To fully understand my narrative, think of me at the charming age when the lips are pure from falsehood, when the eyes are honest though veiled by lids weighed down by shyness in conflict with desire, when the spirit is not yet abject before jesuitical worldliness, and when the heart is as timid as its first impulses are vehemently generous.
I need say nothing of my journey from Paris to Tours with my mother. Her cold demeanor crushed the effusiveness of my affection. As we started afresh after each relay, I resolved to talk to her; but a look or a word scared away the phrases I had composed as a beginning. At Orléans, where we were to sleep, my mother reproached me for my silence. I fell at her knees and clasped them, shedding hot tears; I poured out my heart to her, bursting with affection; I tried to soften her by the eloquence of my pleading; starving for love, my words might have stirred the soul of a stepmother. My mother told me I was acting a farce. I complained of her neglect; she called me an unnatural son. There was such a cold grip about my heart that at Blois I went out on the bridge to throw myself into the Loire. I was put off from suicide simply by the height of the parapet.
On my arrival, my two sisters, who scarcely knew me, showed more surprise than warmth; later, however, by comparison they seemed to me full of kindliness. I was given a bedroom on the third floor. You will understand the extent of my wretchedness when I tell you that my mother left me, a grown man, with no linen but my shabby college outfit, and no wardrobe but what I had brought from Paris.
When I flew from one end of the drawing-room to the other to pick up her handkerchief, she gave me thanks as cold as she might have granted to a servant. Watching her anxiously as I did, to discover whether there were in her heart a friable spot where I could insert some buds of affection, I saw her a tall, parched, thin woman, a gambler, selfish and insolent—like all the Listomères, in whom impertinence is part of their dower. She saw nothing in life but duties to be performed; every cold-hearted woman I have ever met has made duty her religion, as she did; she accepted our adoration as a priest accepts incense at mass; my elder brother seemed to have absorbed the modicum of maternal feeling her heart could contain. She was constantly inflicting small stings of biting irony, the weapon of heartless people, which she freely used on us who could not retort.
In spite of all these thorny barriers, instinctive feeling is held by so many roots, the pious terror inspired by a mother includes so many ties—indeed, to give her up as hopeless is too cruel a shock—that the sublime blunder of loving her lasted till a day when at a riper age we judged her truly. Then began her children’s reprisals. Their indifference, resulting from the disenchantment of the past, enhanced by the slimy wreckage they have rescued from it, overflows her tomb even.
This frightful despotism drove out the voluptuous dreams I had madly hoped to realize at Tours. I flung myself desperately into my father’s library, where I read all the books I did not already know. My long hours of study spared me all contact with my mother; but they left me, morally, worse off than ever. My eldest sister, who has since married our cousin the Marquis de Listomère, sometimes tried to comfort me without being able to soothe the irritation from which I suffered. I longed for death.
Great events, of which I knew nothing, were then in the air. The Duc d’Angoulême, having left Bordeaux to join Louis XVIII in Paris, was to be the recipient of the ovations prepared by the enthusiasm that possessed France on the return of the Bourbons. Touraine in a ferment round its legitimate princes, the town in a turmoil, the windows hung with flags, the residents all in their best, the preparations for the fête, the indefinable something in the air which mounted to my head, all made me long to be present at the ball that was to be given to the Prince. When, greatly daring, I expressed this wish to my mother—at that time too ill to go out—she was extremely wroth. Had I dropped from the Congo, that I knew nothing of what was going on? How could I imagine that the family would not be fitly represented at the ball? In the absence of my father and brother, of course it would be my part to go. Had I no mother? Did she never think of her children’s happiness?—In a moment the almost disowned son had become a person of importance. I was as much amazed by finding myself of consequence as by the deluge of ironical reasoning with which my mother received my request.
I questioned my sisters, and heard that my mother, who liked theatrical surprises, had necessarily considered the matter of my dress. The tailors of Tours, in the sudden rush of customers, could none of them undertake to fit me out. So my mother had sent for a needlewoman, who, as usual in provincial towns, was supposed to be able to do every kind of sewing. A blue coat was secretly made for me, more or less successfully. Silk stocking and new pumps were easily procured; men wore their waistcoats short, and I could have one of my father’s; for the first time in my life I donned a shirt with a goffered frill that gave importance to my figure and was lost in the folds of my cravat. When I was dressed, I was so little like myself that my
