In my fancy, I have always restored her to what she was, or what she appeared at Annecy to the young poet,–lovely, feeling, tender, frail though really pious, prodigal of kindness, thirsting after love, and desirous of blending the tender names of mother and of mistress in her affection for the youth that Providence had confided to her, and whom her love had adopted. This is the true portrait, such as the old men of Chambery and Annecy have told me that their fathers had transmitted to them. Rousseau’s mind itself bears witness against his own accusations. Whence would he have derived his sublime and tender piety, his feminine melancholy, his exquisite and delicate touches of feeling, if a woman had not bestowed them with her heart. No, the woman who called into existence such a man was not a cynical courtesan, but rather a fallen Heloise–an Heloise fallen by love and not by vice or depravity. I appeal from Rousseau the morose old man, calumniating human nature, to Rousseau, the young and ardent lover; and when I go, as I often do, to muse at Les Charmettes, I seek a Madame de Warens far more touching and attractive in my imagination than in his.
XLIV.
A poor woman made us some fire in Madame de Warens’ room; accustomed to the visit of strangers, and to their long conversations on the scene of the early days of a celebrated man, she attended to her usual work in the kitchen and in the yard, and left us at liberty to warm ourselves, or to saunter backwards and forwards from the house to the garden. This little sunny garden, surrounded by a wall which separated it from the vineyards, and overrun with nettles, mallows, and weeds of all kinds, resembled one of those village churchyards where the peasants assemble to bask in the rays of the sun, leaning against the church-walls, with their feet on the graves of the dead. The walks, so neatly gravelled once, were now covered with damp earth and yellow moss, and showed the neglect that had followed on absence. How we would have wished to discover the print of the footsteps of Madame de Warens, when she used to go, basket in hand, from tree to tree, from vine to vine, gathering the pears of the orchard or the grapes of the vineyard, and indulging in merry frolic with, the pupil or the confessor. But there is no trace of them in their house, save their memory. That is enough; their name, their remembrance, their image, the sun they saw, the air they breathed, which seems still beaming with their youth, warm with their breath, and filled with their voices, give one back the light, the dreams, the sounds, which shed enchantment round their spring of life.
I saw by Julie’s pensive countenance, and her silent thoughtfulness, that the sight of this sanctuary of love and genius impressed her as deeply as myself. At times she shunned me, and remained wrapped in her own thoughts as if she feared to communicate them; she would go into the house to warm herself when I was in the garden, and return to sit on the stone bench in the arbor when I joined her at the fireside. At length I went to her in the arbor; the last yellow leaves hung loosely from the vine, and allowed the sun to penetrate and envelop her with its rays.
“What is it you wish to think of without me?” I said in a tone of tender reproach. “Do I ever think alone?” “Alas!” she answered, “you will not believe me, but I was thinking, that I could wish to be Madame de Warens for you, during one single season, even though I were to be forsaken for the remainder of my days, and though shame were to attach to my memory like hers; even though you proved yourself as ungrateful and calumniating as Rousseau!…. How happy she was,” she continued, gazing up at the sky as though she sought the image of the strange creature she envied,–“how happy she was! she sacrificed herself for him she loved.”
“What ingratitude and what profanation of yourself and of our happiness!” I answered, walking slowly back with her towards the house, upon the dry leaves, that rustled beneath our feet.
“Have I then ever, by a single word, or look, or by a single sigh, shown that aught was wanting to my bitter but complete felicity? Cannot you, in your angelic fancy, imagine for another Rousseau (if Nature could have produced two) another Madame de Warens?–a Madame de Warens, young and pure, angel, lover, sister, all at once, bestowing her whole soul, her immaculate and immortal soul, instead of her perishable charms; bestowing it on a brother who was lost and is found, who was young, misled, and wandering too in this world, like the son of the watch-maker; throwing open to that brother, instead of her house and garden, the bright treasures of her affection, purifying him in her rays, cleansing him from his first pollutions by her tears, deterring him forever from any grosser pleasure than that of inward possession and contemplation, teaching him to value his very privations far above the sensual enjoyment that man shares with brutes, pointing out to him his course through life, inciting him to glory and to virtue, and rewarding his sacrifices by this one thought,–that fame, virtue, and sacrifices were all taken into account in the heart of his beloved, all accumulate in her love, are multiplied by her gratitude, and are added to that treasure of tenderness which is ever increasing here below, to be expended only in heaven?”
XLV.
Nevertheless, as I spoke thus, I fell quite overcome, with my face hidden in my hands, on a chair that was near the wall far from hers. I remained there without speaking a word. “Let us begone,” she said; “I am cold; this place is not good for us!” We gave some money to the good woman, and we returned slowly to Chambery.
The next day Julie was to start for Lyons. In the evening Louis came to see us at the inn, and I induced him to go with me to spend a few weeks at my father’s house, which was situated on the road from Paris to Lyons. We then went out together to inquire at the coachmaker’s in Chambery for a light caleche, in which we could follow Julie’s carriage as far as the town where we were to separate. We soon found what we sought.
Before daylight we were off, travelling in silence through the winding defiles of Savoy, which at Pont-de-Beauvoisin open into the monotonous and stony plains of Dauphiny. At every stage we got down and went to the first carriage to inquire about the poor invalid. Alas! every turn of the carriage-wheel which took her further from that spring of life which she had found in Savoy seemed to rob her of her bloom, and to bring back the look of languor and the slow fever which had struck me as being the beauty of death the first time I saw her. As the time for our leaving her drew near, she was visibly oppressed with grief. Between La-Tour-du-Pin and Lyons, we got into her carriage for a few leagues to try and cheer her. I begged her to sing the ballad of Auld Robin Gray for my friend; she did so, to please me, but at the second verse, which relates the parting of the two lovers the analogy between our situation and the hopeless sadness of the ballad, as she sung it, struck her so forcibly that she burst into tears. She took up a black shawl that she wore that day, and threw it as a veil over her face, and I saw her sobbing a long while beneath the shawl. At the last stage she fell into a fainting fit, which lasted till we reached the hotel where we were to get down at Lyons. With the assistance of her maid, we carried her upstairs, and laid her on her bed. In the evening she rallied, and the next day we pursued our journey towards Macon.
XLVI.
It was there we were to separate definitively. We gave our directions to her courier, and hurried over the adieux for fear of increasing her illness by prolonging such painful emotions, as one who with an unflinching hand hastily bares a wound to spare the sufferer. My friend left for my father’s country house, whither I was to follow the next day.
Louis was no sooner gone than I felt quite unable to keep my word. I could not rest under the idea of leaving Julie in tears, to prosecute her long winter journey with only the care of servants, and the thought that she might fall ill in some lonely inn, and die while calling for me in vain, was unbearable. I had no money left; a good old man who had once lent me twenty-five louis had died during my absence. I took my watch, a gold chain that one of my mother’s friends had given me three years before, some trinkets, my epaulets, my sword, and the gold lace off my uniform, wrapped them all in my cloak, and went to my mother’s jeweller, who gave me thirty-five louis for the whole. From thence, I hurried to the inn where Julie slept, and called her courier; I told him I should follow the carriage at a distance to the gates of Paris, but that I did not wish his mistress to know it, for fear she should object to it, out of consideration to me. I inquired the names of the towns and the hotels where he intended to stay on the road, in order that I might stop in the same towns, but stay at other hotels. I rewarded him by anticipation and liberally for his secrecy, then ran to the post house, ordered horses, and set off half an hour after the departure of the carriage I wished to follow.
XLVII.
[Illustration: _RAPHAEL SEES JULIE IN PARIS_.]
No unforeseen obstacles counteracted the mysterious watchfulness which I exercised, though still invisible. The courier gave notice secretly to the postilions of the approach of another caleche, and, as he ordered horses for me, I always found the relays ready. I accelerated or slackened my speed according as I wished to keep at a distance, or to come nearer to the first carriage, and always questioned the postilions respecting the health of the young lady they had just driven. From the top of the hills I could see, far down in the plain, the carriage speeding through fog or sunshine, and bearing away my happiness. My thoughts outstripped the horses; in fancy I entered the carriage and saw Julie asleep, dreaming perhaps of me, or awake, and weeping over our bright days forever flown. When I closed my eyes, to see her better, I fancied I heard her breathe. I can scarcely now comprehend that I had strength of mind and self-denial enough to resist during a journey of one hundred and twenty leagues the impulse that unceasingly impelled me towards that carriage which I followed without attempting to overtake; my whole soul went with it, and my body alone, insensible to the snow and sleet, followed, and was jolted, tossed and swung about, without the least consciousness of its own sufferings. But the fear of causing Julie an unexpected shock which might prove fatal or of renewing a heartrending scene of separation, repelled me, and the idea of watching over her safety like a loving Providence, and with angel-like disinterestedness, nailed me to my resolution.
The first time, she got down at the great Hotel of Autun, and I, in a little inn of the faubourg close by. Before daylight the two carriages, within sight of each other, were once more running along the white and winding road, through the gray plains and druidical oak forests of Upper Burgundy. We stopped in the little town of Avalon,–she in the centre, and I at the extremity of the town. The next day we were rolling on towards Sens. The snow which the north wind had accumulated on the barren heights of Lucy-le-Bois and of Vermanton, fell in half-melted flakes on the road, and smothered the sound of the wheels. One could scarcely distinguish the misty horizon at the distance of a few feet, through the whirling cloud of snow that the wind drifted from the adjoining fields. It was no longer possible, by sight or sound, to judge of the distance between the two carriages. Suddenly I perceived in front, almost touching my horses’ heads, Julie’s carriage, which was drawn up in the middle of the road. The courier had alighted, and was standing on the steps calling out for help and making signs of distress. I leaped out and flew to the carriage, by a first impulse stronger than prudence; I jumped inside, and saw the maid striving to recall her mistress from a fainting fit brought on by the weather and fatigue, and perhaps by the storms of the heart. The courier ran to fetch warm water from the distant cottages, and the maid rubbed her mistress’s cold feet in her hands, or pressed them to her bosom to warm them. Oh, what I felt, as I held that adored form in my arms during one long hour of insensibility, desiring that she should hear, and dreading lest she should recognize, my voice, which recalled her to life, none can conceive or describe, unless they, too, have felt life and death thus struggling in their hearts.
At last our tender care, the application of the hot-water bottles which had been brought by the courier, and the warmth of my hands on hers, recalled heat to the extremities. The color which began to appear in her cheeks, and a long and feeble sigh which escaped her lips, indicated her return to life. I jumped out on the road, so that she might not see me when she opened her eyes, and remained there, behind the carriage, my face muffled up in my cloak. I desired the servants to make no mention of my sudden appearance. They soon made a sign to me that she was recovering consciousness, and I heard her voice stammer forth these words, as if in a dream: “Oh, if Raphael were here! I thought it was Raphael!” I hastily returned to my own carriage; the horses started afresh, and a wide distance soon lay between us. In the evening I went to inquire after her at the inn where she had alighted at Sens. I was told that she was quite well, and was sleeping soundly.
I followed in her track as far as Fossard, a stage near the little town of Montereau; there the road from Sens to Paris branches off in two directions,–one branch passing through Fontainebleau, the other through Melun. This latter being shorter by several leagues, I followed it in order to precede Julie by a few hours in Paris, and see her get down at her own door. I paid the postilions double, and arrived long before dark at the hotel where I was accustomed to put up in Paris. At nightfall I stationed myself on the quay opposite to Julie’s house, that she had so often described to me; I knew it as if I had lived there all my life. I observed through the windows that hurrying to and fro of shadows within, which one sees in a house where some new guest is expected. I could see on the ceiling of her room the reflection of the fire which had been lighted on the hearth. An old man’s face showed itself several times at the window, and appeared to watch and listen to the noises of the quay. It was her husband,–her second father. The concierge held the door open, and stepped out from time to time, to watch and listen likewise. Now and then a pale and rapid gleam of light from the street lamp, which swung backwards and forwards with the gusty wind of December, shot athwart the pavement before the house, and then left it in darkness. At last a travelling carriage swept around the corner of one of the streets which lead to the quay, and stopped before the house. I darted forward and half-concealed myself in the shade of a column at the next door to that at which the carriage stopped. I saw the servants rush to the door. I saw Julie alight, and saw the old man embrace her, as a father embraces his child after a long absence; he then walked heavily upstairs, leaning on the arm of the concierge. The carriage was unpacked, the postilion drove it round to another street to put it up, the door was closed. I returned to my post near the parapet on the river side.
XLVIII.
I stood a long while contemplating from thence the lighted windows of Julie’s house, and sought to discover what was going on inside. I saw the usual stir of an arrival, busy people carrying trunks, unpacking parcels, and setting all things in order; when this bustle had a little subsided, when the lights no longer ran backwards and forwards from room to room, and that the old man’s room alone was lighted by the pale rays of a night lamp, I could distinguish, through the closed windows of the _entresol_ beneath, the motionless shadow of Julie’s tall and drooping form on the white curtains. She remained some time in the same attitude; then I saw her open the window spite of the cold, look towards the Seine in my direction, as if her eye had rested upon me from some preternatural revelation of love, then turn towards the north, and gaze at a star that we used to contemplate together, and which we had both agreed to look at in absence, as a meeting-place for our souls in the inaccessible solitude of the firmament. I felt that look fall on my heart like living coals of fire. I knew that our hearts were united in one thought and my resolution vanished. I darted forward to rush across the quay, to go beneath her windows, and say one word that might make her recognize her brother at her feet. At the same instant she closed her window. The rolling of carriages covered the sound of my voice; the light was extinguished at the _entresol_, and I remained motionless on the quay. The clock of a neighboring edifice struck slowly twelve; I approached the door, and kissed it convulsively without daring to knock. I knelt on the threshold, and prayed to the stones to preserve to me the supreme treasure which I had brought back to confide to these walls, and then slowly withdrew.
XLIX.
I left Paris the next day without having seen a single one of the friends I had there. I inwardly rejoiced at not having bestowed one look, one word, or a single step on any one but her. The rest of the world no longer existed for me. Before I left, however, I put into the post a note dated Paris, and addressed to Julie, which she would receive on waking. The note only contained these words: “I have followed you, I have watched over you though invisible. I would not leave you without knowing that you were under the care of those who love you. Last night, at midnight, when you opened the window, and looked at the star, and sighed, I was there! You might have heard my voice. When you read these lines I shall be far away!”
L.
I travelled day and night in such complete dizziness of thought that I felt neither cold, hunger nor distance, and arrived at M—- as if awaking from a dream, and scarcely remembered that I had been to Paris. I found my friend Louis awaiting me at my father’s house in the country. His presence was soothing to me; I could at least speak to him of her whom he admired as much as I did. We slept in the same room, and part of our nights were spent in talking of the heavenly vision, by which he had been as dazzled as myself. He considered her as one of those delusions of fancy, one of those women above mortal height, like Tasso’s Eleanora, Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s Laura, or Vittoria Colonna, the lover, the poet, and the heroine at once,–forms that flit across the earth, scarcely touching it, and without tarrying, only to fascinate the eyes of some men, the privileged few of love, to lead on their souls to immortal aspirations, and to be the _sursum corda_ of superior imaginations. As to Louis, he dared not raise his love as high as his enthusiasm. His sensitive and tender heart, which had been early wounded, was at that time filled with the image of a poor and pious orphan, one of his own family. His happiness would have been to have married her, and to live in obscurity and peace in a cottage among the hills of Chambery. Want of fortune restricted the two poor lovers to a hopeless and tender friendship, from the fear of lowering the name of their family in poverty, or of bequeathing indigence to children. The young girl died some years after, of solitude and hopelessness. I have never seen a sweeter face droop and die for the want of a few of fortune’s rays. Her countenance, where might be traced the remains of blooming youth, equally ready to revive or to fade forever, bore in the highest degree the sublime and touching impress of that virtue of the unhappy, called resignation. She became blind in consequence of the secret tears she shed during her long years of expectation and uncertainty. I met her once, on my return from one of my journeys to Italy. She was led by the hand through the streets of Chambery, by one of her little sisters. When she heard my voice, she turned pale, and felt for some support with her poor hesitating hand: “Pardon me,” she said; “but when I used formerly to hear that voice, I always heard with it another.” Poor girl! she now listens to her lover’s voice in heaven.
LI.
How long were the two months that I had to pass away from Julie in my father’s house, before the time came that I could join her in Paris! During the last three or four months, I had exhausted the allowance I received from my father, the secret resources of my mother’s indulgence, and the purse of my friends, to pay the debts that dissipation, play, and my travels had made me contract. I had no means of obtaining the small sum I required to go to Paris, and to live there even in seclusion and penury, and was obliged to wait till the month of January, when my quarter’s allowance from my father became due. At that time of the year, too, I was in the habit of receiving some little presents from a rich but severe old uncle, and from some good and prudent old aunts. By means of all these resources, I hoped to collect a sum of six or eight hundred francs, which would be sufficient to keep me in Paris for a few months. Privations would be no trial to my vanity, for my life consisted only in my love. All the riches of this world could, in my eyes, only have served to purchase for me the portion of the day that I was to pass with her.
The weary days of expectation were filled with thoughts of her. We devoted to each other every hour of our time. In the morning, on waking, she retired to her room to write to me, and at the same instant I, too, was writing to her; our pages and our thoughts crossed on the road by every post, questioning, answering, and mingling without a day’s interruption. There were thus in reality for us only a few hours’ absence; in the evening and at night. But even these I consecrated to her: I was surrounded with her letters,–they lay open upon the table, my bed was strewn with them; I learned them by heart. I often repeated to myself the most affecting and impassioned passages, adding in fancy her voice, her gesture, her tone, her look; I would answer her, and thus succeed in producing such a complete delusion of her real presence, that I felt impatient and annoyed when I was summoned to meals, or interrupted by visitors; at these times it seemed as though she were torn from me, or driven away from my room. In my long rambles on the mountains, or in those misty plains without an horizon which border the Saone, I always took her last letter with me, and would sit on the rocks, or on the edge of the water, amid the ice and snow, to read it over and over again. Each time I fancied I discovered some word or expression that had escaped my notice before. I remember that I always instinctively directed my course towards the north, as if each step I took in the direction of Paris brought me nearer to her, and diminished the cruel distance that separated us. Sometimes I went very far on the Paris road under this impression, and when it was time to return, I had always a severe struggle with myself. I felt sorrowful, and would often look back towards that point of the horizon where she dwelt, and walk slowly and heavily home. Oh, how I envied the snow-laden wings of the crows that flew northward through the mist! What a pang I felt as I saw the carriages rolling towards Paris! How many of my useless days of youth would I not have given to be in the place of one of those listless old men who glanced unconcernedly through their carriage windows at the solitary youth by the wayside, whose steps travelled in the contrary direction to his heart. Oh, how interminably long did the short days of December and January appear! There was one bright hour for me, among all my hours,–it was when I heard from my room the step, the voice, and the rattle of the postman, who was distributing the letters in the neighborhood. As soon as I heard him I opened my window; I saw him coming up the street, with his hands full of letters, which he distributed to all the maid-servants, and waited at each door till he received the postage. How I cursed the slowness of the good women, who seemed never to have done reckoning the change into his hand! Before the postman rang at my fathers door I had already flown downstairs, crossed the vestibule, and stood panting at the door. While the old man fumbled among his letters, I strove to discover the envelope of fine post paper, and the pretty English handwriting that distinguished my treasure among all the coarse papers and clumsy superscriptions of commercial or vulgar letters. I seized it with a trembling hand; my eyes swam, my heart beat, and my legs refused their office. I hid the letter in my bosom for fear of meeting some one on the stairs; and lest so frequent a correspondence should appear suspicious to my mother, I would run into my room and bolt my door, so as to devour the pages at leisure, without fear of interruption. How many tears and kisses I impressed on the paper! Alas, when many years afterwards I opened the volume of these letters, how many words effaced by my lips, and that my tears or my transports had washed or torn out, were wanting to the sense of many sentences!
LII.
After breakfast I used to retire to my upper room, to read my letter over again and to answer it. These were the most feverish and delightful hours in the day. I would take four sheets of the largest and thinnest paper that Julie had sent me on purpose from Paris, and whose every page, commencing very high up, ending very low down, crossed, and written on the margin, contained thousands of words. These sheets I covered every morning, and found them too scanty and too soon filled for the passionate and tumultuous overflow of my thoughts. In these letters there was no beginning, no middle, no end, and no grammar; nothing, in short, of what is generally understood by the word style. It was my soul laid bare before another soul expressing, or rather stammering forth, as well as it could, the conflicting emotions that filled it, with the help of the inadequate language of men. But such language was not made to express unutterable things; its imperfect signs and empty terms, its hollow speeches and its icy words, were melted, like refractory ore, by the concentrated fire of our souls, and cast into an indescribable language, vague, ethereal, flaming and caressing, like the licking tongues of fire that had no meaning for others, but which we alone understood, as it was part of ourselves. These effusions of my heart never ended and never slackened. If the firmament had been a single page, and God had bid me fill it with my love, it could not have contained one-half of what spoke within me! I never stopped till the four sheets were filled; yet I always seemed to have said nothing, and in truth I had said nothing,–for who could ever tell what is infinite?
LIII.
These letters, which were without any pitiful pretensions to talent on my part, and were a delight and not a labor, might have been of marvellous service to me at a later period, if fate had destined me to address my fellow men, or to depict the shades, the transports, or the pains of passion, in works of imagination. Unknown to myself, I struggled desperately as Jacob wrestled with the angel, against the poorness, the rigidity, and the resistance of the language I was forced to use, as I knew not the language of the skies. The efforts that I made to conquer, bend, smooth, extend, spiritualize, color, inflame, or moderate expressions; the wish to render by words the nicest shades of feeling the most ethereal aspirations of thought, the most irresistible impulses, and the most chaste reserve of passion; to express looks, attitudes, sighs, silence, and even the annihilation of the heart adoring the invisible object of its love,–all these efforts, I repeat, which seemed to bend my pen beneath my fingers like a rebellious instrument, made me sometimes find the very word, expression, or cry that I required to give a voice to the unutterable. I had used no language, but I had cried forth the cry of my soul; and I was heard. When I rose from my chair, after this desperate but delightful struggle against words, pen, and paper, I remembered that, spite of the winter cold in my room, the perspiration stood upon my forehead, and I used to open the window to cool my fevered brow.
LIV.
My letters were not only a cry of love, they were more frequently full of invocations, contemplation, dreams of the future, prospects of heaven, consolations, and prayers.
My love, which by its nature was debarred from all those enjoyments which relax the heart by satisfying the senses, had opened afresh within me all the springs of piety that had been dried up or polluted by vile pleasures. I felt in my heart all the purity and elevation of divine love. I strove to bear away with me to heaven, on the wings of my excited and almost mystical imagination, that other suffering and discouraged soul. I spoke of God, who alone was perfect enough to have created her superhuman perfection of beauty, genius, and tenderness; great enough to contain our boundless aspirations; infinite and inexhaustible enough to absorb and whelm in himself the love he had lighted in us, so that his flame, in consuming us one by the other, might make us both exhale ourselves in him. I comforted Julie under the sacrifice that necessity obliged us to make of complete happiness here below; I pointed out to her the merit of this self-denial of an instant in the eyes of the Eternal Remunerator of our actions. I blessed the mournful and sublime purity of such sacrifices, since they would one day obtain for us a more immaterial and angelic union in the eternal atmosphere of pure spirits. I went so far as to speak of myself as happy in my abnegation, and to sing the hymns of the martyrdom of love to which we were by love, by greater love, condemned. I entreated Julie not to think of my grief and not to give way to sorrow herself. I showed a courage and a contempt for terrestrial happiness that I possessed, alas! very often only in words. I offered up to her, as a holocaust, all that was human in me. I elevated myself to the immateriality of angels, so that she might not suspect a suffering or a desire in my adoration. I besought her to seek in a tender and sustaining religion, in the shelter of the church, in the mysterious faith of Christ, the God of tears, in kneeling and in invocation,–the hopes, the consolations, and the delights that I had tasted in my childhood. She had renewed in me all my early feelings of piety. I composed prayers for her,–calm, yet ardent prayers, that ascend like flames to Heaven, but like flames that no wind can cause to vacillate. I begged her to pronounce these prayers at certain hours of the day and night, when I would repeat them also, so that our two minds, united by the same words, might be elevated at the same hour in one invocation…. All these were wet with my tears, that left their traces on my words, and were doubtless more powerful and more eloquent than they. I used to go and throw into the post by stealth these letters, the very marrow of my bones; and felt relieved on my return, as if I had thrown off a part of the weight of my own heart.
LV.
Spite of my continual efforts and of the perpetual application of my young and ardent imagination to communicate to my letters the fire that consumed me, to create a language for my sighs, to pour my burning soul upon the paper and make it overleap the distance that divided us,–in this combat against the impotence of words, I was always surpassed by Julie. Her letters had more expression in one phrase than mine in their eight pages,–her heart breathed in the words; one saw her looks in the lines; the expressions seemed still warm from her lips. In her, nothing evaporated during that slow and dull transition of the feeling to the word which lets the lava of the heart cool and pale beneath the pen of man. Woman has no style, that is why all she says is so well said. Style is a garment, but the unveiled soul stands forth upon the lips or beneath the hand of woman. Like the Venus of speech, it rises from the depths of feeling in its naked beauty, wakes of itself to life, wonders at its own existence, and is adored ere it knows that it has spoken.
LVI.
What letters and what ardor! What tones and accents! What fire and purity combined, like light and transparency in a diamond, like passion and bashfulness on the brow of the young girl who loves! What powerful simplicity! What inexhaustible effusions! What sudden revivals in the midst of languor! What sounds and songs! Then there would be sadness, recurring like the unexpected notes at the end of an air; caressing words, which seemed to fan the brow like the breath of a fond mother bending over her smiling child; a voluptuous lulling of half-whispered words, and hushed and dreamy sentences, which wrapped one in rays and murmurs, stillness and perfume, and led one gently by the soft and soothing syllables to the repose of love, the still sleep of the soul, unto the kiss upon the page which said farewell! The farewell and the kiss both silently received, as the lips silently impressed them. I have seen those letters all again; I have read over, page by page, this correspondence, bound up and classed, after death, by the pious hand of friendship; one letter answering the other from the first note down to the last word written by the death-struck hand, to which love still imparted strength. I have read them o’er, and burned them with tears, in secret, as if I committed a crime, and snatching twenty times the half-consumed page from the flames to read it once again. Why did I thus destroy? Because their very ashes would have been too burning for this world, and I have scattered them to the winds of heaven.
LVII.
At length the day came when I could reckon the hours that still separated me from Julie. All the resources that I could command did not amount to a sufficient sum to keep me three or four months in Paris. My mother, who noticed my distress without guessing its cause, drew from the casket which her fondness had already nearly emptied a large diamond, mounted as a ring. Alas, it was the last remaining jewel of her youth! She slipped it secretly into my hand, with tears. “I suffer as much as you can, Raphael,” she said with a mournful look, “to see your unprofitable youth wasted in the idleness of a small town, or in the reveries of a country life. I had always hoped that the gifts of God, that from your infancy I rejoiced to see in you, would attract the notice of the world, and open to you a career of fortune and honor. The poverty against which we have to struggle does not allow us to bring you forward. Hitherto such has been the will of God, and we must submit with resignation to his ways, which are always the best. Yet it is with grief I see you sinking into that moral languor which always follows fruitless endeavors. Let us try Fate once more. Go, since the earth here seems to burn beneath your feet,–go and live for awhile in Paris. Call, with reserve and dignity, on those old friends of your family who are now in power. Show the talents with which Nature and study have endowed you. It is impossible that those at the head of the Government should not strive to attract young men able, as you would be, to serve, support, and adorn the reign of the princes whom God has restored to us. Your poor father has much to do to bring up his six children, and not to fall below his rank in the distresses of our rustic life. Your other relations are good and kind, but they will not understand that breathing-space and action are necessary to the devouring activity of the mind at twenty. Here is my last jewel; I had promised my mother never to part with it save from dire necessity. Take it, and sell it; it will serve to maintain you in Paris a few weeks longer. It is the last token of my love, which I stake for you in the lottery of Providence. It must bring you good luck; for my solicitude, my prayers, my tenderness for you go with it.” I took the ring, and kissed my mother’s hand; a tear fell upon the diamond. Alas, it served not to allow me to seek or to await the favor of great men or princes who turned away from my obscurity, but to live three months of that divine life of the heart worth centuries of greatness. This sacred diamond was to me as Cleopatra’s pearl dissolved in my cup of life, from which I drank happiness and love for a short time.
LVIII.
I completely altered my habits from that day, from respect for my poor mother’s repeated sacrifices, and the concentration of all my thoughts in this one desire,–to see once more my love, and to prolong, as much as possible, by the strictest economy, the allotted time I was to spend with Julie. I became as calculating and as sparing of the little gold I took with me as an old miser. It seemed as though the most trifling sum I spent was an hour of my happiness, or a drop of my felicity that I wasted. I resolved to live like Jean Jacques Rousseau, on little or nothing, and to retrench from my vanity, my dress, or my food, all that I wished to bestow on the rapture of my soul. I was not, however, without an undefined hope of making some use of my talents in the cause of my love. These were as yet made known to a few friends only by some verses; but in the last three months I had written during my sleepless nights a little volume of poetry, amatory, melancholy, or pious, according as my imagination spoke to me in tender or in serious notes. The whole had been copied out with care in my best handwriting, and shown to my father, who was an excellent critic, though somewhat severe; a few friends, too, had favorably judged some fragments. I had bound up my poetical treasure in green, a color of good omen for my hopes of fame; but I had not shown it to my mother, whose chaste and pious purity of mind might have taken alarm at the more antique than Christian voluptuousness of some of my elegies. I hoped that the simple grace and the winged enthusiasm of my poetry might please some intelligent publisher, who would buy my volume, or at least consent to print it at his own expense; and that the public taste, attracted by the novelty of a style springing from the heart, and nursed in the woods, would, perhaps, confer on me a humble fortune and a name.
LIX.
I had no need to look for a lodging in Paris. One of my friends, the young Count de V—-, who had just returned from his travels, was to spend the winter and the following spring there, and had offered to share with me a little _entresol_ that he occupied, over the rooms of the concierge in the magnificent hotel (since pulled down) of the Marechal de Richelieu, in the Rue Neuve St. Augustin. The Count de V—-, with whom I was in almost daily correspondence, knew all. I had given him a letter of introduction to Julie, that he might know the soul of my soul, and that he might understand, if not my delirium, at least my adoration for that woman. At first sight, he comprehended and almost shared my enthusiasm. In his letters, he always alluded, with tender pity and respect, to that fair vision of melancholy, which seemed hovering between life and death, and only detained on earth, he said, by the ineffable love she bore to me. He always spoke to me of her as of a heavenly gift, sent to my eyes and heart, and which would raise me above human nature as long as I remained enveloped in her radiance. V—-, who was persuaded of the holy and superhuman nature of our attachment, considered it as a virtue, and felt no repugnance to being the mediator and confidant of our love. Julie, on her part, spoke of V—- as the only friend she considered worthy of me, and for whom she would have wished to increase my friendship, instead of detracting from it by a mean jealousy of the heart. Both urged me to come to Paris, but V—-, alone, knew the secret motives, and the strictly material impossibility, which had detained me till then. Spite of his devoted friendship, of which he gave me, until his death, so many proofs during the troubles of my life, it was not in his power at that time to remove the obstacles that arrested me. His mother had exhausted her means to give him an education befitting his rank, and to allow him to travel through Europe. He was himself deep in debt, and could only offer me a corner in the apartment that his family provided for him. As to all the rest, he was, at that time of his life, as poor and as much enslaved as myself by the want so cruelly defined by Horace–_Res angustae domi_.
I left M—- in a little one-horse jaunting car, consisting of a wooden seat on an axle-tree, and four poles which supported a tarpaulin to shelter us against the rain. These cars changed horses every four or five miles, and served to convey to Paris the masons from the Bourbonnais and from Auvergne, the weary pedestrians they met on the road, and soldiers lamed by their long marches who were glad to spare a day’s fatigue for a few sous. I felt no shame or annoyance at this vulgar mode of conveyance; I would have travelled barefooted through the snow, and not have felt less proud or less happy, for I was thus saving one or two louis with which I could purchase some days of happiness. I reached the barrier of Paris without having felt a pebble of the road. The night was dark, and it was raining hard; I took up my portmanteau, and soon after knocked at the door of the humble lodging of the Count de V—-.
He was waiting for me; he embraced me, and spoke of her. I was never wearied of questioning and listening to him. That same evening I was to see Julie. V—- was to announce my arrival, and prepare her for joy. When every visitor had retired from Julie’s drawing-room, V—- was to leave last of all to join me at a little _cafe_ of the neighborhood where I was to wait for him, and give me notice that she was alone, and that I might throw myself at her feet. It was only after I had learned all these particulars that I thought of drying my clothes and taking some refreshment. I then took possession of the dark alcove of his ante-room, which was lighted by one round window, and heated by a stove. I dressed myself neatly and simply, so that she I loved might not blush for me before her friends.
At eleven o’clock V—- and I went out on foot; we proceeded together as far as the window which I knew so well. There were three carriages at the door. V—- went up, and I retired to wait for him at the appointed place. How long that hour seemed while I waited for him! How I execrated those visitors who, involuntarily importunate, came in their indifference to dispose of some idle hours, and delayed the reunion of two fond hearts who counted each second of their martyrdom by their palpitations! At last V—- appeared; I followed rapidly on his steps, he left me at the door, and I went up.
LX.
If I were to live a thousand times a thousand years, I should never forget that instant and that sight. She was standing up in the light, her elbow resting carelessly on the white marble of the chimney; her tall and slender figure, her shoulders, and her profile, were reflected in the glass; her face was turned towards the door, her eyes fixed on a little dark passage leading to the drawing-room, and her head was bent forward, and slightly inclined on one side, in the attitude of one listening for the sound of approaching footsteps. She was dressed in mourning, in a black silk dress trimmed with black lace round the neck and the skirt. This profusion of lace, rumpled by the cushions of the sofa to which her indolent and languid life confined her, hung around her like the black and clustering bunches of the elder, shedding its berries in the autumnal wind. The dark color of her gown left only her shoulders, neck, and face in light, and the mourning of her dress seemed completed by the natural mourning of her dark hair, which was gathered up at the back of her head. This uniformity of color added to her height, and showed to advantage her graceful and flexible figure. The reflection of the fire in the glass, the light of the lamp on the chimney-piece striking on her cheek, and the animation of impatient expectation and love, shed on her countenance a splendor of youth, bloom, and life, which seemed a transfiguration effected by love.
My first exclamation was one of joy and delighted surprise at seeing