The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  “I’ve still said nothing about the mental labors and serious undertakings that for the first fifteen years prevented us from being engrossed by our sufferings and since then from regretting them. You know the nature of our work, its purposes and results; you were initiated into this last night; you’ll be more fully so this evening by the Invisibles. I can only tell you that Marcus sits among them and that he himself set up their secret council and organized their entire society with the help of a virtuous prince who has devoted the sum total of his fortune to this mysterious and grandiose enterprise. It has been my whole life as well for the last fifteen years. After twelve years away I was, on the one hand, too much forgotten and, on the other, too much changed not to be able to reappear in Germany. Besides, the strange life that befits certain functions of our order favored my incognito. Charged not with active propaganda, which is the reserve of your glamorous life, but with secret missions that my prudence could carry out, I made a few trips I’ll tell you about a while later. And since then I’ve lived here altogether hidden away, ostensibly fulfilling the lowly functions of a governess in the prince’s household, but in fact seriously engaged only with the secret work, keeping up a vast correspondence in the name of the council with all the important members, serving as their host here and often presiding over their conferences alone with Marcus when the prince and the other supreme heads were away, finally exercising at every moment a rather marked influence on those decisions of theirs that seemed to call for the subtle views and particular discernment of a woman’s mind. Aside from the philosophical questions debated and weighed here, and from which the maturity of my intellect has earned me the right not to be excluded, there are often matters of feeling to be argued and adjudicated. You can well imagine that in our work outside we are often helped or hampered by individual passions, love, hatred, jealousy. By the intermediary of my son and even in person, presenting myself as a sorceress or soothsayer, both disguises being very fashionable among the ladies at court, I’ve frequently been in touch with Princess Amalia of Prussia, with the interesting and unfortunate Princess von Kulmbach, finally with the young Margravine von Bayreuth, Frederick’s sister. We had to conquer their hearts even more than their minds. I labored nobly, I dare say, to win them over, and I’ve succeeded. But that’s not the facet of my life I want to share with you. In your future undertakings you’ll find my tracks and carry on what I began. I want to talk to you about Albert and tell you a whole side of his life that you know nothing about. We still have the time. Listen a bit longer. You’ll understand how I finally came to know, in this dreadful and bizarre life I’ve made for myself, tender feelings and maternal joys.”

  Chapter XXXIV

  “Thoroughly informed by Marcus about everything going on at the Castle of the Giants, I had no sooner learned of their resolution to send Albert on a journey and the direction in which he was to go than I hastened to place myself along his way. At the time I myself was traveling, often with Marcus, as I mentioned a short while ago. The tutor and servants assigned to Albert had not known me, so I had no fear of their seeing me. I was so impatient to set eyes on my son that it was hard to make myself stay a few hours behind him on the road to Venice, which was his first destination. Yet I had resolved to reveal myself to him only with some sort of mysterious solemnity, for it was not merely a mother’s ardent instinct pushing me into his arms; I had a more serious design, an even more motherly duty to fulfill; I wanted to extricate Albert from the narrow-minded superstitions in which they had tried to snare him. I would have to take hold of his imagination, his trust, his mind, and his entire soul. I believed him to be an ardent Catholic, and on the face of things he then was. He regularly observed all the public rites of the Roman church. The people who had given Marcus these details didn’t know what Albert thought and felt deep down, and his father and aunt scarcely knew any better. They found nothing to reproach him aside from a fierce rigorism, a way of interpreting the Gospels that was too naïve and too fervent. They didn’t understand that in his rigid logic and candid simplicity my noble child, with his stubborn determination to practice true Christianity, was already a passionate, incorrigible heretic. I was a bit alarmed by the Jesuit tutor attached to him; I feared not being able to get near him without being seen and thwarted by a fanatical Argus. But I soon learned that the unworthy Abbé *** didn’t even look after my son’s health and that Albert, neglected as well by his servants to whom he loathed giving orders, lived quite a solitary life and was left to his own devices in all the cities he visited. I anxiously observed all his movements. Staying at the same hotel in Venice, I ran across him alone at last, musing in the stairs and loggias, on the quais. Oh, you can just guess how my heart pounded at the sight of him, what a stir there was deep inside me, and what torrents of tears flowed from my bewildered, delighted eyes! Here was the sole object on the face of the earth I was allowed to love, and he looked so handsome, so noble and, alas, so sad! I followed him cautiously. Night was falling. He went into the Chiesa dei SS Giovanni e Paolo, an austere basilica full of tombs that you no doubt know well. Albert knelt down in a corner; I slipped in with him and hid behind a tomb. The church was deserted; it was getting darker and darker with every passing second. Albert was still as a statue. Yet he seemed absorbed in reverie rather than prayer. The sanctuary lamp threw a faint light on his face. He was so pale that it frightened me! His fixed gaze and half-open lips, something desperate in his posture and physiognomy broke my heart; I was trembling like the flickering light of the lamp. If I were to reveal myself to him just then, I felt he would faint dead away. I recalled everything that Marcus had told me about his nervous susceptibility and how dangerous sudden emotions were for such an impressionable nature. So as not to surrender to my impetuous love, I left and went to wait for him under the portico. Over my dress which was in any case very simple and dark I had thrown a brown cloak with a hood that hid my face and made me look like a humble Venetian woman. When he came out, I involuntarily took a step toward him; he stopped and, thinking me a beggar, randomly took a gold coin from his pocket and offered it to me. Oh, with what pride and gratitude I received these alms! Look, Consuelo, a Venetian sequin; I had a hole bored through it for a chain, and I always wear it over my heart like a precious jewel, a relic. Since that day I’ve never taken it off, this token sanctified by the hand of my child. I lost control of my feelings, seized that beloved hand, and drew it to my lips. With a sort of terror he pulled it back, bathed with my tears.

  “ ‘What are you doing, woman?’ he asked in a voice whose pure and resonant timbre reverberated down into my bones. ‘Why are you giving me such a blessing for so meager a gift? You must be in great misery, and I’ve given you too little. What do you need to put an end to your suffering? Speak. I want to console you, and I hope that I am able.’

  “And he gathered all his gold in his hands, without giving it so much as a glance.

  “ ‘You’ve given me enough, kind lad,’ I replied. ‘I’m content.’

  “ ‘But why the tears?’ he asked, struck by the sobs choking me. ‘Do you have some sorrow that my riches cannot remedy?’

  “ ‘No, I’m weeping tears of tenderness and joy.’

  “ ‘Joy! So there are tears of joy? And all for a piece of gold? Oh, wretched mankind! Take all the rest, woman, I beg you, but don’t weep for joy. Give a thought to all your brothers in poverty, so many, so demeaned, so miserable, and why can’t I help them all?”

  “He went away with a sigh. I dared not follow for fear of betraying myself. He had left his gold on the pavement, having offered it to me with a sort of haste to be rid of it. I gathered it up and put it into the alms box to satisfy my son’s noble charity. The next day I once more kept an eye out for him and saw him go into San Marco; I had resolved to be stronger and more controlled, and I was. We were alone again, in the semidarkness of the church. As before, he mused a long while, then all of a sudden I heard him get up and mutter in a deep voice, “O Christ, they cruci
fy you every day of their lives!”

  “ ‘Yes!’ I replied, half reading his thoughts, ‘the Pharisees and the Doctors of the Law!’

  “He shuddered, was silent for a moment, then said in a low voice without turning around, without trying to see who was talking to him like this, ‘My mother’s voice again!’

  “Consuelo, I nearly fainted when I heard Albert invoking my memory, keeping alive in his heart the instinct of this filial divination. Yet the fear of unsettling his mind, already at such a feverish pitch, stopped me again; I once more waited for him under the portico, and when he went by, I didn’t approach, satisfied to have seen him. But he caught sight of me and drew back in horror.

  “ ‘Signora,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation, ‘why are you begging today? Is it indeed a profession, as say the merciless rich? Don’t you have any family? Can’t you make yourself useful to someone, instead of wandering around churches at night like some kind of ghost? Wasn’t what I gave you yesterday enough to keep you out of want today? Do you mean to hoard your brothers’ share?’

  “ ‘I’m not begging,” I replied. ‘I put your gold into the alms box except for a sequin I intend to keep out of love of you.’

  “ ‘So who are you?’ he exclaimed, seizing my arm. ‘Your voice stirs me to the very depths of my soul. I have a feeling I know you. Show me your face! . . . No, don’t! I don’t want to see it, you frighten me.’

  “ ‘Oh, Albert!’ I was beside myself. Throwing caution to the winds, I blurted out, ‘So you too, you’re afraid of me!’

  “He shuddered from head to toe and murmured again with a look of terror and religious awe, ‘Yes, that’s her voice, my mother’s voice!’

  “ ‘I don’t know who your mother is,’ I said, alarmed by my recklessness. ‘I only know your name because it’s already known among the poor. Why are you afraid of me? Is your mother dead?’

  “ ‘That’s what they say,’ he replied, ‘but my mother’s not dead for me.’

  “ ‘So where does she live?’

  “ ‘In my heart, in my thoughts, ceaselessly, eternally. I’ve dreamed of her voice, her face a hundred, a thousand times.’

  “I was as much frightened as charmed by that imperious expansiveness that was drawing him to me. But I noted that he was showing signs of frenzy and subdued my emotions to calm him down.

  “ ‘Albert,’ I said, ‘I knew your mother; I was her friend. She charged me to talk to you about her one day when you were old enough to understand what I’ve got to say. I am not what I seem. I followed you yesterday and today only to have a word with you. So listen to me quietly and don’t let idle superstitions upset you. Will you come talk with me under the arcades of the Procuratie, deserted at this hour? Do you feel calm and collected enough to do this?’

  “ ‘You, my mother’s friend!’ he exclaimed. ‘She charged you to talk to me about her? Oh, yes, talk, talk indeed; you see, I wasn’t wrong, I was hearing an inner voice! I had a feeling there was something of her in you. No, I’m not superstitious, not mad; only my heart is more alive and open than many others to certain things that other people don’t understand and feel. You’ll understand that if you understood my mother. So tell me about her; talk to me again with her voice, her spirit.’

  “Having managed, though imperfectly, to rechannel his emotion, I led him under the arcades and began asking about his childhood, his memories, the principles he had been taught, his notion of his mother’s principles and ideas. My questions made it clear that I knew his family’s secrets and could understand those of his heart. Oh, my daughter, what enthusiastic pride I felt seeing Albert’s ardent love for me, his faith in my piety and virtue, his horror of the superstitious aversion that my memory evoked in the Catholics of Riesenburg; the purity of his soul, the grandeur of his religious and patriotic feeling, finally, all these sublime instincts that a Catholic upbringing had not been able to smother in him! Yet, at the same time, what deep sorrow when I saw the precocious, incurable sadness of this young soul and the battles that were already breaking it, just as they had done their best to break mine! Albert still thought he was a Catholic. He dared not openly revolt against the decrees of the Church. He needed to believe in an established religion. Already educated and meditative beyond his years (he was scarcely twenty), he had thought a great deal about the long, gloomy history of heresy and could not bring himself to condemn certain doctrines of ours. Forced nonetheless to believe that the innovators were wrong, their errors so exaggerated and envenomed by the church historians, he was floating in a sea of uncertainties, sometimes condemning revolt, sometimes cursing tyranny and unable to come to any conclusion, aside from thinking that men of virtue had gone astray in their attempts at reform and that men of blood had defiled the sanctuary meaning to defend it.

  “So it was necessary to illuminate his mind, to make allowances for the faults and excesses of both camps, to teach him to defend courageously the cause of the innovators while deploring their inevitable rages, to exhort him to turn his back on the party of cunning, violence, and subjection while acknowledging the excellence of a certain mission in a more distant past. I had no trouble enlightening him. He had already foreseen, already divined, already concluded before I had finished proving. His admirable instincts responded to my inspiration, but when he had understood it all, pain more overwhelming than uncertainty took hold of his despondent soul. Nowhere on earth was truth recognized! In no sanctuary was the law of God alive any longer! No people, no caste, no school was practicing Christian virtue or striving to clarify and develop it! Catholics and Protestants had abandoned the ways of God! Everywhere might prevailed over right, everywhere the weak were chained and demeaned; every day Christ was crucified on all the altars raised by men! This bitter, searching conversation went on the whole night long. The clocks slowly tolled the hours without Albert giving them a thought. I was frightened by the intensity of his intellect, which let me sense in him such a taste for struggle and such a capacity for pain. I admired the male pride and heartbreaking expression of my noble, unhappy child; I altogether recognized myself in him; I felt that I was reading my past life and starting all over again with him the story of the long torments of my heart and brain; by the light of the moon I contemplated on his broad brow the idle physical and moral beauty of my lonely, misunderstood youth; I wept for both of us at one and the same time, and these complaints were long and heartrending. I dared not reveal to him the secrets of our conspiracy; I was afraid he might not understand them right away and, in his pain, reject them as futile, dangerous efforts. Worried that he had been up walking and talking for such a long time, I pledged to give him a glimpse of a safe haven if he would only wait and prepare himself for some austere secrets; I gently stirred his imagination in anticipation of a new revelation and brought him back to the hotel where we were both staying, promising another conversation several days later so as not to overstimulate his faculties.

  “Only when we were about to go our separate ways did he think to ask who I was.

  “ ‘That I cannot tell you,’ I said. ‘I am using an assumed name; I have reasons for hiding; don’t say a word about me to anyone.’