by Walter Pater
“And I — Monsieur!” said the bishop, suddenly, casting on me one of his august looks, “Do you suppose that I am but a play-actor in my cathedral church?”
“Monseigneur!”
“Yes! Listening to you, one would suppose that we were come to a period of the world in which one must needs be either an atheist or a hypocrite! Personally, I claim to be neither one nor the other.”
“Need I defend myself on that point, Monseigneur? Need I say that I did not come here to give you offence?”
“Doubtless! doubtless! Well, Monsieur, I admit; not without great reserves, mind! for one is always more or less responsible for the atmosphere in which he lives, the influences to which he is subject, for the habitual turn he gives to his thoughts; still, I admit that you are the victim of the incredulity of the age, that you are altogether guiltless in your scepticism, your atheism! since you have no fear of hard words. Is it therefore any the less certain that the union of a fervent believer, such as my niece, with a man like yourself would be a moral disorder of which the consequences might be disastrous? Do you think it could be my duty, as a relative of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, her spiritual father, as a prelate of the Church, to lend my hands to such disorder, to preside over the shocking union of two souls separated by the whole width of heaven?”
The bishop, in proposing that question, kept his eyes fixed ardently on mine.
“Monseigneur,” I answered, after a moment’s embarrassment, “you know as well as, and better than I, the condition of the world, and of our country, at this time. You know that unhappily I am not an exception: that men of faith are rare in it. And permit me to tell you my whole mind. If I must needs suffer the inconsolable misfortune of renouncing the happiness I had hoped for, are you quite sure that the man to whom one of these days you will give your niece may not be something more than a sceptic, or even an atheist?”
“What, Monsieur?”
“A hypocrite, Monseigneur! Mademoiselle de Courteheuse is beautiful enough, rich enough, to excite the ambition of those who may be less scrupulous than I. As for me, if you now know that I am a sceptic, you know also that I am a man of honour: and there is something in that!”
“A man of honour!” the bishop muttered to himself, with a little petulance and hesitation. “A man of honour! Yes, I believe it!” Then, after an interval, “Come, Monsieur,” he said gently, “your case is not as desperate as you suppose. My Aliette is one of those young enthusiasts through whom Heaven sometimes works miracles.” And Bernard refusing any encouragement of that hope (the “very roots of faith are dead” in him for ever) “since you think that,” the bishop answers, “it is honest to say so. But God has His ways!”
Soon after, the journal comes to an end with that peculiar crisis in Bernard’s life which had suggested the writing of it. Aliette, with the approval of her family, has given him her hand. Bernard accepts it with the full purpose of doing all he can to make his wife as happy as she is charming and beloved. The virginal first period of their married life in their dainty house in Paris — the pure and beautiful picture of the mother, the father, and at last the child, a little girl, Jeanne — is presented with M. Feuillet’s usual grace. Certain embarrassments succeed; the development of what was ill-matched in their union; but still with mutual loyalty. A far-reaching acquaintance with, and reflection upon, the world and its ways, especially the Parisian world, has gone into the apparently slight texture of these pages. The accomplished playwright may be recognised in the skilful touches with which M. Feuillet, unrivalled, as his regular readers know, in his power of breathing higher notes into the frivolous prattle of fashionable French life, develops the tragic germ in the elegant, youthful household. Amid the distractions of a society, frivolous, perhaps vulgar, Aliette’s mind is still set on greater things; and, in spite of a thousand rude discouragements, she maintains her generous hope for Bernard’s restoration to faith. One day, a little roughly, he bids her relinquish that dream finally. She looks at him with the moist, suppliant eyes of some weak animal at bay. Then his native goodness returns. In a softened tone he owns himself wrong.
“As to conversions; — no one must be despaired of. Do you remember M. de Rancé? He lived in your favourite age; — M. de Rancé. Well! before he became the reformer of La Trappe he had been a worldling like me, and a great sceptic — what people called a libertine. Still he became a saint! It is true he had a terrible reason for it. Do you know what it was converted him?”
Aliette gave a sign that she did not know.
“Well! he returned to Paris after a few days’ absence. He ran straight to the lady he loved; Madame Montbazon, I think: he went up a little staircase of which he had the key, and the first thing he saw on the table in the middle of the room was the head of his mistress, of which the doctors were about to make a post-mortem examination.”
“If I were sure,” said Aliette, “that my head could have such power, I would love to die.”
She said it in a low voice, but with such an accent of loving sincerity that her husband had a sensation of a sort of painful disquiet. He smiled, however, and tapping her cheek softly, “Folly!” he said. “A head, charming as yours, has no need to be dead that it may work miracles!”
Certainly M. Feuillet has some weighty charges to bring against the Parisian society of our day. When Aliette revolts from a world of gossip, which reduces all minds alike to the same level of vulgar mediocrity, Bernard, on his side, can perceive there a deterioration of moral tone which shocks his sense of honour. As a man of honour, he can hardly trust his wife to the gaieties of a society which welcomes all the world “to amuse itself in undress.”
It happened that at this perplexed period in the youthful household, one and the same person became the recipient both of the tearful confidences of Madame de Vaudricourt and those of her husband. It was the Duchess of Castel-Moret [she is another of M. Feuillet’s admirable minor sketches] an old friend of the Vaudricourt family, and the only woman with whom Aliette since her arrival in Paris had formed a kind of intimacy. The Duchess was far from sharing, on points of morality, and above all of religion, the severe and impassioned orthodoxy of her young friend. She had lived, it is true, an irreproachable life, but less in consequence of defined principles than by instinct and natural taste. She admitted to herself that she was an honest woman as a result of her birth, and had no further merit in the matter. She was old, very careful of herself, and a pleasant aroma floated about her, below her silvery hair. People loved her for her grace — the grace of another time than ours — for her wit, and her worldly wisdom, which she placed freely at the disposal of the public. Now and then she made a match: but her special gift lay rather in the way in which she came to the rescue when a marriage turned out ill. And she had no sinecure: the result was that she passed the best part of her time in repairing family rents. That might “last its time,” she would say. “And then we know that what has been well mended sometimes lasts better than what is new.”
A little later, Bernard, in the interest of Aliette, has chivalrously determined to quit Paris. At Valmoutiers, a fine old place in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, they established themselves for a country life. Here Aliette tastes the happiest days since her marriage. Bernard, of course, after a little time is greatly bored. But so far they have never seriously doubted of their great love for each other. It is here that M. Feuillet brings on the scene a kind of character new in his books; perhaps hardly worthy of the other company there; a sort of female Monsieur de Camors, but without his grace and tenderness, and who actually commits a crime. How would the morbid charms of M. de Camors have vanished, if, as his wife once suspected of him, he had ever contemplated crime! And surely, the showy insolent charms of Sabine de Tallevaut, beautiful, intellectually gifted, supremely Amazonian, yet withal not drawn with M. Feuillet’s usual fineness, scarcely hold out for the reader, any more than for Bernard himself, in the long run, against the vulgarising touch of her cold wickedness. Living in t
he neighbourhood of Valmoutiers, in a somewhat melancholy abode (the mystery of which in the eyes of Bernard adds to her poetic charm) with her guardian, an old, rich, freethinking doctor, devoted to research, she comes to Valmoutiers one night in his company on the occasion of the alarming illness of the only child. They arrive escorted by Bernard himself. The little Jeanne, wrapped in her coverlet, was placed upon the table of her play-room, which was illuminated as if for a party. The illness, the operation (skilfully performed by the old doctor) which restores her to life, are described with that seemingly simple pathos in which M. Feuillet’s consummate art hides itself. Sabine remains to watch the child’s recovery, and becomes an intimate. In vain Bernard struggles against the first real passion of his life; — does everything but send its object out of his sight. Aliette has divined their secret. In the fatal illness which follows soon after, Bernard watches over her with tender solicitude; hoping against hope that the disease may take a favourable turn.
“My child,” he said to her one day, taking the hand which she abandoned to him, “I have just been scolding old Victoire. She is losing her head. In spite of the repeated assurances of the doctors, she is alarmed at seeing you a little worse than usual to-day, and has had the Curé sent for. Do you wish to see him?”
“Pray let me see him!”
She sighed heavily, and fixed upon her husband her large blue eyes, full of anguish — an anguish so sharp and so singular that he felt frozen to the marrow.
He could not help saying with deep emotion, “Do you love me no longer, Aliette?”
“For ever!” murmured the poor child.
He leaned over her with a long kiss upon the forehead. She saw tears stealing from the eyes of her husband, and seemed as if surprised.
Soon afterwards Aliette is dead, to the profound sorrow of Bernard. Less than two years later he has become the husband of Mademoiselle Tallevaut. It was about two years after his marriage with Sabine that Bernard resumed the journal with which we began. In the pages which he now adds he seems at first unchanged. How then as to that story of M. de Rancé, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head of his dead mistress; an incident which the reader of La Morte will surely have taken as a “presentiment”? Aliette had so taken it. “A head so charming as yours,” Bernard had assured her tenderly, “does not need to be dead that it may work miracles!” — How, in the few pages that remain, will M. Feuillet justify that, and certain other delicate touches of presentiment, and at the same time justify the title of his book?
The journal is recommenced in February. On the twentieth of April Bernard writes, at Valmoutiers:
Under pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come to pass a week at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air. By my orders they have kept Aliette’s room under lock and key since the day when she left it in her coffin. To-day I re-entered it for the first time. There was a vague odour of her favourite perfumes. My poor Aliette! why was I unable, as you so ardently desired, to share your gentle creed, and associate myself to the life of your dreams, the life of honesty and peace? Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems to me like paradise. What a terrible scene it was, here in this room! What a memory! I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a look almost of terror! and how quickly she died! I have taken the room for my own. But I shall not remain here long. I intend to go for a few days to Varaville. I want to see my little girl: her dear angel’s face.
VALMOUTIERS, April 22. — What a change there has been in the world since my childhood: since my youth even! what a surprising change in so short a period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing! Then we were, as it were, impregnated with the thought of God — a just God, but benevolent and fatherlike. We really lived under His eyes, as under the eyes of a parent, with respect and fear, but with confidence. We felt sustained by His invisible but undoubted presence. We spoke to Him, and it seemed that He answered. And now we feel ourselves alone — as it were abandoned in the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard, savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle for existence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements, let loose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, with no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above us, in place of the good God of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse than nothing — a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares nothing at all about us.
The aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter, is lately dead. Bernard proposes to take the child away with him to Paris. The child’s old nurse objects. On April the twenty-seventh, Bernard writes:
For a moment — for a few moments — in that room where I have been shutting myself up with the shadow of my poor dead one, a horrible thought had come to me. I had driven it away as an insane fancy. But now, yes! it is becoming a reality. Shall I write this? Yes! I will write it. It is my duty to do so; for from this moment the journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart, is but my last will and testament. If I should disappear from the world, the secret must not die with me. It must be bequeathed to the natural protectors of my child. Her interests, if not her life, are concerned therein.
Here, then, is what passed: I had not arrived in time to render my last duty to Madame de Courteheuse. The family was already dispersed. I found here only Aliette’s brother. To him I communicated my plan concerning the child, and he could but approve. My intention was to bring away with Jeanne her nurse Victoire, who had brought her up, as she brought up her mother. But she is old, and in feeble health, and I feared some difficulties on her part; the more as her attitude towards myself since the death of my first wife has been marked by an ill grace approaching to hostility. I took her aside while Jeanne was playing in the garden.
“My good Victoire,” I said, “while Madame de Courteheuse was living, I considered it a duty to leave her granddaughter in her keeping. Besides, no one was better fitted to watch over her education. At present my duty is to watch over it myself. I propose therefore to take Jeanne with me to Paris; and I hope that you may be willing to accompany her, and remain in her service.” When she understood my intention, the old woman, in whose hands I had noticed a faint trembling, became suddenly very pale. She fixed her firm, grey eyes upon me: “Monsieur le Comte will not do that!”
“Pardon me, my good Victoire, that I shall do. I appreciate your good qualities of fidelity and devotion. I shall be very grateful if you will continue to take care of my daughter, as you have done so excellently. But for the rest, I intend to be the only master in my own house, and the only master of my child.” She laid a hand upon my arm: “I implore you, Monsieur, don’t do this!” Her fixed look did not leave my face, and seemed to be questioning me to the very bottom of my soul. “I have never believed it,” she murmured, “No! I never could believe it. But if you take the child away I shall.”
“Believe what, wretched woman? believe what?”
Her voice sank lower still. “Believe that you knew how her mother came by her death; and that you mean the daughter to die as she did.”
“Die as her mother did?”
“Yes! by the same hand!”
The sweat came on my forehead. I felt as it were a breathing of death upon me. But still I thrust away from me that terrible light on things.
“Victoire!” I said, “take care! You are no fool: you are something worse. Your hatred of the woman who has taken the place of my first wife — your blind hatred — has suggested to you odious, nay! criminal words.”
“Ah! Ah! Monsieur”, she cried with wild energy. “After what I have just told you, take your daughter to live with that woman if you dare.”
I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses. Then, returning to the old woman, “Yet how can I believe you?” I asked. “If you had had the shadow of a proof of what you give me to understand, how could you have kept silence so long? How could you have allowed me to contract that hateful marriage?”
She seemed more confident, and her voice grew g
entler. “Monsieur, it is because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oath on the crucifix to keep that secret for ever.”
“Yet not with me, in fact, — not with me!” And I, in turn, questioned her; my eyes upon hers. She hesitated: then stammered out, “True! not with you! because she believed, poor little soul! that...”
“What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice? Tell me!” Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. “Is it possible, my God, is it possible? But come, sit by me here, and tell me all you know, all you saw. At what time was it you noticed anything — the precise moment?” For in truth she had been suffering for a long time past.
Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine’s crime — we must pardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary world M. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of fully knowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised her in the very act, and did not credit her explanation. “When I surprised her,” she goes on:
“It may already have been too late — be sure it was not the first time she had been guilty — my first thought was to give you information. But I had not the courage. Then I told Madame. I thought I saw plainly that I had nothing to tell she was not already aware of. Nevertheless she chided me almost harshly. ‘You know very well,’ she said, ‘that my husband is always there when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. So that he too would be guilty. Rather than believe that, I would accept death at his hands a hundred times over!’ And I remember, Monsieur, how at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from the little boudoir, and brought her a glass of valerian. She cast on me a terrible look and drank. A few minutes afterwards she was so ill that she thought the end was come. She begged me to give her her crucifix, and made me swear never to utter a word concerning our suspicions. It was then I sent for the priest. I have told you, Monsieur, what I know; what I have seen with my own eyes. I swear that I have said nothing but what is absolutely true.” She paused. I could not answer her. I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them to my forehead, and wept like a child.