by George Sand
“His mother! You, his mother!” exclaimed Consuelo trembling and falling to Wanda’s knees. “Are you a ghost then? Wasn’t your death mourned at the Castle of the Giants?”
“Twenty-seven years ago,” replied the sibyl, “Wanda z Prachalitz, Countess von Rudolstadt, was buried at the Castle of the Giants, in the same chapel and under the same slab where Albert von Rudolstadt, who suffered from the same malady and was subject to the same attacks of catalepsy, was buried last year, a victim of the same error. The son never would have risen from that horrible tomb if the mother, attentive to the danger looming over him, hadn’t kept an invisible vigil by his deathbed and anxiously watched over his interment. It’s his mother who saved a being still full of strength and life from the worms of the sepulcher to which he had been already abandoned; his mother who wrested him from the yoke of the world where he had lived only too long, where he couldn’t live any longer, to transport him into this mysterious realm, this impenetrable asylum where she herself had recovered, if not the health of the body, at least the life of the soul. It’s a strange story, Consuelo, and you have to know it to understand Albert’s story, his sad life, so-called death, and miraculous resurrection. The Invisibles won’t start your initiation until midnight. So lend me your ears, and may the emotions of this bizarre tale brace you for those yet to come.”
Chapter XXXIII
“Rich, beautiful, and of illustrious birth, I was married at the age of twenty to Count Christian, who was already over forty. He could have been my father, and I felt affection and respect for him, but no love. I had been reared in ignorance of the place that love might have in a woman’s life. My parents, stern Lutherans but forced to practice their religion as discreetly as possible, were in their habits and ideas excessively rigid and resolute. Their hatred of foreigners, their inner revolt against the religious and political yoke of Austria, their fanatical attachment to the old freedoms of the fatherland were passed on to me, and these passions were sufficient to my proud youth. I had no idea there could be others, and my mother, who had never known anything but duty, would have thought it a crime to let me have any inkling of such things. For a long time Emperor Charles, Maria Theresa’s father, persecuted my family for heresy and put a price on our wealth, our liberty, and nearly our lives. I could redeem my parents by marrying a Catholic aristocrat devoted to the empire, and I offered myself up with a sort of enthusiastic pride. Among those who were pointed out to me, I chose Count Christian because his character, sweet, conciliatory, and even weak in appearance, gave me hope of secretly converting him to my family’s politics. My parents accepted and blessed my sacrifice. I thought that virtue would make me happy, but unhappiness, its measure fathomed, its injustice known and felt, is not a milieu where the soul can easily flourish. I soon recognized that under his calm, wise, and kindly demeanor Christian was hiding invincible obstinacy, opinionated attachment to the customs of his caste and prejudices of his entourage, a sort of pitiful hatred and pained contempt for any notion of opposition or resistance to the established order. His sister Wenceslawa, tender, vigilant, and generous, but even more riveted to the niceties of piety and the pride of rank, was bittersweet company for me: tender yet overwhelming tyranny, devoted affection that was extremely exasperating. I suffered mortally from having no emotional and intellectual sympathies with these people, despite my feelings for them; living in their midst was killing me; breathing their air was slowly withering me away. You know the story of Albert’s youth, his bridled enthusiasms, his misunderstood religion, his evangelical notions taxed as heresy and madness. My life was a prelude to his, and in the Rudolstadt family you must have heard occasional gasps of horror and pain about the ominous resemblance between mother and son, inside and out.
“I suffered most from the absence of love, and from there sprang all my other afflictions. I was very fond of Christian, but nothing in him could inspire any enthusiasm in me, and I would have required enthusiastic feeling to compress the deep divide between our ways of thinking. My stern religious upbringing did not allow me to separate reason from love. I was eating myself alive. My health began to deteriorate; an extraordinary excitement took hold of my nervous system, I had hallucinations, spells of ecstasy that they called madness and carefully concealed instead of trying to cure them. Yet they tried to keep me entertained and take me out in society, as if balls, performances, and galas could have taken the place of sympathy, love, and trust in my life. I became so ill in Vienna that they brought me back to the Castle of the Giants. I still preferred this dismal place, the chaplain’s exorcisms, and the canoness’s cruel affection to the court of our tyrants.
“My five children dying one after the other were the final blows. It seemed to me that God had cursed my marriage; I energetically desired death. I hoped for nothing more in life. I did my best not to love Albert, my last born, convinced that he was doomed like the others and that I could do nothing to save him.
“One last misfortune brought my exasperation to a climax. I loved, I was loved, and the austerity of my principles forced me not even to acknowledge within my own heart this tremendous emotion. The doctor who treated me during my frequent and painful crises looked less young and handsome than Christian. So it was not the charms of his person that moved me, but the deep sympathy of our souls, the correspondence of our ideas or at least our religious and philosophical instincts, an incredible affinity between our temperaments. Marcus, I can refer to him only by this name, had the same energy, active mind, and patriotic feeling as I did. The words that Shakespeare put into Brutus’ mouth fit him as well as me: “I am not one to bear injustice with a serene countenance.” The misery and degradation of the poor, serfdom, despotic laws, and their monstrous abuses, all the ungodly rights of conquest made him rage with indignation. Oh, what torrents of tears we both shed over the wretched plight of our homeland, of the whole human race, everywhere enslaved or deceived! Here besotted by ignorance, there decimated by rapacity and greed, elsewhere raped and demeaned by the ravages of war, debased and hapless all over the face of the earth. Yet Marcus, more educated than I, was concocting a remedy to so many ills and often told me about strange and mysterious projects for organizing a universal conspiracy against despotism and intolerance. I listened to his plans as though to romantic dreams. I had no more hope; I was too sick and broken to believe in the future. He loved me ardently; I saw it, I felt it, I shared his passion, and yet, during five years of apparent friendship and chaste intimacy, we never revealed to each other the fateful secret that united us. He didn’t ordinarily live in the Bohemian Forest; at least he was often away, ostensibly to treat distant patients and actually to coordinate the conspiracy he was always talking about without convincing me of its results. Each time I saw him again, I felt myself more inflamed by his genius, courage, and perseverance. Each time he returned, he found me weaker, more consumed by an inner fire, more devastated by physical suffering.
“During one of his trips I had horrible convulsions that the ignorant and vain Doctor Wetzelius, whom you know, who treated me in his absence, called malignant fever. Afterward I fell into a total prostration that they took for death. I had no pulse; my breathing was imperceptible. Yet I was fully conscious; I heard the chaplain praying and my family weeping. I heard the heartrending cries of my only child, my poor Albert, and I couldn’t make a single movement; I couldn’t even see him. They had closed my eyes, and it was impossible for me to open them again. I wondered if this was death and if the soul, no longer able to animate the dead body, still experienced the pain of living and the horror of the grave. I heard terrible things being said around my deathbed; the chaplain, trying to calm the canoness’s keen and sincere sorrow, told her that we should thank God for all things and that it was a great blessing for my husband to be delivered from the anguish of my long suffering and the storms of my reprobate soul. Though his words were not so harsh, they amounted to the same thing, and the canoness listened to him and little by little came around to his p
oint of view. Then I even heard him trying to console Christian with the same arguments, expressed in still milder fashion, yet just as cruel for me. I was hearing clearly and understanding in exquisite pain. It was, they thought, God’s will that I not rear my son and that he at his tender age be protected from the poison of heresy with which I was infected. That’s what they said to my husband when he pressed Albert to his breast and exclaimed, “Poor child, what will become of you without your mother?” The chaplain replied, “You’ll raise him up in the ways of God.”
“Finally, after three days of motionless, mute despair I was buried without having recovered the ability to move, without having lost for one instant the certainty of the horrible death they were going to inflict on me! They covered me in diamonds, dressed me in the magnificent array I wore for my engagement in the portrait you saw. They placed a crown of flowers on my head, a gold crucifix on my breast and laid me in a long hollow of white marble cut into the crypt of the chapel. I felt neither the cold nor the lack of air; I was alive in mind only.
“Marcus arrived an hour later, so distraught at first that he couldn’t think. He lay down over my tomb like an automaton; they tore him off; he came back in the night, this time with a hammer and crowbar. A sinister thought had crossed his mind. He knew my attacks of catalepsy; he had never seen them so long, so total; still, from having observed that bizarre condition for a few instants, he concluded that there might have been a dreadful error. He had no trust in Wetzelius as a doctor. I heard his steps overhead and recognized them. The sound of the iron bar raising the slab made me shudder, but I couldn’t utter a cry, a moan. When he lifted the veil over my face, I was so exhausted from all the exertions I had just made to call out to him that I seemed deader than ever. He hesitated a long while; a thousand times he checked my arrested breathing, my heart, my icy hands. I was stiff as a cadaver. I heard his heartrending murmur, “So it’s all over! There’s no more hope! Dead, she’s dead! Oh, Wanda!” He let the veil fall back but didn’t replace the slab. There was once again a horrifying silence. Had he fainted? Was he too abandoning me, so horrified by the view of the woman he had once loved that he had forgotten to close my sepulcher?
“Marcus, sunk in somber meditation, was devising a plan as lugubrious as his grief, as strange as his nature. He wanted to steal my body from the ravages of destruction, secretly make off with it, embalm it, seal it in a metal casket, and keep it always at his side. He was wondering if he had the courage when all of a sudden, in a sort of frenzy, he told himself that he would indeed. He took me in his arms and, without knowing if he had the strength to carry a cadaver all the way home, more than a league away, he put me down on the stone floor and replaced the slab with the dreadful composure that one often has in acts of delirium. Then he wrapped me up in his cloak so that I was completely hidden and left the castle, which wasn’t locked up with the same care as nowadays, given that gangs of malefactors, driven to despair by war, hadn’t yet appeared in those parts. I had become so thin that I truly wasn’t much of a burden. Marcus went through the woods, taking the most desolate trails. Several times he laid me down on the rocks, overcome with grief and terror even more than weariness. He has since told me that more than once he felt horrified to have stolen a dead body and was tempted to return me to my tomb. At last he arrived home, crept silently into the garden and, without anybody seeing, carried me to an isolated lodge he had turned into a study. Only there did the joy of my rescue, the first impulse of joy I had felt in ten years, loose my tongue and let me utter a faint cry.
“A violent paroxysm followed this prostration. Suddenly I was endowed with tremendous strength; I screamed and roared. Marcus’s housekeeper and gardener came running, thinking he was being murdered. He had the presence of mind to head them off, saying that a lady had come to deliver a baby in secret and that he would kill whoever tried to see her and fire anybody who dared say a word. The ploy succeeded. I was dangerously ill in the lodge for three days. Marcus, shut away with me, ministered to me with a zeal and intelligence worthy of his willpower. When I was out of danger and could collect my thoughts, I threw myself into his arms, terrified at the thought that we would have to part.
“ ‘Oh Marcus!’ I cried, ‘why didn’t you let me die here, in your arms! If you love me, kill me; going back to my family is for me worse than death.’ ”
“ ‘Madame,’ was his firm reply, “you’ll never go back there, that’s a vow I’ve made to God and to myself. Now you’re mine alone. You won’t leave my side ever again, or you’ll only get out of here over my dead body.’ ”
“This dreadful resolution horrified and charmed me all at once. I was too confused and weak to appreciate what it involved. I listened to him with the timid, trusting submission of a child and let myself be nursed back to health. Little by little I grew used to the idea of never returning to Riesenburg, never dispelling the notion that I had died. Marcus deployed impassioned rhetoric to convince me. He told me that I couldn’t survive in that marriage and that I had no right to go back to a certain death. He swore that he could keep me out of the public eye for a long time and make me invisible my whole life long to those who knew me. He promised to look after my son and arrange for me to see him in secret. He even gave me sure guarantees of these strange possibilities, and I let myself be persuaded. I agreed to leave with him and never to go back to being Countess von Rudolstadt.
“But just as we were about to depart, in the middle of the night, Marcus was summoned to attend Albert, who was said to be dangerously ill. A mother’s tender love, which hardship seemed to have smothered, reawakened in my breast. I wanted to go with Marcus to Riesenburg; no human power, not even his, could have deterred me. I climbed into his carriage and, enveloped in a long veil, waited anxiously at some remove from the castle for him to see my son and bring me news of him. Indeed he soon returned, assured me that the child was not in danger, and wanted to take me back to his place so that he could spend the night with Albert. I couldn’t make up my mind to do it. I wanted to go on waiting, hidden behind the castle’s dark walls, quivering with anxiety, while he went back to tend to my son. The moment I found myself alone, a thousand worries set upon my heart. I imagined that Marcus was hiding from me the truth about Albert, that he was perhaps at death’s door, that he was going to die without my last kiss. Overcome by this fateful notion, I dashed under the portico of the castle; a footman that I encountered in the courtyard dropped his torch and fled, making the sign of the cross. My face was veiled, but any woman appearing in the middle of the night was enough to arouse the superstitions of these credulous servants. There was no doubt that I was the ghost of the unhappy, ungodly Countess Wanda. By an unexpected stroke of luck I found my way to my son’s room without running into anyone else and arrived just when the canoness had stepped out to fetch some medicine prescribed by Marcus. My husband, as usual, was off praying in his private chapel rather than doing anything to help matters. I ran to my son and pressed him to my bosom. He wasn’t at all afraid of me and hugged me in return; he hadn’t understood that I had died. Just then the chaplain appeared at the door. Marcus thought that all was lost. Yet, with a rare presence of mind, he didn’t move and made as if I weren’t there beside him. Before the chaplain dared take a step in my direction, he choked out a few words of exorcism and fell down in a faint. At that point I resigned myself to escaping by another door and made my way in the dark back to where Marcus had left me. I was reassured, I had seen that Albert was better, his little hands were warm, and his cheeks were no longer flushed with fever. The chaplain’s faint and fright were attributed to a vision. He claimed that he had seen me next to Marcus, holding my son in my arms. Marcus claimed that he hadn’t seen a single thing. Albert had fallen asleep. But the next day he asked for me again, and the following nights, convinced that I hadn’t gone to sleep forever as they tried to tell him, he dreamed of me, thought he saw me again and called out for me several times. From then on the child was kept under close watch, and
the superstitious souls of Riesenburg prayed and prayed to ward off the baleful attentions of my ghost around his cradle.
“Marcus took me back to his place before dawn. We postponed our departure by another week, and when my son was fully recovered, we left Bohemia. Since then I’ve led an itinerant, mysterious life. Always hidden away in my lodgings, always veiled while traveling, using an assumed name and for a long time having no other confidant in the world but Marcus, I spent several years abroad with him. He maintained a close correspondence with a friend who kept him up on everything at Riesenburg, including ample details about the health, character, and upbringing of my son. My deplorable state of health allowed me to lead a most secluded life and see no one at all. I passed for Marcus’s sister and lived for several years down in Italy, in an isolated villa, while Marcus, for a part of each year, went on traveling and pursuing his vast projects.
“I was not Marcus’s mistress; I had remained under the sway of my religious scruples, and it took me more than ten years of meditation to understand that human beings have the right to throw off the yoke of society’s merciless, mindless laws. Given that I was thought dead and had no wish to jeopardize the liberty I had conquered at such a cost, I couldn’t invoke any religious or civil authority to end my marriage to Christian, nor would I have wanted to reopen old wounds for him. He didn’t know how miserable I’d been with him; he thought that I had gone down to the repose of the grave for my own happiness, his family’s peace and my son’s salvation. In such circumstances I saw myself eternally condemned to remain faithful to him. Later on, when the disciples of a new faith had come together and secretly constituted themselves as a religious authority through the good offices of Marcus, when I had changed my ideas enough to accept this new council and join the new Church that could have pronounced my divorce and sanctified our union, it was too late. Marcus, weary of my being so stubborn, had felt the need to find love elsewhere, and I had heroically urged him on. He was married; I was his wife’s friend; yet he wasn’t happy. Her mind and heart weren’t big enough to satisfy the mind and heart of a man of his sort. His projects were beyond her; he took care not to let her in on his accomplishments. She died a few years later without having divined that Marcus still loved me. I took care of her while she was dying and closed her eyes without having to reproach myself for a single thing in her regard, without rejoicing at the disappearance of this obstacle to my long, cruel passion. Youth had fled; I was broken; my life had been too serious and too austere for me to do things differently now that my hair was turning gray. I entered at last into the calm of old age and deeply felt all that is august and sacred in that phase of our lives as women. Yes, there is something more serious about our old age than that of men, about our whole lives as well, when we have a good understanding of them. Men can beguile the march of time; they can still make love and have children later than we can. For us women, nature instead marks a term after which there is something monstrous and ungodly about wanting to reawaken love and encroach with ridiculous delirium upon the splendid privileges of the next generation that has already come forth and cast a shadow over us. Plus, the lessons and examples they expect from us in this solemn moment require a quiet life of contemplation that would be fruitlessly troubled by the commotion of love. Youth can be inspired by its own fervor and find lofty revelations there. Ripe old age only relates to God in the august serenity that comes as a final blessing. God himself offers gentle help and by an imperceptible transformation starts us down that path. He takes care to soothe our passions and turn them into peaceable affections; he rids us of the charms of beauty, thereby removing dangerous temptations. So there is nothing easier than growing old, no matter what is said and thought by all the insane women who bustle about the world, having fallen prey to a sort of stubborn rage to hide from others as well as themselves the decay of their charms and the end of their mission as women. What! Age unsexes us, releases us from the awful labors of maternity, and we would fail to see that this is the moment to raise ourselves up to a sort of angelic state? But, dear daughter, you are so far away from this term, frightening and yet desirable like a port after a storm, that all my reflections on this subject are untimely. Therefore, may they merely help you understand my story. I remained what I had always been, a sister to Marcus, and these bridled emotions, these vanquished desires that had tortured our youth gave to our mature friendship at least qualities of strength and enthusiastic trust not found in ordinary friendships.