When the Lenoncourt family, living at Givry, a château not far from this farm, heard that the Comte de Mortsauf had come back, the Duc de Lenoncourt went to offer him shelter at Givry till he should have time to arrange his residence. The Lenoncourts were splendidly generous to the Count, who recovered his strength through several months’ stay with them, making every effort to disguise his sufferings during this first interval of peace. The Lenoncourts had lost their enormous possessions. So far as name was concerned, the Comte de Mortsauf was a suitable match for their daughter; and Mademoiselle de Lenoncourt, far from being averse to marrying a man of five-and-thirty, old and ailing for his age, seemed quite content. Her marriage would allow her to live with her aunt, the Duchesse de Verneuil (sister to the Prince de Blamont-Chauvry), who was a second mother to the girl.
As the intimate friend of the Duchesse de Bourbon, Madame de Verneuil was one of a saintly circle whose soul was Monsieur de Saint-Martin, born in Touraine, and known as le Philosophe inconnu.3 The disciples of this philosopher practised the virtues inculcated by the lofty speculations of mystical Illuminism. This doctrine gives a key to the supernal worlds, accounts for life by a series of transmigrations, through which man makes his way to sublime destinies, releases duty from its degradation by the law, views the woes of life with the placid fortitude of the Quaker, and enjoins contempt of pain, by infusing a mysterious maternal regard for the angel within us which we must bear up to Heaven. It is Stoicism looking for a future life. Earnest prayer and pure love are the elements of this creed, which, born in the Catholicism of the Roman Church, reverts to the bosom of Primitive Christianity.
Mademoiselle de Lenoncourt remained attached, however, to the Apostolic Church, to which her aunt was equally faithful. Cruelly tried by the storms of the Revolution, the Duchesse de Verneuil had, towards the close of her life, assumed a hue of impassioned piety which overflowed into the soul of her beloved niece with “the light of heavenly love and the oil of spiritual joy,” to use the words of Saint-Martin. This man of peace and virtuous learning was several times the Countess’ guest at Clochegourde after her aunt’s death; to her he had been a constant visitor. When staying at Clochegourde, Saint-Martin could superintend the printing of his latest works by Letourney of Tours.
Madame de Verneuil, with the inspiration of wisdom that comes to old women who have experienced the storms of life, gave Clochegourde to the young wife that she might have a home of her own. With the good grace of old people—which, when they are gracious, is perfection—she surrendered the whole house to her niece, reserving only one room, over that she had formerly used, which was taken by the Countess. Her almost sudden death cast a shroud over the joys of the united household, and left a permanent tinge of sadness on Clochegourde as well as on the young wife’s superstitious soul. The early days of her married life in Touraine were to the Countess the only period, not indeed of happiness, but of lightheartedness in all her life.
After the miseries of his life in exile, Monsieur de Mortsauf, thankful to foresee a sheltered existence in the future, went through a sort of healing of the spirit; he inhaled in this valley the intoxicating fragrance of blossoming hope. Being obliged to consider ways and means, he threw himself into agricultural enterprise, and at first found some delight in it; but Jacques’ birth came like a lightning stroke, blighting the present and the future; the physician pronounced that the child could not live. The Count carefully concealed this sentence of doom from his wife; then he himself consulted a doctor, and had none but crushing answers, confirmed as to their purport by Madeleine’s birth.
These two events, and a sort of inward conviction as to the inevitable end, added to the Count’s ill-health. His name extinct; his young wife, pure and blameless but unhappy in her marriage, doomed to the anxieties of motherhood without knowing its joys—all this humus of his past life, filled with the germs of fresh sufferings, fell on his heart and crowned his misery.
The Countess read the past in the present, and foresaw the future. Though there is nothing so difficult as to make a man happy who feels where he has failed, the Countess attempted the task worthy of an angel. In one day she became a Stoic. After descending into the abyss whence she could still see the heavens, she devoted herself, for one man, to the mission which a Sister of Charity undertakes for the sake of all; and to reconcile him with himself, she forgave him what he could not forgive himself. The Count grew avaricious, she accepted the consequent privations; he dreaded being imposed upon, as men do whose knowledge of the world has filled them with repulsions, and she resigned herself to solitude and to his distrust of men without a murmur; she used all a woman’s wiles to make him wish for what was right, and he thus credited himself with ideas, and enjoyed in his home the pleasures of superiority which he could not have known elsewhere.
Finally, having inured herself to the path of married life, she determined never to leave her home at Clochegourde; for she perceived in her husband a hysterical nature whose eccentricities, in a neighborhood so full of envy and gossip, might be interpreted to the injury of their children. Thus nobody had a suspicion of Monsieur de Mortsauf’s incapacity and aberrations; she had clothed the ruin with a thick hanging of ivy. The Count’s uncertain temper, not so much discontented as malcontent, found in his wife a soft and
