“Well, monsieur?” said I to the Abbé as I kissed Madeleine and Jacques on the brow; but they gave me a cold glance and did not interrupt their prayers.
The Abbé rose, I took his arm to lean on him, asking him: “Is she still living?” He bent his head mildly and sadly.
“Speak, I entreat you, in the name of Our Saviour’s Passion! Why are you praying at the foot of this cross? Why are you here and not with her? Why are the children out in this cold morning? Tell me everything, that I may not blunder fatally in my ignorance.”
“For some days past Madame la Comtesse will only see her children at fixed hours.—Monsieur,” he went on after a pause, “you may perhaps have to wait some hours before you can see Madame de Mortsauf: she is terribly altered! But it will be well to prepare her for the interview; you might cause her some increase of suffering—as to death, it would be a mercy!”
I pressed the holy man’s hand; his look and voice touched a wound without reopening it.
“We are all praying for her here,” he went on, “for she, so saintly, so resigned, so fit to die, has for the last few days had a secret horror of death; she looks at us who are full of life with eyes in which, for the first time, there is an expression of gloom and envy. Her delusions are, I think, not so much the result of a fear of dying as of a sort of inward intoxication—the faded flowers of her youth rotting as they wither. Yes, the angel of evil is struggling with Heaven for that beautiful soul. Madame is going through her Agony in the Garden; her tears mingle with the white roses that crowned her head as a daughter of Jeptha, though married, and that have fallen one by one.
“Wait a little while; do not let her see you yet; you will bring in the glitter of the Court, she will see in your face a reflection of worldly enjoyments, and you will add to her regrets. Have pity on a weakness which God Himself forgave to His Son made man. Though what merit indeed should we have in triumphing where there was no adversary? Allow us, her director and myself, two old men whose ruins cannot offend her sight, to prepare her for this unlooked-for interview, and emotions which the Abbé Birotteau had desired her to forego. But there is in the things of this world an invisible warp of celestial causation which a religious eye can discern, and, since you have come here, you have perhaps been guided by one of the stars which shine in the moral sphere and lead to the tomb as they did to the manger.”
And then he told me, with the unctuous eloquence that falls on the spirit like dew, that for the last six months the Countess’ sufferings had increased every day, in spite of all Origet could do for her. The doctor had come to Clochegourde every evening for two months, striking to snatch this prey from death, for the Countess had said to him: “Save me!”
“But to cure the body the heart must be cured!” the old physician had one day exclaimed.
“As the malady increased the gentle creature’s words became bitter,” the Abbé de Dominis went on. “She cries out to earth to keep her, rather than to God to take her; then she repents of murmuring against the decrees of the Most High. These alternations rend her heart, and make the conflict terrible between body and soul. Often it is the body that conquers.
“ ‘You have cost me dear!’ she said one day to Madeleine and Jacques, sending them away from her bedside. But in the next breath, called back to God by seeing me, she spoke these angelic words to Mademoiselle Madeleine: ‘The happiness of others becomes the joy of those who can no longer be happy.’ And her accent was so pathetic that I felt my own eyes moisten. She falls indeed, but each time she rises again nearer to Heaven.”
Struck by the successive messages sent to me by fate, all leading up, in this vast concert of woe, through mournful modulations, to the funereal thema, the great cry of dying love, I exclaimed:
“Then you do believe that this beautiful lily, cut off in its prime, will bloom again in heaven?”
“You left her as a flower,” he replied, “but you will find her burnt, purified in the fire of sorrow, as pure as a diamond still lying hidden in rubbish. Yes, that brilliant spirit, that angelical star, will emerge glorified from the clouds about it, to pass into the realms of light.”
Just as I pressed the hand of this apostolic man, my heart overpowered with gratitude, the Count’s perfectly white head was seen outside the house, and he flew to meet me with a gesture of great surprise.
“She was right! Here he is. ‘Félix, Félix, Félix!—Félix is come!’ Madame de Mortsauf cried out.—My dear fellow,” he added, with looks distraught by terror, “death is here. Why did it not take an old lunatic like me, whom it had already laid hands on?”
I walked on to the house, summoning all my courage; but on the threshold of the long corridor through the house, from the lawn to the terrace steps, I was met by the Abbé Birotteau.
“Madame la Comtesse begs you will not go to her yet,” said he.
Looking round me I saw the servants coming and going, all very busy, dizzy with grief, and evidently startled by the orders delivered to them through Manette.
“What is the matter?” said the Count, irritated by this bustle, not only from a dread of the terrible end, but as a consequence of his naturally petulant temper.
“A sick woman’s caprice,” replied the Abbé. “Madame la Comtesse does not choose to receive
