Hardly had the poor unfortunate woman spoken these words than, looking down at the habit that she was wearing, she felt a rush of horror at a blasphemy that was so inappropriate to someone in her holy dress. She wiped the tears from her eyelids with her thin, white hand and, raising her eyes to heaven, offered up her eternal suffering in a single look.
At that moment, she heard a voice in her ear. The abbess turned round. It was the sister who received visitors to the convent.
‘Madame,’ she said, ‘there is a woman in the parlour who would like to be allowed to speak to you.’
‘What is her name?’
‘She will say that only to you.’
‘To what rank in life does she appear to belong?’
‘A distinguished one.’
‘Society, again,’ murmured the abbess.
‘What shall I tell her?’ the sister asked.
‘That I am expecting her.’
‘Where, Madame?’
‘Bring her here. I shall receive her in this garden, sitting on this bench. I need air. I feel stifled when I am not in the open.’
The sister left and a short time later returned, followed by a woman whose clothes, luxurious even in their sober simplicity, marked her out as a woman of distinction. She was short in stature, and, though her quick walk might have lacked some nobility, it had an inexpressible charm. Under her arm, she carried a little ivory box, its flat whiteness standing out against the black satin of her dress with its jade ornaments.
‘Madame, this is the mother superior,’ said the nun.
The abbess lowered her veil and turned towards the stranger, who lowered her eyes. The abbess, seeing that she was pale and shivering with emotion, gave her a look that was full of kindness and said: ‘You asked to speak to me, Sister. I am ready to hear you.’
‘Madame,’ said the stranger. ‘I was so happy that in my pride I might have thought that even God himself could not destroy my happiness. Now, God has blown it away. I need to weep, I need to repent. I have come to ask you for shelter, so that my sobs may be stifled by the thick walls of your convent; so that my tears, which have carved deep furrows down my cheeks, may no longer make me a laughing stock; and so that God, who may perhaps expect me to be joyful and full of fun, may find me in a sacred refuge, praying at the foot of His altar.’
‘I can see that your soul is deeply wounded, because I too know what it means to suffer,’ the young abbess replied. ‘And in its pain your soul does not know how to distinguish between reality and what it desires. If you need silence, if you need mortification, if you need penitence, Sister, come in here and suffer with us. But if you are looking for a place, where one can ease one’s heart in unrestrained sobbing and where you can cry out freely in your despair and where no one stares at you, poor victim as you are, then, Madame, oh, Madame…’ she said, shaking her head, ‘go away, shut yourself up in your room. People will see you much less than you will be seen here and the tapestries in your private chapel will absorb your sobs far better than the bare boards of our cells. As for God, unless He has been forced by some too dreadful sins to turn away from you, then He will see you wherever you are.’
The stranger looked up and stared in astonishment at the young abbess who was saying this to her.
‘Madame,’ she said, ‘should not all those who suffer come to the Lord, and is not your house a holy station on the way to heaven?’
‘There is only one way of going to God, Sister,’ replied the nun, carried away by her own despair. ‘What do you regret? Why do you weep? What do you desire? Society has mistreated you, friendship has let you down, you have been short of money and a transitory pain has led you to believe in pain eternal… is that not so? You are suffering now, and you feel that you will always suffer, as when one sees an open wound and thinks that it will never close. But you are wrong. Any wound that is not mortal will heal. So, suffer, then, and let your suffering take its course. You will be cured, and then, if you are chained to us here, another suffering will begin, this time a truly eternal one, implacable and unimagined. You will see the world, to which you cannot return, through a gate of brass, and you will curse the day on which the barrier of this holy hostelry, that you consider to be a station on the road to heaven, was shut behind you. What I am telling you may not be in the rules of my order, I have not been an abbess long enough to know them fully, but it is according to my heart. This is what I see at every moment, not in myself, thank God, but around me.’
‘Oh, no, no!’ the stranger cried. ‘The world is finished for me, and I have lost whatever made me love it. No, fear not, Madame, I shall never have any regret. Oh, I am certain of it! Never!’
‘So is your burden more heavy than I thought? Have you lost a reality, not an illusion? Have you been separated for ever from a husband, a child… or a friend? In that case I do truly pity you, Madame, because your heart has been pierced through and through, and your ill is incurable. So come to us, Madame, and the Lord will console you. He will replace the relatives or the friends that you have lost with us, who form one great family, a flock with Him as our shepherd. And…’ the nun added, in a quiet voice, ‘if He does not console you, which is possible, well, you will have this last consolation of weeping with me, because I came here, as you have, in search of consolation and have not yet found it.’
‘Alas!’ the stranger exclaimed. ‘Are these the sort of words that I should be hearing? Is this how you support a person in misfortune?’
‘Madame,’ the mother superior said, holding a hand out to the young woman, as though to push aside the reproach that she had just made. ‘Do not speak of misfortune to me. I do not know who you are or what has happened to you, but you do not know what unhappiness is.’
‘Oh, you do not know me, Madame,’ said the stranger, in a voice of such grief that the mother superior shuddered to hear it. ‘Because if you did know me, you would not speak to me in that way. In any case, you are not the judge of the extent of my suffering, because to be able to do so, you should have to have suffered as I do. Meanwhile, welcome me, take me in, open the door of the house of God to me, and from my tears, my cries and my daily sufferings, you will see whether or not I am truly unhappy.’
‘Yes,’ the mother superior said. ‘I can tell from your voice and from your words that you have lost the man whom you loved, is that not so?’
The stranger gave a sob and wrung her hands.
‘Oh, yes!’ she said.
‘Very well, since that is what you wish,’ the abbess went on, ‘come into the convent. But I warn you, should you be suffering as much as I am, this is what you will have in these cloisters: two pitiless, everlasting walls, which, instead of raising up our thoughts, as they should, to heaven, constantly drag them down to the earth that you will have left behind. Nothing is extinguished, when the blood goes round, the pulse quickens and the heart loves. Isolated though we are and hidden though we think ourselves to be, the dead call us from the depths of their tombs. Why are you leaving the tomb of your dead?’
‘Because everything that I have loved in this world is here,’ the stranger replied, in a choking voice, falling to her knees in front of the mother superior, who was looking at her in amazement. ‘Now you know my secret, Sister; now you can appreciate my pain, Mother. I beg you on my knees – you can see my tears – to accept the sacrifice that I am making to God or rather to grant the favour that I ask. He is buried in the church at Pessac. Let me weep on his tomb, which is here.’
‘Who is here? What tomb? Who do you mean? What are you saying?’ the mother superior cried, shrinking back from this kneeling woman and looking at her almost in terror.
‘When I was happy,’ the penitent went on in such a quiet voice that it was covered by the sound of the wind blowing through the trees. ‘And I was very happy… I was called Nanon de Lartigues. Do you now recognize me and know what I am asking of you?’
The abbess leapt up as though driven by a spring, and, for a moment, with her eyes loo
king towards heaven and her hands clasped, she remained silent and pale.
‘Oh, Madame,’ she said finally, in a voice that appeared calm, but behind which one could hear a last tremor of emotion. ‘Madame, you don’t know me either, if you ask me for permission to come here and weep on a tomb. Don’t you know that I sacrificed my freedom, my happiness in this world and all the tears in my heart for the sad joy that you come here asking to share? You are Nanon de Lartigues. I, when I had my name, was called the Viscountess de Cambes.’
Nanon gave a cry, went over to the mother superior and, lifting up the hood covering the nun’s dulled eyes, recognized her rival.
‘It is her!’ Nanon murmured. ‘She who was so beautiful when she came to Saint-Georges. Oh, poor woman!’
She took a step back, keeping her eyes fixed on the viscountess and shaking her head.
‘Ah!’ the viscountess exclaimed, carried away by that satisfaction of pride that comes from knowing that we can suffer more deeply than others. ‘Ah! You have just said a kind word, and it does me good. Yes, I have suffered cruelly, and if I am so cruelly changed, it is because I have wept so much – so I am unhappier than you, since you are still beautiful.’
And, as if searching for Canolles, the viscountess raised heavenwards eyes that were shining with the first ray of joy that had lit them in the previous month.
Nanon, still kneeling, hid her face in her hands and burst into tears.
‘Alas, Madame,’ she said. ‘I did not know whom I was addressing, because for the past month I have been unaware of anything that was happening: what kept me beautiful is no doubt that I was mad. Now I am here. I do not wish to make you jealous even unto death, I am merely asking to enter this convent as the humblest of your nuns. You can do what you like with me: you will have the discipline, the dungeon and the in pace1 to use against me if I disobey. But at least from time to time,’ she added in a trembling voice, ‘you will let me see the resting place of the man whom we have loved so much, won’t you?’
And she fell, gasping and exhausted, on the grass.
The viscountess did not reply. Leaning back against the trunk of a sycamore that she had turned to for support, she too seemed ready to expire.
‘Oh, Madame, Madame!’ cried Nanon. ‘You are not answering! You refuse! Well, there is one single treasure remaining to me. It may be that you have nothing of him, yourself… But I do have something. Grant my wish, and this treasure is yours.’
Taking a large locket hanging round her neck on a golden chain, which had been hidden in her bosom, she offered it to Madame de Cambes. The locket stayed open in the hand of Nanon de Lartigues.
Claire gave a cry and pounced on the relic, kissing those cold, dry hairs with such savage emotion that it seemed as though her soul had risen to her lips to join her in the kiss.
‘Well,’ said Nanon, still kneeling and gasping at her feet. ‘Do you think that you have ever suffered as I do at this moment?’
‘You have triumphed, Madame,’ said the Viscountess de Cambes, lifting her up and clasping her in her arms. ‘Come, come, Sister, for now I love you more than the whole world, because you have shared this treasure with me.’
Leaning towards Nanon as she raised her gently from the ground, the viscountess let her lips brush the cheek of the woman who had been her rival…
‘You will be my sister and my friend,’ she said. ‘Yes, we shall live and die together, speaking about him and praying for him. Come, you are right, he sleeps near here in our church. This was the only favour that I was able to obtain from the woman to whom I had dedicated my life. May God forgive her!’
At these words, Claire took Nanon de Lartigues by the hand and, step by step, so lightly that they were hardly brushing against the grass, they arrived under the mass of limes and firs that hid the church.
The viscountess led Nanon to a chapel, in the midst of which, four inches off the ground, was a simple stone, on which was carved a cross.
Without saying a single word, Madame de Cambes merely pointed at this stone.
Nanon knelt down and kissed the marble. Madame de Cambes leant on the altar, kissing the lock of hair. One of them was trying to get used to the idea of death, the other to dream one last time of life.
A quarter of an hour later, the two women returned to the house. Except to speak to God, neither of them had broken their mournful silence with a single word.
‘Madame,’ the viscountess said, ‘from now on you have your cell in this convent. Would you like it to be next door to mine? In that way we shall be less far apart…’
‘I thank you most humbly for your offer, Madame,’ said Nanon de Lartigues, ‘and accept with gratitude. But before I leave the world for ever, let me say a last farewell to my brother, who is waiting for me at the gate and who is also overcome with sorrow.’
‘Alas!’ said Madame de Cambes, recalling despite herself that Cauvignac had been saved at the expense of his fellow captive’s life. ‘Go, then, Sister.’
Nanon went out.
BROTHER AND SISTER
Nanon was right. Cauvignac was waiting for her, sitting on a rock, two yards from his horse and looking sadly at it, while the animal itself was cropping the dry grass as far as its reins allowed, raising its head from time to time and looking intelligently at its master.
In front of the adventurer ran the dusty road, disappearing a league ahead into the elm trees on a small hill, which seemed to leave the convent and extend to eternity. You could say – and, little though he was inclined to philosophic notions, our adventurer himself might have thought – that over there was the world, whose noise humbly petered out against this iron grille surmounted by a cross.
Indeed, Cauvignac had attained such a degree of sensitivity that one might believe him to have such thoughts. But he had already thought too long about such sentimental matters for a man of his character; so he recalled his masculine dignity and started regretting having been so weak. ‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘I, who am so superior to those people of the court in wits, shall I not be their equal in feeling – or at least the lack of it! Damn it! Richon is dead, that’s true. Canolles is dead, that’s also true. But I’m alive, and I have to say it seems to me that that is the main thing.
‘In fact, it’s precisely because I’m alive that I think, and when I think, I remember, and when I remember, I’m sad. Poor Richon – what a brave captain he was! And poor Canolles – what a fine gentleman! Hanged, both of them, by all the devils – and through my fault, that of Roland Cauvignac. Ah, that’s sad! It chokes me.
‘Not to mention that my sister, who has not always had reason to be pleased with me, now has no further reason to keep on the right side of me, since Canolles is dead, and she has been stupid enough to fall out with Monsieur d’Epernon – not to mention that she must have a mortal grudge against me, and as soon as she has a moment will take advantage of it to disinherit me while she is alive.
‘That is definitely the real misfortune, not those cursed memories that plague me. Canolles, Richon, Richon, Canolles… So? Haven’t I seen hundreds of men die? What of it? On my word, there are times when I even regret not having been hanged with them, at least I should have died in good company, while now who knows who’ll be with me when I go…’
At that moment, the convent bell struck seven. This sound brought Cauvignac back to himself. He remembered that his sister had told him to wait until seven, that the ringing told him Nanon was going to reappear and that he had to play his part in consoling her to the end.
The door did, indeed, open, and Nanon reappeared. She crossed the little courtyard, where Cauvignac might have waited for her, had he wished, because strangers had the right to come into this courtyard: while not entirely profane, it was not yet altogether sacred.
But he had not wanted to go so far, saying that the neighbourhood of monastic buildings, especially convents of women, gave him bad thoughts; so, as we said, he stayed on the road, outside the iron gate.
At the sou
nd of footsteps on the gravel, Cauvignac turned round, and, seeing Nanon, who was still separated from him by the gate, he said, with a great sigh: ‘Ah… here you are, Little Sister. When I see one of these frightful gates close on some poor woman, I always feel as though I were watching a tombstone closing over a corpse: I don’t expect to see one without her nun’s habit, or the other without its shroud.’
Nanon smiled sadly.
‘Good!’ Cauvignac said. ‘That’s something: you’re not weeping, at least.’
‘That’s true,’ said Nanon. ‘I can’t weep any more.’
‘But you can still smile, I’m glad to see. We can go now, can’t we? I don’t know why, but this place gives me all kinds of ideas.’
‘Salutary ones?’
‘Salutary? Do you think so? Well, let’s not argue about it, though I’m delighted you consider my thoughts in that way. I hope you’ve made a good stock of them for yourself and that you won’t need to come back for a long time.’
Nanon did not reply. She was thinking.
‘Among those salutary thoughts,’ said Cauvignac, venturing a question, ‘I hope you have put in some about forgetting trespasses against us.’
‘I may not have found forgetfulness, but forgiveness at least.’
‘I should prefer forgetfulness, but no matter. One should not be too fussy, when one is in the wrong. So do you forgive me my trespasses against you, Sister?’
‘They are forgiven,’ said Nanon.
‘Oh! I’m delighted,’ said Cauvignac. ‘So you will see me in future without disgust?’
‘Not only without disgust, but even with pleasure.’
‘With pleasure?’
‘Yes, my friend.’
‘Your friend! Now, Nanon, there’s a name that I like, because you are not obliged to give it to me, while you are obliged to call me “Brother”. So you will endure my presence beside you.’
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