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Marquis de Villemer

<h4>XIV</h4> Being informed by his brother of all these arrangements, the Marquis submitted with gratitude. He was extremely weak, and recovering apparently from a dangerous crisis, which had not wholly exhausted him, but had broken him down morally almost as much as a long illness would have done. He could struggle against his love no longer; and having ceased to feel the dangerous storms of passion, thanks to this prostration, he gave himself up to the pleasure of being tenderly cared for. The Duke would not permit him to question the future. "You cannot come to any decision in your present state," Gaëtan would say to his brother. "You have n't the free use of your will: without health there can be no moral clear-sightedness. Let us cure you, and then you will see plainly that, with your health, you have also regained the strength necessary to resist your love, or to deal with the scruples it causes. In the mean time I don't see what you can have on your conscience, for Mlle de Saint-Geneix suspects nothing, and after all is only doing what a sister would do in her place." This compromise quieted all the invalid's uneasiness. He arose and went to see his mother a few moments, making her believe that a slight indisposition was responsible for the change in his countenance. He asked to be excused from returning till the next day, and so for twenty-four hours, that is, until after the departure of Madame d'Arglade, he could give himself up to almost absolute repose. Throughout the day there subsisted between the Duke and Caroline an air of mutual intelligence and an exchange of glances which had for their subject only the Marquis and his health, but which completely deluded Léonie. She went away perfectly sure of her facts, but without saying anything to the Marchioness which could lead that old lady to suppose her possessed of any penetration whatever. At the close of the week M. de Villemer was much better. Every symptom of aneurism had passed away, and under rational treatment he even regained a certain glow of health, as well as a mental serenity, to which he had long been a stranger. No one for ten years had taken care of him with the assiduity, the devotedness, the evenness of temper, the unheard-of charm, with which Mlle de Saint-Geneix contrived to surround him: we might even say he had never met with attentions at once so sensible and so tender, for his mother, aside from her lack of active physical strength, had shown herself excitable and over-anxious in the care she had lavished on him when his life had before been threatened. She had, indeed, at this time some suspicion of a relapse, when she saw her son more frequently with her, and consequently less devoted to his work; but when this idea occurred the crisis had already passed: the good understanding between the Duke and Caroline as to the need of tranquillity, the absolute ignorance of the servants, few in numbers and therefore very busy, and the serenity of the Marquis himself, all tended to reassure her; and at the close of a fortnight she even observed that her son was regaining an air of youth and health at which she could but rejoice. The condition of the Marquis had been carefully concealed from Madame d'Arglade. The Duke would in no wise give up the great marriage projected for his brother. He thought Léonie was a foolish chatterbox, and did not care to have it understood in society that his brother's health, at any moment, might give serious cause for alarm. The Duke had thoroughly warned Caroline on this point. He was playing with her, in the interests of his brother as he understood them, the double game of preparing her as far as possible, and little by little, for the exercise of an unlimited devotion; and to this end, he thought best to remind her, now and then, that the future well-being of the family rested entirely on the famous marriage. Caroline, then, had no chance to forget this; and relying on the integrity of the two brothers, on her own ideas of duty and the unselfishness of her heart, she walked resolutely toward an abyss which might have engulfed her. And thus the Duke, naturally kind, and animated by the best intentions toward his brother, was coolly working out the misery of a poor girl whose personal merit made her worthy of the highest places of happiness and consideration. Fortunately for Mlle de Saint-Geneix, although the conscience of the Marquis was somewhat stupefied, it was not wholly asleep. Besides, his passion was made up of enthusiasm and sincere affection. He insisted that the Duke should be with them almost always, and in his abrupt sincerity he came near releasing Caroline from her attendance altogether, promising not to begin work again without her permission. The moment came even when he did give her this promise to induce her to cease her watch in the library; he had found her there more than once, a guardian, gently and gayly "savage," over the books and portfolios, placed, she said, under interdict till further orders; but the Duke counteracted the effect of this "imprudence" on his brother's part, by telling Caroline, in a very low voice, that she must not trust a promise, given in good faith to be sure, but which Urbain would not have it in his power to keep. "You don't know how absent-minded he is," said the Duke; "when an idea takes hold of him it masters him, and makes him forget all his promises. I have found him myself, more than twenty times, searching over these bookshelves while my back was turned, and when I called out, 'Here, here, you marauder!' he seemed startled out of a revery and looked at me with an air of great surprise." So Caroline did not relax her watchfulness. The library was much farther from her room than from that of the Marquis; but yet so near the centre of the house that the constant presence of the young lady reader in this room devoted to study was not likely to strike the servants as anything remarkable. They saw her there often, sometimes alone, sometimes with the Duke or the Marquis, more frequently with both, although the Duke had a thousand pretexts for leaving her alone with his brother; but even then the doors always open, the book often in Caroline's hands, the evident interest with which she was reading, and lastly, more than all this, the real truth of the situation,—truth, which has more power than the best-planned deception,—removed every pretext and even every desire for malicious comment. In this state of things Caroline was really happy, and often recurred to it in after years as the most delightful phase of her life. She had suffered from Urbain's coldness, but now she found him showing an unhoped-for kindness and a disposition to trust her again. As soon as all fears for his health were dispelled, a bond was established between them, which, for Caroline, had not a single doubt or apprehension. The Marquis enjoyed her reading exceedingly, and before long he even consented to let her help him with his work. She conducted investigations for him and took notes, which she classified in the very spirit he desired,—a spirit she seemed to divine wonderfully. In short, she rendered his studies so pleasant, and relieved him so cleverly from the dry and disagreeable portions, that he could once more betake himself to writing without pain or fatigue. The Marquis certainly needed a secretary far more than his mother did; but he had never been able to endure this interposition between himself and the objects of his researches. He saw very soon, however, that Caroline never led him off into ideas foreign to his own, but kept him from straying away himself into useless speculations and reveries. She had a remarkable clearness of judgment, joined with a faculty rarely possessed by women, namely, that of order in the sequence of thought. She could remain absorbed in any pursuit a long while, without fatigue or faltering. The Marquis made a discovery,—one that was destined to direct his future. He found himself in presence of a superior mind, not creative, indeed, but analytic in the highest degree,—just the organization he needed to give balance and scope to his own intellect. Let us say, once for all, that M. de Villemer was a man of very sound understanding; but he had not found as yet, and was still awaiting, the crisis of its development. Hence the slow and painful progress of his work. He thought and wrote rapidly; but his conscientiousness, as a philosopher and moralist, was always putting fresh obstacles in the way of his enthusiasm as an historian. He was the victim of his own scruples, like certain devotees, sincere but morbid, who always imagine they have failed to tell their confessor the whole truth. He wanted to confess to the human race the truth about social science; and did not sufficiently admit that this science of truths and facts is, largely, a relative one, determined by the age in which one lives. He could not decide on his course. He strove to discover the meaning of facts long buried among the arcana of the past, and after he had, with great labor, caught a few traces of these, he was surprised to find them often contradictory, and in alarm would doubt his own discernment or his own impartiality, would suspend judgment, laying aside his work, and for weeks and months would be the prey of terrible uncertainties and misgivings. Caroline, without knowing his book, which was still only half written, and which he concealed with a morbid timidity, soon divined the cause of his mental uneasiness from his conversation, and especially his remarks while she was reading aloud. She volunteered a few off-hand reflections of extreme simplicity, but so plainly just and right as to be unanswerable. She was not perplexed by a little blot on a grand life or a tiny glimmer of reason in an age of delirium. She thought the past must be viewed just as we look at paintings, from the distance required by the eye of each in order to take in the whole; and that, as the great masters have done in composing their pictures, we must learn to sacrifice the petty details, which sometimes really destroy the harmony of nature, and even her logic. She called attention to the fact that we notice on a landscape, at every step, strange effects of light and shade, and the multitude will say, "How could a painter render that?" and the painter would reply, "By not rendering it at all." She admitted that the historian is fettered more than the artist to accuracy in matters of fact, but she denied that there could be progress on any different principles in either case. The past and even the present of individual or collective life, according to her, take color and meaning only from their general tenor and results. She ventured on these suggestions, cautiously putting them in the form of questions; without being positive, and as if willing to suppress them in case they were not approved; but M. de Villemer was struck with them, because he felt she had given expression to a certainty, an inward faith, and that if she consented to keep silence, she would still remain none the less convinced. He struggled a little, nevertheless, laying before her a number of facts which had delayed and troubled him. She passed judgment on them in one word, with the strong, good sense of a fresh mind and a pure heart, and he soon exclaimed with a glance at the Duke, "She finds the truth because she has it within her, and that is the first condition of clear insight. Never will the troubled conscience, never will the perverted mind, comprehend history." "Perhaps," said she, "that is why history should not be too much made up from memoirs, for these are nearly always the work of prejudice or passions of the moment. It is the fashion now to dig these out with great care, bringing forward many trifling facts not generally known, and which do not deserve to be known." "Yes, you are right," replied the Marquis; "if the historian, instead of standing firm in his belief and worship of lofty things, lets himself be misled and distracted by trivial ones, truth loses all that reality usurps." If we relate these bits of conversation, perhaps a little out of the usual color of a romance, it is because they are necessary to explain the seriousness and apparent calmness of the relations that were growing up between the scholar and the humble lady-reader in the castle of Séval, in spite of the pains the Duke was taking to leave them as much as possible to the tender influences of youth and love. The Marquis felt that he belonged to Caroline, not only through his enthusiasm, his dreams, his need of throwing a kind of ideal about grace and beauty, but through his reason, his judgment, and through his present certainty that he had met that ideal. Henceforth Caroline was safe; she commanded respect by the weight of her character, and the Marquis stood in no further fear of losing control of his own impulses. The Duke was at first astonished by this unlooked-for result of their intimacy. His brother was cured, he was happy, he seemed to have conquered love by the very power of love itself; but the Duke was intelligent and he understood. He was even seized himself with a serious deference for Caroline. He took an interest in her reading, and soon, instead of falling asleep under the first few pages, he wanted to read in his turn and give them his impressions. He had no convictions, but, in the artist spirit, allowed himself to be moved and borne along by those of others. He had read but little on serious subjects, in the course of his life, but he had admirably retained all kinds of dates and proper names. So that he had in his fine memory, as one might say, a sort of network with large meshes to which the loose lines of his brother's studies could be tied. That is, he was a stranger to nothing except the logical and profound meanings of historical events. He did not lack prejudices; but excellence of style had a power over him which put them to silence, and before an eloquent page, whether of Bossuet or Rousseau, he felt the same enthusiasm. Thus he also found himself pleasantly initiated into the pursuits of the Marquis and the society of Mlle de Saint-Geneix. What was really very good in him is that, from the day he first became aware of his brother's affection for Caroline, she ceased to be a woman in his eyes. He had nevertheless felt some emotion for several days in her presence, and the truth had come upon him unexpectedly in an hour of feverish spite. From day to day he abjured every evil thought, and, touched by seeing that the Marquis, after a terrible attack of jealousy, had restored to him his entire confidence, he knew, for the first time in his life, what it was to feel a true and worthy friendship for a pretty woman. In the month of July Caroline wrote to her sister thus:— "Be easy about me, dear Camille, it is some time since I ceased to watch the invalid, for the invalid has never before been so well; but I have always kept up the practice of rising at day-break in the summer season, and every morning I have several hours I can devote to the work he is kindly permitting me to share with him. Just now he is himself sleeping a good sound sleep, for he retires at ten o'clock, and I am allowed here to do the same, and I often have precious intervals of freedom even in the daytime. Our proximity to the baths of Évaux and the road to Vichy brings us visitors at the very hours when in Paris the Marchioness used to shut herself up; she says this disturbs and wearies her, and yet, all the while, she is delighted! The great correspondence suffers under it, but even the correspondence itself has diminished, since the marriage of the Marquis was projected. This scheme so absorbs Madame de Villemer, that she cannot help confiding it or hinting something about it to all her old friends; after which she will reflect seriously, admitting the imprudence of saying much about it, and that she ought not to rely on the discretion of so many people; and then we throw into the fire the letters she has just dictated. This it is that leads her to say so often: 'Bah! let us stop writing, I would rather say nothing at all than not to mention things that interest me.' "When she has visitors she makes a sign that I may go and join the Marquis, for she knows now that I am taking notes for him. Since his illness is over, I thought there ought to be no mystery made about so simple a thing, and she is quite willing to have me relieve her son from any wearisome portions of his work. She is very curious to know what this book so carefully concealed can possibly be; but there is no danger, of my betraying anything, for I don't know a single word in it. I only know that just now we are deep in the history of France, and more especially in the age of Richelieu; but what I need not mention to any one here is, that I anticipate a great divergence in opinion between the son and the mother on a host of grave matters. "Do not blame me for having taken on myself a double task, and for having gained, as you put it, two masters in the place of one. With the Marchioness the task is sacred, and I have an affectionate pleasure in it; with her son the task is agreeable, and I put into it that kind of veneration of which I have often told you. I enjoy the idea of having contributed to his recovery, of having managed to take care of him without making him impatient, of having gently persuaded him to live a little more as people ought to live in order to be well. I have even taken advantage of his passion for study by telling him that his genius will feel the effects of disease, and that I have no faith in the intellectual clearness of fever. You have no idea how good he has been to me, how patiently he has taken rebuke, and how he has even let himself be scolded by this young-lady sister of yours; how he has thanked me for my interest in him, and submitted to all my prescriptions. It has gone so far that at table, even, he consults me with his eyes as to what he shall eat, and when we go out for a walk he has no more mind of his own than a child as to the little journey which the Duke and I insist on making him take. He has a charming disposition, and every day I discover some new trait in his character. I did think he was a little whimsical and decidedly obstinate; but, poor fellow! it was the crisis that was threatening his life. He has, on the contrary, a gentleness and evenness of temper which is beyond everything; and the charm of familiar intercourse with him resembles nothing so much as the beauty, of the waters flowing through our valley, always limpid, always plentiful, borne along in a strong and even current, never ruffled or capricious. And to follow out this comparison, I might say that his mind has also flowery banks and oases of verdure where one can pause and dream delightfully, for he is full of poetry; and I always wonder how he has ever subjected the warmth of his imagination to the rigid demands of history. "What is more, he pretends that all this is a discovery of mine, and that he is just beginning to perceive it himself. The other day we were looking at the beautiful pastures full of sheep and goats in a ravine crossing that of the Char. At the farther end of this sharp cut, there is a casing of rugged rocks, and some of their notches rise so far above the plateau that, in comparison with the lower level, it is really a mountain; and these beautiful rocks of lilac-gray form a crest, sufficiently imposing to conceal the flat country that lies behind, so you cannot see from here the upper part of the plateau, and you might imagine yourself in some nook of Switzerland. At least, this is what M. de Villemer tells me, to console me for the way in which the Marchioness scouts my admiration. 'Don't worry about that,' said he, 'and don't think it necessary to have seen many sublime things in order to have the conception and the sensation of sublimity. There is grandeur everywhere for those who carry this faculty within themselves; it is not an illusion which they cherish either; it is a revelation of what really exists in nature in a manner more or less pronounced. For dull senses, there must be coarse signs of the power and dimensions of things. This is why many people who go to Scotland, looking for the pictures described by Walter Scott, cannot find them, and pretend that the poet has overpraised his country. His pictures are there, nevertheless, I am very sure, and if you should go there, you would find them at once.' "I confessed to him that real immensity tempted me greatly; that I often saw, in dreams, inaccessible mountains and giddy abysses; that, before an engraving representing the furious waterfalls in Sweden or the bergs that stray from Arctic seas, I have been carried away with wild imaginations of independence, and that there is no tale of distant explorations with enough of suffering and danger in it to take away my regret at not having shared them. "'And yet,' said he, 'before a charming little landscape like this you seemed happy and really satisfied a moment ago. Do you then really feel more in need of emotions and surprises than of tenderness and safety? See how beautiful it is, this stillness! How this hour of reflected lights, barred across with lengthening shadows, this water, in spray which seems caressing the sides of the rock, this motionless leafage looking as if it were silently drinking in the gold of the last sunbeams, how truly indeed is all this serene and thoughtful solemnity the expression of the beautiful and good in nature! I never used to know all this myself. It has not impressed me strongly until lately. I have always been living in the midst of dust and death, or among abstractions. I used, indeed, to dream over the pictures of history, the phantasmagoria of the past. I have sometimes seen the fleet of Cleopatra sailing to the verge of the horizon; in the silence of the night I have thought I heard the warlike trumpets of Roncesvalles; but it was the dominion of a dream, and the reality did not speak to me. But when I saw you gazing at the horizon without saying a word, with an air of content that was like nothing else in the world, I asked myself what could be the secret of your joy; and, if I must tell you all, your selfish patient was a little jealous of everything that charmed you. He set himself perturbedly to work at gazing too, when he settled the point at once; for he felt that he loved what you loved.' "You understand perfectly, my dear little sister, that in talking to me thus the Marquis told an audacious falsehood, for one can but see from all his remarks, and his manner of making them, that he has the true artist enthusiasm for nature, as well as for all else that is lovely; but he is so grateful to me, and so full of honest kindliness, that he misrepresents things in perfect good faith, and imagines himself indebted to me for something new in his intellectual life." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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