The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  Yet Liverani persisted; he wrote another letter and was eloquent, persuasive, and sincere in his humility. “You appeal to my pride,” he said, “and I have no pride with you. If you were to regret someone else while I held you in my arms, I would suffer without taking offense. I would beg you, prostrate and bathing your feet with my tears, to forget him, to trust in me alone. However you love me, and however little, for that I shall be grateful as for an immense happiness.” This was the substance of a series of letters, ardent and timid, submissive and persevering. Consuelo felt her pride dissolving before the penetrating charm of true love. By imperceptible degrees she got used to the idea that she had not yet ever been truly loved previously, not even by Count von Rudolstadt. Then she rebuffed the involuntary spite that this outrage against the holiness of her memories aroused in her, for she was afraid, were she to let it show, of standing in the way of the happiness that Albert could hope to find in a new love. So she resolved to accept in silence the decree of separation that he apparently wanted the tribunal of the Invisibles to issue, and she abstained from writing his name in her replies to the stranger, ordering him to respect the same reserve.

  These replies, moreover, were full of caution and tact. While separating herself from Albert and opening her soul to the thought of another affection, Consuelo did not want to yield to blind intoxication. She forbade the stranger to appear before her and to break his vow of silence until the Invisibles had released him from it. She told him that she freely and voluntarily wanted to join the mysterious association that inspired her with both respect and confidence, that she was determined to undertake the necessary studies to learn their doctrine and to refrain from all personal concerns until she had earned, by a little virtue, the right to think of her own happiness. She did not find the strength to say that she did not love him, but she mustered up enough to tell him that she did not want to love him rashly.

  Liverani appeared to submit, and Consuelo carefully studied several tomes that Matteus had brought her one morning from the prince, along with the report that His Highness and his court had left the residence, but that she would soon have news. She simply listened to the message, asked no questions of Matteus, and read the history of the mysteries of antiquity, Christianity, and the various sects and secret societies that have grown out of them, a very learned compilation handwritten in the library of the Order of the Invisibles by some patient, conscientious disciple. This heavy reading, laborious at the beginning, gradually took hold of her mind, even her imagination. The depiction of the ordeals in the ancient temples of Egypt gave her many terrifying, poetic dreams. The account of the persecution suffered by the sects of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance moved her heart more than ever, and that history of enthusiasm inclined her soul to the religious fanaticism of an imminent initiation.

  For two weeks she had no word from outside and lived in retreat, surrounded by the chevalier’s mysterious attentions, but firm in her resolution not to see him or give him too much hope.

  The summer heat was coming on, and Consuelo, absorbed in her studies, could rest and breathe easily only during the cool of the evening. Little by little she resumed her slow, dreamy walks through the cloistered garden. She thought she was alone there, and yet every now and then some vague feeling made her fancy that the stranger was nearby. The lovely nights, the beautiful shade trees, the solitude, the languid murmur of running water amid the flowers, the perfume of the plants, the passionate voice of the nightingale followed by even more voluptuous silences; the moon casting its broad, oblique beams under the transparent shadows of the fragrant bowers, the evening star setting behind the pink clouds on the horizon, and who knows what else! All the classic feelings of youth and love, but eternally new and powerful, plunged Consuelo’s soul into dangerous reveries; her own slender shadow on the silvery sand of the paths, the flight of a bird roused by her approach, a leaf stirring in the breeze were enough to make her jump and quicken her pace; yet no sooner had these slight fears been dissipated than they were replaced by an undefinable regret, and the thrill of anticipation was stronger than any prompting of the will.

  Once she was flustered more than usual by the rustling leaves and obscure sounds of the night. She had the feeling that someone was walking close by, fleeing at her approach and coming near when she was sitting down. Her restlessness heightened her sense of alarm. She felt unable to defend herself against an encounter in this beautiful spot, under this magnificent sky. Puffs of hot wind blew over her brow. She fled to the lodge and shut herself away in her room. The candles had not been lit. She hid behind a blind and ardently desired to see the one by whom she did not want to be seen. Indeed, she saw a man appear and stroll under her windows without calling her name, without making a gesture, submissive and apparently content to gaze at the place where she lived. It had to be the stranger; at least, Consuelo felt at first that it had to be because of the emotion that washed over her, and she thought she recognized his height and bearing. But soon her mind was seized by strange doubts and distressing fears. The man walking in silence reminded her of Albert at least as much as Liverani. They were the same size; and now that Albert, transformed by his return to health, moved with ease and no longer kept his head bent over or cupped in his hand in a sick or sorry way, Consuelo scarcely knew any better what he looked like than she did the chevalier. Once in full daylight she had caught a brief glimpse of the chevalier walking far ahead of her and enveloped in the folds of a cloak. For a few seconds in the deserted tower she had also seen Albert, now so different from the man she had known; and here she was seeing one or the other not at all distinctly by starlight, and each time that she was about to settle her doubts, he slipped into the shade under the trees and disappeared as though he were a shade himself. He finally vanished altogether, and Consuelo was left torn between joy and fear, upbraiding herself for not having had the courage to call Albert by name to see what would happen and have it out with him fairly and frankly.

  As he withdrew farther and farther away from her, this regret grew ever stronger, along with the conviction that it was indeed Albert whom she had just seen. Carried along by the habitual devotion that had always stood in the place of love for him, she told herself that if he came roaming around her like this, it was in the timid hope of speaking to her. This was not the first time; he had said as much to Trenck on an evening when he may have crossed paths with Liverani in the dark. They needed to talk, and Consuelo resolved to make it happen. Her conscience required that she clear up her doubts about her husband’s real frame of mind, generous or fickle. She went back down to the garden and ran after him, trembling and yet courageous, but she had lost track of him, and she went back and forth through the whole enclosure without encountering him.

  All of a sudden, as she was emerging from a thicket, she saw a man standing at the water’s edge. Was this the one she had been seeking? She called out Albert’s name; he shuddered, passed his hands over his face, and when he turned around, the black mask already covered his features.

  “Albert, is that you?” cried Consuelo. “It’s you, you alone that I’ve been seeking.”

  A stifled exclamation betrayed some emotion in the stranger, either joy or pain. He seemed to want to flee. Thinking that she had recognized Albert’s voice, Consuelo leaped forward and held on to his cloak. But she stopped, for the cloak had pulled open and there on the man’s chest was a rather large silver cross that Consuelo knew only too well: her mother’s, the very one that she had entrusted to the chevalier during their travels together, as a token of gratitude and sympathy.

  “Liverani!” she exclaimed. “It’s always you! Since that’s the case, good bye! Why have you disobeyed me?”

  He threw himself at her feet, wrapped his arms around her, and lavished fervent, respectful embraces on her that Consuelo no longer had the strength to fend off.

  “If you love me and want me to love you, leave me,” she said. “It’s before the Invisibles that I want to see and hear you. Y
our mask frightens me, your silence makes my heart go cold.”

  Liverani raised his hand to his mask, he was going to rip it off and speak. Consuelo, like curious Psyche, no longer had the courage to close her eyes . . . but suddenly the black veil of the secret tribunal’s messengers slipped down over her head. The stranger’s hand that had hastily grabbed hers was loosed in silence. Consuelo felt herself being led away without violence or apparent wrath, but swiftly. She was swept up off the ground, she felt the bottom of a boat give beneath her feet. She glided downstream a long while without anyone saying a word to her, and when light was restored to her, she found herself in the subterranean hall where she had made her first appearance before the tribunal of the Invisibles.

  Chapter XXXI

  There they were, all seven of them, just like the first time, masked, silent, impenetrable as ghosts. The eighth figure, who had spoken to Consuelo on that occasion and was apparently the mouthpiece for the council and the initiator of the disciples, addressed her in these terms.

  “Consuelo, you have already undergone trials from which you have emerged to your glory and our satisfaction. You have our confidence, and we’re going to prove it to you.”

  “Wait,” said Consuelo. “You believe me without reproach, and that’s not so. I’ve disobeyed you; I left the retreat that you assigned me.”

  “Out of curiosity?”

  “No.”

  “Can you say what you learned?”

  “What I learned is very personal to me; I have among you a confessor to whom I can and will reveal it.”

  The old man that Consuelo was invoking stood up and said, “I know everything. The child’s fault is minor. She knows nothing of the matters about which you want her to know nothing. She’ll confide in me once the two of us are alone together. Meanwhile, put this time to good use and reveal to her without delay what she needs to know. I vouch for her in all things.”

  The initiator continued after having turned to the tribunal and received a sign of agreement.

  “Listen carefully,” he said to her, “I’m speaking to you in the name of those whom you see gathered here. It is their spirit, their breath, so to speak, that inspires me. It is their doctrine that I’m going to explain to you.

  “The distinctive feature of the religions of antiquity is that they had two faces, one outward and public, one inward and secret; one being the spirit; the other, the form or the letter. Behind the crude and material symbol, the deep meaning, the sublime idea. Egypt and India, great examples of ancient religions and mothers of pure doctrine, exhibit to the highest degree that dual aspect, the inevitable and fatal sign of societies in their infancy and of the suffering that goes along with humanity’s developing genius. You recently learned what the great mysteries of Memphis and Eleusis were all about, and now you know why the knowledge of God, politics, and society, which was all in the hands of the chief priests with their three-fold powers, religious, military and industrial, did not pass down to the lower classes in these ancient societies. The idea of Christianity, enveloped in purer, more transparent symbols in the words of the revealer, was born to bring the knowledge of truth and the light of faith down into the souls of the people. But theocracy, an inevitable abuse of religions constituted amid turmoil and danger, soon did its best to put the dogma under a veil once again, and it was corrupted in the process. Idolatry and mysteries reappeared, and in Christianity’s painful development one saw the chief priests of apostolic Rome lose, by divine punishment, the divine light and sink back into the darkness into which they wanted to plunge all humanity. From that point on human intelligence developed in ways completely different from those of the past. The temple was no longer, as in antiquity, the sanctuary of truth. Superstition and ignorance, the crude symbol, the dead letter, held sway on the altars and thrones. The spirit descended at last into the classes that had been demeaned too long. Poor monks, obscure doctors, humble penitents, all virtuous apostles of primitive Christianity, turned the secret, persecuted religion into the asylum of unknown truth. They did all they could to initiate the people into the religion of equality; and in the name of Saint John they preached a new gospel, that is to say, a freer, bolder, purer interpretation of the Christian revelation. You know the history of their labors, struggles, and martyrdom; you know how the peoples have suffered, their ardent inspirations, terrifying bursts of energy, grievous downfalls and stormy reawakenings; and through so many exertions, by turns dreadful and sublime, their heroic perseverance in fleeing the darkness and finding the ways of God. The time is near when the veil of the temple will be forever rent asunder, when the mob will storm the sanctuaries of the holy ark. Then symbols will vanish, and access to truth will no longer be guarded by the dragons of religious and monarchical despotism. Every man will be able to walk in the way of light and approach God with all the strength of his soul. No one will say to his brother any longer, ‘Your lot is ignorance and humility. Close your eyes and take the yoke.’ On the contrary, every man will be able to ask his peers to use their eyes, hearts, and arms to help him fathom the secrets of sacred knowledge. But that time is not yet here, and today we can only hail the glimmer of dawn on the horizon. This is still the age of secret religion, mystery’s task is not yet accomplished. We are still shut in the temple, busy forging the weapons to ward off the enemies who come between us and the peoples and forced as yet to keep our doors closed and words secret so that no one can come wrest out of our hands the holy ark, rescued with such difficulty and reserved for the community of mankind.

  “So now you’re being welcomed in the new temple, but it’s still a fortress that has been upholding the cause of liberty for centuries without having won it. War is all around us. We want to be liberators, we’re still only combatants. You’re here to receive the fraternal communion, the banner of salvation, the emblem of liberty and perhaps to die in the breach among us. This is the destiny you’ve accepted; perhaps you’ll succumb without having seen the standard of victory waving over your head. It is still in the name of Saint John that we call men to the crusade. It is still a symbol that we invoke; we are heirs to the Johannites of long ago, the unknown, mysterious, and steadfast successors to Wyclif, Jan Hus, and Luther; we want, as they did, to emancipate the human race, but, like them, we ourselves are not free, and like them, we may be marching to the stake.

  “Yet the battle is being fought on new ground, and the weapons are of a different sort. We still defy the law in its irascible severity and face proscription, poverty, imprisonment, death, for the means of tyranny are always the same, whereas ours are no longer incitements to material revolt and bloody sermons about the cross and the sword. Our war is wholly intellectual, as is our mission. We appeal to the mind and spirit, and we act by the same. It’s not with weapons that we can overthrow governments, organized and sustained with all the resources of brute force nowadays. We’re waging a slower, stealthier, and deeper war by going after their hearts. We’re unsettling their foundations by demolishing the blind faith and idolatrous respect they seek to inspire. We’re making what no one dares any longer call the poison of philosophy penetrate everywhere, into the courts, even into the restless, fascinated minds of princes and kings; we’re destroying all the illusions, and from the top of our fortress we’re launching a bitter attack on the altar and the throne with fervent truth and implacable reason. Victory will be ours, have no doubt. In how many years, how many days? That we don’t know. But our endeavor has such a long history, it has been conducted with such faith, smothered with so little success, resumed with such ardor, pursued with such passion that it cannot fail; it has become immortal in nature like the immortal goods it has resolved to conquer. This work was begun by our ancestors, and every generation has dreamed of completing the task. Were we ourselves not animated by some of the same hope, perhaps our zeal would be less fervent, less effective, but if the spirit of doubt and irony now ruling the world were to prove to us, by its cool calculations and overwhelming arguments, that we are
chasing a dream that can only be realized several centuries from now, our firm belief in our saintly cause would be unshaken; despite the extra toil and pain, we wouldn’t work any less hard for the men of the future. That’s because there is uniting us to the men of the past and the generations of the future a religious bond so tight and so strong that we’ve almost smothered in ourselves the selfish and personal side of human individuality. This is what the common man cannot understand, and yet there is in aristocratic pride something like our hereditary religious enthusiasm. Great lords sacrifice much to glory to be worthy of their ancestors and bequeath many honors to posterity, whereas we, architects of the temple of truth, sacrifice much to virtue to carry on the work of the masters and train hardworking apprentices. By the mind, spirit, and heart we live in the past, present, and future at one and the same time. Those who have gone before and those who will come after are as much us as we ourselves. We believe in the transmission of life, feelings, and generous instincts in souls just as patricians believe in the transmission of racial excellence through their blood. We go even further: we believe in the transmission of life, individuality, the soul and the human person. We feel ourselves fatally, providentially called to carry on the work that we have already dreamed, always pursued and promoted from century to century. Among us there are even a few who have pushed the contemplation of the past and future to the point of almost losing the notion of the present; that’s the sublime fever, the ecstasy of our believers and saints; for we have our saints, our prophets, perhaps also our fanatics and visionaries; but however frenzied or sublime their transports, we respect their inspiration, and in our midst Albert the ecstatic and seer has only found brothers full of sympathy for his pain, of admiration for his enthusiasm.