by George Sand
“You’re wrong, daughter. Albert gave us the right to dispose of his fate and yours, and you yourself did the same when you opened your heart to us and confessed your love for another man.”
“I confessed nothing to you,” replied Consuelo, “and I deny the consent that you are trying to wring out of me.”
“Bring in the sibyl,” said the orator to Marcus.
A tall woman, all draped in white, her face hidden beneath a veil, came in and sat down in the center of the semicircle formed by the judges. Consuelo easily recognized Wanda because of her nervous tremor.
“Speak, priestess of the truth,” said the orator. “Speak, interpreter and revealer of the most intimate secrets, the most subtle stirrings of the heart. Is this woman the wife of Albert von Rudolstadt?”
“She is his faithful, worthy wife,” replied Wanda, “but you must forthwith pronounce her divorce. You see who brings her here; you see that the one among our children whose hand she is holding is the man she loves and to whom she must belong, in virtue of the inalienable right of love in marriage.”
Consuelo turned in surprise toward Liverani and looked at her hand, numb and seemingly dead in his. She looked as though she were in the power of some dream and struggling to wake up. At last she briskly loosed herself from that grasp, and looking at the hollow of her hand, she saw the imprint of her mother’s cross.
“So this is the man I’ve loved!” she said, with the melancholy smile of holy ingenuousness. “That is indeed so. I’ve loved him tenderly, madly, but it was a dream! I thought Albert was no more, and you told me that this man was worthy of my respect and confidence. Then I saw Albert again. I thought I understood from what he said that he no longer wished to be my husband, and I couldn’t help loving this stranger whose missives and attentions intoxicated me with a mad desire. But I was told that Albert still loved me, that he was giving me up out of virtue and generosity. And why then was Albert convinced that my sense of devotion would be less than his? What crime have I committed thus far to be thought capable of shattering his soul by accepting a selfish happiness? No, I’ll never sully myself with such a crime. If Albert deems me unworthy of him for having loved someone else in my heart; if he has a scruple about destroying that love and doesn’t want to inspire a greater love in me, I’ll submit to his decree; I’ll accept this sentence of divorce against which my heart and conscience rebel, but I’ll be neither wife nor lover to another man. Farewell, Liverani, or whoever you may be, to whom I entrusted my mother’s cross in a day of abandon that leaves me neither shame nor remorse. Give me back this token so that there is nothing more between us than a memory of mutual respect and the sense of a duty fulfilled without bitterness or effort.”
“We don’t recognize such morals, you know,” said the sibyl. “We don’t accept such sacrifices. We want to inaugurate and sanctify love, lost and profaned in the world, the free choice of the heart, the holy and voluntary union of two beings equally in love. Over our children we have the right to mend consciences, forgive faults, match up affinities, break the shackles of the old society. You therefore don’t have the right to sacrifice yourself, you cannot stifle the love in your breast and deny the truth of your confession without our having authorized you to do so.”
“Why are you talking to me about liberty, about love and happiness?” exclaimed Consuelo, taking a step toward the judges in an explosion of enthusiasm, her physiognomy radiantly sublime. “Haven’t you just made me undergo ordeals that must leave the brow eternally wan and the soul invincibly austere? What kind of callous, cowardly person do you take me for if you think I’m still capable of dreaming of personal pleasures and pursuing them after what I’ve seen, after what I’ve understood, after what I now know about people’s lives and my duties in this world? No, no! No more love, no more marriage, no more liberty, no more happiness, glory, or art, nothing more for me if I have to make the least of my peers suffer! And hasn’t it been proven that every joy in today’s world is bought at the price of some one else’s? Isn’t there something better to do than to seek one’s own gratification? Isn’t that the way Albert thinks, and don’t I have the right to think as he does? Doesn’t he hope to find, even in the sacrifice of himself, the strength to work for humanity with more ardor and intelligence than ever? Let me be as great as Albert. Let me flee the lying, criminal illusion of happiness. Give me work, weariness, pain, and enthusiasm! I no longer understand joy except in suffering; I yearn for martyrdom ever since you’ve imprudently shown me the trophies of torture. Oh, shame on those who have understood their duty and still worry about enjoying their share of happiness and repose on earth! I’m talking about us, about me! Oh, Liverani, if you’re in love with me after having undergone the ordeals that bring me here, you’re mad, you’re nothing but a child unworthy of being called a man, surely unworthy that I should sacrifice to you Albert’s heroic affection. And you, Albert, if you’re here, if you can hear me, you ought not refuse at least to call me your sister, to offer me your hand and help me walk the arduous path that leads you to God.”
Consuelo’s enthusiasm was at its peak; words no longer sufficed to express it. A sort of vertigo came over her and, like the priestesses of Apollo who in the paroxysm of their divine crises would abandon themselves to cries and strange frenzies, she was swept away to the point of manifesting her overwhelming emotion in the way most natural to her. She began to sing in a resounding voice, enraptured at least as much as she had been singing this same aria in Venice, in public for the first time in her life, and in the presence of Marcello and Porpora:
I cieli immensi narrano
Del grande Iddio la gloria!
This hymn came to her lips because it may be the most naïve and striking expression that music has ever given to religious enthusiasm. But Consuelo was not composed enough to contain and control her voice. After these two verses her intonation became a sob in her throat, she dissolved in tears and fell to her knees.
The Invisibles, galvanized by her fervor, had stood up all at once as though to hear on their feet, in the posture of respect, the song of the inspired one. But seeing her succumb to her emotion, they all came down from their box and gathered round while Wanda seized Consuelo, threw her into Liverani’s arms and exclaimed, “Now then! Take a look at him, and know that God has granted you to reconcile love and virtue, happiness and duty.”
Consuelo, deaf for an instant, and as though carried off to another world, finally looked at Liverani, whose mask has just been ripped off by Marcus. She uttered a piercing cry and nearly expired on his breast as she recognized Albert. Albert and Liverani were the same man.
Chapter XLI
At that moment the doors of the temple swung open with a metallic click, and the Invisibles marched in two by two. The magical voice of the glass harmonica, this instrument of recent invention,1 whose penetrating vibration was a marvel unknown to Consuelo’s senses, issued forth, apparently wafting down from the cupola whose windows stood ajar to moonbeams and the night’s refreshing breezes. Flower petals gently rained down on the happy couple at the center of this solemn procession. Standing beside a golden tripod, Wanda was making bright flames and clouds of incense billow forth with her right hand, and in her left she held the two ends of a chain of symbolic flowers and leaves that she had thrown around the lovers. The leaders of the Invisibles, their faces draped with their long red veils and their brows wreathed with the same leaves of oak and acacia hallowed by their rites, were on their feet, their arms stretched out as though to welcome the brethren who bowed as they passed by. These leaders had the majesty of ancient Druids, but their hands which had never known the stain of blood were open only to bestow blessings, and in the hearts of the disciples religious respect took the place of the fanatic terror of past religions. As the initiates stepped up to the venerable tribunal, they removed their masks to greet barefaced these august characters whose identities remained secret, never having made themselves known to the initiates except through acts of me
rciful justice, fatherly love, and great wisdom. Faithful to the religion of their oaths, without regret or mistrust, the disciples did not attempt to read beneath these impenetrable veils with a curious glance. No doubt these high priests of a new religion were known to their disciples without the latter realizing it. They mingled with them in society and in the very midst of their assemblies; they were the best friends, the most intimate confidants of most of them, perhaps of each one in particular. Yet when they came together in worship, the person of the priest was always veiled, like the oracle in Antiquity.
Oh happy childhood of naïve belief, oh quasi fabulous dawn of sacred conspiracies, that the night of mystery has always enveloped in poetic uncertainties! Even though scarcely a hundred years separate us from these Invisibles, they pose a problem for the historian, but thirty years later Illuminism revived these forms unknown to the crowd and, drawing on the inventive genius of its leaders as well as the tradition of secret societies in mystical Germany, it terrified the world with the most tremendous, the most clever of political and religious conspiracies. For an instant it shook all the dynasties on their thrones, then succumbed in its turn, while passing on to the French Revolution something like an electric current of sublime enthusiasm, ardent faith, and terrible fanaticism. Half a century before these fateful days, and while the gallant monarchy of Louis XV, the philosophical despotism of Frederick II, the skeptical, mocking sovereignty of Voltaire, the ambitious diplomacy of Maria Theresa and the heretical tolerance of Ganganelli seemed to announce that for a long time to come the world would know nothing but decrepitude, antagonism, chaos, and dissolution, the French Revolution was brewing in the dark and germinating underground. It was looming in the minds of fanatic believers as a dream of universal revolution; and while debauchery, hypocrisy, or unbelief officially reigned over the world, a sublime faith, a magnificent revelation of things to come, plans for organization as profound and perhaps more sophisticated than our present-day Fourierism and Saint-Simonism, were already bringing forth in a few groups of exceptional men the ideal conception of a future society, diametrically opposed to the one that covers and still conceals their action in history.
This contrast is one of the most striking features of the eighteenth century, brimming over with so many ideas and intellectual labor of all sorts that the philosophical historians of our times have not yet been able to produce any clear and useful synthesis of it. There is such a mass of contradictory documents and misunderstood facts, at first impossible to grasp, springs roiled up by the turbulent times and requiring patient filtering in order to find the solid bottom. Many energetic laborers have remained obscure, carrying their secret missions to the grave. So many dazzling glories absorbed their contemporaries’ attention, and still today so many brilliant works monopolize the critics’ look back in time! But bit by bit light will emerge from this chaos; and if our century manages to sum itself up, it will also sum up the life of its father, the eighteenth century, this enormous logogriph, this brilliant nebula, where so much cowardliness contrasts with such grandeur, so much knowledge with such ignorance, so much barbarism with such civilization, so much enlightenment with such errors, so much seriousness with such intoxication, so much unbelief with such faith, so much learned pedantry with such frivolous mockery, so much superstition with such proud reason; this century, which saw the reigns of Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Pompadour, Peter the Great, Catherine II, Maria Theresa and that Dubarry woman, Voltaire and Swedenborg, Kant and Mesmer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Cardinal Dubois, Schroepfer and Diderot, Fénelon and Law, Zinzendorf and Leibniz, Frederick II and Robespierre, Louis XIV and Philippe-Egalité, Marie-Antoinette and Charlotte Corday, Weishaupt, Babeuf and Napoleon. . . . A terrifying laboratory where so many heterogeneous forms were thrown into the crucible that their monstrous ebullition belched forth a torrent of smoke through which we are still marching, enveloped in darkness and confusion.
Consuelo no more than Albert, the leaders of the Invisibles no more than their disciples cast a very lucid gaze on this century into which they yearned to throw themselves in the enthusiastic hope of regenerating it at one fell swoop. They believed themselves on the eve of an evangelical republic, like the disciples of Jesus eagerly awaiting the kingdom of God on earth, like the Bohemian Taborites, who thought paradise close at hand, like the French Convention that years later felt it would soon win over the entire planet. Yet, without such mad confidence, where would the great sacrifices be; without great madness, where the great achievements? Without the utopia of the divine dreamer Jesus, where would the notion of human brotherhood be? Without the contagious visions of the ecstatic Joan of Arc, would we still be French? Without the noble chimeras of the eighteenth century, would we have conquered the rudiments of equality? This mysterious revolution—every sect in times past having dreamed that it would happen in their day, and the mystical conspirators of the last century having vaguely predicted that it would occur fifty years earlier, as a time of political and religious renovation—neither Voltaire nor the calm philosophical minds of his time nor Frederick II himself, relying on cold, logical force to realize his ambitions, foresaw its sudden storms, its abrupt miscarriage. The most ardent as well as the most sage were far from reading clearly in the future. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have repudiated his works, had the Mountain, with the guillotine looming over it, appeared to him in a dream. Albert von Rudolstadt would all of a sudden have reverted to the cataleptic madman of Schreckenstein, had these bloody glories, followed by Napoleon’s despotism, the restoration of the Old Regime, and then the reign of the most vile material interests been revealed to him, he who believed that he was laboring to overturn, now and forever, scaffolds and prisons, barracks and convents, brokerage houses and citadels!
So they dreamed, these noble children, and they acted on their dreams with all the strength of their souls. They were neither more nor less of their century than the clever politicians and sage philosophers, their contemporaries. They saw neither more nor less than these the absolute truth of the future, that great Unknown that we all invest with the attributes of our own power, who deceives every one of us, at the same time validates us when she appears to our sons, clad in her imperial gown of many colors of which we have each prepared a piece. Fortunately, every new century sees her as more majestic, given that each one produces more people laboring for her triumph. As for those who wish to shred her royal purple and dress her in eternal mourning, they can do nothing against her, they do not understand her. Slaves to present-day reality, they do not know that the Immortal One has no age and that those who do not dream of her as she may be tomorrow do not see her at all as she must be today.
Albert, in that moment of supreme happiness when Consuelo’s eyes, full of delight, at long last fastened on his; Albert, rejuvenated by the benefits of health and handsome in the intoxication of bliss, felt imbued with that almighty faith that would move mountains if in such moments there were other mountains to move than the weight of our minds reeling with joy. Consuelo was finally before him, like Galatea, that creation of the artist beloved by the gods, waking at one and the same time to love and life. Wordless and rapt in meditation, her physiognomy haloed with celestial light, she was totally, incontestably beautiful for the first time in her life, because she was indeed totally and truly alive for the first time. A sublime serenity shone on her brow, and her large eyes were brimming with that deep pleasure of the soul of which sensual delight is but a feeble reflection. She was so beautiful only because she had no idea what was going on in her heart and on her face. Albert alone existed for her; rather, she now existed only in him, and to her he alone seemed worthy of immense respect and boundless admiration. Albert too was transformed, as if he were invested with supernatural radiance as he contemplated her. Deep in his eyes she could see all the solemn grandeur of the noble pains he had endured, but this past bitterness had left no trace of physical suffering on his features. He had the placid brow of a resurrected martyr who sees th
e earth red with his blood falling away beneath his feet and the heaven of infinite rewards opening overhead. Never had an inspired artist created a nobler face of a hero or saint in the finest days of ancient or Christian art.
All of the Invisibles, awestruck in their turn, gathered round, then stopped and for a few instants surrendered to the noble pleasure of contemplating this beautiful couple, so pure in the presence of God, so chastely happy in the presence of man. Then twenty generous male voices sang in chorus to a broad rhythm of ancient simplicity, “Hymen o Hymenaee!” The music was by Porpora, to whom the words had been sent along with the request that he compose an epithalamium for an illustrious wedding, and he had been worthily compensated without ever knowing by whom. Just as Mozart, on the eve of his death, was one day to find his most sublime inspiration for a mysteriously commissioned Requiem, old Porpora had rediscovered all the genius of his youth to write a wedding song whose poetic mystery had reawakened his imagination. From the first measures Consuelo recognized the style of her beloved teacher and, struggling to pull away from her lover’s gaze, she turned toward the coryphaei to find her adoptive father, but he was there only in spirit. Among those who had become the worthy interpreters of his piece Consuelo recognized several friends, Frederick von Trenck, Porporino, Benda the Younger, Count Golowkin, Schubart, the Chevalier d’Eon, whom she had met in Berlin and whose true sex remained unknown to her as well as to all of Europe; the Count de Saint-Germain, Chancellor Cocceï, Barberini’s husband, Nicolaï the bookseller, Gottlieb, whose beautiful voice dominated all the others, and finally Marcus, whom Wanda vigorously pointed out. An instinctual affinity had already led Consuelo to recognize him as the guide who had introduced her and acted as her godfather or putative father. All of the Invisibles had parted their long, gloomy black robes and thrown them over their shoulders. Simple, elegant suits of white and crimson with gold chains bearing the order’s insignia gave the group a festive look. Their masks were wrapped around their wrists, all ready to be slipped back on at the slightest signal from the watchman posted as a sentry on the dome.