“Have I any thoughts?” said she.
She led me away to her room, made me sit down on the sofa, hunted in the drawer of her dressing-table, and then, kneeling down in front of me, she said:
“Here is all the hair I have lost these twelve months past; take it—it is yours by right; you will some day know how and why.”
I gently bent over her, she did not shrink to avoid my lips, and I pressed them to her brow solemnly, with no guilty excitement, no inviting passion. Did she mean to sacrifice everything? Or had she, like me, only come to look over the precipice?—If love had prompted her to abandon herself, she could not have been so profoundly calm, have given me that religious look, or have said in her clear voice:
“You have quite forgiven me?”
I set out in the evening, she accompanied me on the road to Frapesle, and we stood under the walnut-tree; I pointed it out to her, telling her how I had first seen it, four years ago.
“The valley was so lovely!” I exclaimed.
“And now?” she said eagerly.
“Now you are under the tree,” said I; “and the valley is our own.”
She bent her head, and there we parted. She got into the carriage again with Madeleine, and I into mine, alone.
On my return to Paris, I was fortunately taken up by a press of work which forcibly diverted my mind, and obliged me to live apart from the world, which forgot me. I corresponded with Madame de Mortsauf, to whom I sent my journal every week, and who replied twice a month. It was an obscure and busy life, resembling the overgrown, flowery nooks, quite unknown, which I had admired in the depths of the woods when composing fresh poems of flowers during the last fortnight.
All ye who love, bind yourselves by these delightful duties; impose a rule on yourselves, to be carried out, as the Church does on Christians, for every day.
The rigorous observances created by the Roman Catholic religion are a grand idea; they trace deeper and deeper grooves of duty in the soul by the repetition of acts which encourage hope and fear. The feelings always flow, a living stream, in these channels which keep the current within bounds and purify it, perpetually refreshing the heart, and fertilizing life by the abounding treasures of hidden faith, a divine spring multiplying the single thought of a single love.
My passion, a relic of the Middle Ages, recalling the days of chivalry, became known, I know not how; perhaps the King and the Duc de Lenoncourt spoke of it. From this uppermost sphere, the story, at once romantic and simple, of a young man piously devoted to a beautiful woman who had no public, who was so noble in her solitude, and faithful without the support of duty, no doubt became known in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. I found myself the object of inconvenient attention in drawing-rooms, for an inconspicuous life has advantages which, once tasted, make the parade of a life in public unendurable. Just as eyes that are accustomed to see none but subdued colors are hurt by broad daylight, so there are minds averse to violent contrasts. I was then one of these; you may be surprised now to hear it; but have patience, the eccentricities of the Vandenesse you know will be accounted for.
I found women amiably disposed towards me, and the world kind.
After the Duc de Berry’s marriage the Court became splendid once more, the French fêtes were revived. The foreign occupation was a thing of the past, prosperity returned, amusements were possible. Personages of illustrious rank or considerable wealth poured in from every part of Europe to the capital of intelligence, where all the advantages and the vices of other countries were magnified and intensified by French ingenuity.
Five months after leaving Clochegourde, my good angel wrote me a letter in despair, telling me that her boy had had a serious illness, from which he had recovered indeed, but which had left her in dread for the future; the doctor had spoken of care being needed for his lungs—a terrible verdict that casts a black shadow on every hour of a mother’s life. Hardly had Henriette drawn a breath of relief as Jacques was convalescent, before his sister made her anxious. Madeleine, the pretty flower that had done such credit to her mother’s care, went through an illness which, though not serious, was a cause of anxiety in so fragile a constitution.
Crushed already by the fatigues of Jacques’ long sickness, the Countess had no courage to meet this fresh blow, and the sight of these two beloved beings made her insensible to the increasing torment of her husband’s temper. Storms, each blacker than the last, and bringing with it more stones, uprooted by their cruel surges the hopes that were most deeply rooted in her heart. Weary of strife, she had submitted altogether to the Count’s tyranny, for he had regained all his lost ground.
“When all my strength was devoted to enfolding my children,” she wrote to me, “could I use it to defy Monsieur de Mortsauf, could I defend myself against his aggressions when I was fighting with death? As I make my onward way, alone and feeble, between the two young, melancholy creatures at my side, I feel an invincible disgust of life. What blow can hurt me, or what affection can I respond to when I see Jacques motionless on the terrace, life no longer beaming in anything but his beautiful eyes, made larger by emaciation, as hollow as an old man’s, and where—fatal prognostic—his forward intelligence is contrasted with his bodily weakness? When I see at my side my pretty Madeleine so lively, so fond, so brightly colored, now as pale as the dead; her very hair and eyes
