At last, on the very day before Monseigneur Troubert left Tours, the “old fox” detected the last plot which the gifts had covered, a coup de grâce dealt by the most relentless vengeance to the most helpless of victims. The Baron de Listomère disputed Madame de Listomère’s bequest to Birotteau on the ground of undue influence! Within a few days of the first steps being taken in this action, the Baron was appointed to a ship with the rank of captain; the Curé of Saint-Symphorien was, by an act of discipline, placed under an interdict. His ecclesiastical superiors condemned him by anticipation; so the assassin of the late Sophie Gamard was a rogue as well! Now, if Monseigneur Troubert had kept the old maid’s property, he could hardly have secured Birotteau’s disgrace.
At the moment when Monseigneur Hyacinthe, Bishop of Troyes, was passing in a post-chaise, along the quay of Saint-Symphorien, on his way to Paris, poor Birotteau had just been brought out in an armchair to sit in the sun on a terrace. The unhappy priest, stricken by his archbishop, was pale and haggard. Grief, stamped on every feature, had completely altered the face, which of old had been so blandly cheerful. Ill health had cast a dimness that simulated thought over his eyes, which had been bright once with the pleasures of good living, and devoid of any weight of ideas. This was but the skeleton of that Birotteau who, only a year ago, vacuous but happy, had waddled across the Close, The Bishop shot a glance of contempt and pity at his victim; then he vouchsafed to forget him, and passed on.
In other times Troubert would certainly have been a Hildebrand or an Alexander VI. Nowadays the Church is no longer a political force, and does not absorb all the powers of isolated men. Hence celibacy has this crying evil, that by concentrating the powers of a man on one single passion, namely, egoism, it makes the unwedded soul mischievous or useless.
We live in a time when the fault of most governments is that they make man for society rather than society for man. A perpetual struggle is going on between the individual and the system that tries to turn him to account, while he tries to turn it to account for his own advantage; formerly, man having really more liberty, showed greater generosity for the public weal. The circle in which men move has insensibly widened; the soul that can apprehend it synthetically will never be anything but a grand exception, since, constantly, in moral as in physical force, what is gained in extent is lost in intensity. Society cannot be based on exceptions.
Originally, man was simply and solely a father; his heart beat warmly, concentrated within the radius of the family. Later on he lived for the Clan or for a small Republic; hence the grand historical heroism of Greece and Rome. Next, he became the member of a caste, or of a religion, and often was truly sublime in his devotion to its greatness; but then the field of his interests was increased by the addition of every intellectual realm. In these days his life is bound up with that of a vast fatherland; ere long his family will be the whole human race.
Will not this moral cosmopolitanism, the thing the Roman Church hopes for, be a sublime mistake? It is so natural to believe in that noble chimera—the brotherhood of men. But, alas! the human machine has not such godlike proportions. The souls that are vast enough to wed a sentiment that is the prerogative of a great man will never be those of plain citizens, of fathers of families.
Certain physiologists opine that if the brain expands, the heart must necessarily shrink. That is a mistake. Is not what looks like egoism in the men who bear in their breast a science, a nation, or its laws, the noblest of passions? Is it not, in a way, a motherhood of the people? To bring forth new races or new ideas, must they not combine in their powerful brain the breast of the mother with the force of God? The history of an Innocent III, of a Peter the Great, of all who have guided an epoch or a nation, would at need prove to be, in the highest order of minds, the immense idea represented by Troubert in the depths of the Close of Saint-Gatien.
Story III
A Bachelor’s Establishment
To Monsieur Charles Nodier,
Member of the French Academy,
Chief Librarian at the Arsenal.
Here, my dear Nodier, you have a book full of those incidents which escape the action of the law under the shelter of domestic privacy; but in which the finger of God, so often called Chance, takes the place of human justice, while the moral is not the less striking and instructive for being uttered by a satirist. The outcome, to my mind, is a great lesson for the Family, and for Motherhood. We shall perhaps discover too late the effects of diminished paternal power. That authority, which formerly ceased only on the father’s death, constituted the one human tribunal at which domestic crimes could be tried, and on great occasions the Sovereign would ratify and carry out its decisions. However tender and kind the mother may be, she can no more supply that patriarchal rule than a woman can fill a man’s place on the throne; when the exception occurs, the creature is a monster.
I have never, perhaps, drawn a picture which shows more clearly than this how indispensable the stability of marriage is to European Society, what the sorrows are of woman’s weakness,
