At the time of my visit, Monsieur de Chessel was in the dawn of his ambition, Royalism smiled on him. He affected grand airs perhaps, but to me he was the perfection of kindness. I liked him, too, for a very simple reason: under his roof I found peace for the first time in my life. The interest he took in me—little enough I dare say—seemed to me, the hapless outcast of my family, a model of paternal affection. The attentions of hospitality formed such a contrast with the indifference that had hitherto crushed me, that I showed childlike gratitude for being allowed to live unfettered and almost petted. The owners of Frapesle are indeed so intimately part of the dawn of my happiness, that they dwell in my mind with the memories I love to live in. At a later time, in the very matter of the King’s letters-patent, I had the satisfaction of doing my host some little service.
Monsieur de Chessel spent his fortune with an amount of display that aggrieved some of his neighbors; he could buy fine horses and smart carriages; his wife dressed handsomely; he entertained splendidly; his servants were more numerous than the manners of the country demand; he affected the princely. The estate of Frapesle is vast.
So, as compared with his neighbor, and in the face of all this magnificence, the Comte de Mortsauf, reduced to the family coach, which in Touraine is a cross between a mail-cart and a post-chaise, compelled too by his lack of fortune to make Clochegourde pay, was a Tourangeau, a mere gentleman farmer till the day when royal favor restored his family to unhoped-for dignity. The welcome he had extended to me, the younger son of an impoverished family, whose coat-of-arms dates from the Crusades, had been calculated to throw contempt on the wealth, the woods, the farms and meadows of his neighbor, a man of no birth.
Monsieur de Chessel had quite understood the Count. Indeed, their intercourse had always been polite, but without the daily exchange, the friendly intimacy which might have existed between Clochegourde and Frapesle, two domains divided only by the river, and whose mistresses could signal to each other from their windows.
Jealousy, however, was not the only reason for the Comte de Mortsauf’s solitary life. His early education had been that given to most boys of good family—an insufficient and superficial smattering, on which were grafted the lessons of the world, Court manners, and the exercise of High Court functions or some position of dignity. Monsieur de Mortsauf had emigrated just when this second education should have begun, and so missed it. He was one of those who believed in the early restoration of the Monarchy in France; in this conviction he had spent the years of exile in lamentable idleness. Then, when Condé’s army was broken up, after the Count’s courage had marked him as one of its most devoted soldiers, he still counted on returning ere long with the white standard, and never attempted, like many of the émigrés, to lead an industrious life. Perhaps he could not bear to renounce his name in order to earn his bread in the sweat of the toil he despised.
His hopes, always held over till the morrow, and a sense of honor too, kept him from engaging in the service of a foreign power.
Suffering undermined his strength. Long expeditions on foot without sufficient food, and hopes forever deceived, injured his health and discouraged his spirit. By degrees his poverty became extreme. Though to some men misfortune is a tonic, there are others to whom it is destruction, and the Count was one of these. When I think of this unhappy gentleman of Touraine, wandering and sleeping on the highroads in Hungary, sharing a quarter of a sheep with Prince Esterhazy’s shepherds—from whom the traveler could beg a loaf which the gentleman would not have accepted from their master, and which he many a time refused at the hands of the foes of France—I could never harbor a bitter feeling against the émigré, not even when I saw him ridiculous in his day of triumph.
Monsieur de Mortsauf’s white hair had spoken to me of terrible sufferings, and I sympathize with all exiles too strongly to condemn them. The Count’s cheerfulness-—Frenchman and Tourangeau as he was—quite broke down; he became gloomy, fell ill, and was nursed out of charity in some German asylum. His malady was inflammation of the mesentery, which often proves fatal, and which, if cured, brings in its train a capricious temper, and almost always hypochondria. His amours, buried in the most secret depths of his soul, where I alone ever unearthed them, were of a debasing character, and not only marred his life at the time, but ruined it for the future.
After twelve years’ misery, he came back to France, whither Napoleon’s decree enabled him to return. When, as he crossed the Rhine on foot, he saw the steeple of Strasbourg one fine summer evening, he fainted away.—“ ‘France! France!’ I cried, ‘This is France!’ as a child cries out, ‘Mother!’ when it is hurt,” he told me.
Born to riches, he was now poor; born to lead a regiment or govern the State, he had no authority, no prospects; born healthy and robust, he came home sick and worn out. Bereft of education in a country where men and things had been growing, without interest of any kind, he found himself destitute even of physical and moral strength. His want of fortune made his name a burden to him. His unshaken convictions, his former attachment to Condé, his woes, his memories, his ruined health, had given him a touchy susceptibility, which was likely to find small mercy in France, the land of banter. Half dead, he got as far as le Maine, where, by some accident, due perhaps to the civil war, the revolutionary government had forgotten to sell
