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Marquis de Villemer

<h4>IV</h4> About this time Caroline received a letter which touched her deeply, and which we will transcribe without giving the incorrect spelling and punctuation, that would indeed make it difficult to read. My dear Caroline,—permit your poor nurse always to address you this way,—I have just learned from your elder sister, who has done me the favor of writing me, that you have left her house to become the companion of a lady in Paris. I cannot describe the pain it gives me to think that a person like you, born to ease, as I know, should be obliged to be subject to others, and when I think that it is all of your own good heart, and to help Camille and her children, the tears come to my eyes. My dear young lady, I have only one thing to say, and that is, thanks to the generosity of your parents, that I am not among the most unfortunate. My husband is pretty well off, and carries on besides a small business, which has enabled us to buy a house and a bit of land. My son is a soldier, and your foster-sister has married quite well. So if you should be in want of a few hundred francs some day or other, we should be happy to lend them to you, for any length of time and without interest. By accepting this offer, you will honor and please persons who have always loved you; for my husband esteems you very much, though he knows you only through me, and he often says to me, "She ought to come to us; we could keep her as long as she liked, and as she is strong and a good walker, we could show her our mountains. If she would, she might, too, be the school-mistress of our village; this would not bring her in much, to be sure; but then her expenses would be small, and it would amount, perhaps, to the same as her salary in Paris, where living is so dear." I tell you this just exactly as Peyraque says it, and if your own heart will say the same, we shall have a neat little room all ready for you, and a somewhat wild country to show you. You will not feel afraid,—for when you were a very little thing even, you were always wanting to climb everywhere, so that your poor papa would call you his little squirrel. Remember then, if you are not comfortable where you are, dear Caroline of my heart, that in a little corner of what is to you an unknown country there are those who know you for the best soul in the wide world, and who pray for you every night and morning, asking the good God to bring you here to see us. JUSTINE LANION, PEYRAQUE by marriage. LANTRIAC, near LE PUY, HAUTE LOIRE. Caroline replied immediately, as follows:— "My good Justine, my dear friend,—I wept while reading your letter. They were tears of joy and gratitude. How happy I am to find your friendship as tender as it was on the day when we parted from one another, fourteen years ago! That day lingers in my memory as one of the saddest in my whole life. I had learned to know no mother but you, and losing you was being left motherless for the second time. My good nurse, you loved me so much that for me you had almost forgotten your good husband and your dear children! But they recalled you, your first duty was to them, and I saw from all your letters that they were making you happy. It was they who paid you my debt, for I owed you a great deal; and I have often thought that, if there is anything good or reasonable in me, it is because I have been treated lovingly, gently, and reasonably by her whom my childish eyes first learned to know. Now you want to offer me your savings, you dear good soul! That is good and motherly, like you, and on the part of your husband, who does not know me, it is great and noble. I thank you tenderly, my kind friends, but I need nothing. I am well provided for where I am, and I am as happy as I can be away from my own dear family. "I shall not give up the hope of going to see you, all the same. What you tell me about the neat little room and the fine wild country gives me a strong desire to know your village and your little household. I cannot say when, in the course of my life, I shall find a fortnight of liberty; but be assured that if I ever do find it, it shall be at the disposal of my darling nurse, whom I embrace with all my heart." While Caroline was giving herself up to this frank outburst of feeling, the Duke, Gaëtan d'Aléria, in a splendid Turkish morning costume, was conversing with his brother, the Marquis, from whom he was receiving a morning call in his elegant apartments on the Rue de la Paix. They had just been speaking of business matters, and a lively discussion had arisen between the two brothers. "No, my friend," said the Duke, in a firm tone, "I will be energetic this time: I refuse your signature; you shall not pay my debts!" "I will pay them," rejoined the Marquis, in a tone just as resolute. "It must be done; I ought to do it. I had some hesitation, I will not deny, before knowing the sum-total, and your pride need not suffer from the scruples I felt. I was afraid of becoming involved beyond my ability; but I know now that there will be enough left to maintain our mother comfortably. I have, therefore, determined to save the honor of the family, and you cannot stand in the way." "I do stand in the way: you do not owe me this sacrifice; we do not bear the same name." "We are the sons of the same mother, and I do not want her to die of grief and shame at seeing you insolvent." "I have no more desire for such a disgrace than my mother has. I will marry." "For money? In my mother's eyes, and in mine, as well as in yours, my brother, that would be worse still,—you know it perfectly well!" "Well, then, I will accept a place." "Worse, still worse!" "No, there is nothing worse for me than the pain of ruining you." "I shall not be ruined." "And may I not know the whole amount of my debts?" "It is of no use; enough that you have pledged your word that there is none unknown to the notary, who has charge of the settlement. I have only requested you to be so good as to look over some of these papers to prove their correctness, if that be possible. You have verified them; that is enough, the rest does not concern you." The Duke crumpled the papers angrily, and strode about the room, unable to find words for his mental distress. Then he lighted a cigar which he did not smoke, threw himself into an armchair and became very pale. The Marquis understood the suffering of his brother's pride, and perhaps of his conscience. "Calm yourself," he said. "I sympathize with your sorrow; but it is a good sign, and I trust to the future. Forget this service, which I am doing for my mother rather than for you; but do not forget that whatever is left is henceforth hers. Consider that we may yet have the happiness of keeping her with us a long while, and that she needs not necessarily suffer. Farewell. I will see you again in an hour, to arrange the last details." "Yes, yes, leave me alone," replied the Duke; "you see that I cannot say a word to you now." As soon as the Marquis was gone the Duke rang, gave orders that no one should be admitted, and began to pace the room as before, with desperate agitation. In this hour, he was passing through the supreme and inevitable crisis of his destiny. In none of his other disasters had he seen so much of his own guilt or felt so much real concern. Up to this time, in fact, he had squandered his own fortune with that hardy recklessness which arises from the sense of injuring no one but one's self. He had, so to speak, only made use of a right; then, half without his own knowledge, by encroaching upon his mother's capital, he had consumed it entirely, becoming gradually hardened to the disgrace of throwing upon his brother the duty of maintaining her from his own resources. Let us say all that we can in excuse of the Duke's conduct up to this period. He had been fearfully spoiled; in his mother's heart a very marked preference for him had existed; nature, too, had been partial to him; taller, stronger, more elegant, more brilliant, and apparently more active than his brother, and more demonstratively affectionate from childhood, he had seemed to every one the better endowed and the more amiable of the two. For a long while weakly and taciturn, the Marquis had shown no fondness for anything but study; and this taste, which in a plebeian would have seemed a great advantage, was considered eccentric in a man of rank. This tendency was therefore repressed rather than encouraged, and precisely on that account it became a passion,—an absorbing, pent-up passion, which developed in the young man's soul a quick, inward sensibility and an enthusiasm all the more ardent from having been restrained. The Marquis was far more affectionate than his brother, and yet passed for a man of cold nature, while the Duke, always kindly and communicative, without loving any one exclusively, had long passed for the very soul of warmth. The Duke inherited from his father the impulsive temperament which had proved so delusive, and during his childhood the wild freedom of his ways had given the Marchioness some anxiety. We have mentioned already that after the death of her second husband she had been very much carried away by grief, and that for more than a year she had shrunk from seeing her children. When this moral disease gave place to natural feeling, her first effort was to clasp in her arms the son of the husband whom she had loved. But the child, surprised and perhaps terrified by the impetuosity of caresses which he had almost forgotten, burst into tears without knowing why. It may have been the vague, instinctive reproach of a nature chilled by neglect. The Duke, older than he by three years, but more easily diverted, perceived nothing of all this. He returned his mother's kisses, and the poor woman imagined that he inherited her own warm heart, while the Marquis, she thought, had the traits of his paternal grandfather, a man of letters, but not quite sane. So the Duke was secretly preferred, though not more kindly treated, for the Marchioness had a deep and almost religious sense of justice; but he was petted more, since he alone, she believed, appreciated the value of a caress. Urbain (the Marquis) felt this partiality and suffered from it; but he never allowed himself to complain, and perhaps, already putting a just estimate upon his brother, he did not care to contend with him on such frivolous grounds. In the course of time, the Marchioness found out that she had been greatly mistaken, and that sentiments should be judged by deeds rather than by words; but the habit of spoiling her prodigal son had now become fixed, and to this she soon added a tender pity for the bewildered perversity which seemed to be leading the wilful youth to his own destruction. This perversity, however, did not take its rise in an evil heart. Vanity at first, and dissipation afterward, then the loss of energy, and at last the tyranny of vice,—that, briefly, is the history of this man, charming without real refinement, good without grandeur of soul, sceptical without atheism. At the age when we are describing him, there was in him an awful void in the place where his conscience should have been, and yet it was a conscience rather absent than dead. There would sometimes be returns of it, and struggles with it, fewer and briefer indeed than they had been in his youth, but perhaps on that account all the more desperate; and the one which was going on within him at this time was so cruel that he laid his hand repeatedly upon one of his splendid weapons, as if he were haunted by the spectre of suicide; but he thought of his mother, pushed away the pistols and locked them up, putting both hands to his head, in the fear that he was becoming insane. He had always looked upon money as nothing. His mother's noble disinterested theories on the subject had made the way of false reasoning easy to him. Nevertheless he understood that, in effecting his mother's ruin, he had overstepped his right. He was astounded; he had gone on up to the last, promising himself that he would stop before reaching his brother's fortune, and then he had seriously encroached upon it; but the truth is, that he had not done this knowingly; for, from motives of delicacy, the Marquis had kept no accounts with him in matters of detail, and would never have mentioned them at all, had it not been for the necessity of preserving by an appeal to his honor the little which was left. The Duke therefore did not feel himself guilty of deliberate selfishness, and had reproached Urbain warmly and sincerely for not having warned him sooner. He saw at last the abyss opened by his lawless and reckless conduct; he was bitterly ashamed of having injured his brother's prospects and of having no way to repair the harm, without infringing upon certain rigid principles established by his mother and his education. Yet this error was less serious than that of having wronged his own mother; but it did not appear so to the Duke. It had always seemed to him that whatever belonged to his mother was his own, while in dealing with his brother his pride kept up the distinction of meum and uum. Besides,—should it not be admitted?—while there was no wicked dislike between the two brothers so differently constituted, there was at least a want of confidence and sympathy. The life of the one was a continual protest against that of the other. Urbain had made a silent but powerful effort that the voice of nature within him might be also that of friendship. Gaëtan had made no such effort; trusting to the freedom from malice which characterized him, he had felt a liberty to rail at the austerity of the Marquis. They were then together most of the time, upon a footing of blame delicately restrained by the one, and of ridicule manifested in easy revolt by the other. "Very well," exclaimed the Duke, seeing the Marquis return. "It is an accomplished fact then? I see by your face that you have been signing." "Yes, brother," replied Urbain; "it is all arranged, and there is left for you besides an income of twelve thousand francs, which I did not allow them to use in the liquidation." "Left for me?" rejoined Gaëtan, looking him in the face. "No! you are deceived, there is nothing left for me; but, after having cleared me of debt, you are yourself making me an allowance." "Well, yes," replied the Marquis, "since you must also learn, sooner or later, that you are not at liberty to dispose of the principal." The Duke, who had not yet decided upon anything, wrung his hands with violence and fell back upon his mute opposition. The Marquis made an effort to conquer his habitual reserve, seated himself near Gaëtan, and taking in his own the clenched hands which seemed hesitating to extend themselves to him, "My friend," said he, "you are too haughty with me. Would you not have done for me what I am doing for you?" The Duke felt his pride breaking down. He burst into tears. "No!" said he, pressing his brother's hand feelingly, "I never should have known how to do it. I never could have done it, for my destiny is to injure others, and I shall never have the happiness of saving any one." "You will at least admit that it is a happiness," replied Urbain. "Then consider yourself doing me a kindness, and give me back your friendship which seems to be vanishing under this grievance." "Urbain," cried the Duke, "you speak of my friendship. Now would be the time to thank you with all manner of protestations, but I will not do it; I will never fall so low as to take refuge in hypocrisy. Do you know, brother, that I have never liked you very well?" "I know it, and I account for it by our differing tastes and dispositions; but has not the time now come to like each other better?" "Ah! it is an awful time for that,—the hour of your triumph and of my disgrace. Tell me that, but for my mother, you would have let me succumb. Yes, you must tell me that, and then I may forgive you for what you are doing." "Have I not already said so?" "Tell me so again! You hesitate? It is then a question of the family honor?" "Yes, it is that precisely, the family honor is in question." "And you do not expect me to love you to-day more than on any other day?" "I know," rejoined the Marquis, sadly, "that personally I am not made to be loved." The Duke felt himself completely conquered; he threw himself into his brother's arms. "Come!" he cried, "forgive me. You are a better man than I. I respect you, admire you, I almost worship you; I know, I feel that you are my best friend. My God! what is there that I can do for you? Do you love any woman? Shall I kill her husband? Do you want me to go to China and find some precious manuscript, in some pagoda, risking the cangue, and other pleasant things?" "You think of nothing but a discharge of obligations, Gaëtan. If you would only love me a little, I should be already paid a hundred times over." "Well, then, I do love you with all my heart," replied the Duke, embracing him violently; "and you see I am weeping like a child. Look here! Give me a little esteem in return; I will reform. I am still young. Why, the deuce take it all, at thirty-six one can't have been ruined altogether! A fellow is only a little used up. I will turn over a new leaf,—all the more because that is needed in my case. Well, then, so much the better! I will renew my youth, my health. I will go and pass the summer with you and my mother in the country; I will tell you stories; I will make you laugh again. Come! help me lay my plans, support me, lift me up, console me; for, after all, I don't know where I am, and I feel very unhappy." The Marquis had already noticed, without appearing to do so, the disappearance of the weapons which had been in sight an hour before. He had also read in his brother's face the fearful crisis through which he had passed. He knew furthermore that Gaëtan's moral courage would only bear a certain amount of strain. "Dress yourself now," he said, "and come to breakfast with me. We will chat; we will build air-castles. Who knows but I may convince you that, in certain cases, we begin to be rich on the very day we become poor?" <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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