The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  “He didn’t ever ask me any other questions and seemed content with my reply, but his delicate reserve was accompanied by another sentiment as strange as his nature and somber as his usual frame of mind. Long afterwards he told me that from then on he always took me for his mother’s soul, appearing to him in the flesh and in circumstances explicable for ordinary people, but in fact supernatural. Thus, despite me, my dear Albert doggedly went on identifying me as his mother. He preferred inventing a realm of fantasy rather than doubting my presence, and try as I might, I couldn’t deceive his heart’s victorious instinct. All my efforts to keep his excitement in check only served to maintain him in a sort of calm, contained delirium that had neither naysayer nor confidant, not even I who was its object. He religiously submitted to the will of the ghost who forbade him to identify or name her, but he stubbornly believed himself in a ghost’s power.

  “From that terrifying equanimity that Albert subsequently carried over into the aberrations of his imagination and the somber, stoic courage that always made him face without blanching the phantoms generated by his brain, there ensued a long and fateful error on my part. I was unaware of his bizarre way of accounting for my reappearance on earth. I thought he took me for a mysterious friend of his dead mother and childhood self. True, I was amazed by his slight curiosity about me and the small wonder that my constant attentions caused him, but this blind respect and delicate submission, this absence of worry regarding all of life’s realities seemed so consonant with his absorbed, dreamy, and contemplative nature that I didn’t try hard enough to understand them and fathom their secret causes. So by working to fortify his reason against his excessive enthusiasm, I unwittingly helped develop in him that sort of madness, both sublime and deplorable, of which he has been so long the toy and the victim.

  “Little by little, in a series of conversations without confidants or witnesses, I expounded the doctrines of which our order has made itself the repository and secret propagator. I initiated him into our project for universal regeneration. In Rome, in the subterranean chambers set aside for our mysteries, Marcus introduced Albert and had him received into the first degrees of Freemasonry, while reserving the right to reveal to him ahead of time the symbols hidden in the vague, bizarre forms whose many interpretations lend themselves so well to the measure of the disciples’ intelligence and courage. For seven years I followed my son on all his travels, always departing and arriving one day later. I always made a point to find lodgings at a certain distance from his and never to be seen by his tutor or attendants. As I recommended, he took care to change his servants often and to remain aloof from them. Every now and then I asked if he wasn’t surprised to see me everywhere.

  “ ‘Not at all!’ he replied. ‘I know you’ll follow me wherever I go.’ ”

  “And when I asked him to explain why he felt so sure about that, he said, ‘My mother charged you to give me life, and you know I’d die if you were to abandon me now.’

  “His words were always fervent, as though inspired. I grew used to seeing him like that and unknowingly became so myself while talking with him. Marcus often reproached me, as I myself did, for feeding in this way the inner flame that was devouring Albert. Marcus would have wanted to enlighten him by more positive lessons and cooler reasoning. Yet at other moments I reassured myself thinking that, without the sustenance I was giving him, that flame would have consumed him more quickly and cruelly. My other children had shown a similar inclination to enthusiasm. People had compressed their souls, trying to extinguish them like torches deemed to be burning too bright, and they had succumbed before they had the strength to resist. Without my breath constantly reviving the sacred spark in free, pure air, Albert’s soul might have gone to join those of his brothers, just as without Marcus’s breath I would have died before I had lived. I also strove to give his mind frequent diversions from his eternal aspiration to the realm of ideas. I advised him, I required him to study the real world; he was sweet and conscientious about obeying me. He studied the natural sciences, the languages of the various countries where he was traveling; he read enormously; he even cultivated the arts and took up music on his own. All this was just a game, a pastime for his great, lively intellect. A stranger to all the intoxications of youth, a born enemy of the world and its vanities, he lived everywhere in deep retreat, and stubbornly resisting his tutor’s advice, he refused to set foot in any salon, to be introduced at any court. He scarcely saw, in two or three capitals, his father’s oldest and most serious friends. In their presence he put on a solemn, reserved face that gave them no opportunity to criticize him, and he was open and expansive only with a few disciples of our order to whom Marcus particularly recommended him. He begged us, moreover, not to require him to do any proselytizing until he felt that he had developed a gift for persuasion, and he often frankly told me that he didn’t have it because he still didn’t have enough faith in the excellence of our methods. He let himself be promoted to higher and higher degrees like a docile student, but examining everything with severe logic and scrupulous honesty, he always reserved the right, he said, to suggest reforms and improvements when he felt sufficiently enlightened to dare give rein to his personal inspiration. Until then he wanted to remain humble, patient, and obedient to the prescribed forms of our secret society. Immersed in study and meditation, he held his tutor in check with his serious nature and chilly demeanor. Thus, the abbé came to consider him a dreary pedant and kept his distance as much as possible, busying himself exclusively with the intrigues of his order. Albert even had rather long stays in France and England without the abbé, who was often a hundred leagues away and only met with Albert when he felt like a change of scenery; even then they often did not travel together. Then I was entirely free to see my son, and his exclusive affection repaid me a hundred times over for the care I gave him. My health had improved. It sometimes happens that seriously impaired constitutions grow used to their afflictions and stop suffering, which was the case with me; I almost didn’t notice mine any longer. Fatigue, late nights, long talks, and arduous journeys, instead of finishing me off, kept me in a chronic low fever that became and has remained my normal state. Frail and quaky as you see, I can endure any toil or exhaustion better than you, a lovely spring flower. Ferment has become my element, and there I take my rest, forever on the move like those career couriers who have learned to sleep at a gallop.

  “This experiment in what an energetic soul can endure and accomplish in a sickly body has made more confident in Albert’s strength. I’ve grown used to seeing him like me sometimes flagging and broken, lively and feverish at other moments. We’ve often suffered together the same bodily pains resulting from the same keen emotions; and perhaps our closeness has never been sweeter and more tender than in those times of trial with the same fever burning in our veins and the same prostration making our feeble sighs indistinguishable. How many times did it seem to us that we were the same being! How many times did we break the silence into which the same reverie had sunk us only to say the same words to each other! How many times, finally, one of us ebullient and the other one broken, have we exchanged by a squeeze of the hand that languor and that energy! What good things and bad we’ve experienced together! O my son! My only passion! Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone! What storms we’ve traversed, protected by the same heavenly shield! How much devastation we’ve withstood, holding each other tight and uttering the same words of salvation: love, truth, justice!

  “We were in Poland on the border with Turkey, and Albert, having gone through all the subsequent Masonic initiations and superior ranks that are the last link between that preparatory society and our own, was headed for that part of Germany where we are now in order to be admitted to the sacred banquet of the Invisibles. Just then Count Christian von Rudolstadt called him back home. I was thunderstruck. As for Albert, despite all my care to keep him from forgetting his family, he no longer loved them except as a tender memory out of the past; he no longer understood how
he could live with them. Yet it did not occur to us to resist that command formulated with the cold dignity and confident paternal authority of the Catholic, patrician families in our country. Albert prepared to leave me, not knowing for how long we would be separated, but trusting that he would soon see me again and pull together with Marcus the association that needed him. Albert had little notion of time and even less the ability to appreciate the material contingencies of life.

  “ ‘Are we parting?’ he asked, seeing me weep despite myself. ‘That cannot be. Every time I’ve called out to you from the depths of my heart, you’ve appeared. I’ll call out to you once again.’

  “ ‘Albert, Albert!’ I replied, ‘I can’t follow you to where you’re going this time.’

  “He turned pale and clung to me like a frightened child. The moment had come to reveal my secret.

  “ ‘I am not your mother’s soul,’ I said after a bit of a preamble. ‘I am your mother herself.’

  “ ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he said with a strange smile. ‘Didn’t I know it? Don’t we look alike? Haven’t I seen your portrait at Riesenburg? Besides, had I forgotten you? Hadn’t I always seen you, always known you?’

  “ ‘And you weren’t surprised to see me alive, I who am supposed to be buried in the chapel at the Castle of the Giants?’

  “ ‘No, I wasn’t surprised; I was too overjoyed for that. God can work miracles, and it is not for man to wonder at them.’

  “The strange child had a harder time understanding the frightening realities of my story than the marvelous illusion he had cherished. He had believed in my resurrection as in Christ’s; he had taken my doctrines about the transmission of life literally; he believed in them to excess, in other words, he was not astonished to see me keep the memory and certainty of my individuality after having cast off one body for another. I don’t even know if I managed to convince him that my swoon hadn’t meant the end of my life and that my mortal shell hadn’t remained in the sepulcher. He listened to me with a vacant yet ardent look on his face, as though he were hearing other words than those I was saying. Something inexplicable was going on inside him just then. A terrific bond was still holding Albert’s soul on the edge of the abyss. He would remain alienated from reality until he himself had undergone that final crisis out of which I had miraculously emerged, that apparent death that would be in him the ultimate struggle between the notions of time and eternity. It broke my heart to leave him; I had a vague, painful premonition that he was about to enter that climacteric phase, so to speak, which had so violently shaken my existence, that the hour was near when Albert would be utterly destroyed or renewed. I had noticed that he was prone to catalepsy. Before my eyes he had fallen into sleep so long, so heavy, so frightening; his breathing was then so feeble, his pulse so nearly imperceptible that I kept saying or writing to Marcus, ‘We must never let anybody bury Albert, or we mustn’t fear breaking open his tomb.’ Unfortunately for us, Marcus could no longer show his face at the Castle of the Giants, nor could he set foot in the Empire. He’d been seriously compromised in an insurrection in Prague in which he had in fact had an influence. Only flight had saved him from the rigors of Austrian law. Devoured with worry, I came back here. Albert had promised to write me every day, and I had promised myself that as soon as a letter failed to arrive, I’d leave for Bohemia and show up at Riesenburg, no matter what the consequences might be.

  “The pain of our separation was at first less cruel for him than for me. He didn’t understand what was happening; he seemed not to believe it. But once he was back under that sinister roof where the air is like poison for the ardent hearts of Zizka’s descendants, he suffered a terrible shock in every part of his being; he ran and locked himself up in my old room; he called out to me, and not seeing me appear, became convinced that I had died a second death and wouldn’t be restored to him in the course of his present life. That at least is how he has since explained to me what was going on in that fateful hour that unsettled his mind and faith for years on end. He gazed at my portrait for a long time. A portrait is never anything more than an imperfect likeness, and an artist’s particular impression of us always falls so short of the notions of those who love us passionately that no likeness can ever satisfy them; it can even hurt and sometimes offend them. Albert, looking at that representation of my past youth and beauty, didn’t find his dear old mother, with her gray hair that he found more dignified and the withered pallor that spoke to his heart. He shrank back in terror from the portrait and reappeared before his relatives, somber, tight-lipped, and distraught. He went to visit my tomb where he was seized with vertigo and horror. The idea of death struck him as monstrous, and yet, to console him, his father told him that I was there in the tomb, that he should kneel down and pray for the repose of my soul.

  “ ‘Repose!’ exclaimed Albert, beside himself, ‘the repose of the soul! No, my mother’s soul is not meant for such nothingness, no more than mine. Neither my mother nor I want repose in a tomb. Never, never! I am horrified by this Catholic crypt, these sealed sepulchers, this forsaking of life, this divorce between heaven and earth, between body and soul!’

  “With such talk Albert began to instill fear in his father’s simple, timid soul. His words were relayed to the chaplain so that he might try and explain them. That narrow-minded man took them as nothing more than a cry wrung from Albert’s soul by the feeling that I was damned for all eternity. The superstitious terror that began to spread around Albert, plus his family’s attempts to lead him back to Catholic submission soon became torture for him, and his excitability altogether assumed the morbid quality you saw in him. He became confused. Repeatedly seeing and touching the proof of my death, he forgot that he had known me alive, and I seemed to him nothing more than a fleeting ghost always ready to forsake him. His imagination conjured up this ghost, lending it only incoherent ravings, mournful cries, and sinister threats. When he calmed down, his mind remained under a cloud. He couldn’t remember recent events; he convinced himself that he had only dreamed spending eight years with me; rather, these eight years of happiness, activity, and strength seemed to him an hour’s dream.

  “Not having had any letter from him, I was going to rush off to Riesenburg. Marcus held me back, maintaining that our letters were being intercepted by the postal service, or else that the Rudolstadt family was doing away with them. He was still getting news of Riesenburg from his faithful correspondent; my son was said to be calm, healthy, and happy with his family. You know what care they took to conceal his condition, and at first they succeeded.

  “In his travels Albert had met young Trenck and struck up a warm friendship with him. Trenck, who was loved by the Princess of Prussia and persecuted by King Frederick, wrote to my son about his joys and sorrows and begged that he come to Dresden to give him help and advice. Albert set out in that direction, and no sooner had he left gloomy Riesenburg than his memory, zeal, and reason came back to him. Trenck had met my son in the militia of neophyte Invisibles. There they had made a pact and sworn a knightly bond of brotherhood. When Marcus told me about their projected meeting, I rushed to Dresden, saw Albert again, and followed him to Prussia, where he slipped into the royal palace in disguise to help out Trenck in his love affair and deliver a message for the Invisibles. Marcus thought that these activities and the knowledge that he was doing something useful and generous would rescue Albert from his dangerous melancholy. He was right; Albert was coming back to life among us; when he returned, Marcus wanted to bring him here and have him stay a while with the most revered leaders of the order; he was convinced that breathing the true and vital atmosphere of his excellent soul would make Albert recover his lucid genius. But an unfortunate event suddenly shook my son’s confidence. He had crossed paths with the impostor Cagliostro, whom the Rosicrucians in their imprudence had initiated into some of their mysteries. Albert, a long-standing Rosicrucian, had risen in rank and become the grand master of one of their assemblies. Then he saw at close range wha
t he had thus far only sensed. He touched all these sundry elements that make up the Masonic network; he recognized the error and faddishness, the vanity and deception, even the fraud that was creeping into these sanctuaries already invaded by the insanity and vices of the age. Cagliostro, with his vigilant monitoring of society’s little secrets that he presented as the revelations of a familiar spirit, with his specious eloquence that parodied great revolutionary inspirations, with his art of illusion that conjured up so-called ghosts; Cagliostro, scheming and greedy, horrified the noble disciple. The credulousness of polite society, the petty superstition of a great number of Masons, the shameful cupidity excited by the promises of the philosopher’s stone, and so many other miseries of the times in which we live, shed sinister light in his soul. Living a secluded, studious life, he hadn’t sufficiently fathomed the human race and wasn’t prepared to do battle with so many vile instincts. Unable to endure such wretchedness, he wanted the charlatans and the sorcerers unmasked and ignominiously driven off and away from the confines of our temples. He couldn’t tolerate that we should put up with the degrading assistance of Cagliostro because it was too late to get rid of him, because the man, once irritated, could be the ruin of many respectable men, whereas, flattered by their protection and ostensible trust, he could render many services to the cause without really knowing what it was all about. Albert waxed indignant and pronounced on our work the anathema of a steadfast, ardent soul; he predicted that we would fail for letting the alloy penetrate too far into the chain of gold. He left saying he was going to think about what we were striving to make him understand about the dreadful necessities of conspiratorial work and would return asking for baptism once his piercing doubts were dispelled. We didn’t know, alas, what gloomy thoughts were his when he was alone at Riesenburg. He told us nothing about them; perhaps he didn’t remember them once their bitterness had dissipated.