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Title: The Village Rector

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: September, 1999  [Etext #1899]
Posting Date: March 5, 2010
Last Updated: November 24, 2016

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





THE VILLAGE RECTOR


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley




                             DEDICATION

  To Helene.

  The tiniest boat is not launched upon the sea without the
  protection of some living emblem or revered name, placed upon it
  by the mariners. In accordance with this time-honored custom,
  Madame, I pray you to be the protectress of this book now launched
  upon our literary ocean; and may the Imperial name which the
  Church has canonized and your devotion has doubly sanctified for
  me guard it from perils.

                                                       De Balzac.





THE VILLAGE RECTOR





I. THE SAUVIATS

In the lower town of Limoges, at the corner of the rue de la
Vieille-Poste and the rue de la Cite might have been seen, a generation
ago, one of those shops which were scarcely changed from the period of
the middle-ages. Large tiles seamed with a thousand cracks lay on the
soil itself, which was damp in places, and would have tripped up those
who failed to observe the hollows and ridges of this singular flooring.
The dusty walls exhibited a curious mosaic of wood and brick, stones and
iron, welded together with a solidity due to time, possibly to chance.
For more than a hundred years the ceiling, formed of colossal beams,
bent beneath the weight of the upper stories, though it had never given
way under them. Built _en colombage_, that is to say, with a wooden
frontage, the whole facade was covered with slates, so put on as to
form geometrical figures,--thus preserving a naive image of the burgher
habitations of the olden time.

None of the windows, cased in wood and formerly adorned with carvings,
now destroyed by the action of the weather, had continued plumb; some
bobbed forward, others tipped backward, while a few seemed disposed to
fall apart; all had a compost of earth, brought from heaven knows where,
in the nooks and crannies hollowed by the rain, in which the spring-tide
brought forth fragile flowers, timid creeping plants, and sparse
herbage. Moss carpeted the roof and draped its supports. The corner
pillar, with its composite masonry of stone blocks mingled with brick
and pebbles, was alarming to the eye by reason of its curvature; it
seemed on the point of giving way under the weight of the house, the
gable of which overhung it by at least half a foot. The municipal
authorities and the commissioner of highways did, eventually, pull the
old building down, after buying it, to enlarge the square.

The pillar we have mentioned, placed at the angle of two streets, was
a treasure to the seekers for Limousin antiquities, on account of its
lovely sculptured niche in which was a Virgin, mutilated during the
Revolution. All visitors with archaeological proclivities found traces
of the stone sockets used to hold the candelabra in which public piety
lighted tapers or placed its _ex-votos_ and flowers.

At the farther end of the shop, a worm-eaten wooden staircase led to the
two upper floors which were in turn surmounted by an attic. The house,
backing against two adjoining houses, had no depth and derived all its
light from the front and side windows. Each floor had two small chambers
only, lighted by single windows, one looking out on the rue de la Cite,
the other on the rue de la Vieille-Poste.

In the middle-ages no artisan was better lodged. The house had evidently
belonged in those times to makers of halberds and battle-axes, armorers
in short, artificers whose work was not injured by exposure to the
open air; for it was impossible to see clearly within, unless the iron
shutters were raised from each side of the building; where were also two
doors, one on either side of the corner pillar, as may be seen in many
shops at the corners of streets. From the sill of each door--of fine
stone worn by the tread of centuries--a low wall about three feet high
began; in this wall was a groove or slot, repeated above in the beam by
which the wall of each facade was supported. From time immemorial
the heavy shutters had been rolled along these grooves, held there by
enormous iron bars, while the doors were closed and secured in the same
manner; so that these merchants and artificers could bar themselves into
their houses as into a fortress.

Examining the interior, which, during the first twenty years of this
century, was encumbered with old iron and brass, tires of wheels,
springs, bells, anything in short which the destruction of buildings
afforded of old metals, persons interested in the relics of the old town
noticed signs of the flue of a forge, shown by a long trail of soot,--a
minor detail which confirmed the conjecture of archaeologists as to the
original use to which the building was put. On the first floor (above
the ground-floor) was one room and the kitchen; on the floor above that
were two bedrooms. The garret was used to put away articles more choice
and delicate than those that lay pell-mell about the shop.

This house, hired in the first instance, was subsequently bought by a
man named Sauviat, a hawker or peddler who, from 1786 to 1793, travelled
the country over a radius of a hundred and fifty miles around Auvergne,
exchanging crockery of a common kind, plates, dishes, glasses,--in
short, the necessary articles of the poorest households,--for old iron,
brass, and lead, or any metal under any shape it might lurk in. The
Auvergnat would give, for instance, a brown earthenware saucepan worth
two sous for a pound of lead, two pounds of iron, a broken spade or hoe
or a cracked kettle; and being invariably the judge of his own cause, he
did the weighing.

At the close of his third year Sauviat added the hawking of tin and
copper ware to that of his pottery. In 1793 he was able to buy a chateau
sold as part of the National domain, which he at once pulled to pieces.
The profits were such that he repeated the process at several points of
the sphere in which he operated; later, these first successful essays
gave him the idea of proposing something of a like nature on a larger
scale to one of his compatriots who lived in Paris. Thus it happened
that the “Bande Noire,” so celebrated for its devastations, had its
birth in the brain of old Sauviat, the peddler, whom all Limoges
afterward saw and knew for twenty-seven years in the rickety old shop
among his cracked bells and rusty bars, chains and scales, his twisted
leaden gutters, and metal rubbish of all kinds. We must do him the
justice to say that he knew nothing of the celebrity or the extent
of the association he originated; he profited by his own idea only
in proportion to the capital he entrusted to the since famous firm of
Bresac.

Tired of frequenting fairs and roaming the country, the Auvergnat
settled at Limoges, where he married, in 1797, the daughter of a
coppersmith, a widower, named Champagnac. When his father-in-law died he
bought the house in which he had been carrying on his trade of old-iron
dealer, after ceasing to roam the country as a peddler. Sauviat was
fifty years of age when he married old Champagnac’s daughter, who was
herself not less than thirty. Neither handsome nor pretty, she was
nevertheless born in Auvergne, and the _patois_ seemed to be the mutual
attraction; also she had the sturdy frame which enables women to bear
hard work. In the first three years of their married life Sauviat
continued to do some peddling, and his wife accompanied him, carrying
iron or lead on her back, and leading the miserable horse and cart
full of crockery with which her husband plied a disguised usury.
Dark-skinned, high-colored, enjoying robust health, and showing when
she laughed a brilliant set of teeth, white, long, and broad as
almonds, Madame Sauviat had the hips and bosom of a woman made by Nature
expressly for maternity.

If this strong girl were not earlier married, the fault must be
attributed to the Harpagon “no dowry” her father practised, though
he never read Moliere. Sauviat was not deterred by the lack of dowry;
besides, a man of fifty can’t make difficulties, not to speak of the
fact that such a wife would save him the cost of a servant. He added
nothing to the furniture of his bedroom where, from the day of his
wedding to the day he left the house, twenty years later, there was
never anything but a single four-post bed, with valance and curtains
of green serge, a chest, a bureau, four chairs, a table, and a
looking-glass, all collected from different localities. The chest
contained in its upper section pewter plates, dishes, etc., each article
dissimilar from the rest. The kitchen can be imagined from the bedroom.

Neither husband nor wife knew how to read,--a slight defect of education
which did not prevent them from ciphering admirably and doing a most
flourishing business. Sauviat never bought any article without the
certainty of being able to sell it for one hundred per cent profit.
To relieve himself of the necessity of keeping books and accounts, he
bought and sold for cash only. He had, moreover, such a perfect memory
that the cost of any article, were it only a farthing, remained in his
mind year after year, together with its accrued interest.

Except during the time required for her household duties, Madame Sauviat
was always seated in a rickety wooden chair placed against the corner
pillar of the building. There she knitted and looked at the passers,
watched over the old iron, sold and weighed it, and received payment
if Sauviat was away making purchases. When at home the husband could be
heard at daybreak pushing open his shutters; the household dog rushed
out into the street; and Madame Sauviat presently came out to help
her man in spreading upon the natural counter made by the low walls
on either side of the corner of the house on the two streets, the
multifarious collection of bells, springs, broken gunlocks, and the
other rubbish of their business, which gave a poverty-stricken look
to the establishment, though it usually contained as much as twenty
thousand francs’ worth of lead, steel, iron, and other metals.

Never were the former peddler and his wife known to speak of their
fortune; they concealed its amount as carefully as a criminal hides a
crime; and for years they were suspected of shaving both gold and
silver coins. When Champagnac died the Sauviats made no inventory of his
property; but they rummaged, with the intelligence of rats, into every
nook and corner of the old man’s house, left it as naked as a corpse,
and sold the wares it contained in their own shop.

Once a year, in December, Sauviat went to Paris in one of the public
conveyances. The gossips of the neighborhood concluded that in order to
conceal from others the amount of his fortune, he invested it himself on
these occasions. It was known later that, having been connected in his
youth with one of the most celebrated dealers in metal, an Auvergnat
like himself, who was living in Paris, Sauviat placed his funds with
the firm of Bresac, the mainspring and spine of that famous association
known by the name of the “Bande Noire,” which, as we have already said,
took its rise from a suggestion made by Sauviat himself.

Sauviat was a fat little man with a weary face, endowed by Nature with
a look of honesty which attracted customers and facilitated the sale of
goods. His straightforward assertions, and the perfect indifference of
his tone and manner, increased this impression. In person, his naturally
ruddy complexion was hardly perceptible under the black metallic dust
which powdered his curly black hair and the seams of a face pitted
with the small-pox. His forehead was not without dignity; in fact, it
resembled the well-known brow given by all painters to Saint Peter,
the man of the people, the roughest, but withal the shrewdest, of the
apostles. His hands were those of an indefatigable worker,--large,
thick, square, and wrinkled with deep furrows. His chest was of
seemingly indestructible muscularity. He never relinquished his
peddler’s costume,--thick, hobnailed shoes; blue stockings knit by his
wife and hidden by leather gaiters; bottle-green velveteen trousers; a
checked waistcoat, from which depended the brass key of his silver watch
by an iron chain which long usage had polished till it shone like steel;
a jacket with short tails, also of velveteen, like that of the trousers;
and around his neck a printed cotton cravat much frayed by the rubbing
of his beard.

On Sundays and fete-days Sauviat wore a frock-coat of maroon cloth, so
well taken care of that two new ones were all he bought in twenty years.
The living of galley-slaves would be thought sumptuous in comparison
with that of the Sauviats, who never ate meat except on the great
festivals of the Church. Before paying out the money absolutely needed
for their daily subsistence, Madame Sauviat would feel in the two
pockets hidden between her gown and petticoat, and bring forth a
single well-scraped coin,--a crown of six francs, or perhaps a piece
of fifty-five sous,--which she would gaze at for a long time before she
could bring herself to change it. As a general thing the Sauviats ate
herrings, dried peas, cheese, hard eggs in salad, vegetables seasoned in
the cheapest manner. Never did they lay in provisions, except perhaps
a bunch of garlic or onions, which could not spoil and cost but little.
The small amount of wood they burned in winter they bought of itinerant
sellers day by day. By seven in winter, by nine in summer, the household
was in bed, and the shop was closed and guarded by a huge dog, which got
its living from the kitchens in the neighborhood. Madame Sauviat used
about three francs’ worth of candles in the course of the year.

The sober, toilsome life of these persons was brightened by one joy, but
that was a natural joy, and for it they made their only known outlays.
In May, 1802, Madame Sauviat gave birth to a daughter. She was confined
all alone, and went about her household work five days later. She nursed
her child in the open air, seated as usual in her chair by the corner
pillar, continuing to sell old iron while the infant sucked. Her milk
cost nothing, and she let her little daughter feed on it for two years,
neither of them being the worse for the long nursing.

Veronique (that was the infant’s name) became the handsomest child in
the Lower town, and every one who saw her stopped to look at her. The
neighbors then noticed for the first time a trace of feeling in the old
Sauviats, of which they had supposed them devoid. While the wife cooked
the dinner the husband held the little one, or rocked it to the tune
of an Auvergnat song. The workmen as they passed sometimes saw him
motionless gazing at Veronique asleep on her mother’s knees. He softened
his harsh voice when he spoke to her, and wiped his hands on his
trousers before taking her up. When Veronique tried to walk, the father
bent his legs and stood at a little distance holding out his arms and
making little grimaces which contrasted funnily with the rigid furrows
of his stern, hard face. The man of iron, brass, and lead became a being
of flesh and blood and bones. If he happened to be standing with his
back against the corner pillar motionless, a cry from Veronique would
agitate him and send him flying over the mounds of iron fragments to
find her; for she spent her childhood playing with the wreck of ancient
castles heaped in the depths of that old shop. There were other days on
which she went to play in the street or with the neighboring children;
but even then her mother’s eye was always on her.

It is not unimportant to say here that the Sauviats were eminently
religious. At the very height of the Revolution they observed both
Sunday and fete-days. Twice Sauviat came near having his head cut off
for hearing mass from an unsworn priest. He was put in prison, being
justly accused of helping a bishop, whose life he saved, to fly the
country. Fortunately the old-iron dealer, who knew the ways of bolts
and bars, was able to escape; nevertheless he was condemned to death by
default, and as, by the bye, he never purged himself of that contempt,
he may be said to have died dead.

His wife shared his piety. The avariciousness of the household yielded
to the demands of religion. The old-iron dealers gave their alms
punctually at the sacrament and to all the collections in church. When
the vicar of Saint-Etienne called to ask help for his poor, Sauviat or
his wife fetched at once without reluctance or sour faces the sum they
thought their fair share of the parish duties. The mutilated Virgin on
their corner pillar never failed (after 1799) to be wreathed with holly
at Easter. In the summer season she was feted with bouquets kept fresh
in tumblers of blue glass; this was particularly the case after
the birth of Veronique. On the days of the processions the Sauviats
scrupulously hung their house with sheets covered with flowers, and
contributed money to the erection and adornment of the altar, which was
the pride and glory of the whole square.

Veronique Sauviat was, therefore, brought up in a Christian manner. From
the time she was seven years old she was taught by a Gray sister from
Auvergne to whom the Sauviats had done some kindness in former times.
Both husband and wife were obliging when the matter did not affect their
pockets or consume their time,--like all poor folk who are cordially
ready to be serviceable to others in their own way. The Gray sister
taught Veronique to read and write; she also taught her the history of
the people of God, the catechism, the Old and the New Testaments, and
a very little arithmetic. That was all; the worthy sister thought it
enough; it was in fact too much.

At nine years of age Veronique surprised the whole neighborhood with her
beauty. Every one admired her face, which promised much to the pencil of
artists who are always seeking a noble ideal. She was called “the Little
Virgin” and showed signs already of a fine figure and great delicacy of
complexion. Her Madonna-like face--for the popular voice had well named
her--was surrounded by a wealth of fair hair, which brought out the
purity of her features. Whoever has seen the sublime Virgin of Titian
in his great picture of the “Presentation” at Venice, will know that
Veronique was in her girlhood,--the same ingenuous candor, the same
seraphic astonishment in her eyes, the same simple yet noble attitude,
the same majesty of childhood in her demeanor.

At eleven years of age she had the small-pox, and owed her life to the
care of Soeur Marthe. During the two months that their child was in
danger the Sauviats betrayed to the whole community the depth of their
tenderness. Sauviat no longer went about the country to sales; he stayed
in the shop, going upstairs and down to his daughter’s room, sitting up
with her every night in company with his wife. His silent anguish seemed
so great that no one dared to speak to him; his neighbors looked at
him with compassion, but they only asked news of Veronique from Soeur
Marthe. During the days when the child’s danger reached a crisis, the
neighbors and passers saw, for the first and only time in Sauviat’s
life, tears in his eyes and rolling down his hollow cheeks; he did
not wipe them, but stood for hours as if stupefied, not daring to go
upstairs to his daughter’s room, gazing before him and seeing nothing,
so oblivious of all things that any one might have robbed him.

Veronique was saved, but her beauty perished. Her face, once exquisitely
colored with a tint in which brown and rose were harmoniously mingled,
came out from the disease with a myriad of pits which thickened the
skin, the flesh beneath it being deeply indented. Even her forehead did
not escape the ravages of the scourge; it turned brown and looked as
though it were hammered, like metal. Nothing can be more discordant
than brick tones of the skin surrounded by golden hair; they destroy all
harmony. These fissures in the tissues, capriciously hollowed, injured
the purity of the profile and the delicacy of the lines of the face,
especially that of the nose, the Grecian form of which was lost, and
that of the chin, once as exquisitely rounded as a piece of white
porcelain. The disease left nothing unharmed except the parts it was
unable to reach,--the eyes and the teeth. She did not, however, lose the
elegance and beauty of her shape,--neither the fulness of its lines nor
the grace and suppleness of her waist. At fifteen Veronique was still a
fine girl, and to the great consolation of her father and mother, a good
and pious girl, busy, industrious, and domestic.

After her convalescence and after she had made her first communion,
her parents gave her the two chambers on the second floor for her own
particular dwelling. Sauviat, so course in his way of living for himself
and his wife, now had certain perceptions of what comfort might be; a
vague idea came to him of consoling his child for her great loss, which,
as yet, she did not comprehend. The deprivation of that beauty which was
once the pride and joy of those two beings made Veronique the more dear
and precious to them. Sauviat came home one day, bearing a carpet he
had chanced upon in some of his rounds, which he nailed himself on
Veronique’s floor. For her he saved from the sale of an old chateau
the gorgeous bed of a fine lady, upholstered in red silk damask, with
curtains and chairs of the same rich stuff. He furnished her two
rooms with antique articles, of the true value of which he was wholly
ignorant. He bought mignonette and put the pots on the ledge outside
her window; and he returned from many of his trips with rose trees, or
pansies, or any kind of flower which gardeners or tavern-keepers would
give him.

If Veronique could have made comparisons and known the character, past
habits, and ignorance of her parents she would have seen how much there
was of affection in these little things; but as it was, she simply loved
them from her own sweet nature and without reflection.

The girl wore the finest linen her mother could find in the shops.
Madame Sauviat left her daughter at liberty to buy what materials she
liked for her gowns and other garments; and the father and mother
were proud of her choice, which was never extravagant. Veronique was
satisfied with a blue silk gown for Sundays and fete-days, and on
working-days she wore merino in winter and striped cotton dresses in
summer. On Sundays she went to church with her father and mother, and
took a walk after vespers along the banks of the Vienne or about the
environs. On other days she stayed at home, busy in filling worsted-work
patterns, the payment for which she gave to the poor,--a life of simple,
chaste, and exemplary principles and habits. She did some reading
together with her tapestry, but never in any books except those lent to
her by the vicar of Saint-Etienne, a priest whom Soeur Marthe had first
made known to her parents.

All the rules of the Sauviat’s domestic economy were suspended in favor
of Veronique. Her mother delighted in giving her dainty things to eat,
and cooked her food separately. The father and mother still ate their
nuts and dry bread, their herrings and parched peas fricasseed in salt
butter, while for Veronique nothing was thought too choice and good.

“Veronique must cost you a pretty penny,” said a hatmaker who lived
opposite to the Sauviats and had designs on their daughter for his son,
estimating the fortune of the old-iron dealer at a hundred thousand
francs.

“Yes, neighbor, yes,” Pere Sauviat would say; “if she asked me for ten
crowns I’d let her have them. She has all she wants; but she never asks
for anything; she is as gentle as a lamb.”

Veronique was, as a matter of fact, absolutely ignorant of the value of
things. She had never wanted for anything; she never saw a piece of gold
till the day of her marriage; she had no money of her own; her mother
bought and gave her everything she needed and wished for; so that even
when she wanted to give alms to a beggar, the girl felt in her mother’s
pocket for the coin.

“If that’s so,” remarked the hatmaker, “she can’t cost you much.”

“So you think, do you?” replied Sauviat. “You wouldn’t get off under
forty crowns a year, I can tell you that. Why, her room, she has at
least a hundred crowns’ worth of furniture in it! But when a man has but
one child, he doesn’t mind. The little we own will all go to her.”

“The little! Why, you must be rich, pere Sauviat! It is pretty nigh
forty years that you have been doing a business in which there are no
losses.”

“Ha! I sha’n’t go to the poorhouse for want of a thousand francs or so!”
 replied the old-iron dealer.

From the day when Veronique lost the soft beauty which made her girlish
face the admiration of all who saw it, Pere Sauviat redoubled in
activity. His business became so prosperous that he now went to Paris
several times a year. Every one felt that he wanted to compensate his
daughter by force of money for what he called her “loss of profit.”
 When Veronique was fifteen years old a change was made in the internal
manners and customs of the household. The father and mother went
upstairs in the evenings to their daughter’s apartment, where Veronique
would read to them, by the light of a lamp placed behind a glass globe
full of water, the “Vie des Saints,” the “Lettres Edifiantes,” and other
books lent by the vicar. Madame Sauviat knitted stockings, feeling that
she thus recouped herself for the cost of oil. The neighbors could see
through the window the old couple seated motionless in their armchairs,
like Chinese images, listening to their daughter, and admiring her with
all the powers of their contracted minds, obtuse to everything that was
not business or religious faith.




II. VERONIQUE

There are, no doubt, many young girls in the world as pure as Veronique,
but none purer or more modest. Her confessions might have surprised the
angels and rejoiced the Blessed Virgin.

At sixteen years of age she was fully developed, and appeared the woman
she was eventually to become. She was of medium height, neither her
father nor her mother being tall; but her figure was charming in its
graceful suppleness, and in the serpentine curves laboriously sought by
painters and sculptors,--curves which Nature herself draws so delicately
with her lissom outlines, revealed to the eye of artists in spite of
swathing linen and thick clothes, which mould themselves, inevitably,
upon the nude. Sincere, simple, and natural, Veronique set these
beauties of her form into relief by movements that were wholly free from
affectation. She brought out her “full and complete effect,” if we may
borrow that strong term from legal phraseology. She had the plump arms
of the Auvergnat women, the red and dimpled hand of a barmaid, and her
strong but well-shaped feet were in keeping with the rest of her figure.

At times there seemed to pass within her a marvellous and delightful
phenomenon which promised to Love a woman concealed thus far from every
eye. This phenomenon was perhaps one cause of the admiration her
father and mother felt for her beauty, which they often declared to
be divine,--to the great astonishment of their neighbors. The first to
remark it were the priests of the cathedral and the worshippers with
her at the same altar. When a strong emotion took possession of
Veronique,--and the religious exaltation to which she yielded herself on
receiving the communion must be counted among the strongest emotions of
so pure and candid a young creature,--an inward light seemed to efface
for the moment all traces of the small-pox. The pure and radiant face of
her childhood reappeared in its pristine beauty. Though slightly veiled
by the thickened surface disease had laid there, it shone with the
mysterious brilliancy of a flower blooming beneath the water of the sea
when the sun is penetrating it. Veronique was changed for a few
moments; the Little Virgin reappeared and then disappeared again, like a
celestial vision. The pupils of her eyes, gifted with the power of great
expansion, widened until they covered the whole surface of the blue iris
except for a tiny circle. Thus the metamorphose of the eye, which became
as keen and vivid as that of an eagle, completed the extraordinary
change in the face. Was it the storm of restrained passions; was it some
power coming from the depths of the soul, which enlarged the pupils
in full daylight as they sometimes in other eyes enlarge by night,
darkening the azure of those celestial orbs?

However that may be, it was impossible to look indifferently at
Veronique as she returned to her seat from the altar where she had
united herself with God,--a moment when she appeared to all the parish
in her primitive splendor. At such moments her beauty eclipsed that
of the most beautiful of women. What a charm was there for the man who
loved her, guarding jealously that veil of flesh which hid the woman’s
soul from every eye,--a veil which the hand of love might lift for an
instant and then let drop over conjugal delights! Veronique’s lips were
faultlessly curved and painted in the clear vermilion of her pure warm
blood. Her chin and the lower part of her face were a little heavy, in
the acceptation given by painters to that term,--a heaviness which is,
according to the relentless laws of physiognomy, the indication of an
almost morbid vehemence in passion. She had above her brow, which was
finely modelled and almost imperious, a magnificent diadem of hair,
voluminous, redundant, and now of a chestnut color.

From the age of sixteen to the day of her marriage Veronique’s bearing
was always thoughtful, and sometimes melancholy. Living in such deep
solitude, she was forced, like other solitary persons, to examine and
consider the spectacle of that which went on within her,--the progress
of her thought, the variety of the images in her mind, and the scope of
feelings warmed and nurtured in a life so pure.

Those who looked up from their lower level as they passed along the
rue de la Cite might have seen, on all fine days, the daughter of the
Sauviats sitting at her open window, sewing, embroidering, or pricking
the needle through the canvas of her worsted-work, with a look that
was often dreamy. Her head was vividly defined among the flowers which
poetized the brown and crumbling sills of her casement windows
with their leaded panes. Sometimes the reflection of the red damask
window-curtains added to the effect of that head, already so highly
colored; like a crimson flower she glowed in the aerial garden so
carefully trained upon her window-sill.

The quaint old house possessed therefore something more quaint than
itself,--the portrait of a young girl worthy of Mieris, or Van Ostade,
or Terburg, or Gerard Douw, framed in one of those old, defaced, half
ruined windows the brushes of the old Dutch painters loved so well. When
some stranger, surprised or interested by the building, stopped before
it and gazed at the second story, old Sauviat would poke his head beyond
the overhanging projection, certain that he should see his daughter at
her window. Then he would retreat into the shop rubbing his hands and
saying to his wife in the Auvergne vernacular:--

“Hey! old woman; they’re admiring your daughter!”

In 1820 an incident occurred in the simple uneventful life the girl was
leading, which might have had no importance in the life of any other
young woman, but which, in point of fact, did no doubt exercise over
Veronique’s future a terrible influence.

On one of the suppressed church fete-days, when many persons went about
their daily labor, though the Sauviats scrupulously closed their shop,
attended mass, and took a walk, Veronique passed, on their way to the
fields, a bookseller’s stall on which lay a copy of “Paul and Virginia.”
 She had a fancy to buy it for the sake of the engraving, and her father
paid a hundred sous for the fatal volume, which he put into the pocket
of his coat.

“Wouldn’t it be well to show that book to Monsieur le vicaire before
you read it?” said her mother, to whom all printed books were a sealed
mystery.

“I thought of it,” answered Veronique.

The girl passed the whole night reading the story,--one of the most
touching bits of writing in the French language. The picture of mutual
love, half Biblical and worthy of the earlier ages of the world, ravaged
her heart. A hand--was it divine or devilish?--raised the veil which,
till then, had hidden nature from her. The Little Virgin still existing
in the beautiful young girl thought on the morrow that her flowers had
never been so beautiful; she heard their symbolic language, she looked
into the depths of the azure sky with a fixedness that was almost
ecstasy, and tears without a cause rolled down her cheeks.

In the life of all women there comes a moment when they comprehend their
destiny,--when their hitherto mute organization speaks peremptorily.
It is not always a man, chosen by some furtive involuntary glance, who
awakens their slumbering sixth sense; oftener it is some unexpected
sight, the aspect of scenery, the _coup d’oeil_ of religious pomp, the
harmony of nature’s perfumes, a rosy dawn veiled in slight mists, the
winning notes of some divinest music, or indeed any unexpected motion
within the soul or within the body. To this lonely girl, buried in that
old house, brought up by simple, half rustic parents, who had never
heard an unfit word, whose pure unsullied mind had never known the
slightest evil thought,--to the angelic pupil of Soeur Marthe and the
vicar of Saint-Etienne the revelation of love, the life of womanhood,
came from the hand of genius through one sweet book. To any other
mind the book would have offered no danger; to her it was worse in its
effects than an obscene tale. Corruption is relative. There are chaste
and virgin natures which a single thought corrupts, doing all the more
harm because no thought of the duty of resistance has occurred.

The next day Veronique showed the book to the good priest, who approved
the purchase; for what could be more childlike and innocent and pure
than the history of Paul and Virginia? But the warmth of the tropics,
the beauty of the scenery, the almost puerile innocence of a love that
seemed so sacred had done their work on Veronique. She was led by the
sweet and noble achievement of its author to the worship of the Ideal,
that fatal human religion! She dreamed of a lover like Paul. Her
thoughts caressed the voluptuous image of that balmy isle. Childlike,
she named an island in the Vienne, below Limoges and nearly opposite to
the Faubourg Saint-Martial, the Ile de France. Her mind lived there in
the world of fancy all young girls construct,--a world they enrich with
their own perfections. She spent long hours at her window, looking
at the artisans or the mechanics who passed it, the only men whom the
modest position of her parents allowed her to think of. Accustomed, of
course, to the idea of eventually marrying a man of the people, she
now became aware of instincts within herself which revolved from all
coarseness.

In such a situation she naturally made many a romance such as young
girls are fond of weaving. She clasped the idea--perhaps with the
natural ardor of a noble and virgin imagination--of ennobling one of
those men, and of raising him to the height where her own dreams led
her. She may have made a Paul of some young man who caught her eye,
merely to fasten her wild ideas on an actual being, as the mists of a
damp atmosphere, touched by frost, crystallize on the branches of a tree
by the wayside. She must have flung herself deep into the abysses of
her dream, for though she often returned bearing on her brow, as if from
vast heights, some luminous reflections, oftener she seemed to carry in
her hand the flowers that grew beside a torrent she had followed down a
precipice.

On the warm summer evenings she would ask her father to take her on his
arm to the banks of the Vienne, where she went into ecstasies over the
beauties of the sky and fields, the glories of the setting sun, or
the infinite sweetness of the dewy evening. Her soul exhaled itself
thenceforth in a fragrance of natural poesy. Her hair, until then simply
wound about her head, she now curled and braided. Her dress showed
some research. The vine which was running wild and naturally among the
branches of the old elm, was transplanted, cut and trained over a green
and pretty trellis.

After the return of old Sauviat (then seventy years of age) from a trip
to Paris in December, 1822, the vicar came to see him one evening, and
after a few insignificant remarks he said suddenly:--

“You had better think of marrying your daughter, Sauviat. At your age
you ought not to put off the accomplishment of so important a duty.”

“But is Veronique willing to be married?” asked the old man, startled.

“As you please, father,” she said, lowering her eyes.

“Yes, we’ll marry her!” cried stout Madame Sauviat, smiling.

“Why didn’t you speak to me about it before I went to Paris, mother?”
 said Sauviat. “I shall have to go back there.”

Jerome-Baptiste Sauviat, a man in whose eyes money seemed to constitute
the whole of happiness, who knew nothing of love, and had never seen
in marriage anything but the means of transmitting property to another
self, had long sworn to marry Veronique to some rich bourgeois,--so
long, in fact, that the idea had assumed in his brain the
characteristics of a hobby. His neighbor, the hat-maker, who possessed
about two thousand francs a year, had already asked, on behalf of his
son, to whom he proposed to give up his hat-making establishment, the
hand of a girl so well known in the neighborhood for her exemplary
conduct and Christian principles. Sauviat had politely refused, without
saying anything to Veronique. The day after the vicar--a very important
personage in the eyes of the Sauviat household--had mentioned the
necessary of marrying Veronique, whose confessor he was, the old man
shaved and dressed himself as for a fete-day, and went out without
saying a word to his wife or daughter; both knew very well, however,
that the father was in search of a son-in-law. Old Sauviat went to
Monsieur Graslin.

Monsieur Graslin, a rich banker in Limoges, had, like Sauviat himself,
started from Auvergne without a penny; he came to Limoges to be a
porter, found a place as an office-boy in a financial house, and there,
like many other financiers, he made his way by dint of economy, and also
through fortunate circumstances. Cashier at twenty-five years of age,
partner ten years later, in the firm of Perret and Grossetete, he ended
by finding himself the head of the house, after buying out the senior
partners, both of whom retired into the country, leaving him their funds
to manage in the business at a low interest.

Pierre Graslin, then forty-seven years of age, was supposed to possess
about six hundred thousand francs. The estimate of his fortune had
lately increased throughout the department, in consequence of his outlay
in having built, in a new quarter of the town called the place d’Arbres
(thus assisting to give Limoges an improved aspect), a fine house, the
front of it being on a line with a public building with the facade of
which it corresponded. This house had now been finished six months, but
Pierre Graslin delayed furnishing it; it had cost him so much that he
shrank from the further expense of living in it. His vanity had led him
to transgress the wise laws by which he governed his life. He felt, with
the good sense of a business man, that the interior of the house
ought to correspond with the character of the outside. The furniture,
silver-ware, and other needful accessories to the life he would have to
lead in his new mansion would, he estimated, cost him nearly as much as
the original building. In spite, therefore, of the gossip of tongues and
the charitable suppositions of his neighbors, he continued to live on
in the damp, old, and dirty ground-floor apartment in the rue
Montantmanigne where his fortune had been made. The public carped,
but Graslin had the approval of his former partners, who praised a
resolution that was somewhat uncommon.

A fortune and a position like those of Pierre Graslin naturally excited
the greed of not a few in a small provincial city. During the last
ten years more than one proposition of marriage had been intimated to
Monsieur Graslin. But the bachelor state was so well suited to a man
who was busy from morning till night, overrun with work, eager in the
pursuit of money as a hunter for game, and always tired out with his
day’s labor, that Graslin fell into none of the traps laid for him
by ambitious mothers who coveted so brilliant a position for their
daughters.

Graslin, another Sauviat in an upper sphere, did not spend more than
forty sous a day, and clothed himself no better than his under-clerk.
Two clerks and an office-boy sufficed him to carry on his business,
which was immense through the multiplicity of its details. One clerk
attended to the correspondence; the other had charge of the accounts;
but Pierre Graslin was himself the soul, and body too, of the whole
concern. His clerks, chosen from his own relations, were safe men,
intelligent and as well-trained in the work as himself. As for the
office-boy, he led the life of a truck horse,--up at five in the morning
at all seasons, and never getting to bed before eleven at night.

Graslin employed a charwoman by the day, an old peasant from Auvergne,
who did his cooking. The brown earthenware off which he ate, and the
stout coarse linen which he used, were in keeping with the character of
his food. The old woman had strict orders never to spend more than three
francs daily for the total expenses of the household. The office-boy
was also man-of-all-work. The clerks took care of their own rooms. The
tables of blackened wood, the straw chairs half unseated, the wretched
beds, the counters and desks, in short, the whole furniture of house and
office was not worth more than a thousand francs, including a colossal
iron safe, built into the wall, before which slept the man-of-all-work
with two dogs at his feet.

Graslin did not often go into society, which, however, discussed
him constantly. Two or three times a year he dined with the
receiver-general, with whom his business brought him into occasional
intercourse. He also occasionally took a meal at the prefecture; for he
had been appointed, much to his regret, a member of the Council-general
of the department--“a waste of time,” he remarked. Sometimes his brother
bankers with whom he had dealings kept him to breakfast or dinner; and
he was forced also to visit his former partners, who spent their winters
in Limoges. He cared so little to keep up his relations to society that
in twenty-five years Graslin had not offered so much as a glass of water
to any one. When he passed along the street persons would nudge each
other and say: “That’s Monsieur Graslin”; meaning, “There’s a man
who came to Limoges without a penny and has now acquired an enormous
fortune.” The Auvergnat banker was a model which more than one father
pointed out to his son, and wives had been known to fling him in the
faces of their husbands.

We can now understand the reasons that led a man who had become the
pivot of the financial machine of Limoges to repulse the various
propositions of marriage which parents never ceased to make to him. The
daughters of his partners, Messrs. Perret and Grossetete, were married
before Graslin was in a position to take a wife; but as each of these
ladies had young daughters, the wiseheads of the community finally
concluded that old Perret or old Grossetete had made an arrangement with
Graslin to wait for one of his granddaughters, and thenceforth they left
him alone.

Sauviat had watched the ascending career of his compatriot more
attentively and seriously than any one else. He had known him from
the time he first came to Limoges; but their respective positions had
changed so much, at least apparently, that their friendship, now become
merely superficial, was seldom freshened. Still, in his relation as
compatriot, Graslin never disdained to talk with Sauviat when they
chanced to meet. Both continued to keep up their early _tutoiement_, but
only in their native dialect. When the receiver-general of Bourges, the
youngest of the brothers Grossetete, married his daughter in 1823 to the
youngest son of Comte Fontaine, Sauviat felt sure that the Grossetetes
would never allow Graslin to enter their family.

After his conference with the banker, Pere Sauviat returned home
joyously. He dined that night in his daughter’s room, and after dinner
he said to his womenkind:--

“Veronique will be Madame Graslin.”

“Madame Graslin!” exclaimed Mere Sauviat, astounded.

“Is it possible?” said Veronique, to whom Graslin was personally
unknown, and whose imagination regarded him very much as a Parisian
grisette would regard a Rothschild.

“Yes, it is settled,” said old Sauviat solemnly. “Graslin will furnish
his house magnificently; he is to give our daughter a fine Parisian
carriage and the best horses to be found in the Limousin; he will buy
an estate worth five hundred thousand francs, and settle that and his
town-house upon her. Veronique will be the first lady in Limoges,
the richest in the department, and she can do what she pleases with
Graslin.”

Veronique’s education, her religious ideas, and her boundless affection
for her parents, prevented her from making a single objection; it did
not even cross her mind to think that she had been disposed of without
reference to her own will. On the morrow Sauviat went to Paris, and was
absent for nearly a week.

Pierre Graslin was, as can readily be imagined, not much of a talker; he
went straight and rapidly to deeds. A thing decided on was a thing done.
In February, 1822, a strange piece of news burst like a thunderbolt on
the town of Limoges. The hotel Graslin was being handsomely furnished;
carriers’ carts came day after day from Paris, and their contents were
unpacked in the courtyard. Rumors flew about the town as to the beauty
and good taste of the modern or the antique furniture as it was seen
to arrive. The great firm of Odiot and Company sent down a magnificent
service of plate by the mail-coach. Three carriages, a caleche, a coupe,
and a cabriolet arrived, wrapped in straw with as much care as if they
were jewels.

“Monsieur Graslin is going to be married!”

These words were said by every pair of lips in Limoges in the course of
a single evening,--in the salons of the upper classes, in the kitchens,
in the shops, in the streets, in the suburbs, and before long throughout
the whole surrounding country. But to whom? No one could answer. Limoges
had a mystery.




III. MARRIAGE

On the return of old Sauviat Graslin paid his first evening visit at
half-past nine o’clock. Veronique was expecting him, dressed in her blue
silk gown and muslin guimpe, over which fell a collaret made of lawn
with a deep hem. Her hair was simply worn in two smooth bandeaus,
gathered into a Grecian knot at the back of her head. She was seated on
a tapestried chair beside her mother, who occupied a fine armchair with
a carved back, covered with red velvet (evidently the relic of some old
chateau), which stood beside the fireplace. A bright fire blazed on the
hearth. On the chimney-piece, at either side of an antique clock, the
value of which was wholly unknown to the Sauviats, six wax candles in
two brass sconces twisted like vine-shoots, lighted the dark room and
Veronique in all her budding prime. The old mother was wearing her best
gown.

From the silent street, at that tranquil hour, through the soft shadows
of the ancient stairway, Graslin appeared to the modest, artless
Veronique, her mind still dwelling on the sweet ideas which Bernadin de
Saint-Pierre had given her of love.

Graslin, who was short and thin, had thick black hair like the bristles
of a brush, which brought into vigorous relief a face as red as that
of a drunkard emeritus, and covered with suppurating pimples, either
bleeding or about to burst. Without being caused by eczema or scrofula,
these signs of a blood overheated by continual toil, anxiety, and the
lust of business, by wakeful nights, poor food, and a sober life,
seemed to partake of both these diseases. In spite of the advice of his
partners, his clerks, and his physician, the banker would never compel
himself to take the healthful precautions which might have prevented, or
would at least modify, this malady, which was slight at first, but had
greatly increased from year to year. He wanted to cure it, and would
sometimes take baths or drink some prescribed potion; but, hurried
along on the current of his business, he soon neglected the care of his
person. Sometimes he thought of suspending work for a time, travelling
about, and visiting the noted baths for such diseases; but where is the
hunter after millions who is willing to stop short?

In that blazing furnace shone two gray eyes rayed with green lines
starting from the pupils, and speckled with brown spots,--two implacable
eyes, full of resolution, rectitude, and shrewd calculation. Graslin’s
nose was short and turned up; he had a mouth with thick lips, a
prominent forehead, and high cheek-bones, coarse ears with large edges
discolored by the condition of his blood,--in short, he was an ancient
satyr in a black satin waistcoat, brown frock-coat, and white cravat.
His strong and vigorous shoulders, which began life by bearing heavy
burdens, were now rather bent; and beneath this torso, unduly developed,
came a pair of weak legs, rather badly affixed to the short thighs. His
thin and hairy hands had the crooked fingers of those whose business it
is to handle money. The habit of quick decision could be seen in the
way the eyebrows rose into a point over each arch of the eye. Though
the mouth was grave and pinched, its expression was that of inward
kindliness; it told of an excellent nature, sunk in business, smothered
possibly, though it might revive by contact with a woman.

At this apparition Veronique’s heart was violently agitated; blackness
came before her eyes; she thought she cried aloud; but she really sat
there mute, with fixed and staring gaze.

“Veronique, this is Monsieur Graslin,” said old Sauviat.

Veronique rose, curtsied, dropped back into her chair, and looked at her
mother, who was smiling at the millionaire, seeming, as her father
did, so happy,--so happy that the poor girl found strength to hide her
surprise and her violent repulsion. During the conversation which then
took place something was said of Graslin’s health. The banker looked
naively into the mirror, with bevelled edges in an ebony frame.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I am not good-looking.”

Thereupon he proceeded to explain the blotches on his face as the result
of his overworked life. He related how he had constantly disobeyed his
physician’s advice; and remarked that he hoped to change his appearance
altogether when he had a wife to rule his household, and take better
care of him than he took of himself.

“Is a man married for his face, compatriot?” said Sauviat, giving the
other a hearty slap on the thigh.

Graslin’s speech went straight to those natural feelings which, more or
less, fill the heart of every woman. The thought came into Veronique’s
mind that her face, too, had been destroyed by a horrible disease, and
her Christian modesty rebuked her first impression.

Hearing a whistle in the street, Graslin went downstairs, followed by
Sauviat. They speedily returned. The office-boy had brought the first
bouquet, which was a little late in coming. When the banker exhibited
this mound of exotic flowers, the fragrance of which completely filled
the room, and offered it to his future wife, Veronique felt a rush
of conflicting emotions; she was suddenly plunged into the ideal and
fantastic world of tropical nature. Never before had she seen white
camelias, never had she smelt the fragrance of the Alpine cistus, the
Cape jessamine, the cedronella, the volcameria, the moss-rose, or any of
the divine perfumes which woo to love, and sing to the heart their hymns
of fragrance. Graslin left Veronique that night in the grasp of such
emotions.

From this time forth, as soon as all Limoges was sleeping, the banker
would slip along the walls to the Sauviats’ house. There he would tap
gently on the window-shutter; the dog did not bark; old Sauviat came
down and let him in, and Graslin would then spend an hour or two with
Veronique in the brown room, where Madame Sauviat always served him a
true Auvergnat supper. Never did this singular lover arrive without
a bouquet made of the rarest flowers from the greenhouse of his old
partner, Monsieur Grossetete, the only person who as yet knew of the
approaching marriage. The man-of-all-work went every evening to fetch
the bunch, which Monsieur Grossetete made himself.

Graslin made about fifty such visits in two months; each time, besides
the flowers, he brought with him some rich present,--rings, a watch, a
gold chain, a work-box, etc. These inconceivable extravagances must
be explained, and a word suffices. Veronique’s dowry, promised by her
father, consisted of nearly the whole of old Sauviat’s property, namely,
seven hundred and fifty thousand francs. The old man retained an
income of eight thousand francs derived from the Funds, bought for him
originally for sixty thousand francs in assignats by his correspondent
Brezac, to whom, at the time of his imprisonment, he had confided that
sum, and who kept it for him safely. These sixty thousand francs in
assignats were the half of Sauviat’s fortune at the time he came so
near being guillotined. Brezac was also, at the same time, the faithful
repository of the rest, namely, seven hundred louis d’or (an enormous
sum at that time in gold), with which old Sauviat began his business
once more as soon as he recovered his liberty. In thirty years each of
those louis d’or had been transformed into a bank-note for a thousand
francs, by means of the income from the Funds, of Madame Sauviat’s
inheritance from her father, old Champagnac, and of the profits accruing
from the business and the accumulated interest thereon in the hands of
the Brezac firm. Brezac himself had a loyal and honest friendship for
Sauviat,--such as all Auvergnats are apt to feel for one another.

So, whenever Sauviat passed the front of the Graslin mansion he had said
to himself, “Veronique shall live in that fine palace.” He knew very
well that no girl in all the department would have seven hundred and
fifty thousand francs as a marriage portion, besides the expectation
of two hundred and fifty thousand more. Graslin, his chosen son-in-law,
would therefore infallibly marry Veronique; and so, as we have seen, it
came about.

Every evening Veronique had her fresh bunch of flowers, which on the
morrow decked her little salon and was carefully concealed from the
neighbors. She admired the beautiful jewels, the pearls and diamonds,
the bracelets, the rubies, gifts which assuredly gratify all the
daughters of Eve. She thought herself less plain when she wore them. She
saw her mother happy in the marriage, and she had no other point of view
from which to make comparisons. She was, moreover, totally ignorant of
the duties or the purpose of marriage. She heard the solemn voice of the
vicar of Saint-Etienne praising Graslin to her as a man of honor,
with whom she would lead an honorable life. Thus it was that Veronique
consented to receive Monsieur Graslin as her future husband.

When it happens that in a life so withdrawn from the world, so solitary
as that of Veronique, a single person enters it every day, that person
cannot long remain indifferent; either he is hated, and the aversion,
justified by a deepening knowledge of his character, renders him
intolerable, or the habit of seeing bodily defects dims the eye to
them. The mind looks about for compensations; his countenance awakens
curiosity; its features brighten; fleeting beauties appear in it. At
last the inner, hidden beneath the outer, shows itself. Then, when the
first impressions are fairly overcome, the attachment felt is all the
stronger, because the soul clings to it as its own creation. That is
love. And here lies the reason of those passions conceived by beautiful
things for other beings apparently ugly. The outward aspect, forgotten
by affection, is no longer seen in a creature whose soul is deeply
valued. Besides this, beauty, so necessary to a woman, takes many
strange aspects in man; and there is as much diversity of feeling among
women about the beauty of men as there is among men about the beauty
of women. So, after deep reflection and much debating with herself,
Veronique gave her consent to the publication of the banns.

From that moment all Limoges rang with this inexplicable
affair,--inexplicable because no one knew the secret of it, namely, the
immensity of the dowry. Had that dowry been known Veronique could have
chosen a husband where she pleased; but even so, she might have made a
mistake.

Graslin was thought to be much in love. Upholsterers came from Paris
to fit up the house. Nothing was talked of in Limoges but the profuse
expenditures of the banker. The value of the chandeliers was calculated;
the gilding of the walls, the figures on the clocks, all were discussed;
the jardinieres, the caloriferes, the objects of luxury and novelty,
nothing was left unnoticed. In the garden of the hotel Graslin, above
the icehouse, was an aviary, and all the inhabitants of the town were
presently surprised by the sight of rare birds,--Chinese pheasants,
mysterious breeds of ducks. Every one flocked to see them. Monsieur and
Madame Grossetete, an old couple who were highly respected in Limoges,
made several visits to the Sauviats, accompanied by Graslin. Madame
Grossetete, a most excellent woman, congratulated Veronique on her happy
marriage. Thus the Church, the family, society, and all material things
down to the most trivial, made themselves accomplices to bring about
this marriage.

In the month of April the formal invitations to the wedding were issued
to all Graslin’s friends and acquaintance. On a fine spring morning
a caleche and a coupe, drawn by Limousin horses chosen by Monsieur
Grossetete, drew up at eleven o’clock before the shop of the
iron-dealer, bringing, to the great excitement of the neighborhood,
the former partners of the bridegroom and the latter’s two clerks.
The street was lined with spectators, all anxious to see the Sauviats’
daughter, on whose beautiful hair the most renowned hairdresser in
Limoges had placed the bridal wreath and a costly veil of English
lace. Veronique wore a gown of simple white muslin. A rather imposing
assemblage of the most distinguished women in the society of the town
attended the wedding in the cathedral, where the bishop, knowing the
religious fervor of the Sauviats, deigned to marry Veronique himself.
The bride was very generally voted plain.

She entered her new house, and went from one surprise to another. A
grand dinner was to precede the ball, to which Graslin had invited
nearly all Limoges. The dinner, given to the bishop, the prefect, the
judge of the court, the attorney-general, the mayor, the general, and
Graslin’s former partners with their wives, was a triumph for the bride,
who, like all other persons who are simple and natural, showed charms
that were not expected in her. Neither of the bridal pair could dance;
Veronique continued therefore to do the honors to her guests, and to win
the esteem and good graces of nearly all the persons who were presented
to her, asking Grossetete, who took an honest liking to her, for
information about the company. She made no mistakes and committed no
blunders. It was during this evening that the two former partners of the
banker announced the amount of the dowry (immense for Limousin) given
by the Sauviats to their daughter. At nine o’clock the old iron-dealer
returned home and went to bed, leaving his wife to preside over the
bride’s retiring. It was said by everyone throughout the town that
Madame Graslin was very plain, though well made.

Old Sauviat now wound up his business and sold his house in town. He
bought a little country-place on the left bank of the Vienne between
Limoges and Cluzeau, ten minutes’ walk from the suburb of Saint-Martial,
where he intended to finish his days tranquilly with his wife. The old
couple had an apartment in the hotel Graslin and always dined once or
twice a week with their daughter, who, as often, made their house in the
country the object of her walks.

This enforced rest almost killed old Sauviat. Happily, Graslin found a
means of occupying his father-in-law. In 1823 the banker was forced to
take possession of a porcelain manufactory, to the proprietors of which
he had advanced large sums, which they found themselves unable to repay
except by the sale of their factory, which they made to him. By the help
of his business connections and by investing a large amount of property
in the concern, Graslin made it one of the finest manufactories of
Limoges ware in the town. Afterwards he resold it at a fine profit;
meantime he placed it under the superintendence of his father-in-law,
who, in spite of his seventy-two years, counted for much in the return
of prosperity to the establishment, who himself renewed his youth in the
employment. Graslin was then able to attend to his legitimate business
of banking without anxiety as to the manufactory.

Sauviat died in 1827 from an accident. While taking account of stock he
fell into a _charasse_,--a sort of crate with an open grating in which
the china was packed; his leg was slightly injured, so slightly that
he paid no attention to it; gangrene set in; he would not consent to
amputation, and therefore died. The widow gave up about two hundred and
fifty thousand francs which came to her from Sauviat’s estate, reserving
only a stipend of two hundred francs a month, which amply sufficed for
her wants. Graslin bound himself to pay her that sum duly. She kept her
little house in the country, and lived there alone without a servant and
against the remonstrances of her daughter, who could not induce her to
alter this determination, to which she clung with the obstinacy peculiar
to old persons. Madame Sauviat came nearly every day into Limoges to see
her daughter, and the latter still continued to make her mother’s house,
from which was a charming view of the river, the object of her walks.
From the road leading to it could be seen that island long loved by
Veronique and called by her the Ile de France.

In order not to complicate our history of the Graslin household with the
foregoing incidents, we have thought it best to end that of the Sauviats
by anticipating events, which are moreover useful as explaining the
private and hidden life which Madame Graslin now led. The old mother,
noticing that Graslin’s miserliness, which returned upon him, might
hamper her daughter, was for some time unwilling to resign the property
left to her by her husband. But Veronique, unable to imagine a case in
which a woman might desire the use of her own property, urged it upon
her mother with reasons of great generosity, and out of gratitude to
Graslin for restoring to her the liberty and freedom of a young girl.
But this is anticipating.

The unusual splendor which accompanied Graslin’s marriage had disturbed
all his habits and constantly annoyed him. The mind of the great
financier was a very small one. Veronique had had no means of judging
the man with whom she was to pass her life. During his fifty-five visits
he had let her see nothing but the business man, the indefatigable
worker, who conceived and sustained great enterprises, and analyzed
public affairs, bringing them always to the crucial test of the Bank.
Fascinated by the million offered to him by Sauviat, he showed himself
generous by calculation. Carried away by the interests of his marriage
and by what he called his “folly,” namely, the house which still goes
by the name of the hotel Graslin, he did things on a large scale. Having
bought horses, a caleche, and a coupe, he naturally used them to
return the wedding visits and go to those dinners and balls, called the
“retours de noces,” which the heads of the administration and the
rich families of Limoges gave to the newly married pair. Under this
impulsion, which carried him entirely out of his natural sphere, Graslin
sent to Paris for a man-cook and took a reception day. For a year
he kept the pace of a man who possesses a fortune of sixteen hundred
thousand francs, and he became of course the most noted personage in
Limoges. During this year he generously put into his wife’s purse every
month twenty-five gold pieces of twenty francs each.

Society concerned itself much about Veronique from the day of her
marriage, for she was a boon to its curiosity, which has little to feed
on in the provinces. Veronique was all the more studied because she
had appeared in the social world like a phenomenon; but once there, she
remained always simple and modest, in the attitude of a person who
is observing habits, customs, manners, things unknown to her, and
endeavoring to conform to them. Already voted ugly but well-shaped, she
was now declared kindly but stupid. She was learning so many things, she
had so much to hear and to see that her looks and speech did certainly
give some reason for this judgment. She showed a sort of torpor which
resembled lack of mind. Marriage, that hard calling, as she said, for
which the Church, the Code, and her mother exhorted her to resignation
and obedience, under pain of transgressing all human laws and causing
irreparable evil, threw her into a dazed and dizzy condition, which
amounted sometimes to a species of inward delirium.

Silent and self-contained, she listened as much to herself as she did to
others. Feeling within her the most violent “difficulty of existing,” to
use an expression of Fontenelle’s, which was constantly increasing, she
became terrified at herself. Nature resisted the commands of the mind,
the body denied the will. The poor creature, caught in the net, wept on
the breast of that great Mother of the poor and the afflicted,--she
went for comfort to the Church; her piety redoubled, she confided the
assaults of the demon to her confessor; she prayed to heaven for succor.
Never, at any period of her life, did she fulfil her religious duties
with such fervor. The despair of not loving her husband flung her
violently at the foot of the altar, where divine and consolatory
voices urged her to patience. She was patient, she was gentle, and she
continued to live on, hoping always for the happiness of maternity.

“Did you notice Madame Graslin this morning?” the women would say to
each other. “Marriage doesn’t agree with her; she is actually green.”

“Yes,” some of them would reply; “but would you give your daughter to a
man like Graslin? No woman could marry him with impunity.”

Now that Graslin was married, all the mothers who had courted him for
ten years past pursued him with sarcasms.

Veronique grew visibly thinner and really ugly; her eyes looked weary,
her features coarsened, her manner was shy and awkward; she acquired
that air of cold and melancholy rigidity for which the ultra-pious are
so often blamed. Her skin took on a grayish tone; she dragged herself
languidly about during this first year of married life, ordinarily so
brilliant for a young wife. She tried to divert her mind by reading,
profiting by the liberty of married women to read what they please. She
read the novels of Walter Scott, the poems of Lord Byron, the works
of Schiller and of Goethe, and much else of modern and also ancient
literature. She learned to ride a horse, and to dance and to draw. She
painted water-colors and made sepia sketches, turning ardently to
all those resources which women employ to bear the weariness of their
solitude. She gave herself that second education which most women derive
from a man, but which she derived from herself only.

The natural superiority of a free, sincere spirit, brought up, as it
were in a desert and strengthened by religion, had given her a sort of
untrammelled grandeur and certain needs, to which the provincial world
she lived in offered no sustenance. All books pictured Love to her, and
she sought for the evidence of its existence, but nowhere could she see
the passion of which she read. Love was in her heart, like seeds in the
earth, awaiting the action of the sun. Her deep melancholy, caused by
constant meditation on herself, brought her back by hidden by-ways to
the brilliant dreams of her girlish days. Many a time she must have
lived again that old romantic poem, making herself both the actor and
the subject of it. Again she saw that island bathed in light, flowery,
fragrant, caressing to her soul. Often her pallid eyes wandered around
a salon with piercing curiosity. The men were all like Graslin. She
studied them, and then she seemed to question their wives; but nothing
on the faces of those women revealed an inward anguish like to hers,
and she returned home sad and gloomy and distressed about herself. The
authors she had read in the morning answered to the feelings in her
soul; their thoughts pleased her; but at night she heard only empty
words, not even presented in a lively way,--dull, empty, foolish
conversations in petty local matters, or personalities of no interest to
her. She was often surprised at the heat displayed in discussions which
concerned no feeling or sentiment--to her the essence of existence, the
soul of life.

Often she was seen with fixed eyes, mentally absorbed, thinking no doubt
of the days of her youthful ignorance spent in that chamber full of
harmonies now forever passed away. She felt a horrible repugnance
against dropping into the gulf of pettiness in which the women among
whom she lived were floundering. This repugnance, stamped on her
forehead, on her lips, and ill-disguised, was taken for the insolence
of a parvenue. Madame Graslin began to observe on all faces a certain
coldness; she felt in all remarks an acrimony, the causes of which were
unknown to her, for she had no intimate friend to enlighten or advise
her. Injustice, which angers little minds, brings loftier souls to
question themselves, and communicates a species of humility to them.
Veronique condemned herself, endeavoring to see her own faults. She
tried to be affable; they called her false. She grew more gentle still;
they said she was a hypocrite, and her pious devotion helped on the
calumny. She spent money, gave dinners and balls, and they taxed her
with pride.

Unsuccessful in all these attempts, unjustly judged, rebuffed by the
petty and tormenting pride which characterizes provincial society,
where each individual is armed with pretensions and their attendant
uneasiness, Madame Graslin fell back into utter solitude. She returned
with eagerness to the arms of the Church. Her great soul, clothed with
so weak a flesh, showed her the multiplied commandments of Catholicism
as so many stones placed for protection along the precipices of life, so
many props brought by charitable hands to sustain human weakness on
its weary way; and she followed, with greater rigor than ever, even the
smallest religious practices.

On this the liberals of the town classed Madame Graslin among the
_devotes_, the ultras. To the different animosities Veronique had
innocently acquired, the virulence of party feeling now added its
periodical exasperation. But as this ostracism took nothing really from
her, she quietly left society and lived in books which offered her
such infinite resources. She meditated on what she read, she compared
systems, she widened immeasurably the horizons of her intellect and the
extent of her education; in this way she opened the gates of her soul to
curiosity.

During this period of resolute study, in which religion supported and
maintained her mind, she obtained the friendship of Monsieur Grossetete,
one of those old men whose mental superiority grows rusty in provincial
life, but who, when they come in contact with an eager mind, recover
something of their former brilliancy. The good man took an earnest
interest in Veronique, who, to reward him for the flattering warmth of
heart which old men show to those they like, displayed before him,
and for the first time in her life, the treasures of her soul and
the acquirements of her mind, cultivated so secretly, and now full of
blossom. An extract from a letter written by her about this time to
Monsieur Grossetete will show the condition of the mind of a woman who
was later to give signal proofs of a firm and lofty nature:--

  “The flowers you sent me for the ball were charming, but they
  suggested harsh reflections. Those pretty creatures gathered by
  you, and doomed to wilt upon my bosom to adorn a fete, made me
  think of others that live and die unseen in the depths of your
  woods, their fragrance never inhaled by any one. I asked myself
  why I was dancing there, why I was decked with flowers, just as I
  ask God why he has placed me to live in this world.

  “You see, my friend, all is a snare to the unhappy; the smallest
  matter brings the sick mind back to its woes; but the greatest
  evil of certain woes is the persistency which makes them a fixed
  idea pervading our lives. A constant sorrow ought rather to be a
  divine inspiration. You love flowers for themselves, whereas I
  love them as I love to listen to fine music. So, as I was saying,
  the secret of a mass of things escapes me. You, my old friend, you
  have a passion,--that of the horticulturist. When you return to
  town inspire me with that taste, so that I may rush to my
  greenhouse with eager feet, as you go to yours to watch the
  development of your plants, to bud and bloom with them, to admire
  what you create,--the new colors, the unexpected varieties, which
  expand and grow beneath your eyes by the virtue of your care.

  “My greenhouse, the one I watch, is filled with suffering souls.
  The miseries I try to lessen sadden my heart; and when I take them
  upon myself, when, after finding some young woman without clothing
  for her babe, some old man wanting bread, I have supplied their
  needs, the emotions their distress and its relief have caused me
  do not suffice my soul. Ah, friend, I feel within me untold powers
  --for evil, possibly,--which nothing can lower, which the sternest
  commands of our religion are unable to abase! Sometimes, when I go
  to see my mother, walking alone among the fields, I want to cry
  aloud, and I do so. It seems to me that my body is a prison in
  which some evil genius is holding a shuddering creature while
  awaiting the mysterious words which are to burst its obstructive
  form.

  “But that comparison is not a just one. In me it seems to be the
  body that seeks escape, if I may say so. Religion fills my soul,
  books and their riches occupy my mind. Why, then, do I desire some
  anguish which shall destroy the enervating peace of my existence?

  “Oh, if some sentiment, some mania that I could cultivate, does
  not come into my life, I feel I shall sink at last into the gulf
  where all ideas are dulled, where character deteriorates, motives
  slacken, virtues lose their backbone, and all the forces of the
  soul are scattered,--a gulf in which I shall no longer be the
  being Nature meant me to be!

  “This is what my bitter complainings mean. But do not let them
  hinder you from sending me those flowers. Your friendship is so
  soothing and so full of loving kindness that it has for the last
  few months almost reconciled me to myself. Yes, it makes me happy
  to have you cast a glance upon my soul, at once so barren and so
  full of bloom; and I am thankful for every gentle word you say to
  one who rides the phantom steed of dreams, and returns worn-out.”

At the end of the third year of his married life, Graslin, observing
that his wife no longer used her horses, and finding a good market for
them, sold them. He also sold the carriages, sent away the coachman, let
the bishop have his man-cook, and contented himself with a woman. He no
longer gave the monthly sum to his wife, telling her that he would pay
all bills. He thought himself the most fortunate of husbands in meeting
no opposition whatever to these proceedings from the woman who had
brought him a million of francs as a dowry. Madame Graslin, brought up
from childhood without ever seeing money, or being made to feel that it
was an indispensable element in life, deserved no praise whatever
for this apparent generosity. Graslin even noticed in a corner of the
secretary all the sums he had ever given her, less the money she had
bestowed in charity or spent upon her dress, the cost of which was much
lessened by the profusion of her wedding trousseau.

Graslin boasted of Veronique to all Limoges as being a model wife.
He next regretted the money spent on the house, and he ordered the
furniture to be all packed away or covered up. His wife’s bedroom,
dressing-room, and boudoir were alone spared from these protective
measures; which protect nothing, for furniture is injured just as much
by being covered up as by being left uncovered. Graslin himself lived
almost entirely on the ground-floor of the house, where he had his
office, and resumed his old business habits with avidity. He thought
himself an excellent husband because he went upstairs to breakfast and
dined with his wife; but his unpunctuality was so great that it was
not more than ten times a month that he began a meal with he; he had
exacted, out of courtesy, that she should never wait for him. Veronique
did, however, always remain in the room while her husband took his
meals, serving him herself, that she might at least perform voluntarily
some of the visible obligations of a wife.

The banker, to whom the things of marriage were very indifferent, and
who had seen nothing in his wife but seven hundred and fifty thousand
francs, had never once perceived Veronique’s repugnance to him. Little
by little he now abandoned Madame Graslin for his business. When
he wished to put a bed in the room adjoining his office on the
ground-floor, Veronique hastened to comply with the request. So that
three years after their marriage these two ill-assorted beings returned
to their original estate, each equally pleased and happy to do so. The
moneyed man, possessing eighteen hundred thousand francs, returned
with all the more eagerness to his old avaricious habits because he had
momentarily quitted them. His two clerks and the office-boy were better
lodged and rather better fed, and that was the only difference
between the present and the past. His wife had a cook and maid (two
indispensable servants); but except for the actual necessities of life,
not a penny left his coffers for his household.

Happy in the turn which things were now taking, Veronique saw in the
evident satisfaction of the banker the absolution for this separation
which she would never have asked for herself. She had no conception that
she was as disagreeable to Graslin as Graslin was repulsive to her. This
secret divorce made her both sad and joyful. She had always looked
to motherhood for an interest in life; but up to this time (1828) the
couple had had no prospect of a family.




IV. THE HISTORY OF MANY MARRIED WOMEN IN THE PROVINCES

So now, in her magnificent house and envied for her wealth by all the
town, Madame Graslin recovered the solitude of her early years in
her father’s house, less the glow of hope and the youthful joys
of ignorance. She lived among the ruins of her castles in the air,
enlightened by sad experience, sustained by religious faith, occupied
by the care of the poor, whom she loaded with benefits. She made clothes
for the babies, gave mattresses and sheets to those who slept on straw;
she went among the poor herself, followed by her maid, a girl from
Auvergne whom her mother procured for her, and who attached herself
body and soul to her mistress. Veronique made an honorable spy of her,
sending her to discover the places where suffering could be stilled,
poverty softened.

This active benevolence, carried on with strict attention to religious
duties, was hidden in the deepest secrecy and directed by the various
rectors in the town, with whom Veronique had a full understanding in
all her charitable deeds, so as not to suffer the money so needed for
unmerited misfortunes to fall into the hands of vice. It was during this
period of her life that she won a friendship quite as strong and quite
as precious as that of old Grossetete. She became the beloved lamb of a
distinguished priest, who was persecuted for his true merits, which were
wholly misunderstood, one of the two grand-vicars of the diocese, named
the Abbe Dutheil.

This priest belonged to the portion of the French clergy who incline
toward certain concessions, who would be glad to associate the Church
with the people’s interests, and so enable it to regain, through the
application of true evangelical doctrine, its former influence over the
masses, which it might then draw to closer relations with the monarchy.
Whether it was that the Abbe Dutheil recognized the impossibility of
enlightening the court of Rome and the higher clergy on this point,
or that he had consented to sacrifice his own opinions to those of
his superiors, it is certain that he remained within the limits of the
strictest orthodoxy, being very well aware that any manifestation of his
principles at the present time would deprive him of all chance of the
episcopate.

This eminent priest united in himself great Christian modesty and a
noble character. Without pride or ambition he remained at his post
and did his duty in the midst of perils. The liberals of the town were
ignorant of the motives of his conduct; they claimed him as being
of their opinions and considered him a patriot,--a word which meant
revolutionist in Catholic minds. Loved by his inferiors, who dared not,
however, proclaim his merits, feared by his equals who kept watch upon
him, he was a source of embarrassment to the bishop. His virtues and his
knowledge, envied, no doubt, prevented persecution; it was impossible to
complain of him, though he criticized frankly the political blunders by
which both the throne and the clergy mutually compromised themselves.
He often foretold results, but vainly,--like poor Cassandra, who was
equally cursed before and after the disaster she predicted. Short of a
revolution the Abbe Dutheil was likely to remain as he was, one of those
stones hidden in the foundation wall on which the edifice rests. His
utility was recognized and they left him in his place, like many other
solid minds whose rise to power is the terror of mediocrities. If, like
the Abbe de Lamennais, he had taken up his pen he would doubtless, like
him, have been blasted by the court of Rome.

The Abbe Dutheil was imposing in appearance. His exterior revealed the
underlying of a profound nature always calm and equable on the surface.
His tall figure and its thinness did not detract from the general
effect of his lines, which recalled those by which the genius of Spanish
painters delights to represent the great monastic meditators, and those
selected at a later period by Thorwaldsen for the Apostles. The long,
almost rigid folds of the face, in harmony with those of his vestment,
had the charm which the middle-ages bring into relief in the mystical
statues placed beside the portals of their churches. Gravity of thought,
word, and accent, harmonized in this man and became him well. Seeing
his dark eyes hollowed by austerities and surrounded by a brown circle;
seeing, too, his forehead, yellow as some old stone, his head and hands
almost fleshless, men desired to hear the voice and the instructions
which issued from his lips. This purely physical grandeur which accords
with moral grandeur, gave this priest a somewhat haughty and disdainful
air, which was instantly counteracted to an observer by his modesty and
by his speech, though it did not predispose others in his favor. In
some more elevated station these advantages would have obtained that
necessary ascendancy over the masses which the people willingly allow to
men who are thus endowed. But superiors will not forgive their inferiors
for possessing the externals of greatness, nor for displaying
that majesty so prized by the ancients but so often lacking to the
administrators of modern power.

By one of those strange freaks of circumstance which are never accounted
for, the other vicar-general, the Abbe de Grancour, a stout little man
with a rosy complexion and blue eyes, whose opinions were diametrically
opposed to those of the Abbe Dutheil, liked to be in the latter’s
company, although he never testified this liking enough to put himself
out of the good graces of the bishop, to whom he would have sacrificed
everything. The Abbe de Grancour believed in the merit of his colleague,
recognized his talents, secretly accepted his doctrines, and condemned
them openly; for the little priest was one of those men whom superiority
attracts and intimidates,--who dislike it and yet cultivate it. “He
would embrace me and condemn me,” the Abbe Dutheil said of him. The Abbe
de Grancour had neither friends nor enemies; he was therefore likely
to live and die a vicar-general. He said he was drawn to visit Madame
Graslin by the desire of counselling so religious and benevolent a
person; and the bishop approved of his doing so,--Monsieur de Grancour’s
real object being to spend a few evenings with the Abbe Dutheil in
Veronique’s salon.

The two priests now came pretty regularly to see Madame Graslin, and
make her a sort of report about her poor and discuss the best means
of succoring and improving them. But Monsieur Graslin had now begun to
tighten his purse-strings, having made the discovery, in spite of the
innocent deceptions of his wife and her maid, that the money he paid did
not go solely for household expenses and for dress. He was angry when
he found out how much money his wife’s charities cost him; he called the
cook to account, inquired into all the details of the housekeeping, and
showed what a grand administrator he was by practically proving that his
house could be splendidly kept for three thousand francs a year. Then he
put his wife on an allowance of a hundred francs a month, and boasted of
his liberality in so doing. The office-boy, who liked flowers, was made
to take care of the garden on Sundays. Having dismissed the gardener,
Graslin used the greenhouse to store articles conveyed to him as
security for loans. He let the birds in the aviary die for want of
care, to avoid the cost of their food and attendance. And he even took
advantage of a winter when there was no ice, to give up his icehouse and
save the expense of filling it.

By 1828 there was not a single article of luxury in the house which he
had not in some way got rid of. Parsimony reigned unchecked in the hotel
Graslin. The master’s face, greatly improved during the three years
spent with his wife (who induced him to follow his physician’s advice),
now became redder, more fiery, more blotched than before. Business
had taken such proportions that it was necessary to promote the
boy-of-all-work to the position of cashier, and to find some stout
Auvergnat for the rougher service of the hotel Graslin.

Thus, four years after her marriage, this very rich woman could not
dispose of a single penny by her own will. The avarice of her husband
succeeded the avarice of her parents. Madame Graslin had never
understood the necessity of money until the time came when her
benevolence was checked.

By the beginning of the year 1828 Veronique had entirely recovered the
blooming health which had given such beauty to the innocent young girl
sitting at her window in the old house in the rue de la Cite; but by
this time she had acquired a fine literary education, and was fully
able to think and to speak. An excellent judgment gave real depth to
her words. Accustomed now to the little things of life, she wore the
fashions of the period with infinite grace. When she chanced about this
time to visit a salon she found herself--not without a certain inward
surprise--received by all with respectful esteem. These changed
feelings and this welcome were due to the two vicars-general and to
old Grossetete. Informed by them of her noble hidden life, and the
good deeds so constantly done in their midst, the bishop and a few
influential persons spoke of Madame Graslin as a flower of true piety,
a violet fragrant with virtues; in consequence of which, one of those
strong reactions set in, unknown to Veronique, which are none the less
solid and durable because they are long in coming. This change in public
opinion gave additional influence to Veronique’s salon, which was
now visited by all the chief persons in the society of the town, in
consequence of certain circumstances we shall now relate.

Toward the close of this year the young Vicomte de Grandville was sent
as deputy solicitor to the courts of Limoges. He came preceded by a
reputation always given to Parisians in the provinces. A few days after
his arrival, during a soiree at the prefecture, he made answer to
a rather foolish question, that the most able, intelligent, and
distinguished woman he had met in the town was Madame Graslin.

“Perhaps you think her the handsomest also?” said the wife of the
receiver-general.

“I cannot think so in your presence, madame,” he replied, “and therefore
I am in doubt. Madame Graslin possesses a beauty which need inspire no
jealousy, for it seldom shows itself: she is only beautiful to those she
loves; you are beautiful to all the world. When Madame Graslin’s soul
is moved by true enthusiasm, it sheds an expression upon her face which
changes it completely. Her countenance is like a landscape,--dull in
winter, glorious in summer; but the world will always see it in winter.
When she talks with friends on some literary or philosophical topic, or
on certain religious questions which interest her, she is roused into
appearing suddenly an unknown woman of marvellous beauty.”

This declaration, which was caused by observing the phenomenon that
formerly made Veronique so beautiful on her return from the holy table,
made a great noise in Limoges, where for a time the young deputy, to
whom the place of the _procureur-general_ was said to be promised,
played a leading part. In all provincial towns a man who rises a trifle
above others becomes, for a period more or less protracted, the object
of a liking which resembles enthusiasm, and which usually deceives the
object of this ephemeral worship. It is to this social caprice that we
owe so many local geniuses, soon ignored and their false reputations
mortified. The men whom women make the fashion in this way are oftener
strangers than compatriots.

In this particular case the admirers of the Vicomte de Grandville were
not mistaken; he was in truth a superior man. Madame Graslin was the
only woman he found in Limoges with whom he could exchange ideas and
keep up a varied conversation. A few months after his arrival, attracted
by the increasing charm of Veronique’s manners and conversation, he
proposed to the Abbe Dutheil, and a few other of the remarkable men
in Limoges, to meet in the evenings at Madame Graslin’s house and play
whist. At this time Madame Graslin was at home five evenings in the week
to visitors, reserving two free days, as she said, for herself.

When Madame Graslin had thus gathered about her the distinguished men we
have mentioned, others were not sorry to give themselves the reputation
of cleverness by seeking to join the same society. Veronique also
received three or four of the distinguished officers of the garrison and
staff; but the freedom of mind displayed by her guests, and the tacit
discretion enjoined by the manners of the best society, made her
extremely cautious as to the admission of those who now vied with each
other to obtain her invitations.

The other women in this provincial society were not without jealousy in
seeing Madame Graslin surrounded by the most agreeable and distinguished
men in the town; but by this time Veronique’s social power was all the
stronger because it was exclusive; she accepted the intimacy of four or
five women only, and these were strangers in Limoges who had come from
Paris with their husbands, and who held in horror the petty gossip of
provincial life. If any one outside of this little clique of superior
persons came in to make a visit, the conversation immediately changed,
and the habitues of the house talked commonplace.

The hotel Graslin thus became an oasis where intelligent minds found
relaxation and relief from the dulness of provincial life; where
persons connected with the government could express themselves freely
on politics without fear of having their words taken down and repeated;
where all could satirize that which provoked satire, and where each
individual abandoned his professional trammels and yielded himself up to
his natural self.

So, after being the most obscure young girl in all Limoges, considered
ugly, dull, and vacant, Madame Graslin, at the beginning of the year
1828, was regarded as one of the leading personages in the town, and the
most noted woman in society. No one went to see her in the mornings, for
all knew her habits of benevolence and the regularity of her religious
observances. She always went to early mass so as not to delay her
husband’s breakfast, for which, however, there was no fixed hour, though
she never failed to be present and to serve it herself. Graslin had
trained his wife to this little ceremony. He continued to praise her on
all occasions; he thought her perfect; she never asked him for anything;
he could pile up louis upon louis, and spread his investments over a
wide field of enterprise through his relations with the Brezacs;
he sailed with a fair wind and well freighted over the ocean of
commerce,--his intense business interest keeping him in the still,
though half-intoxicated, frenzy of gamblers watching events on the green
table of speculation.

During this happy period, and until the beginning of the year 1829,
Madame Graslin attained, in the eyes of her friends, to a degree of
beauty that was really extraordinary, the reasons of which they
were unable to explain. The blue of the iris expanded like a flower,
diminishing the dark circle of the pupil, and seeming to float in
a liquid and languishing light that was full of love. Her forehead,
illumined by thoughts and memories of happiness, was seen to whiten like
the zenith before the dawn, and its lines were purified by an inward
fire. Her face lost those heated brown tones which betoken a disturbance
of the liver,--that malady of vigorous constitutions, or of persons
whose soul is distressed and whose affections are thwarted. Her temples
became adorably fresh and pure; gleams of the celestial face of a
Raffaelle showed themselves now and then in hers,--a face hitherto
obscured by the malady of grief, as the canvas of the great master is
encrusted by time. Her hands seemed whiter; her shoulders took on an
exquisite fulness; her graceful, animated movements gave to her supple
figure its utmost charm.

The Limoges women accused her of being in love with Monsieur de
Grandville, who certainly paid her assiduous attention, to which
Veronique opposed all the barriers of a conscientious resistance. The
viscount professed for her one of those respectful attachments which
did not blind the habitual visitors of her salon. The priests and men of
sense saw plainly that this affection, which was love on the part of
the young man, did not go beyond the permissible line in Madame Graslin.
Weary at last of a resistance based on religious principle, the Vicomte
de Grandville consoled himself (to the knowledge of his intimates)
with other and easier friendships; which did not, however, lessen his
constant admiration and worship of the beautiful Madame Graslin,--such
was the term by which she was designated in 1829.

The most clear-sighted among those who surrounded her attributed the
change which rendered Veronique increasingly charming to her friends to
the secret delight which all women, even the most religious, feel when
they see themselves courted; and to the satisfaction of living at last
in a circle congenial to her mind, where the pleasure of exchanging
ideas and the happiness of being surrounded by intelligent and
well-informed men and true friends, whose attachment deepened day by
day, had dispersed forever the weary dulness of her life.

Perhaps, however, closer, more perceptive or sceptical observers were
needed than those who frequented the hotel Graslin, to detect
the barbaric grandeur, the plebeian force of the People which lay
deep-hidden in her soul. If sometimes her friends surprised her in a
torpor of meditation either gloomy or merely pensive, they knew she bore
upon her heart the miseries of others, and had doubtless that morning
been initiated in some fresh sorrow, or had penetrated to some haunt
where vices terrify the soul with their candor.

The viscount, now promoted to be _procureur-general_, would occasionally
blame her for certain unintelligent acts of charity by which, as he knew
from his secret police-reports, she had given encouragement to criminal
schemes.

“If you ever want money for any of your paupers, let me be a sharer in
your good deeds,” said old Grossetete, taking Veronique’s hand.

“Ah!” she replied with a sigh, “it is impossible to make everybody
rich.”

At the beginning of this year an event occurred which was destined
to change the whole interior life of this woman and to transform
the splendid expression of her countenance into something far more
interesting in the eyes of painters.

Becoming uneasy about his health, Graslin, to his wife’s despair, no
longer desired to live on the ground-floor. He returned to the
conjugal chamber and allowed himself to be nursed. The news soon spread
throughout Limoges that Madame Graslin was pregnant. Her sadness,
mingled with joy, struck the minds of her friends, who then for the
first time perceived that in spite of her virtues she had been happy in
the fact of living separate from her husband. Perhaps she had hoped
for some better fate ever since the time when, as it was known, the
attorney-general had declined to marry the richest heiress in the place,
in order to keep his loyalty to her.

From this suggestion there grew up in the minds of the profound
politicians who played their whist at the hotel Graslin a belief
that the viscount and the young wife had based certain hopes on the
ill-health of the banker which were now frustrated. The great agitations
which marked this period of Veronique’s life, the anxieties which a
first childbirth causes in every woman, and which, it is said, threatens
special danger when she is past her first youth, made her friends more
attentive than ever to her; they vied with each other in showing her
those little kindnesses which proved how warm and solid their affection
really was.




V. TASCHERON

It was in this year that Limoges witnessed a terrible event and the
singular drama of the Tascheron trial, in which the young Vicomte
de Grandville displayed the talents which afterwards made him
_procureur-general_.

An old man living in a lonely house in the suburb of Saint-Etienne was
murdered. A large fruit-garden lay between the road and the house, which
was also separated from the adjoining fields by a pleasure-garden, at
the farther end of which were several old and disused greenhouses. In
front of the house a rapid slope to the river bank gave a view of the
Vienne. The courtyard, which also sloped downward, ended at a little
wall, from which small columns rose at equal distances united by a
railing, more, however, for ornament than protection, for the bars of
the railing were of painted wood.

The old man, named Pingret, noted for his avarice, lived with a single
woman-servant, a country-girl who did all the work of the house. He
himself took care of his espaliers, trimmed his trees, gathered his
fruit, and sent it to Limoges for sale, together with early vegetables,
in the raising of which he excelled.

The niece of this old man, and his sole heiress, married to a gentleman
of small means living in Limoges, a Madame des Vanneaulx, had again and
again urged her uncle to hire a man to protect the house, pointing out
to him that he would thus obtain the profits of certain uncultivated
ground where he now grew nothing but clover. But the old man steadily
refused. More than once a discussion on the subject had cut into the
whist-playing of Limoges. A few shrewd heads declared that the old miser
buried his gold in that clover-field.

“If I were Madame des Vanneaulx,” said a wit, “I shouldn’t torment my
uncle about it; if somebody murders him, why, let him be murdered! I
should inherit the money.”

Madame des Vanneaulx, however, wanted to keep her uncle, after the
manner of the managers of the Italian Opera, who entreat their popular
tenor to wrap up his throat, and give him their cloak if he happens to
have forgotten his own. She had sent old Pingret a fine English mastiff,
which Jeanne Malassis, the servant-woman brought back the next day
saying:--

“Your uncle doesn’t want another mouth to feed.”

The result proved how well-founded were the niece’s fears. Pingret was
murdered on a dark night, in the middle of his clover-field, where
he may have been adding a few coins to a buried pot of gold. The
servant-woman, awakened by the struggle, had the courage to go to the
assistance of the old miser, and the murderer was under the necessity of
killing her to suppress her testimony. This necessity, which frequently
causes murderers to increase the number of their victims, is an evil
produced by the fear of the death penalty.

This double murder was attended by curious circumstances which told as
much for the prosecution as for the defence. After the neighbors had
missed seeing the little old Pingret and his maid for a whole morning
and had gazed at his house through the wooden railings as they passed
it, and seen that, contrary to custom, the doors and windows were
still closed, an excitement began in the Faubourg Saint-Etienne which
presently reached the rue de la Cloche, where Madame des Vanneaulx
resided.

The niece was always in expectation of some such catastrophe, and she at
once notified the officers of the law, who went to the house and broke
in the gate. They soon discovered in a clover patch four holes, and
near two of these holes lay the fragments of earthenware pots, which had
doubtless been full of gold the night before. In the other two holes,
scarcely covered up, were the bodies of old Pingret and Jeanne Malassis,
who had been buried with their clothes on. The poor girl had run to her
master’s assistance in her night-gown, with bare feet.

While the _procureur-du-roi_, the commissary of police, and the
examining magistrate were gathering all particulars for the basis of
their action, the luckless des Vanneaulx picked up the broken pots and
calculated from their capacity the sum lost. The magistrates admitted
the correctness of their calculations and entered the sum stolen on
their records as, in all probability, a thousand gold coins to each pot.
But were these coins forty-eight or forty, twenty-four or twenty francs
in value? All expectant heirs in Limoges sympathized with the des
Vanneaulx. The Limousin imagination was greatly stirred by the spectacle
of the broken pots. As for old Pingret, who often sold vegetables
himself in the market, lived on bread and onions, never spent more than
three hundred francs a year, obliged and disobliged no one, and had
never done one atom of good in the suburb of Saint-Etienne where he
lived, his death did not excite the slightest regret. Poor Jeanne
Malassis’ heroism, which the old miser, had she saved him, would
certainly not have rewarded, was thought rash; the number of souls who
admired it was small in comparison with those who said: “For my part, I
should have stayed in my bed.”

The police found neither pen nor ink wherewith to write their report in
the bare, dilapidated, cold, and dismal house. Observing persons and the
heir might then have noticed a curious inconsistency which may be seen
in certain misers. The dread the little old man had of the slightest
outlay showed itself in the non-repaired roof which opened its sides
to the light and the rain and snow; in the cracks of the walls; in the
rotten doors ready to fall at the slightest shock; in the windows, where
the broken glass was replaced by paper not even oiled. All the windows
were without curtains, the fireplaces without mirrors or andirons; the
hearth was garnished with one log of wood and a few little sticks almost
caked with the soot which had fallen down the chimney. There were two
rickety chairs, two thin couches, a few cracked pots and mended plates,
a one-armed armchair, a dilapidated bed, the curtains of which time had
embroidered with a bold hand, a worm-eaten secretary where the miser
kept his seeds, a pile of linen thickened by many darns, and a heap
of ragged garments, which existed only by the will of their master; he
being dead they dropped into shreds, powder, chemical dissolution, in
fact I know not into what form of utter ruin, as soon as the heir or the
officers of the law laid rough hands upon them; they disappeared as if
afraid of being publicly sold.

The population at Limoges was much concerned for these worthy des
Vanneaulx, who had two children; and yet, no sooner did the law lay
hands upon the reputed doer of the crime than the guilty personage
absorbed attention, became a hero, and the des Vanneaulx were relegated
into a corner of the picture.

Toward the end of March Madame Graslin began to feel some of those pains
which precede a first confinement and cannot be concealed. The inquiry
as to the murder was then going on, but the murderer had not as yet been
arrested.

Veronique now received her friends in her bedroom, where they played
whist. For several days past Madame Graslin had not left the house, and
she seemed to be tormented by several of those caprices attributed to
women in her condition. Her mother came to see her almost every day, and
the two women remained for hours in consultation.

It was nine o’clock, and the card tables were still without players, for
every one was talking of the murder. Monsieur de Grandville entered the
room.

“We have arrested the murderer of old Pingret,” he said, joyfully.

“Who is it?” was asked on all sides.

“A porcelain workman; a man whose character has always been excellent,
and who was in a fair way to make his fortune. He worked in your
husband’s old factory,” added Monsieur de Grandville, turning to Madame
Graslin.

“What is his name?” asked Veronique, in a weak voice.

“Jean-Francois Tascheron.”

“Unhappy man!” she answered. “Yes, I have often seen him; my poor father
recommended him to my care as some one to be looked after.”

“He left the factory before Sauviat’s death,” said her mother, “and went
to that of Messrs. Philippart, who offered him higher wages-- But my
daughter is scarcely well enough for this exciting conversation,” she
added, calling attention to Madame Graslin, whose face was as white as
her sheets.

After that evening Mere Sauviat gave up her own home, and came, in spite
of her sixty-six years, to stay with her daughter and nurse her through
her confinement. She never left the room; Madame Graslin’s friends
found the old woman always at the bed’s head busy with her eternal
knitting,--brooding over Veronique as she did when the girl had the
small-pox, answering questions for her and often refusing to admit
visitors. The maternal and filial love of mother and daughter was so
well known in Limoges that these actions of Madame Sauviat caused no
comment.

A few days later, when the viscount, thinking to amuse the invalid,
began to relate details which the whole town were eagerly demanding
about Jean-Francois Tascheron, Madame Sauviat again stopped him hastily,
declaring that he would give her daughter bad dreams. Veronique,
however, looking fixedly at Monsieur de Grandville, asked him to finish
what he was saying. Thus her friends, and she herself, were the first
to know the results of the preliminary inquiry, which would soon be
made public. The following is a brief epitome of the facts on which the
indictment found against the prisoner was based.

Jean-Francois Tascheron was the son of a small farmer burdened with a
family, who lived in the village of Montegnac.

Twenty years before this crime, which was famous throughout the
Limousin, the canton of Montegnac was known for its evil ways. The
saying was proverbial in Limoges that out of one hundred criminals in
the department fifty belonged to the arrondissement of Montegnac. Since
1816, however, two years after a priest named Bonnet was sent there as
rector, it had lost its bad reputation, and the inhabitants no longer
sent their heavy contingent to the assizes. This change was widely
attributed to the influence acquired by the rector, Monsieur Bonnet,
over a community which had lately been a hotbed for evil-minded persons
whose actions dishonored the whole region. The crime of Jean-Francois
Tascheron brought back upon Montegnac its former ill-savor.

By a curious trick of chance, the Tascherons were almost the only family
in this village community who had retained through its evil period the
old rigid morals and religious habits which are noticed by the observers
of to-day to be rapidly disappearing throughout the country districts.
This family had therefore formed a point of reliance to the rector, who
naturally bore it on his heart. The Tascherons, remarkable for their
uprightness, their union, their love of work, had never given other than
good examples to Jean-Francois. Induced by the praiseworthy ambition of
earning his living by a trade, the lad had left his native village, to
the regret of his parents and friends, who greatly loved him, and had
come to Limoges. During his two years’ apprenticeship in a porcelain
factory, his conduct was worthy of all praise; no apparent ill-conduct
had led up to the horrible crime which was now to end his life. On the
contrary, Jean-Francois Tascheron had given the time which other workmen
were in the habit of spending in wine-shops and debauchery to study and
self-improvement.

The most searching and minute inquiry on the part of the provincial
authorities (who have plenty of time on their hands) failed to throw any
light on the secrets of the young man’s life. When the mistress of the
humble lodging-house in which he lived was questioned she said she
had never had a lodger whose moral conduct was as blameless. He was
naturally amiable and gentle, and sometimes gay. About a year before
the commission of the crime, his habits changed: he slept away from home
several times a month and often for consecutive nights; but where she
did not know, though she thought, from the state of his shoes when he
returned, that he must have been into the country. She noticed that
although he appeared to have left the town, he never wore his heavy
boots, but always a pair of light shoes. He shaved before starting, and
put on clean linen. Hearing this, the police turned their attention to
houses of ill-fame and questionable resorts; but Jean-Francois Tascheron
was found to be wholly unknown among them. The authorities then made a
search through the working-girl and _grisette_ class; but none of these
women had had relations with the accused.

A crime without a motive is unheard of, especially in a young man whose
desire for education and whose laudable ambition gave him higher ideas
and a superior judgment to that of other workmen. The police and the
examining justice, finding themselves balked in the above directions,
attributed the murder to a passion for gambling; but after the most
searching inquiries it was proved that Tascheron never played cards.

At first Jean-Francois entrenched himself in a system of flat denials,
which, of course, in presence of a jury, would fall before proof; they
seemed to show the collusion of some person either well versed in law or
gifted with an intelligent mind. The following are the chief proofs the
prosecution were prepared to present, and they are, as is frequently the
case in trials for murder, both important and trifling; to wit:--

The absence of Tascheron during the night of the crime, and his refusal
to say where he was, for the accused did not offer to set up an alibi;
a fragment of his blouse, torn off by the servant-woman in the struggle,
found close by on a tree to which the wind had carried it; his presence
that evening near Pingret’s house, which was noticed by passers and
by persons living in the neighborhood, though it might not have been
remembered unless for the crime; a false key made by Tascheron which
fitted the door opening to the fields; this key was found carefully
buried two feet below one of the miser’s holes, where Monsieur des
Vanneaulx, digging deep to make sure there was not another layer of
treasure-pots, chanced to find it; the police, after many researches,
found the different persons who had furnished Tascheron with the iron,
loaned him the vice, and given him the file, with which the key was
presumably made.

The key was the first real clue. It put the police on the track of
Tascheron, whom they arrested on the frontiers of the department, in a
wood where he was awaiting the passage of a diligence. An hour later he
would have started for America.

Besides all this, and in spite of the care with which certain footmarks
in the ploughed field and on the mud of the road had been effaced and
covered up, the searchers had found in several places the imprint of
shoes, which they carefully measured and described, and which were
afterwards found to correspond with the soles of Tascheron’s shoes
taken from his lodgings. This fatal proof confirmed the statement of
the landlady. The authorities now attributed the crime to some foreign
influence, and not to the man’s personal intention; they believed he had
accomplices, basing this idea on the impossibility of one man carrying
away the buried money; for however strong he might be, no man could
carry twenty-five thousand francs in gold to any distance. If each pot
contained, as it was supposed to have done, about that sum, this would
have required four trips to and from the clover-patch. Now, a singular
circumstance went far to prove the hour at which the crime was
committed. In the terror Jeanne Malassis must have felt on hearing her
master’s cries, she knocked over, as she rose, the table at her bedside,
on which lay her watch, the only present the miser had given her in five
years. The mainspring was broken by the shock, and the hands had stopped
at two in the morning. By the middle of March (the date of the murder)
daylight dawns between five and six o’clock. To whatever distance the
gold had been carried, Tascheron could not possibly, under any apparent
hypothesis, have transported it alone.

The care with which some of the footsteps were effaced, while others,
to which Tascheron’s shoes fitted, remained, certainly pointed to some
mysterious assistant. Forced into hypotheses, the authorities once more
attributed the crime to a desperate passion; not finding any trace of
the object of such a passion in the lower classes, they began to look
higher. Perhaps some bourgeoise, sure of the discretion of a man who
had the face and bearing of a hero, had been drawn into a romance the
outcome of which was crime.

This supposition was to some extent justified by the facts of the
murder. The old man had been killed by blows with a spade; evidently,
therefore, the murder was sudden, unpremeditated, fortuitous. The lovers
might have planned the robbery, but not the murder. The lover and the
miser, Tascheron and Pingret, each under the influence of his master
passion, must have met by the buried hoards, both drawn thither by the
gleaming of gold on the utter darkness of that fatal night.

In order to obtain, if possible, some light on this latter supposition,
the authorities arrested and kept in solitary confinement a sister of
Jean-Francois, to whom he was much attached, hoping to obtain through
her some clue to the mystery of her brother’s private life. Denise
Tascheron took refuge in total denial of any knowledge whatever, which
gave rise to a suspicion that she did know something of the causes of
the crime, although in fact she knew nothing.

The accused himself showed points of character that were rare amongst
the peasantry. He baffled the cleverest police-spies employed against
him, without knowing their real character. To the leading minds of the
magistracy his guilt seemed caused by the influence of passion, and not
by necessity or greed, as in the case of ordinary murderers, who usually
pass through stages of crime and punishment before they commit the
supreme deed. Active and careful search was made in following up this
idea; but the uniform discretion of the prisoner gave no clue whatever
to his prosecutors. The plausible theory of his attachment to a woman of
the upper classes having once been admitted, Jean-Francois was subjected
to the most insidious examination upon it; but his caution triumphed
over all the moral tortures the examining judge applied to him. When,
making a final effort, that official told him that the person for whom
he had committed the crime was discovered and arrested, his face did not
change, and he replied ironically:--

“I should very much like to see him.”

When the public were informed of these circumstances, many persons
adopted the suspicions of the magistrates, which seemed to be confirmed
by Tascheron’s savage obstinacy in giving no account of himself.
Increased interest was felt in a young man who was now a problem. It is
easy to see how these elements kept public curiosity on the _qui vive_,
and with what eager interest the trial would be followed. But in spite
of every effort on the part of the police, the prosecution stopped short
on the threshold of hypothesis; it did not venture to go farther into
the mystery where all was obscurity and danger. In certain judicial
cases half-certainties are not sufficient for the judges to proceed
upon. Nevertheless the case was ordered for trial, in hopes that the
truth would come to the surface when the case was brought into court, an
ordeal under which many criminals contradict themselves.

Monsieur Graslin was one of the jury; so that either through her husband
or through Monsieur de Grandville, the public prosecutor, Veronique knew
all the details of the criminal trial which, for a fortnight, kept the
department, and we may say all France, in a state of excitement. The
attitude maintained by the accused seemed to justify the theory of the
prosecution. More than once when the court opened, his eyes turned upon
the brilliant assemblage of women who came to find emotions in a real
drama, as though he sought for some one. Each time that the man’s
glance, clear, but impenetrable, swept along those elegant ranks, a
movement was perceptible, a sort of shock, as though each woman feared
she might appear his accomplice under the inquisitorial eyes of judge
and prosecutor.

The hitherto useless efforts of the prosecution were now made public,
also the precautions taken by the criminal to ensure the success of his
crime. It was shown that Jean-Francois Tascheron had obtained a passport
for North America some months before the crime was committed. Thus the
plan of leaving France was fully formed; the object of his passion must
therefore be a married woman; for he would have no reason to flee the
country with a young girl. Possibly the crime had this one object in
view, namely, to obtain sufficient means to support this unknown woman
in comfort.

The prosecution had found no passport issued to a woman for North
America. In case she had obtained one in Paris, the registers of that
city were searched, also those of the towns contingent to Limoges, but
without result. All the shrewdest minds in the community followed
the case with deep attention. While the more virtuous dames of
the department attributed the wearing of pumps on a muddy road (an
inexplicable circumstance in the ordinary lives of such shoes) to the
necessity of noiselessly watching old Pingret, the men pointed out that
pumps were very useful in silently passing through a house--up stairways
and along corridors--without discovery.

So Jean-Francois Tascheron and his mistress (by this time she was young,
beautiful, romantic, for every one made a portrait of her) had evidently
intended to escape with only one passport, to which they would forge the
additional words, “and wife.” The card tables were deserted at night in
the various social salons, and malicious tongues discussed what women
were known in March, 1829, to have gone to Paris, and what others could
be making, openly or secretly, preparations for a journey. Limoges might
be said to be enjoying its Fualdes trial, with an unknown and mysterious
Madame Manson for an additional excitement. Never was any provincial
town so stirred to its depths as Limoges after each day’s session.
Nothing was talked of but the trial, all the incidents of which
increased the interest felt for the accused, whose able answers,
learnedly taken up, turned and twisted and commented upon, gave rise
to ample discussions. When one of the jurors asked Tascheron why he had
taken a passport for America, the man replied that he had intended
to establish a porcelain manufactory in that country. Thus, without
committing himself to any line of defence, he covered his accomplice,
leaving it to be supposed that the crime was committed, if at all, to
obtain funds for this business venture.

In the midst of such excitement it was impossible for Veronique’s
friends to refrain from discussing in her presence the progress of the
case and the reticence of the criminal. Her health was extremely feeble;
but the doctor having advised her going out into the fresh air, she
had on one occasion taken her mother’s arm and walked as far as Madame
Sauviat’s house in the country, where she rested. On her return she
endeavored to keep about until her husband came to his dinner, which she
always served him herself. On this occasion Graslin, being detained in
the court-room, did not come in till eight o’clock. She went into the
dining-room as usual, and was present at a discussion which took place
among a number of her friends who had assembled there.

“If my poor father were still living,” she remarked to them, “we should
know more about the matter; possibly this man might never have become a
criminal. I think you have all taken a singular idea about the matter.
You insist that love is at the bottom of the crime, and I agree with you
there; but why do you think this unknown person is a married woman? He
may have loved some young girl whose father and mother would not let her
marry him.”

“A young girl could, sooner or later, have married him legitimately,”
 replied Monsieur de Grandville. “Tascheron has no lack of patience; he
had time to make sufficient means to support her while awaiting the
time when all girls are at liberty to marry against the wishes of their
parents; he need not have committed a crime to obtain her.”

“I did not know that a girl could marry in that way,” said Madame
Graslin; “but how is it that in a town like this, where all things are
known, and where everybody sees everything that happens to his neighbor,
not the slightest clue to this woman has been obtained? In order to
love, persons must see each other and consequently be seen. What do you
really think, you magistrates?” she added, plunging a fixed look into
the eyes of the _procureur-general_.

“We think that the woman belongs to the bourgeois or the commercial
class.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said Madame Graslin. “A woman of that class
does not have elevated sentiments.”

This reply drew all eyes on Veronique, and the whole company waited for
an explanation of so paradoxical a speech.

“During the hours I lie awake at night I have not been able to keep my
mind from dwelling on this mysterious affair,” she said slowly, “and I
think I have fathomed Tascheron’s motive. I believe the person he loves
is a young girl, because a married woman has interests, if not feelings,
which partly fill her heart and prevent her from yielding so completely
to a great passion as to leave her home. There is such a thing as a love
proceeding from passion which is half maternal, and to me it is evident
that this man was loved by a woman who wished to be his prop, his
Providence. She must have put into her passion something of the genius
that inspires the work of artists and poets, the creative force which
exists in woman under another form; for it is her mission to create men,
not things. Our works are our children; our children are the pictures,
books, and statues of our lives. Are we not artists in their earliest
education? I say that this unknown woman, if she is not a young girl,
has never been a mother but is filled with the maternal instinct; she
has loved this man to form him, to develop him. It needs a feminine
element in you men of law to detect these shades of motive, which too
often escape you. If I had been your deputy,” she said, looking straight
at the _procureur-general_, “I should have found the guilty woman, if
indeed there is any guilt about it. I agree with the Abbe Dutheil that
these lovers meant to fly to America with the money of old Pingret. The
theft led to the murder by the fatal logic which the punishment of
death inspires. And so,” she added with an appealing look at Monsieur de
Grandville, “I think it would be merciful in you to abandon the theory
of premeditation, for in so doing you would save the man’s life. He is
evidently a fine man in spite of his crime; he might, perhaps, repair
that crime by a great repentance if you gave him time. The works of
repentance ought to count for something in the judgment of the law. In
these days is there nothing better for a human being to do than to give
his life, or build, as in former times, a cathedral of Milan, to expiate
his crimes?”

“Your ideas are noble, madame,” said Monsieur de Grandville, “but,
premeditation apart, Tascheron would still be liable to the penalty of
death on account of the other serious and proved circumstances attending
the crime,--such as forcible entrance and burglary at night.”

“Then you think that he will certainly be found guilty?” she said,
lowering her eyelids.

“I am certain of it,” he said; “the prosecution has a strong case.”

A slight tremor rustled Madame Graslin’s dress.

“I feel cold,” she said. Taking her mother’s arm she went to bed.

“She seemed quite herself this evening,” said her friends.

The next day Veronique was much worse and kept her bed. When her
physician expressed surprise at her condition she said, smiling:--

“I told you that that walk would do me no good.”

Ever since the opening of the trial Tascheron’s demeanor had been
equally devoid of hypocrisy or bravado. Veronique’s physician, intending
to divert his patient’s mind, tried to explain this demeanor, which the
man’s defenders were making the most of. The prisoner was misled, said
the doctor, by the talents of his lawyer, and was sure of acquittal;
at times his face expressed a hope that was greater than that of merely
escaping death. The antecedents of the man (who was only twenty-three
years old) were so at variance with the crime now charged to him
that his legal defenders claimed his present bearing to be a proof of
innocence; besides, the overwhelming circumstantial proofs of the theory
of the prosecution were made to appear so weak by his advocate that the
man was buoyed up by the lawyer’s arguments. To save his client’s
life the lawyer made the most of the evident want of premeditation;
hypothetically he admitted the premeditation of the robbery but not of
the murders, which were evidently (no matter who was the guilty party)
the result of two unexpected struggles. Success, the doctor said, was
really as doubtful for one side as for the other.

After this visit of her physician Veronique received that of the
_procureur-general_, who was in the habit of coming in every morning on
his way to the court-room.

“I have read the arguments of yesterday,” she said to him, “and to-day,
as I suppose, the evidence for the defence begins. I am so interested in
that man that I should like to have him saved. Couldn’t you for once
in your life forego a triumph? Let his lawyer beat you. Come, make me a
present of the man’s life, and perhaps you shall have mine some day. The
able presentation of the defence by Tascheron’s lawyer really raises a
strong doubt, and--”

“Why, you are quite agitated,” said the viscount somewhat surprised.

“Do you know why?” she answered. “My husband has just remarked a most
horrible coincidence, which is really enough in the present state of my
nerves, to cause my death. If you condemn this man to death it will be
on the very day when I shall give birth to my child.”

“But I can’t change the laws,” said the lawyer.

“Ah! you don’t know how to love,” she retorted, closing her eyes; then
she turned her head on the pillow and made him an imperative sign to
leave the room.

Monsieur Graslin pleaded strongly but in vain with his fellow-jurymen
for acquittal, giving a reason which some of them adopted; a reason
suggested by his wife:--

“If we do not condemn this man to death, but allow him to live, the des
Vanneaulx will in the end recover their property.”

This weighty argument made a division of the jury, into five for
condemnation against seven for acquittal, which necessitated an appeal
to the court; but the judge sided with the minority. According to the
legal system of that day this action led to a verdict of guilty. When
sentence was passed upon him Tascheron flew into a fury which was
natural enough in a man full of life and strength, but which the court
and jury and lawyers and spectators had rarely witnessed in persons who
were thought to be unjustly condemned.




VI. DISCUSSIONS AND CHRISTIAN SOLICITUDES

In spite of the verdict, the drama of this crime did not seem over so
far as the community was concerned. So complicated a case gave rise, as
usually happens under such circumstances, to two sets of diametrically
opposite opinions as to the guilt of the hero, whom some declared to be
an innocent and ill-used victim, and others the worst of criminals.

The liberals held for Tascheron’s innocence, less from conviction than
for the satisfaction of opposing the government.

“What an outrage,” they said, “to condemn a man because his footprint
is the size of another man’s footprint; or because he will not tell you
where he spent the night, as if all young men would not rather die than
compromise a woman. They prove he borrowed tools and bought iron, but
have they proved he made that key? They find a bit of blue linen hanging
to the branch of a tree, possibly put there by old Pingret himself
to scare the crows, though it happens to match a tear in Tascheron’s
blouse. Is a man’s life to depend on such things as these? Jean-Francois
denies everything, and the prosecution has not produced a single witness
who saw the crime or anything relating to it.”

They talked over, enlarged upon, and paraphrased the arguments of the
defence. “Old Pingret! what was he?--a cracked money box!” said the
strong-minded. A few of the more determined progressists, denying
the sacred laws of property, which the Saint-Simonians were already
attacking under their abstract theories of political economy, went
further.

“Pere Pingret,” they said, “was the real author of the crime. By
hoarding his gold that man robbed the nation. What enterprises might
have been made fruitful by his useless money! He had barred the way of
industry, and was justly punished.”

They pitied the poor murdered servant-woman, but Denise, Tascheron’s
sister, who resisted the wiles of lawyers and did not give a single
answer at the trial without long consideration of what she ought to say,
excited the deepest interest. She became in their minds a figure to
be compared (though in another sense) with Jeannie Deans, whose piety,
grace, modesty and beauty she possessed.

Francois Tascheron continued, therefore, to excite the curiosity of
not only all the town but all the department, and a few romantic women
openly testified their admiration for him.

“If there is really in all this a love for some woman high above him,”
 they said, “then he is surely no ordinary man, and you will see that he
will die well.”

The question, “Will he speak out,--will he not speak?” gave rise to many
a bet.

Since the burst of rage with which Tascheron received his sentence, and
which was so violent that it might have been fatal to persons about him
in the court-room if the gendarmes had not been there to master him, the
condemned man threatened all who came near him with the fury of a
wild beast; so that the jailers were obliged to put him into a
straight-jacket, as much to protect his life as their own from the
effects of his anger. Prevented by that controlling power from doing
violence, Tascheron gave vent to his despair by convulsive jerks which
horrified his guardians, and by words and looks which the middle-ages
would have attributed to demoniacal possession. He was so young that
many women thought pitifully of a life so full of passion about to be
cut off forever. “The Last Day of a Condemned Man,” that mournful
elegy, that useless plea against the penalty of death (the mainstay of
society!), which had lately been published, as if expressly to meet this
case, was the topic of all conversations.

But, above all, in the mind of every one, stood that invisible unknown
woman, her feet in blood, raised aloft by the trial as it were on a
pedestal,--torn, no doubt, by horrible inward anguish and condemned to
absolute silence within her home. Who was this Medea whom the public
well-nigh admired,--the woman with that impenetrable brow, that white
breast covering a heart of steel? Perhaps she was the sister or the
cousin or the daughter or the wife of this one or of that one among
them! Alarm seemed to creep into the bosom of families. As Napoleon
finely said, it is especially in the domain of the imagination that the
power of the Unknown is immeasurable.

As for the hundred thousand francs stolen from Monsieur and Madame des
Vanneaulx no efforts of the police could find them; and the obstinate
silence of the criminal gave no clue. Monsieur de Grandville tried the
common means of holding out hopes of commutation of the sentence in case
of confession; but when he went to see the prisoner and suggest it the
latter received him with such furious cries and epileptic contortions,
such rage at being powerless to take him by the throat, that he could do
nothing.

The law could only look to the influence of the Church at the last
moment. The des Vanneaulx had frequently consulted with the Abbe Pascal,
chaplain of the prison. This priest was not without the faculty of
making prisoners listen to him, and he religiously braved Tascheron’s
violence, trying to get in a few words amid the storms of that powerful
nature in convulsion. But this struggle of spiritual fatherhood against
the hurricane of unchained passions, overcame the poor abbe completely.

“The man has had his paradise here below,” said the old man, in his
gentle voice.

Little Madame des Vanneaulx consulted her friends as to whether she
ought to try a visit herself to the criminal. Monsieur des Vanneaulx
talked of offering terms. In his anxiety to recover the money he
actually went to Monsieur de Grandville and asked for the pardon of his
uncle’s murderer if the latter would make restitution of the hundred
thousand francs. The _procureur-general_ replied that the majesty of the
crown did not stoop to such compromises.

The des Vanneaulx then had recourse to the lawyer who had defended
Tascheron, and to him they offered ten per cent of whatever sum he could
recover. This lawyer was the only person before whom Tascheron was not
violent. The heirs authorized him to offer the prisoner an additional
ten per cent to be paid to his family. In spite of all these inducements
and his own eloquence, the lawyer could obtain nothing whatever from his
client. The des Vanneaulx were furious; they anathematized the unhappy
man.

“He is not only a murderer, but he has no sense of decency,” cried
Madame des Vanneaulx (ignorant of Fualdes’ famous complaint), when she
received word of the failure of the Abbe Pascal’s efforts, and was told
there was no hope of a reversal of the sentence by the court of appeals.

“What good will our money do him in the place he is going to?” said
her husband. “Murder can be conceived of, but useless theft is
inconceivable. What days we live in, to be sure! To think that people in
good society actually take an interest in such a wretch!”

“He has no honor,” said Madame des Vanneaulx.

“But perhaps the restitution would compromise the woman he loves,” said
an old maid.

“We would keep his secret,” returned Monsieur des Vanneaulx.

“Then you would be compounding a felony,” remarked a lawyer.

“Oh, the villain!” was Monsieur des Vanneaulx’s usual conclusion.

One of Madame Graslin’s female friends related to her with much
amusement these discussions of the des Vanneaulx. This lady, who was
very intelligent, and one of those persons who form ideals and desire
that all things should attain perfection, regretted the violence and
savage temper of the condemned; she would rather he had been cold and
calm and dignified, she said.

“Do you not see,” replied Veronique, “that he is thus avoiding their
temptations and foiling their efforts? He is making himself a wild beast
for a purpose.”

“At any rate,” said the lady, “he is not a well-bred man; he is only a
workman.”

“If he had been a well-bred man,” said Madame Graslin, “he would soon
have sacrificed that unknown woman.”

These events, discussed and turned and twisted in every salon, every
household, commented on in a score of ways, stripped bare by the
cleverest tongues in the community, gave, of course, a cruel interest
to the execution of the criminal, whose appeal was rejected after two
months’ delay by the upper court. What would probably be his demeanor in
his last moments? Would he speak out? Would he contradict himself? How
would the bets be decided? Who would go to see him executed, and who
would not go, and how could it be done? The position of the localities,
which in Limoges spares a criminal the anguish of a long distance to the
scaffold, lessens the number of spectators. The law courts which adjoin
the prison stand at the corner of the rue du Palais and the rue du
Pont-Herisson. The rue du Palais is continued in a straight line by the
short rue de Monte-a-Regret, which leads to the place des Arenes, where
the executions take place, and which probably owes its name to that
circumstances. There is therefore but little distance to go, few houses
to pass, and few windows to look from. No person in good society would
be willing to mingle in the crowd which would fill the streets.

But the expected execution was, to the great astonishment of the whole
town, put off from day to day for the following reason:--

The repentance and resignation of great criminals on their way to death
is one of the triumphs which the Church reserves for itself,--a triumph
which seldom misses its effect on the popular mind. Repentance is so
strong a proof of the power of religious ideas--taken apart from all
Christian interest, though that, of course, is the chief object of
the Church--that the clergy are always distressed by a failure on such
occasions. In July, 1829, such a failure was aggravated by the spirit of
party which envenomed every detail in the life of the body politic. The
liberal party rejoiced in the expectation that the priest-party (a term
invented by Montlosier, a royalist who went over to the constitutionals,
and was dragged by them far beyond his wishes),--that the priests would
fail on so public an occasion before the eyes of the people. Parties _en
masse_ commit infamous actions which would cover a single man with shame
and opprobrium; therefore when one man alone stands in his guilt
before the eyes of the masses, he becomes a Robespierre, a Jeffries, a
Laubardemont, a species of expiatory altar on which all secret guilts
hang their _ex-votos_.

The authorities, sympathizing with the Church, delayed the execution,
partly in the hope of gaining some conclusive information for
themselves, and partly to allow religion an opportunity to prevail.

Nevertheless, their power was not unlimited, and the sentence must
sooner or later be carried out. The same liberals who, out of mere
opposition, had declared Tascheron innocent, and who had done their best
to break down the verdict, now clamored because the sentence was not
executed. When the opposition is consistent it invariably falls into
such unreasonableness, because its object is not to have right on its
own side, but to harass the authorities and put them in the wrong.

Accordingly, about the beginning of August, the government officials
felt their hand forced by that clamor, so often stupid, called “public
opinion.” The day for the execution was named. In this extremity the
Abbe Dutheil took upon himself to propose to the bishop a last resource,
the adoption of which caused the introduction into this judicial drama
of a remarkable personage, who serves as a bond between all the figures
brought upon the scene of it, and who, by ways familiar to Providence,
was destined to lead Madame Graslin along a path where her virtues were
to shine with greater brilliancy as a noble benefactress and an angelic
Christian woman.

The episcopal palace at Limoges stands on a hill which slopes to the
banks of the Vienne; and its gardens, supported by strong walls topped
with a balustrade, descend to the river by terrace after terrace,
according to the natural lay of the land. The rise of this hill is such
that the suburb of Saint-Etienne on the opposite bank seems to lie at
the foot of the lower terrace. From there, according to the direction in
which a person walks, the Vienne can be seen either in a long stretch
or directly across it, in the midst of a fertile panorama. On the west,
after the river leaves the embankment of the episcopal gardens, it turns
toward the town in a graceful curve which winds around the suburb
of Saint-Martial. At a short distance beyond that suburb is a pretty
country house called Le Cluseau, the walls of which can be seen from
the lower terrace of the bishop’s palace, appearing, by an effect of
distance, to blend with the steeples of the suburb. Opposite to Le
Cluseau is the sloping island, covered with poplar and other trees,
which Veronique in her girlish youth had named the Ile de France. To the
east the distance is closed by an ampitheatre of hills.

The magic charm of the site and the rich simplicity of the building
make this episcopal palace one of the most interesting objects in a town
where the other edifices do not shine, either through choice of material
or architecture.

Long familiarized with the aspects which commend these gardens to all
lovers of the picturesque, the Abbe Dutheil, who had induced the Abbe de
Grancour to accompany him, descended from terrace to terrace, paying no
attention to the ruddy colors, the orange tones, the violet tints, which
the setting sun was casting on the old walls and balustrades of the
gardens, on the river beneath them, and, in the distance, on the houses
of the town. He was in search of the bishop, who was sitting on the
lower terrace under a grape-vine arbor, where he often came to take his
dessert and enjoy the charm of a tranquil evening. The poplars on the
island seemed at this moment to divide the waters with the lengthening
shadow of their yellowing heads, to which the sun was lending the
appearance of a golden foliage. The setting rays, diversely reflected on
masses of different greens, produced a magnificent harmony of melancholy
tones. At the farther end of the valley a sheet of sparkling water
ruffled by the breeze brought out the brown stretch of roofs in the
suburb of Saint-Etienne. The steeples and roofs of Saint-Martial, bathed
in light, showed through the tracery of the grape-vine arbor. The soft
murmur of the provincial town, half hidden by the bend of the river, the
sweetness of the balmy air, all contributed to plunge the prelate into
the condition of quietude prescribed by medical writers on digestion;
seemingly his eyes were resting mechanically on the right bank of the
river, just where the long shadows of the island poplars touched it on
the side toward Saint-Etienne, near the field where the twofold
murder of old Pingret and his servant had been committed. But when
his momentary felicity was interrupted by the arrival of the two grand
vicars, and the difficulties they brought to him to solve, it was
seen his eyes were filled with impenetrable thoughts. The two priests
attributed this abstraction to the fact of being bored, whereas, on the
contrary, the prelate was absorbed in seeing in the sands of the Vienne
the solution of the enigma then so anxiously sought for by the officers
of justice, the des Vanneaulx, and the community at large.

“Monsieur,” said the Abbe de Grancour, approaching the bishop, “it is
all useless; we shall certainly have the distress of seeing that
unhappy Tascheron die an unbeliever. He vociferates the most horrible
imprecations against religion; he insults that poor Abbe Pascal; he
spits upon the crucifix; and means to die denying all, even hell.”

“He will shock the populace on the scaffold,” said the Abbe Dutheil.
“The great scandal and horror his conduct will excite may hide our
defeat and powerlessness. In fact, as I have just been saying to
Monsieur de Grancour, this very spectacle may drive other sinners into
the arms of the Church.”

Troubled by these words, the bishop laid down upon a rustic wooden table
the bunch of grapes at which he was picking, and wiped his fingers as he
made a sign to the two grand vicars to be seated.

“The Abbe Pascal did not take a wise course,” he said.

“He is actually ill in his bed from the effects of his last scene with
the man,” said the Abbe de Grancour. “If it were not for that we might
get him to explain more clearly the difficulties that have defeated all
the various efforts monseigneur ordered him to make.”

“The condemned man sings obscene songs at the highest pitch of his voice
as soon as he sees any one of us, so as to drown out every word we try
to say to him,” said a young priest who was sitting beside the bishop.

This young man, who was gifted with a charming personality, had his
right arm resting on the table, while his white hand dropped negligently
on the bunches of grapes, seeking the ripest, with the ease and
assurance of an habitual guest or favorite. He was both to the prelate,
being the younger brother of Baron Eugene de Rastignac, to whom ties of
family and also of affection had long bound the Bishop of Limoges. Aware
of the want of fortune which devoted this young man to the Church, the
bishop took him as his private secretary to give him time to wait for
eventual preferment. The Abbe Gabriel bore a name which would lead him
sooner or later to the highest dignities of the Church.

“Did you go to see him, my son?” asked the bishop.

“Yes, Monseigneur. As soon as I entered his cell the wretched man hurled
the most disgusting epithets at you and at me. He behaved in such a
manner that it was impossible for any priest to remain in his presence.
Might I give Monseigneur a word of advice?”

“Let us listen to the words of wisdom which God Almighty sometimes puts
into the mouths of children,” said the bishop, smiling.

“Well, you know he made Balaam’s ass speak out,” said the young abbe
quickly.

“But according to some commentators she did not know what she was
saying,” replied the bishop, laughing.

The two grand vicars smiled. In the first place, the joke came from
Monseigneur; next, it bore gently on the young abbe, of whom the
dignitaries and other ambitious priests grouped around the bishop were
somewhat jealous.

“My advice would be,” resumed the young man, “to ask Monsieur de
Grandville to reprieve the man for the present. When Tascheron knows
that he owes an extension of his life to our intercession, he may
pretend to listen to us, and if he listens--”

“He will persist in his present conduct, finding that it has won
him that advantage,” said the bishop, interrupting his favorite.
“Messieurs,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “does the whole town
know of these details?”

“There is not a household in which they are not talked over,” said the
Abbe de Grancour. “The state in which our good Abbe Pascal was put by
his last efforts is the present topic of conversation throughout the
town.”

“When is Tascheron to be executed?” asked the bishop.

“To-morrow, which is market-day;” replied Monsieur de Grancour.

“Messieurs,” exclaimed the bishop, “religion must not be overset in this
way. The more public attention is attracted to the matter, the more I am
determined to obtain a notable triumph. The Church is now in presence
of a great difficulty. We are called upon to do miracles in this
manufacturing town, where the spirit of sedition against religious and
monarchical principles has such deep root, where the system of inquiry
born of protestantism (which in these days calls itself liberalism,
prepared at any moment to take another name) extends into everything. Go
at once to Monsieur de Grandville; he is wholly on our side, and say to
him from me that we beg for a few days’ reprieve. I will go myself and
see that unhappy man.”

“You, Monseigneur!” said the Abbe de Rastignac. “If you should fail,
wouldn’t that complicate matters? You ought not to go unless you are
certain of success.”

“If Monseigneur will permit me to express my opinion,” said the Abbe
Dutheil, “I think I can suggest a means which may bring victory to
religion in this sad case.”

The prelate answered with a sign of assent, so coldly given as to show
how little credit he gave to his vicar-general.

“If any one can influence that rebellious soul and bring it back to
God,” continued the Abbe Dutheil, “it is the rector of the village in
which he was born, Monsieur Bonnet.”

“One of your proteges,” remarked the bishop.

“Monseigneur, Monsieur Bonnet is one of those men who protect
themselves, both by their active virtues and their gospel work.”

This simple and modest reply was received in a silence which would have
embarrassed any other man than the Abbe Dutheil. The three priests chose
to see in it one of those hidden and unanswerable sarcasms which are
characteristic of ecclesiastics, who contrive to express what they want
to say while observing the strictest decorum. In this case there was
nothing of the kind. The Abbe Dutheil never thought of himself and had
no double meaning.

“I have heard of Saint Aristides for some time,” said the bishop,
smiling. “If I have left his light under a bushel I may have been unjust
or prejudiced. Your liberals are always crying up Monsieur Bonnet as
though he belonged to their party. I should like to judge for myself of
this rural apostle. Go at once, messieurs, to Monsieur de Grandville,
and ask for the reprieve; I will await his answer before sending our
dear Abbe Gabriel to Montegnac to fetch the saintly man. We will give
his Blessedness a chance to do miracles.”

As he listened to these words of the prelate the Abbe Dutheil reddened;
but he would not allow himself to take notice of the incivilities of the
speech. The two grand vicars bowed in silence and withdrew, leaving the
prelate alone with his secretary.

“The secrets of the confession we are so anxious to obtain from the
unhappy man himself are no doubt buried there,” said the bishop to his
young abbe, pointing to the shadow of the poplars where it fell on a
lonely house between the island and Saint-Etienne.

“I have always thought so,” replied Gabriel. “I am not a judge and I
will not be an informer; but if I were a magistrate I should have known
the name of that woman who trembles at every sound, at every word, while
forced to keep her features calm and serene under pain of going to the
scaffold with her lover. She has nothing to fear, however. I have seen
the man; he will carry the secret of that passionate love to the grave
with him.”

“Ah! you sly fellow!” said the bishop, twisting the ear of his secretary
as he motioned to the space between the island and the suburb
of Saint-Etienne which the last gleams of the setting sun were
illuminating, and on which the young abbe’s eyes were fixed. “That is
the place where justice should have searched; don’t you think so?”

“I went to see the criminal to try the effect of my suspicions upon
him,” replied the young man. “I could not speak them out, for fear of
compromising the woman for whose sake he dies.”

“Yes,” said the bishop, “we will hold our tongues; we are not the
servants of human justice. One head is enough. Besides, sooner or later,
the secret will be given to the Church.”

The perspicacity which the habit of meditation gives to priests is far
superior to that of lawyers or the police. By dint of contemplating from
those terraces the scene of the crime, the prelate and his secretary had
ended by perceiving circumstances unseen by others, in spite of all the
investigations before and during the trial of the case.

Monsieur de Grandville was playing whist at Madame Graslin’s house; it
was necessary to await his return; the bishop did not therefore receive
his answer till nearly midnight. The Abbe Gabriel, to whom the prelate
lent his carriage, started at two in the morning for Montegnac. This
region, which begins about twenty-five miles from the town, is situated
in that part of the Limousin which lies at the base of the mountains
of the Correze and follows the line of the Creuze. The young abbe left
Limoges all heaving with expectation of the spectacle on the morrow, and
still unaware that it would not take place.




VII. MONTEGNAC

Priests and religious devotees have a tendency in the matter of payments
to keep strictly to the letter of the law. Is this from poverty, or from
the selfishness to which their isolation condemns them, thus encouraging
the natural inclination of all men to avarice; or is it from a
conscientious parsimony which saves all it can for deeds of charity?
Each nature will give a different answer to this question. The
difficulty of putting the hand into the pocket, sometimes concealed by
a gracious kindliness, oftener unreservedly exhibited, is more
particularly noticeable in travelling. Gabriel de Rastignac, the
prettiest youth who had served before the altar for many a long day,
gave only a thirty-sous _pour-boire_ to the postilion. Consequently he
travelled slowly. Postilions drive bishops and other clergy with the
utmost care when they merely double the legal wage, and they run no risk
of damaging the episcopal carriage for any such sum, fearing, they
might say, to get themselves into trouble. The Abbe Gabriel, who was
travelling alone for the first time, said, at each relay, in his dulcet
voice:--

“Pray go faster, postilion.”

“We ply the whip,” replied an old postilion, “according to how the
traveller plies his finger and thumb.”

The young abbe flung himself back into a corner of the carriage unable
to comprehend that answer. To occupy the time he began to study the
country through which he was passing, making several mental excursions
on foot among the hills through which the road winds between Bordeaux
and Lyon.

About fifteen miles from Limoges the landscape, losing the graceful flow
of the Vienne through the undulating meadows of the Limousin, which
in certain places remind one of Switzerland, especially about
Saint-Leonard, takes on a harsh and melancholy aspect. Here we come upon
vast tracts of uncultivated land, sandy plains without herbage, hemmed
in on the horizon by the summits of the Correze. These mountains have
neither the abrupt rise of the Alpine ranges nor their splendid ridges;
neither the warm gorges and desolate peaks of the Appenines, nor the
picturesque grandeur of the Pyrenees. Their undulating slopes, due
to the action of water, prove the subsidence of some great natural
catastrophe in which the floods retired slowly. This characteristic,
common to most of the earth convulsions in France, has perhaps
contributed, together with the climate, to the epitaph of _douce_
bestowed by all Europe on our sunny France.

Though this abrupt transition from the smiling landscapes of the
Limousin to the sterner aspects of La Marche and Auvergne may offer to
the thinker and the poet, as he passes them on his way, an image of the
Infinite, that terror of certain minds; though it incites to revelry
the woman of the world, bored as she travels luxuriously in her
carriage,--to the inhabitants of this region Nature is cruel, savage,
and without resources. The soil of these great gray plains is thankless.
The vicinity of a capital town could alone reproduce the miracle worked
in Brie during the last two centuries. Here, however, not only is a
town lacking, but also the great residences which sometimes give life
to these hopeless deserts, where civilization languishes, where the
agriculturist sees only barrenness, and the traveller finds not a single
inn, nor that which, perchance, he is there to seek,--the picturesque.

Great minds, however, do not dislike these barren wastes, necessary
shadows in Nature’s vast picture. Quite recently Fenimore Cooper has
magnificently developed with his melancholy genius the poesy of such
solitudes, in his “Prairie.” These regions, unknown to botanists,
covered by mineral refuse, round pebbles, and a sterile soil, cast
defiance to civilization. France should adopt the only solution to
these difficulties, as the British have done in Scotland, where patient,
heroic agriculture has changed the arid wastes into fertile farms.
Left in their savage and primitive state these uncultivated social
and natural wastes give birth to discouragement, laziness, weakness
resulting from poor food, and crime when needs become importunate.

These few words present the past history of Montegnac. What could be
done in that great tract of barren land, neglected by the government,
abandoned by the nobility, useless to industry,--what but war against
society which disregarded its duty? Consequently, the inhabitants of
Montegnac lived to a recent period, as the Highlands of Scotland lived
in former times, by murder and rapine. From the mere aspect of this
region a thinking man would understand how, twenty years earlier, the
inhabitants were at war with society. The great upland plain, flanked
on one side by the valley of the Vienne, on the other by the charming
valleys of La Marche, then by Auvergne, and bounded by the mountains of
the Correze, is like (agriculture apart) the plateau of La Beauce, which
separates the basin of the Loire from that of the Seine, also like those
of Touraine and Berry, and many other of the great upland plains which
are cut like facets on the surface of France and are numerous enough
to claim the attention of the wisest administrators. It is amazing
that while complaint is made of the influx of population to the social
centres, the government does not employ the natural remedy of redeeming
a region where, as statistics show, there are many million acres of
waste land, certain parts of which, especially in Berry, have a soil
from seven to eight feet deep.

Many of these plains which might be covered by villages and made
splendidly productive belong to obstinate communes, the authorities of
which refuse to sell to those who would develop them, merely to keep
the right to pasture cows upon them! On all these useless, unproductive
lands is written the word “Incapacity.” All soils have some special
fertility of their own. Arms and wills are ready; the thing lacking is
a sense of duty combined with talent on the part of the government. In
France, up to the present time, these upland plains have been sacrificed
to the valleys; the government has chosen to give all its help to those
regions of country which can take care of themselves.

Most of these luckless uplands are without water, the first essential
for production. The mists which ought to fertilize the gray, dead soil
by discharging oxygen upon it, sweep across it rapidly, driven by the
wind, for want of trees which might arrest them and so obtain their
nourishment. Merely to plant trees in such a region would be carrying a
gospel to it. Separated from the nearest town or city by a distance as
insurmountable to poor folk as though a desert lay between them, with
no means of reaching a market for their products (if they produced
anything), close to an unexplored forest which supplied them with wood
and the uncertain livelihood of poaching, the inhabitants often suffered
from hunger during the winters. The soil not being suitable for wheat,
and the unfortunate peasantry having neither cattle of any kind nor
farming implements, they lived for the most part on chestnuts.

Any one who has studied zoological productions in a museum, or become
personally aware of the indescribable depression caused by the brown
tones of all European products, will understand how the constant sight
of these gray, arid plains must have affected the moral nature of the
inhabitants, through the desolate sense of utter barrenness which they
present to the eye. There, in those dismal regions, is neither coolness
nor brightness, nor shade nor contrast,--none of all those ideas and
spectacles of Nature which awaken and rejoice the heart; even a stunted
apple-tree would be hailed as a friend.

A country road, recently made, runs through the centre of this great
plain, and meets the high-road. Upon it, at a distance of some fifteen
miles from the high-road, stands Montegnac, at the foot of a hill,
as its name designates, the chief town of a canton or district in
the Haute-Vienne. The hill is part of Montegnac, which thus unites
a mountainous scenery with that of the plains. This district is a
miniature Scotland, with its lowlands and highlands. Behind the hill, at
the foot of which lies the village, rises, at a distance of about three
miles, the first peak of the Correze mountains. The space between
is covered by the great forest of Montegnac, which clothes the hill,
extends over the valley, and along the slopes of the mountain (though
these are bare in some places), continuing as far as the highway to
Aubusson, where it diminishes to a point near a steep embankment on
that road. This embankment commands a ravine through which the post-road
between Bordeaux and Lyon passes. Travellers, either afoot or in
carriages, were often stopped in the depths of this dangerous gorge
by highwaymen, whose deeds of violence went unpunished, for the site
favored them; they could instantly disappear, by ways known to them
alone, into the inaccessible parts of the forest.

Such a region was naturally out of reach of law. No one now travelled
through it. Without circulation, neither commerce, industry, exchange of
ideas, nor any of the means to wealth, can exist; the material triumphs
of civilization are always the result of the application of primitive
ideas. Thought is invariably the point of departure and the goal of all
social existence. The history of Montegnac is a proof of that axiom
of social science. When at last the administration was able to concern
itself with the needs and the material prosperity of this region of
country, it cut down this strip of forest, and stationed a detachment of
gendarmerie near the ravine, which escorted the mail-coaches between the
two relays; but, to the shame of the gendarmerie be it said, it was the
gospel, and not the sword, the rector Monsieur Bonnet, and not Corporal
Chervin, who won a civil victory by changing the morals of a population.
This priest, filled with Christian tenderness for the poor, hapless
region, attempted to regenerate it, and succeeded in the attempt.

After travelling for about an hour over these plains, alternately stony
and dusty, where the partridges flocked in tranquil coveys, their wings
whirring with a dull, heavy sound as the carriage came toward them,
the Abbe Gabriel, like all other travellers on the same road, saw with
satisfaction the roofs of Montegnac in the distance. At the entrance of
the village was one of those curious post-relays which are seen only
in the remote parts of France. Its sign was an oak board on which
some pretentious postilion had carved the words, _Pauste o chevos_,
blackening the letters with ink, and then nailing the board by its
four corners above the door of a wretched stable in which there were no
horses. The door, which was nearly always open, had a plank laid on the
soil for its threshold, to protect the stable floor, which was lower
than the road, from inundation when it rained. The discouraged traveller
could see within worn-out, mildewed, and mended harnesses, certain to
break at a plunge of the horses. The horses themselves were hard at
work in the fields, or anywhere but in the stable. If by any chance they
happen to be in their stalls, they are eating; if they have finished
eating, the postilion has gone to see his aunt or his cousin, or is
getting in the hay, or else he is asleep; no one can say where he is;
the traveller has to wait till he is found, and he never comes till he
has finished what he is about. When he does come he loses an immense
amount of time looking for his jacket and his whip, or putting the
collars on his horses. Near by, at the door of the post-house, a worthy
woman is fuming even more than the traveller, in order to prevent the
latter from complaining loudly. This is sure to be the wife of the
post-master, whose husband is away in the fields.

The bishop’s secretary left his carriage before a post-house of this
kind, the walls of which resembled a geographical map, while the
thatched roof, blooming like a flower-garden, seemed to be giving way
beneath the weight of stone-crop. After begging the post-mistress to
have everything in readiness for his departure in an hour’s time, the
abbe asked the way to the parsonage. The good woman showed him a lane
which led to the church, telling him the rectory was close beside it.

While the young abbe followed this lane, which was full of stones
and closed on either side by hedges, the post-mistress questioned the
postilion. Since starting from Limoges each postilion had informed his
successor of the conjectures of the Limoges postilion as to the mission
of the bishop’s messenger. While the inhabitants of the town were
getting out of bed and talking of the coming execution, a rumor spread
among the country people that the bishop had obtained the pardon of
the innocent man; and much was said about the mistakes to which human
justice was liable. If Jean-Francois was executed later, it was certain
that he was regarded in the country regions as a martyr.

After taking a few steps along the lane, reddened by the autumn leaves,
and black with mulberries and damsons, the Abbe Gabriel turned round
with the instinctive impulse which leads us all to make acquaintance
with a region which we see for the first time,--a sort of instinctive
physical curiosity shared by dogs and horses.

The position of Montegnac was explained to him as his eyes rested on
various little streams flowing down the hillsides and on a little river,
along the bank of which runs the country road which connects the chief
town of the arrondissement with the prefecture. Like all the villages
of this upland plain, Montegnac is built of earth baked in the sun and
moulded into square blocks. After a fire a house looks as if it had been
built of brick. The roofs are of thatch. Poverty is everywhere visible.

Before the village lay several fields of potatoes, radishes, and rye,
redeemed from the barren plain. On the slope of the hill were irrigated
meadows where the inhabitants raised horses, the famous Limousin breed,
which is said to be a legacy of the Arabs when they descended by the
Pyrenees into France and were cut to pieces by the battle-axes of the
Franks under Charles Martel. The heights are barren. A hot, baked,
reddish soil shows a region where chestnuts flourish. The springs,
carefully applied to irrigation, water the meadows only, nourishing
the sweet, crisp grass, so fine and choice, which produces this race of
delicate and high-strung horses,--not over-strong to bear fatigue,
but showy, excellent for the country of their birth, though subject to
changes if transplanted. A few mulberry trees lately imported showed an
intention of cultivating silk-worms.

Like most of the villages in this world Montegnac had but one street,
through which the high road passed. Nevertheless there was an upper and
a lower Montegnac, reached by lanes going up or going down from the main
street. A line of houses standing along the brow of the hill presented
the cheerful sight of terraced gardens, which were entered by flights
of steps from the main street. Some had their steps of earth, others
of pebbles; here and there old women were sitting on them, knitting or
watching children, and keeping up a conversation from the upper to the
lower town across the usually peaceful street of the little village;
thus rumors spread easily and rapidly in Montegnac. All the gardens,
which were full of fruit-trees, cabbages, onions, and other vegetables,
had bee-hives along their terraces.

Another line of houses, running down from the main street to the river,
the course of which was outlined by thriving little fields of hemp and
the sorts of fruit trees which like moisture, lay parallel with the
upper town; some of the houses, that of the post-house, for instance,
were in a hollow, and were well-situated for certain kinds of work, such
as weaving. Nearly all of them were shared by walnut-trees, the tree
_par excellence_ of strong soils.

On this side of the main street at the end farthest from the great plain
was a dwelling-house, very much larger and better cared for than those
in other parts of the village; around it were other houses equally well
kept. This little hamlet, separated from the village by its gardens, was
already called Les Tascherons, a name it keeps to the present day.

The village itself mounted to very little, but thirty or more outlying
farms belonged to it. In the valley, leading down to the river,
irrigating channels like those of La Marche and Berry indicated the flow
of water around the village by the green fringe of verdure about them;
Montegnac seemed tossed in their midst like a vessel at sea. When
a house, an estate, a village, a region, passes from the wretched
condition to a prosperous one, without becoming either rich or splendid,
life seems so easy, so natural to living beings, that the spectator may
not at once suspect the enormous labor, infinite in petty detail, grand
in persistency like the toil buried in a foundation wall, in short, the
forgotten labor on which the whole structure rests.

Consequently the scene that lay before him told nothing extraordinary
to the young Abbe Gabriel as his eye took in the charming landscape.
He knew nothing of the state of the region before the arrival of the
rector, Monsieur Bonnet. The young man now went on a few steps and again
saw, several hundred feet above the gardens of the upper village, the
church and the parsonage, which he had already seen from a distance
confusedly mingled with the imposing ruins clothed with creepers of the
old castle of Montegnac, one of the residences of the Navarreins family
in the twelfth century.

The parsonage, a house originally built no doubt for the bailiff or
game-keeper, was noticeable for a long raised terrace planted with
lindens from which a fine view extended over the country. The steps
leading to this terrace and the walls which supported it showed their
great age by the ravages of time. The flat moss which clings to stones
had laid its dragon-green carpet on each surface. The numerous families
of the pellitories, the chamomiles, the mesembryanthemums, pushed their
varied and abundant tufts through the loop-holes in the walls, cracked
and fissured in spite of their thickness. Botany had lavished there
its most elegant drapery of ferns of all kinds, snap-dragons with their
violet mouths and golden pistils, the blue anchusa, the brown lichens,
so that the old worn stones seemed mere accessories peeping out at
intervals from this fresh growth. Along the terrace a box hedge, cut
into geometric figures, enclosed a pleasure garden surrounding the
parsonage, above which the rock rose like a white wall surmounted by
slender trees that drooped and swayed above it like plumes.

The ruins of the castle looked down upon the house and church. The
house, built of pebbles and mortar, had but one story surmounted by an
enormous sloping roof with gable ends, in which were attics, no doubt
empty, considering the dilapidation of their windows. The ground-floor
had two rooms parted by a corridor, at the farther end of which was a
wooden staircase leading to the second floor, which also had two rooms.
A little kitchen was at the back of the building in a yard, where were
the stable and coach-house, both unused, deserted, and worthless. The
kitchen garden lay between the church and the house; a ruined gallery
led from the parsonage to the sacristy.

When the young abbe saw the four windows with their leaded panes, the
brown and mossy walls, the door in common pine slit like a bundle of
matches, far from being attracted by the adorable naivete of these
details, the grace of the vegetations which draped the roof and the
dilapidated wooden frames of the windows, the wealth of the clambering
plants escaping from every cranny, and the clasping tendrils of the
grape-vine which looked into every window as if to bring smiling ideas
to those within, he congratulated himself heartily on being a bishop in
perspective instead of a village rector.

This house, apparently always open, seemed to belong to everybody. The
Abbe Gabriel entered a room communicating with the kitchen, which was
poorly furnished with an oak table on four stout legs, a tapestried
armchair, a number of chairs all of wood, and an old chest by way
of buffet. No one was in the kitchen except a cat which revealed the
presence of a woman about the house. The other room served as a salon.
Casting a glance about it the young priest noticed armchairs in natural
wood covered with tapestry; the woodwork and the rafters of the ceiling
were of chestnut which had turned as black as ebony. A tall clock in
a green case painted with flowers, a table with a faded green cloth,
several chairs, two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, between which was
an Infant Jesus in wax under a glass case, completed the furniture of
the room. The chimney-piece of wood with common mouldings was filled by
a fire-board covered by a painting representing the Good Shepherd with
a lamb over his shoulder, which was probably the gift of some young
girl,--the mayor’s daughter, or the judge’s daughter,--in return for the
pastor’s care of her education.

The forlorn condition of the house was distressing to behold; the walls,
once whitewashed, were now discolored, and stained to a man’s height
by constant friction. The staircase with its heavy baluster and wooden
steps, though very clean, looked as if it might easily give way under
the feet. On the other side of the house, opposite to the entrance
door, another door opening upon the kitchen garden enabled the Abbe de
Rastignac to judge of the narrowness of that garden, which was closed
at the back by a wall cut in the white and friable stone side of
the mountain, against which espaliers were fastened, covered with
grape-vines and fruit-trees so ill taken care of that their leaves were
discolored with blight.

The abbe returned upon his steps and walked along the paths of the first
garden, from which he could see, in the distance beyond the village,
the magnificent stretch of valley, a true oasis at the edge of the vast
plains, which now, veiled by the light mists of morning, lay along the
horizon like a tranquil ocean. Behind him could be seen, on one side,
for a foil, the dark masses of the bronze-green forest; on the other,
the church and the ruins of the castle perched on the rock and vividly
detached upon the blue of the ether. The Abbe Gabriel, his feet creaking
on the gravelly paths cut in stars and rounds and lozenges, looked down
upon the village, where some of the inhabitants were already gazing up
at him, and then at the fresh, cool valley, with its tangled paths, its
river bordered with willows in delightful contrast to the endless plain,
and he was suddenly seized with sensations which changed the nature of
his thoughts; he admired the sweet tranquillity of the place; he felt
the influence of that pure air; he was conscious of the peace inspired
by the revelation of a life brought back to Biblical simplicity; he saw,
confusedly, the beauties of this old parsonage, which he now re-entered
to examine its details with greater interest.

A little girl, employed, no doubt, to watch the house, though she was
picking and eating fruit in the garden, heard the steps of a man with
creaking shoes on the great square flags of the ground-floor rooms. She
ran in to see who it was. Confused at being caught by a priest with a
fruit in one hand and another in her mouth, she made no answer to the
questions of the handsome young abbe. She had never imagined such an
abbe,--dapper and spruce as hands could make him, in dazzling linen and
fine black cloth without spot or wrinkle.

“Monsieur Bonnet?” she said at last. “Monsieur Bonnet is saying mass,
and Mademoiselle Ursule is at church.”

The Abbe Gabriel did not notice a covered way from the house to the
church; he went back to the road which led to the front portal, a
species of porch with a sloping roof that faced the village. It was
reached by a series of disjointed stone steps, at the side of which lay
a ravine washed out by the mountain torrents and covered with noble
elms planted by Sully the Protestant. This church, one of the poorest
in France where there are so many poor churches, was like one of those
enormous barns with projecting doors covered by roofs supported on
brick or wooden pillars. Built, like the parsonage, of cobblestones and
mortar, flanked by a face of solid rock, and roofed by the commonest
round tiles, this church was decorated on the outside with the richest
creations of sculpture, rich in light and shade and lavishly massed
and colored by Nature, who understands such art as well as any Michael
Angelo. Ivy clasped the walls with its nervous tendrils, showing stems
amid its foliage like the veins in a lay figure. This mantle, flung by
Time to cover the wounds he made, was starred by autumn flowers drooping
from the crevices, which also gave shelter to numerous singing birds.
The rose-window above the projecting porch was adorned with blue
campanula, like the first page of an illuminated missal. The side
which communicated with the parsonage, toward the north, was not less
decorated; the wall was gray and red with moss and lichen; but the other
side and the apse, around which lay the cemetery, was covered with a
wealth of varied blooms. A few trees, among others an almond-tree--one
of the emblems of hope--had taken root in the broken wall; two enormous
pines standing close against the apsis served as lightning-rods. The
cemetery, enclosed by a low, half-ruined wall, had for ornament an iron
cross, mounted on a pedestal and hung with box, blessed at Easter,--one
of those affecting Christian thoughts forgotten in cities. The village
rector is the only priest who, in these days, thinks to go among his
dead and say to them each Easter morn, “Thou shalt live again!” Here and
there a few rotten wooden crosses stood up from the grassy mounds.

The interior of the church harmonized perfectly with the poetic tangle
of the humble exterior, the luxury and art of which was bestowed by
Time, for once in a way charitable. Within, the eye first went to the
roof, lined with chestnut, to which age had given the richest tints of
the oldest woods of Europe. This roof was supported at equal distances
by strong shafts resting on transversal beams. The four white-washed
walls had no ornament whatever. Poverty had made the parish
iconoclastic, whether it would or not. The church, paved and furnished
with benches, was lighted by four arched windows with leaded panes. The
altar, shaped like a tomb, was adorned by a large crucifix placed
above a tabernacle in walnut with a few gilt mouldings, kept clean and
shining, eight candlesticks economically made of wood painted white, and
two china vases filled with artificial flowers such as the drudge of a
money-changer would have despised, but with which God was satisfied.

The sanctuary lamp was a night-wick placed in an old holy-water basin
of plated copper hanging by silken cords, the spoil of some demolished
chateau. The baptismal fonts were of wood; so were the pulpit and a sort
of cage provided for the church-wardens, the patricians of the village.
An altar to the Virgin presented to public admiration two colored
lithographs in small gilt frames. The altar was painted white, adorned
with artificial flowers in gilded wooden vases, and covered by a cloth
edged with shabby and discolored lace.

At the farther end of the church a long window entirely covered by a
red calico curtain produced a magical effect. This crimson mantle cast
a rosy tint upon the whitewashed walls; a thought divine seemed to glow
upon the altar and clasp the poor nave as if to warm it. The passage
which led to the sacristy exhibited on one of its walls the patron saint
of the village, a large Saint John the Baptist with his sheep, carved in
wood and horribly painted.

But in spite of all this poverty the church was not without some tender
harmonies delightful to choice souls, and set in charming relief by
their own colors. The rich dark tones of the wood relieved the white of
the walls and blended with the triumphal crimson cast on the chancel.
This trinity of color was a reminder of the grand Catholic doctrine.

If surprise was the first emotion roused by this pitiful house of the
Lord, surprise was followed speedily by admiration mingled with pity.
Did it not truly express the poverty of that poor region? Was it not
in harmony with the naive simplicity of the parsonage? The building was
perfectly clean and well-kept. The fragrance of country virtues exhaled
within it; nothing showed neglect or abandonment. Though rustic and
poor and simple, prayer dwelt there; those precincts had a soul,--a soul
which was felt, though we might not fully explain to our own souls how
we felt it.




VIII. THE RECTOR OF MONTEGNAC

The Abbe Gabriel glided softly through the church so as not to disturb
the devotions of two groups of persons on the benches near the high
altar, which was separated from the nave at the place where the lamp was
hung by a rather common balustrade, also of chestnut wood, and covered
with a cloth intended for the communion. On either side of the nave a
score of peasants, men and women, absorbed in fervent prayer, paid no
attention to the stranger when he passed up the narrow passage between
the two rows of seats.

When the young abbe stood beneath the lamp, whence he could see the two
little transepts which formed a cross, one of which led to the sacristy,
the other to the cemetery, he noticed on the cemetery side a family
clothed in black kneeling on the pavement, the transepts having no
benches. The young priest knelt down on the step of the balustrade which
separated the choir from the nave and began to pray, casting oblique
glances at a scene which was soon explained to him. The gospel had been
read. The rector, having removed his chasuble, came down from the altar
and stood before the railing; the young abbe, who foresaw this movement,
leaned back against the wall, so that Monsieur Bonnet did not see him.
Ten o’clock was striking.

“Brethren,” said the rector, in a voice of emotion, “at this very moment
a child of this parish is paying his debt to human justice by enduring
its last penalty, while we are offering the sacrifice of the mass for
the peace of his soul. Let us unite in prayer to God, imploring Him not
to turn His face from that child in these his last moments, and to
grant to his repentance the pardon in heaven which is denied to him here
below. The sin of this unhappy man, one of those on whom we most relied
for good examples, can only be explained by his disregard of religious
principles.”

Here the rector was interrupted by sobs from the kneeling group in
mourning garments, whom the Abbe Gabriel recognized, by this show of
affection, as the Tascheron family, although he did not know them. First
among them was an old couple (septuagenarians) standing by the wall,
their faces seamed with deep-cut, rigid wrinkles, and bronzed like a
Florentine medal. These persons, stoically erect like statues, in their
old darned clothes, were doubtless the grandfather and the grandmother
of the criminal. Their glazed and reddened eyes seemed to weep blood,
their arms trembled so that the sticks on which they leaned tapped
lightly on the pavement. Next, the father and the mother, their faces in
their handkerchiefs, sobbed aloud. Around these four heads of the family
knelt the two married sisters accompanied by their husbands, and three
sons, stupefied with grief. Five little children on their knees, the
oldest not seven years old, unable, no doubt, to understand what
was happening, gazed and listened with the torpid curiosity that
characterizes the peasantry, and is really the observation of physical
things pushed to its highest limit. Lastly, the poor unmarried sister,
imprisoned in the interests of justice, now released, a martyr to
fraternal affection, Denise Tascheron, was listening to the priest’s
words with a look that was partly bewildered and partly incredulous.
For her, her brother could not die. She well represented that one of the
Three Marys who did not believe in the death of Christ, though she was
present at the last agony. Pale, with dry eyes, like all those who have
gone without sleep, her fresh complexion was already faded, less by
toil and field labor than by grief; nevertheless, she had many of the
beauties of a country maiden,--a plump, full figure, finely shaped
arms, rounded cheeks, and clear, pure eyes, lighted at this instant with
flashes of despair. Below the throat, a firm, fair skin, not tanned by
the sun, betrayed the presence of a white and rosy flesh where the form
was hidden.

The married daughters wept; their husbands, patient farmers, were grave
and serious. The three brothers, profoundly sad, did not raise their
eyes from the ground. In the midst of this dreadful picture of dumb
despair and desolation, Denise and her mother alone showed symptoms of
revolt.

The other inhabitants of the village united in the affliction of this
respectable family with a sincere and Christian pity which gave the same
expression to the faces of all,--an expression amounting to horror when
the rector’s words announced that the knife was then falling on the neck
of a young man whom they all knew well from his very birth, and whom
they had doubtless thought incapable of crime.

The sobs which interrupted the short and simple allocution which the
pastor made to his flock overcame him so much that he stopped and said
no more, except to invite all present to fervent prayer.

Though this scene was not of a nature to surprise a priest, Gabriel de
Rastignac was too young not to be profoundly touched by it. As yet he
had never exercised the priestly virtues; he knew himself called to
other functions; he was not forced to enter the social breaches where
the heart bleeds at the sight of woes: his mission was that of the
higher clergy, who maintain the spirit of devotion, represent the
highest intellect of the Church, and on eminent occasions display the
priestly virtues on a larger stage,--like the illustrious bishops of
Marseille and Meaux, and the archbishops of Arles and Cambrai.

This little assemblage of country people weeping and praying for him
who, as they supposed, was then being executed on a public square, among
a crowd of persons come from all parts to swell the shame of such a
death,--this feeble counterpoise of prayer and pity, opposed to the
ferocious curiosity and just maledictions of a multitude, was enough
to move any soul, especially when seen in that poor church. The Abbe
Gabriel was tempted to go up to the Tascherons and say,--

“Your son and brother is reprieved.”

But he did not like to disturb the mass; and, moreover, he knew that
a reprieve was only a delay of execution. Instead of following the
service, he was irresistibly drawn to a study of the pastor from whom
the clergy in Limoges expected the conversion of the criminal.

Judging by the parsonage, Gabriel de Rastignac had made himself a
portrait of Monsieur Bonnet as a stout, short man with a strong and red
face, framed for toil, half a peasant, and tanned by the sun. So
far from that, the young abbe met his equal. Slight and delicate in
appearance, Monsieur Bonnet’s face struck the eyes at once as the
typical face of passion given to the Apostles. It was almost triangular,
beginning with a broad brow furrowed by wrinkles, and carried down from
the temples to the chin in two sharp lines which defined his hollow
cheeks. In this face, sallowed by tones as yellow as those of a church
taper, shone two blue eyes that were luminous with faith, burning with
eager hope. It was divided into two equal parts by a long nose, thin and
straight, with well-cut nostrils, beneath which spoke, even when closed
and voiceless, a large mouth, with strongly marked lips, from which
issued, whenever he spoke aloud, one of those voices which go straight
to the heart. The chestnut hair, which was thin and fine, and lay flat
upon the head, showed a poor constitution maintained by a frugal diet.
WILL made the power of this man.

Such were his personal distinctions. His short hands might have
indicated in another man a tendency to coarse pleasures, and perhaps
he had, like Socrates, conquered his temptations. His thinness was
ungraceful, his shoulders were too prominent, his knees knocked
together. The body, too much developed for the extremities, gave him the
look of a hump-backed man without a hump. In short, his appearance was
not pleasing. None but those to whom the miracles of thought, faith, art
are known could adore that flaming gaze of the martyr, that pallor of
constancy, that voice of love,--distinctive characteristics of this
village rector.

This man, worthy of the primitive Church, which exists no longer
except in the pictures of the sixteenth century and in the pages of
Martyrology, was stamped with the die of the human greatness which
most nearly approaches the divine greatness through Conviction,--that
indefinable something which embellishes the commonest form, gilds with
glowing tints the faces of men vowed to any worship, no matter what,
and brings into the face of a woman glorified by a noble love a sort of
light. CONVICTION is human will attaining to its highest reach. At once
both cause and effect, it impresses the coldest natures; it is a species
of mute eloquence which holds the masses.

Coming down from the altar the rector caught the eye of the Abbe Gabriel
and recognized him; so that when the bishop’s secretary reached the
sacristy Ursule, to whom her master had already given orders, was
waiting for him with a request that he would follow her.

“Monsieur,” said Ursule, a woman of canonical age, conducting the Abbe
de Rastignac by the gallery through the garden, “Monsieur Bonnet told me
to ask if you had breakfasted. You must have left Limoges very early
to get here by ten o’clock. I will soon have breakfast ready for you.
Monsieur l’abbe will not find a table like that of Monseigneur the
bishop in this poor village, but we will do the best we can. Monsieur
Bonnet will soon be in; he has gone to comfort those poor people, the
Tascherons. Their son has met with a terrible end to-day.”

“But,” said the Abbe Gabriel, when he could get in a word, “where is the
house of those worthy persons? I must take Monsieur Bonnet at once
to Limoges by order of the bishop. That unfortunate man will not be
executed to-day; Monseigneur has obtained a reprieve for him.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Ursule, whose tongue itched to spread the news about the
village, “monsieur has plenty of time to carry them that comfort while I
get breakfast ready. The Tascherons’ house is beyond the village; follow
the path below that terrace and it will take you there.”

As soon as Ursule lost sight of the abbe she went down into the village
to disseminate the news, and also to buy the things needed for the
breakfast.

The rector had been informed, while in church, of a desperate resolution
taken by the Tascherons as soon as they heard that Jean-Francois’s
appeal was rejected and that he had to die. These worthy souls intended
to leave the country, and their worldly goods were to be sold that
very morning. Delays and formalities unexpected by them had hitherto
postponed the sale. They had been forced to remain in their home until
the execution, and drink each day the cup of shame. This determination
had not been made public until the evening before the day appointed for
the execution. The Tascherons had expected to leave before that fatal
day; but the proposed purchaser of their property was a stranger in
those parts, and was prevented from clinching the bargain by a delay in
obtaining the money. Thus the hapless family were forced to bear their
trouble to its end. The feeling which prompted this expatriation was
so violent in these simple souls, little accustomed to compromise with
their consciences, that the grandfather and grandmother, the father and
the mother, the daughters and their husbands and the sons, in short, all
who bore and had borne the name of Tascheron or were closely allied to
it made ready to leave the country.

This emigration grieved the whole community. The mayor entreated the
rector to do his best to retain these worthy people. According to the
new Code the father was not responsible for the son, and the crime
of the father was no disgrace to the children. Together with other
emancipations which have weakened paternal power, this system has led
to the triumph of individualism, which is now permeating the whole
of modern society. He who thinks on the things of the future sees
the spirit of family destroyed, where the makers of the new Code have
introduced freedom of will and equality. The Family must always be the
basis of society. Necessarily temporary, incessantly divided, recomposed
to dissolve again, without ties between the future and the past, it
cannot fulfil that mission; the Family of the olden time no longer
exists in France. Those who have proceeded to demolish the ancient
edifice have been logical in dividing equally the family property,
in diminishing the authority of the father, in suppressing great
responsibilities; but is the reconstructed social state as solid, with
its young laws still untried, as it was under a monarchy, in spite of
the old abuses? In losing the solidarity of families, society has lost
that fundamental force which Montesquieu discovered and named HONOR. It
has isolated interests in order to subjugate them; it has sundered
all to enfeeble all. Society reigns over units, over single figures
agglomerated like grains of corn in a heap. Can the general interests of
all take the place of Family? Time alone can answer that question.

Nevertheless, the old law still exists; its roots have struck so deep
that you will find it still living, as we find perennials in polar
regions. Remote places are still to be found in the provinces where what
are now called prejudices exist, where the family suffers in the crime
of a child or a father.

This sentiment made the place uninhabitable any longer to the
Tascherons. Their deep religious feeling took them to church that
morning; for how could they let the mass be offered to God asking Him to
inspire their son with repentance that alone could restore to him life
eternal, and not share in it? Besides, they wished to bid farewell to
the village altar. But their minds were made up and their plans already
carried out. When the rector who followed them from church reached the
principal house he found their bags and bundles ready for the journey.
The purchaser of the property was there with the money. The notary had
drawn up the papers. In the yard behind the house was a carriole ready
harnessed to carry away the older couple with the money, and the mother
of Jean-Francois. The remainder of the family were to go on foot by
night.

At the moment when the young abbe entered the low room in which the
family were assembled the rector of Montegnac had exhausted all the
resources of his eloquence. The old pair, now insensible to the violence
of grief, were crouching in a corner on their bags and looking round
on their old hereditary home, its furniture, and the new purchaser, and
then upon each other as if to say:--

“Did we ever think this thing could happen?”

These old people, who had long resigned their authority to their son,
the father of the criminal, were, like kings on their abdication,
reduced to the passive role of subjects and children. Tascheron, the
father, was standing up; he listened to the pastor, and replied to him
in a low voice and by monosyllables. This man, who was about forty-eight
years of age, had the noble face which Titian has given to so many of
his Apostles,--a countenance full of faith, of grave and reflective
integrity, a stern profile, a nose cut in a straight and projecting
line, blue eyes, a noble brow, regular features, black, crisp, wiry
hair, planted on his head with that symmetry which gives a charm to
these brown faces, bronzed by toil in the open air. It was easy to see
that the rector’s appeals were powerless against that inflexible will.

Denise was leaning against the bread-box, looking at the notary, who
was using that receptacle as a writing-table, seated before it in the
grandmother’s armchair. The purchaser was sitting on a stool beside him.
The married sisters were laying a cloth upon the table, and serving the
last meal the family were to take in its own house before expatriating
itself to other lands and other skies. The sons were half-seated on
the green serge bed. The mother, busy beside the fire, was beating an
omelet. The grandchildren crowded the doorway, before which stood the
incoming family of the purchaser.

The old smoky room with its blackened rafters, through the window of
which was visible a well-kept garden planted by the two old people,
seemed in harmony with the pent-up anguish which could be read on all
their faces in diverse expressions. The meal was chiefly prepared for
the notary, the purchaser, the menkind, and the children. The father
and mother, Denise and her sisters, were too unhappy to eat. There was
a lofty, stern resignation in the accomplishment of these last duties of
rustic hospitality. The Tascherons, men of the olden time, ended their
days in that house as they had begun them, by doing its honors. This
scene, without pretension, though full of solemnity, met the eyes of the
bishop’s secretary when he approached the village rector to fulfil the
prelate’s errand.

“The son of these good people still lives,” said Gabriel.

At these words, heard by all in the deep silence, the two old people
rose to their feet as if the last trump had sounded. The mother dropped
her pan upon the fire; Denise gave a cry of joy; all the others stood by
in petrified astonishment.

“Jean-Francois is pardoned!” cried the whole village, now rushing toward
the house, having heard the news from Ursule. “Monseigneur the bishop--”

“I knew he was innocent!” cried the mother.

“Will it hinder the purchase?” said the purchaser to the notary, who
answered with a satisfying gesture.

The Abbe Gabriel was now the centre of all eyes; his sadness raised a
suspicion of mistake. To avoid correcting it himself, he left the house,
followed by the rector, and said to the crowd outside that the execution
was only postponed for some days. The uproar subsided instantly into
dreadful silence. When the Abbe Gabriel and the rector returned, the
expression on the faces of the family was full of anguish; the silence
of the crowd was understood.

“My friends, Jean-Francois is not pardoned,” said the young abbe, seeing
that the blow had fallen; “but the state of his soul has so distressed
Monseigneur that he has obtained a delay in order to save your son in
eternity.”

“But he lives!” cried Denise.

The young abbe took the rector aside to explain to him the injurious
situation in which the impenitence of his parishioner placed religion,
and the duty the bishop imposed upon him.

“Monseigneur exacts my death,” replied the rector. “I have already
refused the entreaties of the family to visit their unhappy son. Such a
conference and the sight of his death would shatter me like glass. Every
man must work as he can. The weakness of my organs, or rather, the
too great excitability of my nervous organization, prevents me from
exercising these functions of our ministry. I have remained a simple
rector expressly to be useful to my kind in a sphere in which I can
really accomplish my Christian duty. I have carefully considered how
far I could satisfy this virtuous family and do my pastoral duty to this
poor son; but the very idea of mounting the scaffold with him, the mere
thought of assisting in those fatal preparations, sends a shudder as of
death through my veins. It would not be asked of a mother; and remember,
monsieur, he was born in the bosom of my poor church.”

“So,” said the Abbe Gabriel, “you refuse to obey Monseigneur?”

“Monseigneur is ignorant of the state of my health; he does not know
that in a constitution like mine nature refuses--” said Monsieur Bonnet,
looking at the younger priest.

“There are times when we ought, like Belzunce at Marseille, to risk
certain death,” replied the Abbe Gabriel, interrupting him.

At this moment the rector felt a hand pulling at his cassock; he heard
sobs, and turning round he saw the whole family kneeling before him.
Young and old, small and great, all were stretching their supplicating
hands to him. One sole cry rose from their lips as he turned his face
upon them:--

“Save his soul, at least!”

The old grandmother it was who had pulled his cassock and was wetting it
with her tears.

“I shall obey, monsieur.”

That said, the rector was forced to sit down, for his legs trembled
under him. The young secretary explained the frenzied state of the
criminal’s mind.

“Do you think,” he said, as he ended his account, “that the sight of his
young sister would shake his determination?”

“Yes, I do,” replied the rector. “Denise, you must go with us.”

“And I, too,” said the mother.

“No!” cried the father; “that child no longer exists for us, and you
know it. None of us shall see him.”

“Do not oppose what may be for his salvation,” said the young abbe. “You
will be responsible for his soul if you refuse us the means of softening
it. His death may possibly do more injury than his life has done.”

“She may go,” said the father; “it shall be her punishment for opposing
all the discipline I ever wished to give her son.”

The Abbe Gabriel and Monsieur Bonnet returned to the parsonage, where
Denise and her mother were requested to come in time to start for
Limoges with the two ecclesiastics.

As the younger man walked along the path which followed the outskirts
of upper Montegnac he was able to examine the village priest so warmly
commended by the vicar-general less superficially than he did in church.
He felt at once inclined in his favor, by the simple manners, the voice
full of magic power, and the words in harmony with the voice of the
village rector. The latter had only visited the bishop’s palace once
since the prelate had taken Gabriel de Rastignac as secretary. He had
hardly seen this favorite, destined for the episcopate, though he knew
how great his influence was. Nevertheless, he behaved with a dignified
courtesy that plainly showed the sovereign independence which the Church
bestows on rectors in their parishes. But the feelings of the young
abbe, far from animating his face, gave it a stern expression; it
was more than cold, it was icy. A man capable of changing the moral
condition of a whole population must surely possess some powers of
observation, and be more or less of a physiognomist; and even if the
rector had no other science than that of goodness, he had just given
proof of rare sensibility. He was therefore struck by the coldness with
which the bishop’s secretary met his courteous advances. Compelled to
attribute this manner to some secret annoyance, the rector sought in
his own mind to discover if he had wounded his guest, or in what way his
conduct could seem blameworthy in the eyes of his superiors.

An awkward silence ensued, which the Abbe de Rastignac broke by a speech
that was full of aristocratic assumption.

“You have a very poor church, monsieur,” he said.

“It is too small,” replied Monsieur Bonnet. “On the great fete-days the
old men bring benches to the porch, and the young men stand outside in a
circle; but the silence is so great that all can hear my voice.”

Gabriel was silent for some moments.

“If the inhabitants are so religious how can you let the building remain
in such a state of nudity?” he said at last.

“Alas, monsieur, I have not the courage to spend the money which is
needed for the poor on decorating the church,--the poor are the church.
I assure I should not be ashamed of my church if Monseigneur should
visit it on the Fete-Dieu. The poor return on that day what they have
received. Did you notice the nails which are placed at certain distances
on the walls? They are used to hold a sort of trellis of iron wire
on which the women fasten bouquets; the church is fairly clothed with
flowers, and they keep fresh all day. My poor church, which you think
so bare, is decked like a bride; it is filled with fragrance; even the
floor is strewn with leaves, in the midst of which they make a path of
scattered roses for the passage of the holy sacrament. That’s a day on
which I do not fear comparison with the pomps of Saint-Peter at Rome;
the Holy Father has his gold, and I my flowers,--to each his own
miracle. Ah! monsieur, the village of Montegnac is poor, but it is
Catholic. In former times the inhabitants robbed travellers; now
travellers may leave a sack full of money where they please and they
will find it in my house.”

“That result is to your glory,” said Gabriel.

“It is not a question of myself,” replied the rector, coloring at this
labored compliment, “but of God’s word, of the blessed bread--”

“Brown bread,” remarked the abbe, smiling.

“White bread only suits the stomachs of the rich,” replied the rector,
modestly.

The young abbe took the hands of the older priest and pressed them
cordially.

“Forgive me, monsieur,” he said, suddenly making amends with a look in
his beautiful blue eyes which went to the depths of the rector’s soul.
“Monseigneur told me to test your patience and your modesty, but I can’t
go any further; I see already how much injustice the praises of the
liberals have done you.”

Breakfast was ready; fresh eggs, butter, honey, fruits, cream, and
coffee were served by Ursule in the midst of flowers, on a white cloth
laid upon the antique table in that old dining-room. The window which
looked upon the terrace was open; clematis, with its white stars
relieved in the centre by the yellow bunch of their crisped stamens,
clasped the railing. A jasmine ran up one side, nasturtiums clambered
over the other. Above, the reddening foliage of a vine made a rich
border that no sculptor could have rendered, so exquisite was the
tracery of its lace-work against the light.

“Life is here reduced, you see, to its simplest expression,” said the
rector, smiling, though his face did not lose the look which the sadness
of his heart conveyed to it. “If we had known of your arrival (but who
could have foreseen your errand?) Ursule would have had some mountain
trout for you; there’s a brook in the forest where they are excellent.
I forget, however, that this is August and the Gabou is dry. My head is
confused with all these troubles.”

“Then you like your life here?” said the young abbe.

“Yes, monsieur; if God wills, I shall die rector of Montegnac. I could
have wished that my example were followed by certain distinguished men
who have thought they did better things in becoming philanthropists.
But modern philanthropy is an evil to society; the principles of the
Catholic religion can alone cure the diseases which permeate social
bodies. Instead of describing those diseases and extending their ravages
by complaining elegies, they should put their hand to the work and
enter the Lord’s vineyard as simple laborers. My task is far from being
accomplished here, monsieur. It is not enough to reform the people, whom
I found in a frightful condition of impiety and wickedness; I wish to
die in the midst of a generation of true believers.”

“You have only done your duty, monsieur,” said the young man, still
coldly, for his heart was stirred with envy.

“Yes, monsieur,” replied the rector, modestly, giving his companion a
glance which seemed to say: Is this a further test? “I pray that all may
do their duty throughout the kingdom.”

This remark, full of deep meaning, was still further emphasized by a
tone of utterance, which proved that in 1829 this priest, as grand in
thought as he was noble in humility of conduct, and who subordinated his
thoughts to those of his superiors, saw clearly into the destinies of
both church and monarchy.

When the two afflicted women came the young abbe, very impatient to get
back to Limoges, left the parsonage to see if the horses were harnessed.
A few moments later he returned to say that all was ready. All four then
started under the eyes of the whole population of Montegnac, which was
gathered in the roadway before the post-house. The mother and sister
kept silence. The two priests, seeing rocks ahead in many subjects,
could neither talk indifferently nor allow themselves to be cheerful.
While seeking for some neutral subject the carriage crossed the plain,
the aspect of which dreary region seemed to influence the duration of
their melancholy silence.

“How came you to adopt the ecclesiastical profession?” asked the Abbe
Gabriel, suddenly, with an impulsive curiosity which seized him as soon
as the carriage turned into the high-road.

“I did not look upon the priesthood as a profession,” replied the
rector, simply. “I cannot understand how a man can become a priest for
any other reason than the undefinable power of vocation. I know that
many men have served in the Lord’s vineyard who have previously worn
out their hearts in the service of passion; some have loved hopelessly,
others have had their love betrayed; men have lost the flower of their
lives in burying a precious wife or an adored mistress; some have been
disgusted with social life at a period when uncertainty hovers over
everything, even over feelings, and doubt mocks tender certainties by
calling them beliefs; others abandon politics at a period when power
seems to be an expiation and when the governed regard obedience as
fatality. Many leave a society without banners; where opposing forces
only unite to overthrow good. I do not think that any man would give
himself to God from a covetous motive. Some men have looked upon the
priesthood as a means of regenerating our country; but, according to
my poor lights, a priest-patriot is a meaningless thing. The priest can
only belong to God. I did not wish to offer our Father--who nevertheless
accepts all--the wreck of my heart and the fragments of my will; I
gave myself to him whole. In one of those touching theories of pagan
religion, the victim sacrificed to the false gods goes to the altar
decked with flowers. The significance of that custom has always deeply
touched me. A sacrifice is nothing without grace. My life is simple and
without the very slightest romance. My father, who has made his own way
in the world, is a stern, inflexible man; he treats his wife and his
children as he treats himself. I have never seen a smile upon his lips.
His iron hand, his stern face, his gloomy, rough activity, oppressed
us all--wife, children, clerks and servants--under an almost savage
despotism. I could--I speak for myself only--I could have accommodated
myself to this life if the power thus exercised had had an equal
repression; but, captious and vacillating, he treated us all with
intolerable alternations. We were always ignorant whether we were doing
right or whether he considered us to blame; and the horrible expectancy
which results from that is torture in domestic life. A street life seems
better than a home under such circumstances. Had I been alone in the
house I would have borne all from my father without murmuring; but my
heart was torn by the bitter, unceasing anguish of my dear mother, whom
I ardently loved and whose tears put me sometimes into a fury in which I
nearly lost my reason. My school days, when boys are usually so full of
misery and hard work, were to me a golden period. I dreaded holidays.
My mother herself preferred to come and see me. When I had finished
my philosophical course and was forced to return home and become my
father’s clerk, I could not endure it more than a few months; my mind,
bewildered by the fever of adolescence, threatened to give way. On a sad
autumn evening as I was walking alone with my mother along the Boulevard
Bourdon, then one of the most melancholy parts of Paris, I poured my
heart into hers, and I told her that I saw no possible life before me
except in the Church. My tastes, my ideas, all that I most loved would
be continually thwarted so long as my father lived. Under the cassock of
a priest he would be forced to respect me, and I might thus on certain
occasions become the protector of my family. My mother wept much. Just
at this period my eldest brother (since a general and killed at Leipzig)
had entered the army as a private soldier, driven from his home for the
same reasons that made me wish to be a priest. I showed my mother that
her best means of protection would be to marry my sister, as soon as she
was old enough, to some man of strong character, and to look for help
to this new family. Under pretence of avoiding the conscription without
costing my father a penny to buy me off, I entered the seminary of
Saint-Sulpice at the age of nineteen. Within those celebrated old
buildings I found a peace and happiness that were troubled only by the
thought of my mother and my sister’s sufferings. Their domestic misery,
no doubt, went on increasing; for whenever they saw me they sought to
strengthen my resolution. Perhaps I had been initiated into the secrets
of charity, such as our great Saint Paul defines it, by my own trials.
At any rate, I longed to stanch the wounds of the poor in some forgotten
corner of the earth, and to prove by my example, if God would deign to
bless my efforts, that the Catholic religion, judged by its actions for
humanity, is the only true, the only beneficent and noble civilizing
force. During the last days of my diaconate, grace, no doubt,
enlightened me. I have fully forgiven my father, regarding him as the
instrument of my destiny. My mother, though I wrote her a long and
tender letter, explaining all things and proving to her that the finger
of God was guiding me, my poor mother wept many tears as she saw my
hair cut off by the scissors of the Church. She knew herself how many
pleasures I renounced, but she did not know the secret glories to which
I aspired. Women are so tender! After I once belonged to God I felt a
boundless peace; I felt no needs, no vanities, none of those cares which
trouble men so much. I knew that Providence would take care of me as
a thing of its own. I entered a world from which all fear is banished;
where the future is certain; where all things are divine, even the
silence. This quietude is one of the benefactions of grace. My mother
could not conceive that a man could espouse a church. Nevertheless,
seeing me happy, with a cloudless brow, she grew happier herself.
After I was ordained I came to the Limousin to visit one of my
paternal relations, who chanced to speak to me of the then condition
of Montegnac. A thought darted into my mind with the vividness of
lightning, and I said to myself inwardly: ‘Here is thy vineyard!’ I
came here, and you see, monsieur, that my history is very simple and
uneventful.”

At this instant Limoges came into sight, bathed in the last rays of the
setting sun. When the women saw it they could not restrain their tears;
they wept aloud.




IX. DENISE

The young man whom these two different loves were now on their way
to comfort, who excited so much artless curiosity, so much spurious
sympathy and true solicitude, was lying on his prison pallet in one
of the condemned cells. A spy watched beside the door to catch, if
possible, any words that might escape him, either in sleep or in one of
his violent furies; so anxious were the officers of justice to exhaust
all human means of discovering Jean-Francois Tascheron’s accomplice and
recover the sums stolen.

The des Vanneaulx had promised a reward to the police, and the police
kept constant watch on the obstinate silence of the prisoner. When the
man on duty looked through a loophole made for the purpose he saw the
convict always in the same position, bound in the straight-jacket, his
head secured by a leather thong ever since he had attempted to tear the
stuff of the jacket with his teeth.

Jean-Francois gazed steadily at the ceiling with a fixed and despairing
eye, a burning eye, as if reddened by the terrible thoughts behind it.
He was a living image of the antique Prometheus; the memory of some lost
happiness gnawed at his heart. When the solicitor-general himself went
to see him that magistrate could not help testifying his surprise at
a character so obstinately persistent. No sooner did any one enter his
cell than Jean-Francois flew into a frenzy which exceeded the limits
known to physicians for such attacks. The moment he heard the key turn
in the lock or the bolts of the barred door slide, a light foam whitened
his lips.

Jean-Francois Tascheron, then twenty-five years of age, was small
but well-made. His wiry, crinkled hair, growing low on his forehead,
indicated energy. His eyes, of a clear and luminous yellow, were too
near the root of the nose,--a defect which gave him some resemblance
to birds of prey. The face was round, of the warm brown coloring which
marks the inhabitants of middle France. One feature of his physiognomy
confirmed an assertion of Lavater as to persons who are destined to
commit murder; his front teeth lapped each other. Nevertheless his face
bore all the characteristics of integrity and a sweet and artless moral
nature; there was nothing surprising in the fact that a woman had loved
him passionately. His fresh mouth with its dazzling teeth was charming,
but the vermilion of the lips was of the red-lead tint which indicates
repressed ferocity, and, in many human beings, a free abandonment to
pleasure. His demeanor showed none of the low habits of a workman. In
the eyes of the women who were present at the trial it seemed evident
that one of their sex had softened those muscles used to toil, had
ennobled the countenance of the rustic, and given grace to his person.
Women can always detect the traces of love in a man, just as men can see
in a woman whether, as the saying is, love has passed that way.

Toward evening of the day we are now relating Jean-Francois heard the
sliding of bolts and the noise of the key in the lock. He turned his
head violently and gave vent to the horrible growl with which his
frenzies began; but he trembled all over when the beloved heads of his
sister and his mother stood out against the fading light, and behind
them the face of the rector of Montegnac.

“The wretches! is this why they keep me alive?” he said, closing his
eyes.

Denise, who had lately been confined in a prison, was distrustful of
everything; the spy had no doubt hidden himself merely to return in a
few moments. The girl flung herself on her brother, bent her tearful
face to his and whispered:--

“They may be listening to us.”

“Otherwise they would not have let you come here,” he replied in a loud
voice. “I have long asked the favor that none of my family should be
admitted here.”

“Oh! how they have bound him!” cried the mother. “My poor child! my poor
boy!” and she fell on her knees beside the pallet, hiding her head in
the cassock of the priest, who was standing by her.

“If Jean will promise me to be quiet,” said the rector, “and not attempt
to injure himself, and to behave properly while we are with him, I will
ask to have him unbound; but the least violation of his promise will
reflect on me.”

“I do so want to move as I please, dear Monsieur Bonnet,” said the
criminal, his eyes moistening with tears, “that I give you my word to do
as you wish.”

The rector went out, and returned with the jailer, and the jacket was
taken off.

“You won’t kill me to-night, will you?” said the turnkey.

Jean made no answer.

“Poor brother!” said Denise, opening a basket which had just passed
through a rigorous examination. “Here are some of the things you like; I
dare say they don’t feed you for the love of God.”

She showed him some fruit, gathered as soon as the rector had told her
she could go to the jail, and a _galette_ his mother had immediately
baked for him. This attention, which reminded him of his boyhood, the
voice and gestures of his sister, the presence of his mother and the
rector, brought on a reaction and he burst into tears.

“Ah! Denise,” he said, “I have not had a good meal for six months. I eat
only when driven to it by hunger.”

The mother and sister went out and then returned; with the natural
housekeeping spirit of such women, who want to give their men material
comfort, they soon had a supper for their poor child. In this the
officials helped them; for an order had been given to do all that
could with safety be done for the condemned man. The des Vanneaulx had
contributed, with melancholy hope, toward the comfort of the man
from whom they still expected to recover their inheritance. Thus poor
Jean-Francois had a last glimpse of family joys, if joys they could be
called under such circumstances.

“Is my appeal rejected?” he said to Monsieur Bonnet.

“Yes, my child; nothing is left for you to do but to make a Christian
end. This life is nothing in comparison to that which awaits you; you
must think now of your eternal happiness. You can pay your debt to
man with your life, but God is not content with such a little thing as
that.”

“Give up my life! Ah! you do not know all that I am leaving.”

Denise looked at her brother as if to warn him that even in matters of
religion he must be cautious.

“Let us say no more about it,” he resumed, eating the fruit with an
avidity which told of his inward fire. “When am I--”

“No, no! say nothing of that before me!” said the mother.

“But I should be easier in mind if I knew,” he said, in a low voice to
the rector.

“Always the same nature,” exclaimed Monsieur Bonnet. Then he bent down
to the prisoner’s ear and whispered, “If you will reconcile yourself
this night with God so that your repentance will enable me to absolve
you, it will be to-morrow. We have already gained much in calming you,”
 he said, aloud.

Hearing these last words, Jean’s lips turned pale, his eyes rolled up in
a violent spasm, and an angry shudder passed through his frame.

“Am I calm?” he asked himself. Happily his eyes encountered the tearful
face of Denise, and he recovered his self-control. “So be it,” he said
to the rector; “there is no one but you to whom I would listen; they
have known how to conquer me.”

And he flung himself on his mother’s breast.

“My son,” said the mother, weeping, “listen to Monsieur Bonnet; he risks
his life, the dear rector, in going to you to--” she hesitated, and then
said, “to the gate of eternal life.”

Then she kissed Jean’s head and held it to her breast for some moments.

“Will he, indeed, go with me?” asked Jean, looking at the rector, who
bowed his head in assent. “Well, yes, I will listen to him; I will do
all he asks of me.”

“You promise it?” said Denise. “The saving of your soul is what we
seek. Besides, you would not have all Limoges and the village say that a
Tascheron knows not how to die a noble death? And then, too, think that
all you lose here you will regain in heaven, where pardoned souls will
meet again.”

This superhuman effort parched the throat of the heroic girl. She was
silent after this, like her mother, but she had triumphed. The criminal,
furious at seeing his happiness torn from him by the law, now quivered
at the sublime Catholic truth so simply expressed by his sister. All
women, even young peasant-women like Denise, know how to touch these
delicate chords; for does not every woman seek to make love eternal?
Denise had touched two chords, each most sensitive. Awakened pride
called on the other virtues chilled by misery and hardened by despair.
Jean took his sister’s hand and kissed it, and laid it on his heart in a
deeply significant manner; he applied it both gently and forcibly.

“Yes,” he said, “I must renounce all; this is the last beating of my
heart, its last thought. Keep them, Denise.”

And he gave her one of those glances by which a man in crucial moments
tries to put his soul into the soul of another human being.

This thought, this word, was, in truth, a last testament, an unspoken
legacy, to be as faithfully transmitted as it was trustfully given. It
was so fully understood by mother, sister, and priest, that they all
with one accord turned their faces from each other, to hide their tears
and keep the secret of their thoughts in their own breasts. Those few
words were the dying agony of a passion, the farewell of a soul to the
glorious things of earth, in accordance with true Catholic renunciation.
The rector, comprehending the majesty of all great human things, even
criminal things, judged of this mysterious passion by the enormity of
the sin. He raised his eyes to heaven as if to invoke the mercy of God.
Thence come the consolations, the infinite tendernesses of the Catholic
religion,--so humane, so gentle with the hand that descends to man,
showing him the law of higher spheres; so awful, so divine, with that
other hand held out to lead him into heaven.

Denise had now significantly shown the rector the spot by which to
strike that rock and make the waters of repentance flow. But suddenly,
as though the memories evoked were dragging him backwards, Jean-Francois
gave the harrowing cry of the hyena when the hunters overtake it.

“No, no!” he cried, falling on his knees, “I will live! Mother, give me
your clothes; I can escape! Mercy, mercy! Go see the king; tell him--”

He stopped, gave a horrible roar, and clung convulsively to the rector’s
cassock.

“Go,” said Monsieur Bonnet, in a low voice, to the agitated women.

Jean heard the words; he raised his head, gazed at his mother and
sister, then he stopped and kissed their feet.

“Let us say farewell now; do not come back; leave me alone with Monsieur
Bonnet. You need not be uneasy about me any longer,” he said, pressing
his mother and his sister to him with a strength in which he seemed to
put all his life.

“How is it we do not die of this?” said Denise to her mother as they
passed through the wicket.

It was nearly eight o’clock when this parting took place. At the gate of
the prison the two women met the Abbe de Rastignac, who asked them news
of the prisoner.

“He will no doubt be reconciled with God,” said Denise. “If repentance
has not yet begun, he is very near it.”

The bishop was soon after informed that the clergy would triumph on this
occasion, and that the criminal would go to the scaffold with the
most edifying religious sentiments. The prelate, with whom was the
attorney-general, expressed a wish to see the rector. Monsieur Bonnet
did not reach the palace before midnight. The Abbe Gabriel, who made
many trips between the palace and the jail, judged it necessary to fetch
the rector in the episcopal coach; for the poor priest was in a state of
exhaustion which almost deprived him of the use of his legs. The effect
of his day, the prospect of the morrow, the sight of the secret struggle
he had witnessed, and the full repentance which had at last overtaken
his stubborn lamb when the great reckoning of eternity was brought home
to him,--all these things had combined to break down Monsieur Bonnet,
whose nervous, electrical nature entered into the sufferings of others
as though they were his own. Souls that resemble that noble soul espouse
so ardently the impressions, miseries, passions, sufferings of those
in whom they are interested, that they actually feel them, and in a
horrible manner, too; for they are able to measure their extent,--a
knowledge which escapes others who are blinded by selfishness of heart
or the paroxysm of grief. It is here that a priest like Monsieur Bonnet
becomes an artist who feels, rather than an artist who judges.

When the rector entered the bishop’s salon and found there the two
grand-vicars, the Abbe de Rastignac, Monsieur de Grandville, and the
_procureur-general_, he felt convinced that something more was expected
of him.

“Monsieur,” said the bishop, “have you obtained any facts which you
can, without violating your duty, confide to the officers of the law for
their guidance?”

“Monseigneur, in order to give absolution to that poor, wandering child,
I waited not only till his repentance was as sincere and as complete as
the Church could wish, but I have also exacted from him the restitution
of the money.”

“This restitution,” said the _procureur-general_, “brings me here
to-night; it will, of course, be made in such a way as to throw light
on the mysterious parts of this affair. The criminal certainly had
accomplices.”

“The interests of human justice,” said the rector, “are not those for
which I act. I am ignorant of how the restitution will be made, but
I know it will take place. In sending for me to minister to my
parishioner, Monseigneur placed me under the conditions which give to
rectors in their parishes the same powers which Monseigneur exercises
in his diocese,--barring, of course, all questions of discipline and
ecclesiastical obedience.”

“That is true,” said the bishop. “But the question here is how to
obtain from the condemned man voluntary information which may enlighten
justice.”

“My mission is to win souls to God,” said Monsieur Bonnet.

Monsieur de Grancour shrugged his shoulders slightly, but his colleague,
the Abbe Dutheil nodded his head in sign of approval.

“Tascheron is no doubt endeavoring to shield some one, whom the
restitution will no doubt bring to light,” said the _procureur-general_.

“Monsieur,” replied the rector, “I know absolutely nothing which would
either confute or justify your suspicion. Besides, the secrets of
confession are inviolable.”

“Will the restitution really take place?” asked the man of law.

“Yes, monsieur,” replied the man of God.

“That is enough for me,” said the _procureur-general_, who relied on the
police to obtain the required information; as if passions and personal
interests were not tenfold more astute than the police.

The next day, this being market-day, Jean-Francois Tascheron was led
to execution in a manner to satisfy both the pious and the political
spirits of the town. Exemplary in behavior, pious and humble, he kissed
the crucifix, which Monsieur Bonnet held to his lips with a trembling
hand. The unhappy man was watched and examined; his glance was
particularly spied upon; would his eyes rove in search of some one in
the crowd or in a house? His discretion did, as a matter of fact, hold
firm to the last. He died as a Christian should, repentant and absolved.

The poor rector was carried away unconscious from the foot of the
scaffold, though he did not even see the fatal knife.

During the following night, on the high-road fifteen miles from Limoges,
Denise, though nearly exhausted by fatigue and grief, begged her father
to let her go again to Limoges and take with her Louis-Marie Tascheron,
one of her brothers.

“What more have you to do in that town?” asked her father, frowning.

“Father,” she said, “not only must we pay the lawyer who defended him,
but we must also restore the money which he has hidden.”

“You are right,” said the honest man, pulling out a leathern pouch he
carried with him.

“No, no,” said Denise, “he is no longer your son. It is not for those
who cursed him, but for those who loved him, to reward the lawyer.”

“We will wait for you at Havre,” said the father.

Denise and her brother returned to Limoges before daylight. When the
police heard, later, of this return they were never able to discover
where the brother and sister had hidden themselves.

Denise and Louis went to the upper town cautiously, about four o’clock
that afternoon, gliding along in the shadow of the houses. The poor girl
dared not raise her eyes, fearing to meet the glances of those who had
seen her brother’s execution. After calling on Monsieur Bonnet, who
in spite of his weakness, consented to serve as father and guardian to
Denise in the matter, they all went to the lawyer’s house in the rue de
la Comedie.

“Good-morning, my poor children,” said the lawyer, bowing to Monsieur
Bonnet; “how can I be of service to you? Perhaps you would like me to
claim your brother’s body and send it to you?”

“No, monsieur,” replied Denise, weeping at an idea which had never yet
occurred to her. “I come to pay his debt to you--so far, at least, as
money can pay an eternal debt.”

“Pray sit down,” said the lawyer; noticing that Denise and the rector
were still standing.

Denise turned away to take from her corset two notes of five hundred
francs each, which were fastened by a pin to her chemise; then she sat
down and offered them to her brother’s defender. The rector gave the
lawyer a flashing look which was instantly moistened by a tear.

“Keep the money for yourself, my poor girl,” said the lawyer. “The rich
do not pay so generously for a lost cause.”

“Monsieur,” said Denise, “I cannot obey you.”

“Then the money is not yours?” said the lawyer.

“You are mistaken,” she replied, looking at Monsieur Bonnet as if to
know whether God would be angry at the lie.

The rector kept his eyes lowered.

“Well, then,” said the lawyer, taking one note of five hundred francs
and offering the other to the rector, “I will share it with the poor.
Now, Denise, change this one, which is really mine,” he went on, giving
her the note, “for your velvet ribbon and your gold cross. I will hang
the cross above my mantel to remind me of the best and purest young
girl’s heart I have ever known in my whole experience as a lawyer.”

“I will give it to you without selling it,” cried Denise, taking off her
_jeannette_ and offering it to him.

“Monsieur,” said the rector, “I accept the five hundred francs to pay
for the exhumation of the poor lad’s body and its transportation to
Montegnac. God has no doubt pardoned him, and Jean will rise with my
flock on that last day when the righteous and the repentant will be
called together to the right hand of the Father.”

“So be it,” replied the lawyer.

He took Denise by the hand and drew her toward him to kiss her forehead;
but the action had another motive.

“My child,” he whispered, “no one in Montegnac has five-hundred-franc
notes; they are rare even at Limoges, where they are only taken at a
discount. This money has been given to you; you will not tell me by
whom, and I don’t ask you; but listen to me: if you have anything more
to do in this town relating to your poor brother, take care! You and
Monsieur Bonnet and your brother Louis will be followed by police-spies.
Your family is known to have left Montegnac, and as soon as you are seen
here you will be watched and surrounded before you are aware of it.”

“Alas!” she said. “I have nothing more to do here.”

“She is cautious,” thought the lawyer, as he parted from her. “However,
she is warned; and I hope she will get safely off.”

              *     *     *     *     *

During this last week in September, when the weather was as warm as in
summer, the bishop gave a dinner to the authorities of the place. Among
the guests were the _procureur-du-roi_ and the attorney-general. Some
lively discussions prolonged the party till a late hour. The company
played whist and backgammon, a favorite game with the clergy. Toward
eleven o’clock the _procureur-du-roi_ walked out upon the upper terrace.
From the spot where he stood he saw a light on that island to which, on
a certain evening, the attention of the bishop and the Abbe Gabriel had
been drawn,--Veronique’s “Ile de France,”--and the gleam recalled to
the _procureur’s_ mind the unexplained mysteries of the Tascheron crime.
Then, reflecting that there could be no legitimate reason for a fire on
that lonely island in the river at that time of night, an idea, which
had already struck the bishop and the secretary, darted into his mind
with the suddenness and brilliancy of the flame itself which was shining
in the distance.

“We have all been fools!” he cried; “but this will give us the
accomplices.”

He returned to the salon, sought out Monsieur de Grandville, said a
few words in his ear, after which they both took leave. But the Abbe de
Rastignac accompanied them politely to the door; he watched them as they
departed, saw them go to the terrace, noticed the fire on the island,
and thought to himself, “She is lost!”

The emissaries of the law got there too late. Denise and Louis, whom
Jean had taught to dive, were actually on the bank of the river at a
spot named to them by Jean, but Louis Tascheron had already dived four
times, bringing up each time a bundle containing twenty thousand francs’
worth of gold. The first sum was wrapped in a foulard handkerchief
knotted by the four corners. This handkerchief, from which the water
was instantly wrung, was thrown into a great fire of drift wood already
lighted. Denise did not leave the fire until she saw every particle of
the handkerchief consumed. The second sum was wrapped in a shawl, the
third in a cambric handkerchief; these wrappings were instantly burned
like the foulard.

Just as Denise was throwing the wrapping of the fourth and last package
into the fire the gendarmes, accompanied by the commissary of police,
seized that incriminating article, which Denise let them take without
manifesting the least emotion. It was a handkerchief, on which, in spite
of its soaking in the river, traces of blood could still be seen. When
questioned as to what she was doing there, Denise said she was taking
the stolen gold from the river according to her brother’s instructions.
The commissary asked her why she was burning certain articles; she said
she was obeying her brother’s last directions. When asked what those
articles were she boldly answered, without attempting to deceive: “A
foulard, a shawl, a cambric handkerchief, and the handkerchief now
captured.” The latter had belonged to her brother.

This discovery and its attendant circumstances made a great stir in
Limoges. The shawl, more especially, confirmed the belief that Tascheron
had committed this crime in the interests of some love affair.

“He protects that woman after his death,” said one lady, hearing of
these last discoveries, rendered harmless by the criminal’s precautions.

“There may be some husband in Limoges who will miss his foulard,” said
the _procureur-du-roi_, with a laugh, “but he will not dare speak of
it.”

“These matters of dress are really so compromising,” said old Madame
Perret, “that I shall make a search through my wardrobe this very
evening.”

“Whose pretty little footmarks could he have taken such pains to efface
while he left his own?” said Monsieur de Grandville.

“Pooh! I dare say she was an ugly woman,” said the _procureur-du-roi_.

“She has paid dearly for her sin,” observed the Abbe de Grancour.

“Do you know what this affair shows?” cried Monsieur de Grandville. “It
shows what women have lost by the Revolution, which has levelled all
social ranks. Passions of this kind are no longer met with except in
men who still feel an enormous distance between themselves and their
mistresses.”

“You saddle love with many vanities,” remarked the Abbe Dutheil.

“What does Madame Graslin think?” asked the prefect.

“What do you expect her to think?” said Monsieur de Grandville. “Her
child was born, as she predicted to me, on the morning of the execution;
she has not seen any one since then, for she is dangerously ill.”

A scene took place in another salon in Limoges which was almost comical.
The friends of the des Vanneaulx came to congratulate them on the
recovery of their property.

“Yes, but they ought to have pardoned that poor man,” said Madame
des Vanneaulx. “Love, and not greed, made him steal the money; he was
neither vicious nor wicked.”

“He was full of consideration for us,” said Monsieur des Vanneaulx; “and
if I knew where his family had gone I would do something for them. They
are very worthy people, those Tascherons.”




X. THIRD PHASE OF VERONIQUE’S LIFE

When Madame Graslin recovered from the long illness that followed the
birth of her child, which was not till the close of 1829, an illness
which forced her to keep her bed and remain in absolute retirement,
she heard her husband talking of an important piece of business he was
anxious to concede. The ducal house of Navarreins had offered for sale
the forest of Montegnac and the uncultivated lands around it.

Graslin had never yet executed the clause in his marriage contract with
his wife which obliged him to invest his wife’s fortune in lands; up to
this time he had preferred to employ the money in his bank, where he had
fully doubled it. He now began to speak of this investment. Hearing him
discuss it Veronique appeared to remember the name of Montegnac,
and asked her husband to fulfil his engagement about her property
by purchasing these lands. Monsieur Graslin then proposed to see the
rector, Monsieur Bonnet, and inquire of him about the estate, which
the Duc de Navarreins was desirous of selling because he foresaw the
struggle which the Prince de Polignac was forcing on between liberalism
and the house of Bourbon, and he augured ill of it; in fact, the duke
was one of the boldest opposers of the _coup-d’Etat_.

The duke had sent his agent to Limoges to negotiate the matter; telling
him to accept any good sum of money, for he remembered the Revolution
of 1789 too well not to profit by the lessons it had taught the
aristocracy. This agent had now been a month laying siege to Graslin,
the shrewdest and wariest business head in the Limousin,--the only man,
he was told by practical persons, who was able to purchase so large a
property and pay for it on the spot. The Abbe Dutheil wrote a line to
Monsieur Bonnet, who came to Limoges at once, and was taken to the hotel
Graslin.

Veronique determined to ask the rector to dinner; but the banker would
not let him go up to his wife’s apartment until he had talked to him
in his office for over an hour and obtained such information as fully
satisfied him, and made him resolve to buy the forest and domains
of Montegnac at once for the sum of five hundred thousand francs. He
acquiesced readily in his wife’s wish that this purchase and all others
connected with it should be in fulfilment of the clause of the marriage
contract relative to the investment of her dowry. Graslin was all the
more ready to do so because this act of justice cost him nothing, he
having doubled the original sum.

At this time, when Graslin was negotiating the purchase, the Navarreins
domains comprised the forest of Montegnac which contained about thirty
thousand acres of unused land, the ruins of the castle, the gardens,
park, and about five thousand acres of uncultivated land on the plain
beyond Montegnac. Graslin immediately bought other lands in order to
make himself master of the first peak in the chain of the Correzan
mountains on which the vast forest of Montegnac ended. Since the
imposition of taxes the Duc de Navarreins had never received more
than fifteen thousand francs per annum from this manor, once among the
richest tenures of the kingdom, the lands of which had escaped the sale
of “public domain” ordered by the Convention, on account probably of
their barrenness and the known difficulty of reclaiming them.

When the rector went at last to Madame Graslin’s apartment, and saw the
woman noted for her piety and for her intellect of whom he had heard
speak, he could not restrain a gesture of amazement. Veronique had now
reached the third phase of her life, that in which she was to rise into
grandeur by the exercise of the highest virtues,--a phase in which she
became another woman. To the Little Virgin of Titian, hidden at eleven
years of age beneath a spotted mantle of small-pox, had succeeded a
beautiful woman, noble and passionate; and from that woman, now wrung by
inward sorrows, came forth a saint.

Her skin bore the yellow tinge which colors the austere faces of
abbesses who have been famous for their macerations. The attenuated
temples were almost golden. The lips had paled, the red of an opened
pomegranate was no longer on them, their color had changed to the pale
pink of a Bengal rose. At the corners of the eyes, close to the nose,
sorrows had made two shining tracks like mother-of-pearl, where tears
had flowed; tears which effaced the marks of small-pox and glazed the
skin. Curiosity was invincibly attracted to that pearly spot, where the
blue threads of the little veins throbbed precipitately, as though they
were swelled by an influx of blood brought there, as it were, to feed
the tears. The circle round the eyes was now a dark-brown that was
almost black above the eyelids, which were horribly wrinkled. The cheeks
were hollow; in their folds lay the sign of solemn thoughts. The chin,
which in youth was full and round, the flesh covering the muscles,
was now shrunken, to the injury of its expression, which told of an
implacable religious severity exercised by this woman upon herself.

At twenty-nine years of age Veronique’s hair was scanty and already
whitening. Her thinness was alarming. In spite of her doctor’s advice
she insisted on suckling her son. The doctor triumphed in the result;
and as he watched the changes he had foretold in Veronique’s appearance,
he often said:--

“See the effects of childbirth on a woman! She adores that child; I have
often noticed that mothers are fondest of the children who cost them
most.”

Veronique’s faded eyes were all that retained even a memory of her
youth. The dark blue of the iris still cast its passionate fires, to
which the woman’s life seemed to have retreated, deserting the cold,
impassible face, and glowing with an expression of devotion when the
welfare of a fellow-being was concerned.

Thus the surprise, the dread of the rector ceased by degrees as he
went on explaining to Madame Graslin all the good that a large owner
of property could do at Montegnac provided he lived there. Veronique’s
beauty came back to her for a moment as her eyes glowed with the light
of an unhoped-for future.

“I will live there,” she said. “It shall be my work. I will ask Monsieur
Graslin for money, and I will gladly share in your religious enterprise.
Montegnac shall be fertilized; we will find some means to water those
arid plains. Like Moses, you have struck a rock from which the waters
will gush.”

The rector of Montegnac, when questioned by his friends in Limoges about
Madame Graslin, spoke of her as a saint.

The day after the purchase was concluded Monsieur Graslin sent an
architect to Montegnac. The banker intended to restore the chateau,
gardens, terrace, and park, and also to connect the castle grounds with
the forest by a plantation. He set himself to make these improvements
with vainglorious activity.

A few months later Madame Graslin met with a great misfortune. In
August, 1830, Graslin, overtaken by the commercial and banking disasters
of that period, became involved by no fault of his own. He could not
endure the thought of bankruptcy, nor that of losing a fortune of three
millions acquired by forty years of incessant toil. The moral malady
which resulted from this anguish of mind aggravated the inflammatory
disease always ready to break forth in his blood. He took to his bed.
Since her confinement Veronique’s regard for her husband had developed,
and had overthrown all the hopes of her admirer, Monsieur de Grandville.
She strove to save her husband’s life by unremitting care, with no
result but that of prolonging for a few months the poor man’s tortures;
but the respite was very useful to Grossetete, who, foreseeing the end
of his former clerk and partner, obtained from him all the information
necessary for the prompt liquidation of the assets.

Graslin died in April, 1831, and the widow’s grief yielded only to
Christian resignation. Veronique’s first words, when the condition
of Monsieur Graslin’s affairs were made known to her, were that she
abandoned her own fortune to pay the creditors; but it was found that
Graslin’s own property was more than sufficient. Two months later, the
liquidation, of which Grossetete took charge, left to Madame Graslin the
estate of Montegnac and six hundred thousand francs, her whole personal
fortune. The son’s name remained untainted, for Graslin had injured no
one’s property, not even that of his wife. Francis Graslin, the son,
received about one hundred thousand francs.

Monsieur de Grandville, to whom Veronique’s grandeur of soul and noble
qualities were well known, made her an offer of marriage; but, to the
surprise of all Limoges, Madame Graslin declined, under pretext that
the Church discouraged second marriages. Grossetete, a man of strong
common-sense and sure grasp of a situation, advised Veronique to invest
her property and what remained of Monsieur Graslin’s in the Funds; and
he made the investment himself in one of the government securities which
offered special advantages at that time, namely, the Three-per-cents,
which were then quoted at fifty. The child Francis received, therefore,
six thousand francs a year, and his mother forty thousand. Veronique’s
fortune was still the largest in the department.

When these affairs were all settled, Madame Graslin announced her
intention of leaving Limoges and taking up her residence at Montegnac,
to be near Monsieur Bonnet. She sent for the rector to consult about
the enterprise he was so anxious to carry on at Montegnac, in which she
desired to take part. But he endeavored unselfishly to dissuade her,
telling her that her place was in the world and in society.

“I was born of the people and I wish to return to the people,” she
replied. On which the rector, full of love for his village, said no more
against Madame Graslin’s apparent vocation; and the less because she had
actually put it out of her power to continue in Limoges, having sold the
hotel Graslin to Grossetete, who, to cover a sum that was due to him,
took it at its proper valuation.

The day of her departure, toward the end of August, 1831, Madame
Graslin’s numerous friends accompanied her some distance out of the
town. A few went as far as the first relay. Veronique was in an
open carriage with her mother. The Abbe Dutheil (just appointed to a
bishopric) occupied the front seat of the carriage with old Grossetete.
As they passed through the place d’Aine, Veronique showed signs of a
sudden shock; her face contracted so that the play of the muscles could
be seen; she clasped her infant to her breast with a convulsive motion,
which old Madame Sauviat concealed by instantly taking the child, for
she seemed to be on the watch for her daughter’s agitation. Chance
willed that Madame Graslin should pass through the square in which stood
the house she had formerly occupied with her father and mother in her
girlish days; she grasped her mother’s hand while great tears fell from
her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

After leaving Limoges she turned and looked back, seeming to feel an
emotion of happiness which was noticed by all her friends. When Monsieur
de Grandville, then a young man of twenty-five, whom she declined to
take as a husband, kissed her hand with an earnest expression of regret,
the new bishop noticed the strange manner in which the black pupil of
Veronique’s eyes suddenly spread over the blue of the iris, reducing it
to a narrow circle. The eye betrayed unmistakably some violent inward
emotion.

“I shall never see him again,” she whispered to her mother, who received
this confidence without betraying the slightest feeling in her old face.

Madame Graslin was at that instant under the observation of Grossetete,
who was directly in front of her; but, in spite of his shrewdness,
the old banker did not detect the hatred which Veronique felt for the
magistrate, whom she nevertheless received at her house. But churchmen
have far more perception than other men, and Monsieur Dutheil suddenly
startled Veronique with a priestly glance.

“Do you regret nothing in Limoges?” he asked her.

“Nothing, now that you are leaving it; and monsieur,” she added, smiling
at Grossetete, who was bidding her adieu, “will seldom be there.”

The bishop accompanied Madame Graslin as far as Montegnac.

“I ought to walk this road in sackcloth and ashes,” she said in her
mother’s ear as they went on foot up the steep slope of Saint-Leonard.

The old woman put her finger on her lips and glanced at the bishop, who
was looking at the child with terrible attention. This gesture, and the
luminous look in the prelate’s eyes, sent a shudder through Veronique’s
body. At the aspect of the vast plains stretching their gray expanse
before Montegnac the fire died out of her eyes, and an infinite sadness
overcame her. Presently she saw the village rector coming to meet her,
and together they returned to the carriage.

“There is your domain, madame,” said Monsieur Bonnet, extending his hand
toward the barren plain.

A few moments more, and the village of Montegnac, with its hill, on
which the newly erected buildings struck the eye, came in sight, gilded
by the setting sun, and full of the poesy born of the contrast between
the beautiful spot and the surrounding barrenness, in which it lay
like an oasis in the desert. Madame Graslin’s eyes filled suddenly with
tears. The rector called her attention to a broad white line like a gash
on the mountain side.

“See what my parishioners have done to testify their gratitude to the
lady of the manor,” he said, pointing to the line, which was really a
road; “we can now drive up to the chateau. This piece of road has been
made by them without costing you a penny, and two months hence we shall
plant it with trees. Monseigneur will understand what trouble and care
and devotion were needed to accomplish such a change.”

“Is it possible they have done that?” said the bishop.

“Without accepting any payment for their work, Monseigneur. The poorest
put their hands into it, knowing that it would bring a mother among
them.”

At the foot of the hill the travellers saw the whole population of the
neighborhood, who were lighting fire-boxes and discharging a few guns;
then two of the prettiest of the village girls, dressed in white, came
forward to offer Madame Graslin flowers and fruit.

“To be thus received in this village!” she exclaimed, grasping the
rector’s hand as if she stood on the brink of a precipice.

The crowd accompanied the carriage to the iron gates of the avenue. From
there Madame Graslin could see her chateau, of which as yet she had only
caught glimpses, and she was thunderstruck at the magnificence of the
building. Stone is rare in those parts, the granite of the mountains
being difficult to quarry. The architect employed by Graslin to
restore the house had used brick as the chief substance of this vast
construction. This was rendered less costly by the fact that the
forest of Montegnac furnished all the necessary wood and clay for its
fabrication. The framework of wood and the stone for the foundations
also came from the forest; otherwise the cost of the restorations would
have been ruinous. The chief expenses had been those of transportation,
labor, and salaries. Thus the money laid out was kept in the village,
and greatly benefited it.

At first sight, and from a distance, the chateau presents an enormous
red mass, threaded by black lines produced by the pointing, and edged
with gray; for the window and door casings, the entablatures, corner
stones, and courses between the stories, are of granite, cut in facets
like a diamond. The courtyard, which forms a sloping oval like that of
the Chateau de Versailles, is surrounded by brick walls divided into
panels by projecting buttresses. At the foot of these walls are groups
of rare shrubs, remarkable for the varied color of their greens. Two
fine iron gates placed opposite to each other lead on one side to a
terrace which overlooks Montegnac, on the other to the offices and a
farm-house.

The grand entrance-gate, to which the road just constructed led, is
flanked by two pretty lodges in the style of the sixteenth century.
The facade on the courtyard looking east has three towers,--one in the
centre, separated from the two others by the main building of the house.
The facade on the gardens, which is absolutely the same as the others,
looks westward. The towers have but one window on the facade; the main
building has three on either side of the middle tower. The latter,
which is square like a _campanile_, the corners being vermiculated, is
noticeable for the elegance of a few carvings sparsely distributed. Art
is timid in the provinces, and though, since 1829, ornamentation has
made some progress at the instigation of certain writers, landowners
were at that period afraid of expenses which the lack of competition and
skilled workmen rendered serious.

The corner towers, which have three stories with a single window in
each, looking to the side, are covered with very high-pitched roofs
surrounded by granite balustrades, and on each pyramidal slope of these
roofs crowned at the top with the sharp ridge of a platform surrounded
with a wrought iron railing, is another window carved like the rest.
On each floor the corbels of the doors and windows are adorned with
carvings copied from those of the Genoese mansions. The corner tower
with three windows to the south looks down on Montegnac; the other, to
the north, faces the forest. From the garden front the eye takes in that
part of Montegnac which is still called Les Tascherons, and follows
the high-road leading through the village to the chief town of the
department. The facade on the courtyard has a view of the vast plains
semicircled by the mountains of the Correze, on the side toward
Montegnac, but ending in the far distance on a low horizon. The main
building has only one floor above the ground-floor, covered with a
mansarde roof in the olden style. The towers at each end are three
stories in height. The middle tower has a stunted dome something like
that on the Pavillon de l’Horloge of the palace of the Tuileries, and in
it is a single room forming a belvedere and containing the clock. As
a matter of economy the roofs had all been made of gutter-tiles, the
enormous weight of which was easily supported by the stout beams and
uprights of the framework cut in the forest.

Before his death Graslin had laid out the road which the peasantry
had just built out of gratitude; for these restorations (which Graslin
called his folly) had distributed several hundred thousand francs
among the people; in consequence of which Montegnac had considerably
increased. Graslin had also begun, before his death, behind the offices
on the slope of the hill leading down to the plain, a number of farm
buildings, proving his intention to draw some profit from the hitherto
uncultivated soil of the plains. Six journeyman-gardeners, who were
lodged in the offices, were now at work under orders of a head gardener,
planting and completing certain works which Monsieur Bonnet had
considered indispensable.

The ground-floor apartments of the chateau, intended only for
reception-rooms, had been sumptuously furnished; the upper floor was
rather bare, Monsieur Graslin having stopped for a time the work of
furnishing it.

“Ah, Monseigneur!” said Madame Graslin to the bishop, after going the
rounds of the house, “I who expected to live in a cottage! Poor Monsieur
Graslin was extravagant indeed!”

“And you,” said the bishop, adding after a pause, as he noticed the
shudder than ran through her frame at his first words, “you will be
extravagant in charity?”

She took the arm of her mother, who was leading Francis by the hand,
and went to the long terrace at the foot of which are the church and
the parsonage, and from which the houses of the village can be seen
in tiers. The rector carried off Monseigneur Dutheil to show him the
different sides of the landscape. Before long the two priests came round
to the farther end of the terrace, where they found Madame Graslin and
her mother motionless as statues. The old woman was wiping her eyes with
a handkerchief, and her daughter stood with both hands stretched beyond
the balustrade as though she were pointing to the church below.

“What is the matter, madame?” said the rector to Madame Sauviat.

“Nothing,” replied Madame Graslin, turning round and advancing a few
steps to meet the priests; “I did not know that I should have the
cemetery under my eyes.”

“You can put it elsewhere; the law gives you that right.”

“The law!” she exclaimed with almost a cry.

Again the bishop looked fixedly at Veronique. Disturbed by the dark
glance with which the priest had penetrated the veil of flesh that
covered her soul, dragging thence a secret hidden in the grave of that
cemetery, she said to him suddenly:--

“Well, _yes_!”

The priest laid his hand over his eyes and was silent for a moment as if
stunned.

“Help my daughter,” cried the old mother; “she is fainting.”

“The air is so keen, it overcomes me,” said Madame Graslin, as she fell
unconscious into the arms of the two priests, who carried her into one
of the lower rooms of the chateau.

When she recovered consciousness she saw the priests on their knees
praying for her.

“May the angel you visited you never leave you!” said the bishop,
blessing her. “Farewell, my daughter.”

Overcome by those words Madame Graslin burst into tears.

“Tears will save her!” cried her mother.

“In this world and in the next,” said the bishop, turning round as he
left the room.

The room to which they had carried Madame Graslin was on the first floor
above the ground-floor of the corner tower, from which the church and
cemetery and southern side of Montegnac could be seen. She determined
to remain there, and did so, more or less uncomfortably, with Aline her
maid and little Francis. Madame Sauviat, naturally, took another room
near hers.

It was several days before Madame Graslin recovered from the violent
emotion which overcame her on that first evening, and her mother induced
her to stay in bed at least during the mornings. At night, Veronique
would come out and sit on a bench of the terrace from which her eyes
could rest on the church and cemetery. In spite of Madame Sauviat’s mute
but persistent opposition, Madame Graslin formed an almost monomaniacal
habit of sitting in the same place, where she seemed to give way to the
blackest melancholy.

“Madame will die,” said Aline to the old mother.

Appealed to by Madame Sauviat, the rector, who had wished not to seem
intrusive, came henceforth very frequently to visit Madame Graslin; he
needed only to be warned that her soul was sick. This true pastor took
care to pay his visits at the hour when Veronique came out to sit at the
corner of the terrace with her child, both in deep mourning.




XI. THE RECTOR AT WORK

It was now the beginning of October, and Nature was growing dull and
sad. Monsieur Bonnet, perceiving in Veronique from the moment of her
arrival at Montegnac the existence of an inward wound, thought it wisest
to wait for the voluntary and complete confidence of a woman who would
sooner or later become his penitent.

One evening Madame Graslin looked at the rector with eyes almost
glazed with that fatal indecision often observable in persons who
are cherishing the thought of death. From that moment Monsieur Bonnet
hesitated no longer; he set before him the duty of arresting the
progress of this cruel moral malady.

At first there was a brief struggle of empty words between the priest
and Veronique, in which they both sought to veil their real thoughts.
In spite of the cold, Veronique was sitting on the granite bench holding
Francis on her knee. Madame Sauviat was standing at the corner of the
terrace, purposely so placed as to hide the cemetery. Aline was waiting
to take the child away.

“I had supposed, madame,” said the rector, who was now paying his
seventh visit, “that you were only melancholy; but I see,” sinking
his voice to a whisper, “that your soul is in despair. That feeling is
neither Christian nor Catholic.”

“But,” she replied, looking to heaven with piercing eyes and letting a
bitter smile flicker on her lips, “what other feeling does the Church
leave to a lost soul unless it be despair?”

As he heard these words the rector realized the vast extent of the
ravages in her soul.

“Ah!” he said, “you are making this terrace your hell, when it ought to
be your Calvary from which to rise to heaven.”

“I have no pride left to place me on such a pedestal,” she answered, in
a tone which revealed the self-contempt that lay within her.

Here the priest, by one of those inspirations which are both natural and
frequent in noble souls, the man of God lifted the child in his arms
and kissed its forehead, saying, in a fatherly voice, “Poor little one!”
 Then he gave it himself to the nurse, who carried it away.

Madame Sauviat looked at her daughter, and saw the efficacy of the
rector’s words; for Veronique’s eyes, long dry, were moist with tears.
The old woman made a sign to the priest and disappeared.

“Let us walk,” said the rector to Veronique leading her along the
terrace to the other end, from which Les Tascherons could be seen. “You
belong to me; I must render account to God for your sick soul.”

“Give me time to recover from my depression,” she said to him.

“Your depression comes from injurious meditation,” he replied, quickly.

“Yes,” she said, with the simplicity of a grief which has reached the
point of making no attempt at concealment.

“I see plainly that you have fallen into the gulf of apathy,” he cried.
“If there is a degree of physical suffering at which all sense of
modesty expires, there is also a degree of moral suffering in which all
vigor of soul is lost; I know that.”

She was surprised to hear that subtle observation and to find such
tender pity from this village rector; but, as we have seen already, the
exquisite delicacy which no passion had ever touched gave him the true
maternal spirit for his flock. This _mens devinior_, this apostolic
tenderness, places the priest above all other men and makes him, in a
sense, divine. Madame Graslin had not as yet had enough experience of
Monsieur Bonnet to know this beauty hidden in his soul like a spring,
from which flowed grace and purity and true life.

“Ah! monsieur,” she cried, giving herself wholly up to him by a gesture,
a look, such as the dying give.

“I understand you,” he said. “What is to be done? What will you become?”

They walked in silence the whole length of the balustrade, facing toward
the plain. The solemn moment seemed propitious to the bearer of good
tidings, the gospel messenger, and he took it.

“Suppose yourself now in the presence of God,” he said, in a low voice,
mysteriously; “what would you say to Him?”

Madame Graslin stopped as though struck by a thunderbolt; she shuddered;
then she said simply, in tones that brought tears to the rector’s
eyes:--

“I should say, as Jesus Christ said: ‘Father, why hast thou forsaken
me?’”

“Ah! Magdalen, that is the saying I expected of you,” cried Monsieur
Bonnet, who could not help admiring her. “You see you are forced to
appeal to God’s justice; you invoke it! Listen to me, madame. Religion
is, by anticipation, divine justice. The Church claims for herself the
right to judge the actions of the soul. Human justice is a feeble image
of divine justice; it is but a pale imitation of it applied to the needs
of society.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You are not the judge of your own case, you are dependent upon God,”
 said the priest; “you have neither the right to condemn yourself nor
the right to absolve yourself. God, my child, is a great reverser of
judgments.”

“Ah!” she exclaimed.

“He _sees_ the origin of things, where we see only the things
themselves.”

Veronique stopped again, struck by these ideas, that were new to her.

“To you,” said the brave priest, “to you whose soul is a great one, I
owe other words than those I ought to give to my humble parishioners.
You, whose mind and spirit are so cultivated, you can rise to the sense
divine of the Catholic religion, expressed by images and words to the
poor and childlike. Listen to me attentively, for what I am about to say
concerns you; no matter how extensive is the point of view at which I
place myself for a moment, the case is yours. _Law_, invented to
protect society, is based on equality. Society, which is nothing but an
assemblage of acts, is based on inequality. There is therefore lack
of harmony between act and law. Ought society to march on favored or
repressed by law? In other words, ought law to be in opposition to the
interior social movement for the maintenance of society, or should it
be based on that movement in order to guide it? All legislators have
contented themselves with analyzing acts, indicating those that seemed
to them blamable or criminal, and attaching punishments to such or
rewards to others. That is human law; it has neither the means to
prevent sin, nor the means to prevent the return to sinfulness of those
it punishes. Philanthropy is a sublime error; it tortures the body
uselessly, it produces no balm to heal the soul. Philanthropy gives
birth to projects, emits ideas, confides the execution of them to man,
to silence, to labor, to rules, to things mute and powerless. Religion
is above these imperfections, for it extends man’s life beyond this
world. Regarding us all as degraded from our high estate, religion has
opened to us an inexhaustible treasure of indulgence. We are all more or
less advanced toward our complete regeneration; no one is sinless; the
Church expects wrong-doing, even crime. Where society sees a criminal
to be expelled from its bosom, the Church sees a soul to save. More, far
more than that! Inspired by God, whom she studies and contemplates,
the Church admits the inequalities of strength, she allows for the
disproportion of burdens. If she finds us unequal in heart, in body,
in mind, in aptitude, and value, she makes us all equal by repentance.
Hence equality is no longer a vain word, for we can be, we are, all
equal through feeling. From the formless fetichism of savages to
the graceful inventions of Greece, or the profound and metaphysical
doctrines of Egypt and India, whether taught in cheerful or in
terrifying worship, there is a conviction in the soul of man--that
of his fall, that of his sin--from which comes everywhere the idea of
sacrifice and redemption. The death of the Redeemer of the human race is
an image of what we have to do for ourselves,--redeem our faults, redeem
our errors, redeem our crimes! All is redeemable; Catholicism itself is
in that word; hence its adorable sacraments, which help the triumph
of grace and sustain the sinner. To weep, to moan like Magdalen in the
desert, is but the beginning; the end is Action. Monasteries wept and
prayed; they prayed and civilized; they were the active agents of our
divine religion. They built, planted, cultivated Europe; all the while
saving the treasures of learning, knowledge, human justice, politics,
and art. We shall ever recognize in Europe the places where those
radiant centres once were. Nearly all our modern towns are the children
of monasteries. If you believe that God will judge you, the Church tells
you by my voice that sin can be redeemed by works of repentance. The
mighty hand of God weighs both the evil done and the value of benefits
accomplished. Be yourself like those monasteries; work here the same
miracles. Your prayers must be labors. From your labors must come the
good of those above whom you are placed by fortune, by superiority of
mind; even this natural position of your dwelling is the image of your
social situation.”

As he said the last words, the priest and Madame Graslin turned to walk
back toward the plains, and the rector pointed both to the village at
the foot of the hill, and to the chateau commanding the whole landscape.
It was then half-past four o’clock; a glow of yellow sunlight enveloped
the balustrade and the gardens, illuminated the chateau, sparkled on the
gilded railings of the roof, lighted the long plain cut in two by the
high-road,--a sad, gray ribbon, not bordered there by the fringe of
trees which waved above it elsewhere on either side.

When Veronique and Monsieur Bonnet had passed the main body of the
chateau, they could see--beyond the courtyard, the stables, and the
offices--the great forest of Montegnac, along which the yellow glow was
gliding like a soft caress. Though this last gleam of the setting sun
touched the tree-tops only, it enabled the eye to see distinctly the
caprices of that marvellous tapestry which nature makes of a forest in
autumn. The oaks were a mass of Florentine bronze, the walnuts and the
chestnuts displayed their blue-green tones, the early trees were putting
on their golden foliage, and all these varied colors were shaded with
the gray of barren spots. The trunks of trees already stripped of
leafage showed their light-gray colonnades; the russet, tawny, grayish
colors, artistically blended by the pale reflections of an October sun,
harmonized with the vast uncultivated plain, green as stagnant water.

A thought came into the rector’s mind as he looked at this fine
spectacle, mute in other ways,--for not a tree rustled, not a bird
chirped, death was on the plain, silence in the forest; here and there a
little smoke from the village chimneys, that was all. The chateau
seemed as gloomy as its mistress. By some strange law all things about a
dwelling imitate the one who rules there; the owner’s spirit hovers over
it. Madame Graslin--her mind grasped by the rector’s words, her soul
struck by conviction, her heart affected in its tenderest emotions by
the angelic quality of that pure voice--stopped short. The rector raised
his arm and pointed to the forest. Veronique looked there.

“Do you not think it has a vague resemblance to social life?” he said.
“To each its destiny. How many inequalities in that mass of trees! Those
placed the highest lack earth and moisture; they die first.”

“Some there are whom the shears of the woman gathering fagots cut short
in their prime,” she said bitterly.

“Do not fall back into those thoughts,” said the rector sternly, though
with indulgence still. “The misfortune of this forest is that it has
never been cut. Do you see the phenomenon these masses present?”

Veronique, to whose mind the singularities of the forest nature
suggested little, looked obediently at the forest and then let her eyes
drop gently back upon the rector.

“You do not notice,” he said, perceiving from that look her total
ignorance, “the lines where the trees of all species still hold their
greenness?”

“Ah! true,” she said. “I see them now. Why is it?”

“In that,” replied the rector, “lies the future of Montegnac, and
your own fortune, an immense fortune, as I once explained to Monsieur
Graslin. You see the furrows of those three dells, the mountain streams
of which flow into the torrent of the Gabou. That torrent separates the
forest of Montegnac from the district which on this side adjoins ours.
In September and October it goes dry, but in November it is full of
water, the volume of which would be greatly increased by a partial
clearing of the forest, so as to send all the lesser streams to join
it. As it is, its waters do no good; but if one or two dams were made
between the two hills on either side of it, as they have done at Riquet,
and at Saint-Ferreol--where they have made immense reservoirs to feed
the Languedoc canal--this barren plain could be fertilized by judicious
irrigation through trenches and culverts managed by watergates; sending
the water when needed over these lands, and diverting it at other
times to our little river. You could plant fine poplars along these
water-courses and raise the finest cattle on such pasturage as you
would then obtain. What is grass, but sun and water? There is quite soil
enough on the plains to hold the roots; the streams will furnish dew and
moisture; the poplars will hold and feed upon the mists, returning their
elements to the herbage; these are the secrets of the fine vegetation of
valleys. If you undertook this work you would soon see life and joy and
movement where silence now reigns, where the eye is saddened by barren
fruitlessness. Would not that be a noble prayer to God? Such work would
be a better occupation of your leisure than the indulgence of melancholy
thoughts.”

Veronique pressed the rector’s hand, answering with four brief words,
but they were grand ones:--

“It shall be done.”

“You conceive the possibility of this great work,” he went on; “but you
cannot execute it. Neither you nor I have the necessary knowledge to
accomplish an idea which might have come to all, but the execution of
which presents immense difficulties; for simple as it may seem, the
matter requires the most accurate science with all its resources. Seek,
therefore, at once for the proper human instruments who will enable you
within the next dozen years to get an income of six or seven thousand
louis out of the six thousand acres you irrigate and fertilize. Such an
enterprise will make Montegnac at some future day the most prosperous
district in the department. The forest, as yet, yields you no return,
but sooner or later commerce will come here in search of its fine
woods--those treasures amassed by time; the only ones the production of
which cannot be hastened or improved upon by man. The State may some day
provide a way of transport from this forest, for many of the trees would
make fine masts for the navy; but it will wait until the increasing
population of Montegnac makes a demand upon its protection; for the
State is like fortune, it comes only to the rich. This estate, well
managed, will become, in the course of time, one of the finest in
France; it will be the pride of your grandson, who may then find the
chateau paltry, comparing it with its revenues.”

“Here,” said Veronique, “is a future for my life.”

“A beneficent work such as that will redeem wrongdoing,” said the
rector.

Seeing that she understood him, he attempted to strike another blow on
this woman’s intellect, judging rightly that in her the intellect
led the heart, whereas in other women the heart is their road to
intelligence.

“Do you know,” he said after a pause, “the error in which you are
living?”

She looked at him timidly.

“Your repentance is as yet only a sense of defeat endured,--which
is horrible, for it is nothing else than the despair of Satan; such,
perhaps, was the repentance of mankind before the coming of Jesus
Christ. But our repentance, the repentance of Christians, is the horror
of a soul struck down on an evil path, to whom, by this very shock,
God has revealed Himself. You are like the pagan Orestes; make yourself
another Paul.”

“Your words have changed me utterly,” she cried. “Now--oh! now I want to
live.”

“The spirit conquers,” thought the modest rector, as he joyfully took
his leave. He had cast nourishment before a soul hunted into secret
despair by giving to its repentance the form of a good and noble action.




XII. THE SOUL OF FORESTS

Veronique wrote to Monsieur Grossetete on the morrow. A few days later
she received from Limoges three saddle-horses sent by her old friend.
Monsieur Bonnet found at Veronique’s request, a young man, son of the
postmaster, who was delighted to serve Veronique and earn good wages.
This young fellow, small but active, with a round face, black eyes and
hair, and named Maurice Champion, pleased Veronique very much and was
immediately inducted into his office, which was that of taking care of
the horses and accompanying his mistress on her excursions.

The head-forester of Montegnac was a former cavalry-sergeant in the
Royal guard, born at Limoges, whom the Duc de Navarreins had sent to his
estate at Montegnac to study its capabilities and value, in order that
he might derive some profit from it. Jerome Colorat found nothing but
waste land utterly barren, woods unavailable for want of transportation,
a ruined chateau, and enormous outlays required to restore the house and
gardens. Alarmed, above all, by the beds of torrents strewn with granite
rocks which seamed the forest, this honest but unintelligent agent was
the real cause of the sale of the property.

“Colorat,” said Madame Graslin to her forester, for whom she had sent,
“I shall probably ride out every morning, beginning with to-morrow. You
know all the different parts of the land that belonged originally to
this estate and those which Monsieur Graslin added to it: I wish you to
go with me and point them out; for I intend to visit every part of the
property myself.”

The family within the chateau saw with joy the change that now appeared
in Veronique’s behavior. Without being told to do so, Aline got out her
mistress’s riding-habit and put it in good order for use. The next day
Madame Sauviat felt unspeakable relief when her daughter left her room
dressed to ride out.

Guided by the forester and Champion, who found their way by
recollection, for the paths were scarcely marked on these unfrequented
mountains, Madame Graslin started on the first day for the summits,
intending to explore those only, so as to understand the watershed and
familiarize herself with the lay of the ravines, the natural path of the
torrents when they tore down the slopes. She wished to measure the task
before her,--to study the land and the water-ways, and find for herself
the essential points of the enterprise which the rector had suggested to
her. She followed Colorat, who rode in advance; Champion was a few steps
behind her.

So long as they were making their way through parts that were dense with
trees, going up and down undulations of ground lying near to each other
and very characteristic of the mountains of France, Veronique was lost
in contemplation of the marvels of the forest. First came the venerable
centennial trees, which amazed her till she grew accustomed to them;
next, the full-grown younger trees reaching to their natural height;
then, in some more open spot, a solitary pine-tree of enormous height;
or--but this was rare--one of those flowing shrubs, dwarf elsewhere,
but here attaining to gigantic development, and often as old as the soil
itself. She saw, with a sensation quite unspeakable, a cloud rolling
along the face of the bare rocks. She noticed the white furrows made
down the mountain sides by the melting snows, which looked at a distance
like scars and gashes. Passing through a gorge stripped of vegetation,
she nevertheless admired, in the cleft flanks of the rocky slope, aged
chestnuts as erect as the Alpine fir-trees.

The rapidity with which she advanced left her no time to take in all
the varied scene, the vast moving sands, the quagmires boasting a few
scattered trees, fallen granite boulders, overhanging rocks, shaded
valleys, broad open spaces with moss and heather still in bloom
(though some was dried), utter solitudes overgrown with juniper and
caper-bushes; sometimes uplands with short grass, small spaces enriched
by an oozing spring,--in short, much sadness, many splendors, things
sweet, things strong, and all the singular aspects of mountainous Nature
in the heart of France.

As she watched these many pictures, varied in form but all inspired with
the same thought, the awful sadness of this Nature, so wild, so ruined,
abandoned, fruitless, barren, filled her soul and answered to her secret
feelings. And when, through an opening among the trees, she caught a
glimpse of the plain below her, when she crossed some arid ravine over
gravel and stones, where a few stunted bushes alone could grow, the
spirit of this austere Nature came to her, suggesting observations new
to her mind, derived from the many significations of this varied scene.

There is no spot in a forest which does not have its significance; not
a glade, not a thicket but has its analogy with the labyrinth of human
thought. Who is there among those whose minds are cultivated or whose
hearts are wounded who can walk alone in a forest and the forest not
speak to him? Insensibly a voice lifts itself, consoling or terrible,
but oftener consoling than terrifying. If we seek the causes of the
sensation--grave, simple, sweet, mysterious--that grasps us there,
perhaps we shall find it in the sublime and artless spectacle of all
these creations obeying their destiny and immutably submissive. Sooner
or later the overwhelming sense of the permanence of Nature fills our
hearts and stirs them deeply, and we end by being conscious of God. So
it was with Veronique; in the silence of those summits, from the odor
of the woods, the serenity of the air, she gathered--as she said that
evening to Monsieur Bonnet--the certainty of God’s mercy. She saw
the possibility of an order of deeds higher than any to which her
aspirations had ever reached. She felt a sort of happiness within her;
it was long, indeed since she had known such a sense of peace. Did
she owe that feeling to the resemblance she found between that barren
landscape and the arid, exhausted regions of her soul? Had she seen
those troubles of nature with a sort of joy, thinking that Nature was
punished though it had not sinned? At any rate, she was powerfully
affected; Colorat and Champion, following her at a little distance,
thought her transfigured.

At a certain sport Veronique was struck with the stern harsh aspect of
the steep and rocky beds of the dried-up torrents. She found herself
longing to hear the sound of water splashing through those scorched
ravines.

“The need to love!” she murmured.

Ashamed of the words, which seemed to come to her like a voice, she
pushed her horse boldly toward the first peak of the Correze, where,
in spite of the forester’s advice, she insisted on going. Telling her
attendants to wait for her she went on alone to the summit, which is
called the Roche-Vive, and stayed there for some time, studying
the surrounding country. After hearing the secret voice of the many
creations asking to live she now received within her the touch, the
inspiration, which determined her to put into her work that wonderful
perseverance displayed by Nature, of which she had herself already given
many proofs.

She fastened her horse to a tree and seated herself on a large rock,
letting her eyes rove over the broad expanse of barren plain, where
Nature seemed a step-mother,--feeling in her heart the same stirrings of
maternal love with which at times she gazed upon her infant. Prepared by
this train of emotion, these half involuntary meditations (which, to
use her own fine expression, winnowed her heart), to receive the
sublime instruction offered by the scene before her, she awoke from her
lethargy.

“I understood then,” she said afterwards to the rector, “that our souls
must be ploughed and cultivated like the soil itself.”

The vast expanse before her was lighted by a pale November sun. Already
a few gray clouds chased by a chilly wind were hurrying from the west.
It was then three o’clock. Veronique had taken more than four hours to
reach the summit, but, like all others who are harrowed by an inward
misery, she paid no heed to external circumstances. At this moment her
being was actually growing and magnifying with the sublime impetus of
Nature itself.

“Do not stay here any longer, madame,” said a man, whose voice made her
quiver, “or you will soon be unable to return; you are six miles from
any dwelling, and the forest is impassable at night. But that is not
your greatest danger. Before long the cold on this summit will become
intense; the reason of this is unknown, but it has caused the death of
many persons.”

Madame Graslin saw before her a man’s face, almost black with sunburn,
in which shone eyes that were like two tongues of flame. On either side
of this face hung a mass of brown hair, and below it was a fan-shaped
beard. The man was raising respectfully one of those enormous
broad-brimmed hats which are worn by the peasantry of central France,
and in so doing displayed a bald but splendid forehead such as we
sometimes see in wayside beggars. Veronique did not feel the slightest
fear; the situation was one in which all the lesser considerations that
make a woman timid had ceased.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“My home is near by,” he answered.

“What can you do in such a desert?” she said.

“I live.”

“But how? what means of living are there?”

“I earn a little something by watching that part of the forest,” he
answered, pointing to the other side of the summit from the one that
overlooked Montegnac. Madame Graslin then saw the muzzle of a gun and
also a game-bag. If she had had any fears this would have put an end to
them.

“Then you are a keeper?” she said.

“No, madame; in order to be a keeper we must take a certain oath; and to
take an oath we must have civic rights.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I am Farrabesche,” he said, with deep humility, lowering his eyes to
the ground.

Madame Graslin, to whom the name told nothing, looked at the man and
noticed in his face, the expression of which was now very gentle, the
signs of underlying ferocity; irregular teeth gave to the mouth, the
lips blood-red, an ironical expression full of evil audacity; the dark
and prominent cheek-bones had something animal about them. The man was
of middle height, with strong shoulders, a thick-set neck, and the large
hairy hands of violent men capable of using their strength in a brutal
manner. His last words pointed to some mystery, to which his bearing,
the expression of his countenance, and his whole person, gave a sinister
meaning.

“You must be in my service, then?” said Veronique in a gentle voice.

“Have I the honor of speaking to Madame Graslin?” asked Farrabesche.

“Yes, my friend,” she answered.

Farrabesche instantly disappeared, with the rapidity of a wild animal,
after casting a glance at his mistress that was full of fear.




XIII. FARRABESCHE

Veronique hastened to mount her horse and rejoin the servants, who were
beginning to be uneasy about her; for the strange unhealthiness of the
Roche-Vive was well known throughout the neighborhood. Colorat begged
his mistress to go down into the little valley which led to the plain.
It would be dangerous, he said, to return by the hills, or by the
tangled paths they had followed in the morning, where, even with his
knowledge of the country, they were likely to be lost in the dusk.

Once on the plain Veronique rode slowly.

“Who is this Farrabesche whom you employ?” she asked her forester.

“Has madame met him?” cried Colorat.

“Yes, but he ran away from me.”

“Poor man! perhaps he does not know how kind madame is.”

“But what has he done?”

“Ah! madame, Farrabesche is a murderer,” replied Champion, simply.

“Then they pardoned him!” said Veronique, in a trembling voice.

“No, madame,” replied Colorat, “Farrabesche was tried and condemned
to ten years at the galleys; he served half his time, and then he
was released on parole and came here in 1827. He owes his life to the
rector, who persuaded him to give himself up to justice. He had been
condemned to death by default, and sooner or later he must have been
taken and executed. Monsieur Bonnet went to find him in the woods,
all alone, at the risk of being killed. No one knows what he said to
Farrabesche. They were alone together two days; on the third day the
rector brought Farrabesche to Tulle, where he gave himself up. Monsieur
Bonnet went to see a good lawyer and begged him to do his best for the
man. Farrabesche escaped with ten years in irons. The rector went to
visit him in prison, and that dangerous fellow, who used to be the
terror of the whole country, became as gentle as a girl; he even let
them take him to the galleys without a struggle. On his return he
settled here by the rector’s advice; no one says a word against him; he
goes to mass every Sunday and all the feast-days. Though his place is
among us he slips in beside the wall and sits alone. He goes to the
altar sometimes and prays, but when he takes the holy sacrament he
always kneels apart.”

“And you say that man killed another man?”

“One!” exclaimed Colorat; “he killed several! But he is a good man all
the same.”

“Is that possible?” exclaimed Veronique, letting the bridle fall on the
neck of her horse.

“Well, you see, madame,” said the forester, who asked no better than to
tell the tale, “Farrabesche may have had good reason for what he did. He
was the last of the Farrabesches,--an old family of the Correze, don’t
you know! His elder brother, Captain Farrabesche, died ten years earlier
in Italy, at Montenotte, a captain when he was only twenty-two years
old. Wasn’t that ill-luck? and such a lad, too! knew how to read and
write, and bid fair to be a general. The family grieved terribly, and
good reason, too. As for me, I heard all about his death, for I was
serving at that time under L’AUTRE. Oh! he made a fine death, did
Captain Farrabesche; he saved the army and the Little Corporal. I
was then in the division of General Steingel, a German,--that is, an
Alsacian,--a famous good general but rather short-sighted, and that was
the reason why he was killed soon after Captain Farrabesche. The younger
brother--that’s this one--was only six years old when he heard of his
brother’s death. The second brother served too; but only as a private
soldier; he died a sergeant in the first regiment of the Guard, at the
battle of Austerlitz, where, d’ye see, madame, they manoeuvred just as
quietly as they might in the Carrousel. I was there! oh! I had the luck
of it! went through it all without a scratch! Now this Farrabesche of
ours, though he’s a brave fellow, took it into his head he wouldn’t go
to the wars; in fact, the army wasn’t a healthy place for one of his
family. So when the conscription caught him in 1811 he ran away,--a
refractory, that’s what they called them. And then it was he went and
joined a party of _chauffeurs_, or maybe he was forced to; at any rate
he _chauffed_! Nobody but the rector knows what he really did with
those brigands--all due respect to them! Many a fight he had with
the gendarmes and the soldiers too; I’m told he was in seven regular
battles--”

“They say he killed two soldiers and three gendarmes,” put in Champion.

“Who knows how many?--he never told,” went on Colorat. “At last, madame,
they caught nearly all his comrades, but they never could catch him;
hang him! he was so young and active, and knew the country so well,
he always escaped. The _chauffeurs_ he consorted with kept themselves
mostly in the neighborhood of Brives and Tulle; sometimes they came down
this way, because Farrabesche knew such good hiding-places about here.
In 1814 the conscription took no further notice of him, because it was
abolished; but for all that, he was obliged to live in the woods in
1815; because, don’t you see? as he hadn’t enough to live on, he helped
to stop a mail-coach over there, down that gorge; and then it was they
condemned him. But, as I told you just now, the rector persuaded him to
give himself up. It wasn’t easy to convict him, for nobody dared testify
against him; and his lawyer and Monsieur Bonnet worked so hard they got
him sentenced for ten years only; which was pretty good luck after being
a _chauffeur_--for he did _chauffe_.”

“Will you tell me what _chauffeur_ means?”

“If you wish it, madame, I will tell you what they did, as far as I know
about it from others, for I never was _chauffed_ myself. It wasn’t a
good thing to do, but necessity knows no law. Well, this is how it was:
seven or eight would go to some farmer or land-owner who was thought to
have money; the farmer would build a good fire and give them a supper,
lasting half through the night, and then, when the feast was over, if
the master of the house wouldn’t give them the sum demanded, they just
fastened his feet to the spit, and didn’t unfasten them till they
got it. That’s how it was. They always went masked. Among all their
expeditions they sometimes made unlucky ones. Hang it, there’ll always
be obstinate, miserly old fellows in the world! One of them, a farmer,
old Cochegrue, so mean he’d shave an egg, held out; he let them roast
his feet. Well, he died of it. The wife of Monsieur David, near Brives,
died of terror at merely seeing those fellows tie her husband’s feet.
She died saying to David: ‘Give them all you have.’ He wouldn’t, and so
she just pointed out the hiding-place. The _chauffeurs_ (that’s why they
call them _chauffeurs_,--warmers) were the terror of the whole country
for over five years. But you must get it well into your head,--oh,
excuse me, madame, but you must know that more than one young man of
good family belonged to them, though somehow they were never the ones to
be caught.”

Madame Graslin listened without interrupting or replying. There was
silence for a few moments, and then little Champion, jealous of the
right to amuse his mistress, wanted to tell her what he knew of the late
galley-slave.

“Madame ought to know more about Farrabesche; he hasn’t his equal at
running, or at riding a horse. He can kill an ox with a blow of his
fist; nobody can shoot like him; he can carry seven hundred feet as
straight as a die,--there! One day they surprised him with three of his
comrades; two were wounded, one was killed,--good! Farrabesche was all
but taken. Bah! he just sprang on the horse of one of the gendarmes
behind the man, pricked the horse with his knife, made it run with all
its might, and so disappeared, holding the gendarme tight round the
body. But he held him so tight that after a time he threw the body on
the ground and rode away alone on the horse and master of the horse; and
he had the cheek to go and sell it not thirty miles from Limoges! After
that affair he hid himself for three months and was never seen. The
authorities offered a hundred golden louis to whoever would deliver him
up.”

“Another time,” added Colorat, “when the prefect of Tulle offered a
hundred louis for him, he made one of his own cousins, Giriex of Vizay,
earn them. His cousin denounced him, and appeared to deliver him up.
Oh, yes, he delivered him sure enough! The gendarmes were delighted, and
took him to Tulle; there they put him in the prison of Lubersac, from
which he escaped that very night, profiting by a hole already begun by
one of his accomplices who had been executed. All these adventures gave
Farrabesche a fine reputation. The _chauffeurs_ had lots of outside
friends; people really loved them. They were not skinflints like those
of to-day; they spent their money royally, those fellows! Just fancy,
madame, one evening Farrabesche was chased by gendarmes; well, he
escaped them by staying twenty minutes under water in the pond of a
farm-yard. He breathed air through a straw which he kept above the
surface of the pool, which was half muck. But, goodness! what was that
little disagreeableness to a man who spends his nights in the tree-tops,
where the sparrows can hardly hold themselves, watching the soldiers
going to and fro in search of him below? Farrabesche was one of the
half-dozen _chauffeurs_ whom the officers of justice could never lay
hands on. But as he belonged to the region and was brought up with them,
and had, as they said, only fled the conscription, all the women were on
his side,--and that’s a great deal, you know.”

“Is it really certain that Farrabesche did kill several persons?” asked
Madame Graslin.

“Yes, certain,” replied Colorat; “it is even said that it was he who
killed the traveller by the mail-coach in 1812; but the courier and the
postilion, the only witnesses who could have identified him, were dead
before he was tried.”

“Tried for the robbery?” asked Madame Graslin.

“Yes, they took everything; amongst it twenty-five thousand francs
belonging to the government.”

Madame Graslin rode silently after that for two or three miles. The sun
had now set, the moon was lighting the gray plain, which looked like an
open sea. Champion and Colorat began to wonder at Madame Graslin, whose
silence seemed strange to them, and they were greatly astonished to see
the shining track of tears upon her cheeks; her eyes were red and full
of tears, which were falling drop by drop as she rode along.

“Oh, madame,” said Colorat, “don’t pity him! The lad has had his day.
He had pretty girls in love with him; and now, though to be sure he
is closely watched by the police, he is protected by the respect and
good-will of the rector; for he has really repented. His conduct at
the galleys was exemplary. Everybody knows he is as honest as the most
honest man among us. Only he is proud; he doesn’t choose to expose
himself to rebuff; so he lives quietly by himself and does good in his
own way. He has made a nursery of about ten acres for you on the other
side of the Roche-Vive; he plants in the forests wherever he thinks
there’s a chance of making a tree grow; he trims the tree and cuts out
the dead wood, and ties it up into bundles for the poor. All the poor
people know they can get their wood from him all cut and ready to burn;
so they go and ask him for it, instead of taking it themselves and
injuring your forest. He is another kind of _chauffeur_ now, and
warms his poor neighbors to their comfort and not to their harm. Oh,
Farrabesche loves your forest! He takes care of it as if it were his own
property.”

“And he lives--all alone?” exclaimed Madame Graslin, adding the two last
words hastily.

“Excuse me, not quite alone, madame; he takes care of a boy about
fifteen years old,” said Maurice Champion.

“Yes, that’s so,” said Colorat; “La Curieux gave birth to the child some
little time before Farrabesche was condemned.”

“Is it his child?” asked Madame Graslin.

“People think so.”

“Why didn’t he marry her?”

“How could he? They would certainly have arrested him. As it was, when
La Curieux heard he was sentenced to the galleys the poor girl left this
part of the country.”

“Was she a pretty girl?”

“Oh!” said Maurice, “my mother says she was very like another girl
who has also left Montegnac for something the same reason,--Denise
Tascheron.”

“She loved him?” said Madame Graslin.

“Ha, yes! because he _chauffed_; women do like things that are out of
the way. However, nothing ever did surprise the community more than
that love affair. Catherine Curieux lived as virtuous a life as a holy
virgin; she passed for a pearl of purity in her village of Vizay,
which is really a small town in the Correze on the line between the two
departments. Her father and mother are farmers to the Messieurs Brezac.
Catherine Curieux was about seventeen when Farrabesche was sent to the
galleys. The Farrabesches were an old family from the same region, who
settled in the commune of Montegnac; they hired their farm from the
village. The father and mother Farrabesche are dead, but Catherine’s
three sisters are married, one in Aubusson, another in Limoges, and a
third in Saint-Leonard.”

“Do you think Farrabesche knows where Catherine Curieux is?” asked
Madame Graslin.

“If he did know he’d break his parole. Oh! he’d go to her. As soon as he
came back from the galleys he got Monsieur Bonnet to ask for the little
boy whom the grandfather and grandmother were taking care of; and
Monsieur Bonnet obtained the child.”

“Does no one know what became of the mother?”

“No one,” said Colorat. “The girl felt that she was ruined; she was
afraid to stay in her own village. She went to Paris. What is she doing
there? Well, that’s the question; but you might as well hunt for a
marble among the stones on that plain as look for her there.”

They were now riding up the ascent to the chateau as Colorat pointed to
the plain below. Madame Sauviat, evidently uneasy, Aline and the other
servants were waiting at the gate, not knowing what to think of this
long absence.

“My dear,” said Madame Sauviat, helping her daughter to dismount, “you
must be very tired.”

“No, mother,” replied Madame Graslin, in so changed a voice that Madame
Sauviat looked closely at her and then saw the mark of tears.

Madame Graslin went to her own rooms with Aline, who took her orders for
all that concerned her personal life. She now shut herself up and would
not even admit her mother; when Madame Sauviat asked to enter, Aline
stopped her, saying, “Madame has gone to sleep.”

The next day Veronique rode out attended by Maurice only. In order to
reach the Roche-Vive as quickly as possible she took the road by which
she had returned the night before. As they rode up the gorge which lies
between the mountain peak and the last hill of the forest (for, seen
from the plain, the Roche-Vive looks isolated) Veronique requested
Maurice to show her the house in which Farrabesche lived and then to
hold the horses and wait for her; she wished to go alone. Maurice took
her to a path which led down on the other side of the Roche-Vive and
showed her the thatched roof of a dwelling half buried in the mountain,
below which lay the nursery grounds. It was then about mid-day. A light
smoke issued from the chimney. Veronique reached the cottage in a few
moments, but she did not make her presence known at once. She stood a
few moments lost in thoughts known only to herself as she gazed on the
modest dwelling which stood in the middle of a garden enclosed with a
hedge of thorns.

Beyond the lower end of the garden lay several cares of meadow land
surrounded by an evergreen hedge; the eye looked down on the flattened
tops of fruit trees, apple, pear, and plum trees scattered here and
there among these fields. Above the house, toward the crest of the
mountain where the soil became sandy, rose the yellow crowns of a
splendid grove of chestnuts. Opening the railed gate made of half-rotten
boards which enclosed the premises, Madame Graslin saw a stable, a small
poultry-yard and all the picturesque and living accessories of poor
homes, which have so much of rural poesy about them. Who could see
without emotion the linen fluttering on the hedges, the bunches of
onions hanging from the eaves, the iron saucepans drying in the sun, the
wooden bench overhung with honeysuckle, the stone-crop clinging to the
thatch, as it does on the roofs of nearly all the cottages in France,
revealing a humble life that is almost vegetative?

It was impossible for Veronique to come upon her keeper without his
receiving due notice; two fine hunting dogs began to bark as soon as the
rustling of her habit was heard on the dried leaves. She took the end of
it over her arm and advanced toward the house. Farrabesche and his boy,
who were sitting on a wooden bench outside the door, rose and uncovered
their heads, standing in a respectful attitude, but without the least
appearance of servility.

“I have heard,” said Veronique, looking attentively at the boy, “that
you take much care of my interests; I wished to see your house and the
nurseries, and ask you a few questions relating to the improvements I
intend to make.”

“I am at madame’s orders,” replied Farrabesche.

Veronique admired the boy, who had a charming face of a perfect oval,
rather sunburned and brown but very regular in features, the forehead
finely modelled, orange-colored eyes of extreme vivacity, black hair cut
straight across the brow and allowed to hang down on either side of the
face. Taller than most boys of his age, the little fellow was nearly
five feet high. His trousers, like his shirt, were of coarse gray linen,
his waistcoat, of rough blue cloth with horn buttons much worn and a
jacket of the cloth so oddly called Maurienne velvet, with which the
Savoyards like to clothe themselves, stout hob-nailed shoes, and no
stockings. This costume was exactly like that of his father, except that
Farrabesche had on his head the broad-brimmed felt hat of the peasantry,
while the boy had only a brown woollen cap.

Though intelligent and animated, the child’s face was instinct with the
gravity peculiar to all human beings of any age who live in solitude;
he seemed to put himself in harmony with the life and the silence of the
woods. Both Farrabesche and his son were specially developed on
their physical side, possessing many of the characteristics of
savages,--piercing sight, constant observation, absolute self-control,
a keen ear, wonderful agility, and an intelligent manner of speaking. At
the first glance the boy gave his father Madame Graslin recognized one
of those unbounded affections in which instinct blends with thought, and
a most active happiness strengthens both the will of the instinct and
the reasoning of thought.

“This must be the child I have heard of,” said Veronique, motioning to
the boy.

“Yes, madame.”

“Have you made no attempt to find his mother?” asked Veronique, making a
sign to Farrabesche to follow her a little distance.

“Madame may not be aware that I am not allowed to go beyond the district
in which I reside.”

“Have you never received any news of her?”

“At the expiration of my term,” he answered, “I received from the
Commissioner a thousand francs, sent to him quarterly for me in little
sums which police regulations did not allow me to receive till the day I
left the galleys. I think that Catherine alone would have thought of me,
as it was not Monsieur Bonnet who sent this money; therefore I have kept
it safely for Benjamin.”

“And Catherine’s parents?”

“They have never inquired for her since she left. Besides they did
enough in taking charge of the little one.”

“Well, Farrabesche,” said Veronique, returning toward the house. “I will
make it my business to know if Catherine still lives; and if so, what is
her present mode of life.”

“Oh! madame, whatever that may be,” said the man gently, “it would
be happiness for me if I could have her for my wife. It is for her to
object, not me. Our marriage would legitimatize this poor boy, who as
yet knows nothing of his position.”

The look the father threw upon the lad explained the life of these two
beings, abandoned, or voluntarily isolated; they were all in all to each
other, like two compatriots adrift upon a desert.

“Then you love Catherine?” said Veronique.

“Even if I did not love her, madame,” he replied, “she is to me, in my
situation, the only woman there is in the world.”

Madame Graslin turned hurriedly and walked away under the chestnut
trees, as if attacked by some sharp pain; the keeper, thinking she was
moved by a sudden caprice, did not venture to follow her.




XIV. THE TORRENT OF THE GABOU

Veronique remained for some minutes under the chestnut trees, apparently
looking at the landscape. Thence she could see that portion of the
forest which clothes the side of the valley down which flows the torrent
of the Gabou, now dry, a mass of stones, looking like a huge ditch cut
between the wooded mountains of Montegnac and another chain of parallel
hills beyond,--the latter being much steeper and without vegetation,
except for heath and juniper and a few sparse trees toward their summit.

These hills, desolate of aspect, belong to the neighboring domain and
are in the department of the Correze. A country road, following
the undulations of the valley, serves to mark the line between the
arrondissement of Montegnac and the two estates. This barren slope
supports, like a wall, a fine piece of woodland which stretches away
in the distance from its rocky summit. Its barrenness forms a complete
contrast to the other slope, on which is the cottage of Farrabesche.
On the one side, harsh, disfigured angularities, on the other,
graceful forms and curving outlines; there, the cold, dumb stillness of
unfruitful earth held up by horizontal blocks of stone and naked
rock, here, trees of various greens, now stripped for the most part of
foliage, but showing their fine straight many-colored trunks on every
slope and terrace of the land; their interlacing branches swaying to the
breeze. A few more persistent trees, oaks, elms, beeches, and chestnuts,
still retained their yellow, bronzed, or crimsoned foliage.

Toward Montegnac, where the valley widened immensely, the two slopes
form a horse-shoe; and from the spot where Veronique now stood leaning
against a tree she could see the descending valleys lying like the
gradations of an ampitheatre, the tree-tops rising from each tier like
persons in the audience. This fine landscape was then on the other side
of her park, though it afterwards formed part of it. On the side toward
the cottage near which she stood the valley narrows more and more until
it becomes a gorge, about a hundred feet wide.

The beauty of this view, over which Madame Graslin’s eyes now roved
mechanically, recalled her presently to herself. She returned to the
cottage where the father and son were standing, silently awaiting her
and not seeking to explain her singular absence.

She examined the house, which was built with more care than its thatched
roof seemed to warrant. It had, no doubt, been abandoned ever since
the Navarreins ceased to care for this domain. No more hunts, no more
game-keepers. Though the house had been built for over a hundred years,
the walls were still good, notwithstanding the ivy and other sorts
of climbing-plants which clung to them. When Farrabesche obtained
permission to live there he tiled the room on the lower floor and put
in furniture. Veronique saw, as she entered, two beds, a large walnut
wardrobe, a bread-box, dresser, table, three chairs, and on the dresser
a few brown earthenware dishes and other utensils necessary to life.
Above the fireplace were two guns and two gamebags. A number of little
things evidently made by the father for the child touched Veronique’s
heart--the model of a man-of-war, of a sloop, a carved wooden cup, a
wooden box of exquisite workmanship, a coffer inlaid in diaper pattern,
a crucifix, and a splendid rosary. The chaplet was made of plum-stones,
on each of which was carved a head of marvellous delicacy,--of Jesus
Christ, of the apostles, the Madonna, Saint John the Baptist, Saint
Joseph, Saint Anne, the two Magdalens, etc.

“I do that to amuse the little one in the long winter evenings,” he
said, as if excusing himself.

The front of the house was covered with jessamine and roses, trained to
the wall and wreathing the windows of the upper floor, where Farrabesche
stored his provisions. He bought little except bread, salt, sugar, and a
few such articles, for he kept chickens, ducks, and two pigs. Neither he
nor the boy drank wine.

“All that I have heard of you and all that I now see,” said Madame
Graslin at last, “make me feel an interest in your welfare which will
not, I hope, be a barren one.”

“I recognize Monsieur Bonnet’s kindness in what you say,” cried
Farrabesche, in a tone of feeling.

“You are mistaken; the rector has not yet spoken of you to me;
chance--or God--has done it.”

“Yes, madame, God! God alone can do miracles for a miserable man like
me.”

“If you have been a miserable man,” said Madame Graslin, lowering her
voice that the child might not hear her (an act of womanly delicacy
which touched his heart), “your repentance, your conduct, and the
rector’s esteem have now fitted you to become a happier man. I have
given orders to finish the building of the large farmhouse which
Monsieur Graslin intended to establish near the chateau. I shall
make you my farmer, and you will have an opportunity to use all your
faculties, and also to employ your son. The _procureur-general_
in Limoges shall be informed about you, and the humiliating
police-inspection you are now subjected to shall be removed. I promise
you.”

At these words Farrabesche fell on his knees, as if struck down by the
realization of a hope he had long considered vain. He kissed the hem of
Madame Graslin’s habit, then her feet. Seeing the tears in his father’s
eyes, the boy wept too, without knowing why.

“Rise, Farrabesche,” said Madame Graslin, “you do not know how natural
it is that I should do for you what I have promised. You planted
those fine trees, did you not?” she went on, pointing to the groups of
Northern pine, firs, and larches at the foot of the dry and rocky hill
directly opposite.

“Yes, madame.”

“Is the earth better there?”

“The water in washing down among the rocks brings a certain amount of
soil, which it deposits. I have profited by this; for the whole of the
level of the valley belongs to you,--the road is your boundary.”

“Is there much water at the bottom of that long valley?”

“Oh, madame,” cried Farrabesche, “before long, when the rains begin, you
will hear the torrent roar even at the chateau; but even that is nothing
to what happens in spring when the snows melt. The water then rushes
down from all parts of the forest behind Montegnac, from those great
slopes which are back of the hills on which you have your park. All
the water of these mountains pours into this valley and makes a deluge.
Luckily for you, the trees hold the earth; otherwise the land would
slide into the valley.”

“Where are the springs?” asked Madame Graslin, giving her full attention
to what he said.

Farrabesche pointed to a narrow gorge which seemed to end the valley
just below his house. “They are mostly on a clay plateau lying between
the Limousin and the Correze; they are mere green pools during the
summer, and lose themselves in the soil. No one lives in that unhealthy
region. The cattle will not eat the grass or reeds that grow near the
brackish water. That vast tract, which has more than three thousand
acres in it, is an open common for three districts; but, like the plains
of Montegnac, no use can be made of it. This side on your property, as I
showed you, there is a little earth among the stones, but over there is
nothing but sandy rock.”

“Send your boy for the horses; I will ride over and see it for myself.”

Benjamin departed, after Madame Graslin had shown him the direction in
which he would find Maurice and the horses.

“You who know, so they tell me, every peculiarity of the country
thoroughly,” continued Madame Graslin, “explain to me how it is that
the streams of my forest which are on the side of the mountain toward
Montegnac, and ought therefore to send their waters down there, do not
do so, neither in regular water-courses nor in sudden torrents after
rains and the melting of the snows.”

“Ah, madame,” said Farrabesche, “the rector, who thinks all the time
about the welfare of Montegnac, has guessed the reason, but he can’t
find any proof of it. Since your arrival, he has made me trace the path
of the water from point to point through each ravine and valley. I was
returning yesterday, when I had the honor of meeting you, from the
base of the Roche-Vive, where I carefully examined the lay of the land.
Hearing the horses’ feet, I came up to see who was there. Monsieur
Bonnet is not only a saint, madame; he is a man of great knowledge.
‘Farrabesche,’ he said to me (I was then working on the road the village
has just built to the chateau, and the rector came to me and pointed to
that chain of hills from Montegnac to Roche-Vive),--‘Farrabesche,’ he
said, ‘there must be some reason why that water-shed does not send any
of its water to the plain; Nature must have made some sluiceway which
carries it elsewhere.’ Well, madame, that idea is so simple you would
suppose any child might have thought it; yet no one since Montegnac
existed, neither the great lords, nor their bailiffs, nor their
foresters, nor the poor, nor the rich, none of those who saw that plain
barren for want of water, ever asked themselves why the streams which
now feed the Gabou do not come there. The three districts above, which
have constantly been afflicted with fevers in consequence of stagnant
water, never looked for the remedy; I myself, who live in the wilds,
never dreamed of it; it needed a man of God.”

The tears filled his eyes as he said the word.

“All that men of genius discover,” said Madame Graslin, “seems so simple
that every one thinks they might have discovered it themselves. But,”
 she added, as if to herself, “genius has this fine thing about it,--it
resembles all the world, but no one resembles it.”

“I understood Monsieur Bonnet at once,” continued Farrabesche; “it did
not take him many words to tell me what I had to do. Madame, this fact
I tell you of is all the more singular because there are, toward the
plain, great rents and fissures in the mountain, gorges and ravines down
which the water flows; but, strange to say, these clefts and ravines and
gorges all send their streams into a little valley which is several feet
below the level of your plain. To-day I have discovered the reason of
this phenomenon: from the Roche-Vive to Montegnac, at the foot of the
mountains, runs a shelf or barricade of rock, varying in height from
twenty to thirty feet; there is not a break in it from end to end; and
it is formed of a species of rock which Monsieur Bonnet calls schist.
The soil above it, which is of course softer than rock, has been
hollowed out by the action of the water, which is turned at right angles
by the barricade of rock, and thus flows naturally into the Gabou.
The trees and underbrush of the forest conceal this formation and the
hollowing out of the soil. But after following the course of the water,
as I have done by the traces left of its passage, it is easy to convince
any one of the fact. The Gabou thus receives the water-shed of both
mountains,--that which ought to go down the mountain face on which your
park and garden are to the plain, and that which comes down the rocky
slopes before us. According to Monsieur Bonnet the present state of
things will crease when the water-shed toward the plain gains a natural
outlet, and is dammed toward the Gabou by the earth and rocks which the
mountain torrents bring down with them. It will take a hundred years to
do that, however; and besides, it isn’t desirable. If your soil will
not take up more water than the great common you are now going to
see, Montegnac would be full of stagnant pools, breeding fever in the
community.”

“I suppose that the places Monsieur Bonnet showed me the other day where
the foliage of the trees is still green mark the present conduits by
which the water falls into the Gabou?”

“Yes, madame. Between Roche-Vive and Montegnac there are three distinct
mountains with three hollows between them, down which the waters,
stopped by the schist barrier, turn off into the Gabou. The belt of
trees still green at the foot of the hill above the barrier, which
looks, at a distance, like a part of the plain, is really the
water-sluice the rector supposed, very justly, that Nature had made for
herself.”

“Well, what has been to the injury of Montegnac shall soon be its
prosperity,” said Madame Graslin, in a tone of deep intention. “And
inasmuch as you have been the first instrument employed on the work, you
shall share in it; you shall find me faithful, industrious workmen; lack
of money can always be made up by devotion and good work.”

Benjamin and Maurice came up as Veronique ended these words; she mounted
her horse and signed to Farrabesche to mount the other.

“Guide me,” she said, “to the place where the waters spread out in pools
over that waste land.”

“There is all the more reason why madame should go there,” said
Farrabesche, “because the late Monsieur Graslin, under the rector’s
advice, bought three hundred acres at the opening of that gorge, on
which the waters have left sediment enough to make good soil over
quite a piece of ground. Madame will also see the opposite side of the
Roche-Vive, where there are fine woods, among which Monsieur Graslin
would no doubt have put a farm had he lived; there’s an excellent place
for one, where the spring which rises just by my house loses itself
below.”

Farrabesche rode first to show the way, taking Veronique through a path
which led to the spot where the two slopes drew closely together and
then flew apart, one to the east the other to the west, as if repulsed
by a shock. This narrow passage, filled with large rocks and coarse,
tall grasses, was only about sixty feet in width.

The Roche-Vive, cut perpendicularly on this side looked like a wall of
granite in which there was no foothold; but above this inflexible wall
was a crown of trees, the roots of which hung down it, mostly pines
clinging to the rock with their forked feet like birds on a bough.

The opposite hill, hollowed by time, had a frowning front, sandy, rocky,
and yellow; here were shallow caverns, dips without depth; the soft
and pulverizing rock had ochre tones. A few plants with prickly leaves
above, and burdocks, reeds, and aquatic growths below, were indication
enough of the northern exposure and the poverty of the soil. The bed
of the torrent was of stone, quite hard, but yellow. Evidently the
two chains, though parallel and ripped asunder by one of the great
catastrophes which have changed the face of the globe, were, either from
some inexplicable caprice or for some unknown reason, the discovery of
which awaited genius, composed of elements that were wholly dissimilar.
The contrast of their two natures showed more clearly here than
elsewhere.

Veronique now saw before her an immense dry plateau, without any
vegetation, chalky (this explained the absorption of the water) and
strewn with pools of stagnant water and rocky places stripped of soil.
To the right were the mountains of the Correze; to left the Roche-Vive
barred the view covered with its noble trees; on its further slope was
a meadow of some two hundred acres, the verdure of which contrasted with
the hideous aspect of the desolate plateau.

“My son and I cut that ditch you see down there marked by the tall
grasses,” said Farrabesche; “it joins the one which bounds your forest.
On this side the estate is bounded by a desert, for the nearest village
is three miles distant.”

Veronique turned rapidly to the dismal plain, followed by her guide.
She leaped her horse across the ditch and rode at full gallop across the
drear expanse, seeming to take a savage pleasure in contemplating that
vast image of desolation. Farrabesche was right. No power, no will could
put to any use whatever that soil which resounded under the horses’
feet as though it were hollow. This effect was produced by the natural
porousness of the clay; but there were fissures also through which the
water flowed away, no doubt to some distant source.

“There are many souls like this,” thought Veronique, stopping her horse
after she had ridden at full speed for fifteen or twenty minutes. She
remained motionless and thoughtful in the midst of this desert, where
there was neither animal nor insect life and where the birds never flew.
The plain of Montegnac was at least pebbly or sandy; on it were places
where a few inches of soil did give a foothold for the roots of certain
plains; but here the ungrateful chalk, neither stone nor earth, repelled
even the eye, which was forced to turn for relief to the blue of the
ether.

After examining the bounds of her forest and the meadows purchased by
her husband, Veronique returned toward the outlet of the Gabou, but
slowly. She then saw Farrabesche gazing into a sort of ditch which
looked like one a speculator might have dug into this desolate corner of
the earth expecting Nature to give up some hidden treasure.

“What is the matter?” asked Veronique, noticing on that manly face an
expression of deep sadness.

“Madame, I owe my life to that ditch; or rather, to speak more
correctly, I owe to it time for repentance, time to redeem my sins in
the eyes of men.”

This method of explaining life so affected Madame Graslin that she
stopped her horse on the brink of the ditch.

“I was hiding there, madame. The ground is so resonant that when my ear
was against it I could hear the horses of the gendarmerie, or even the
footsteps of the soldiers, which are always peculiar. That gave me time
to escape up the Gabou to a place where I had a horse, and I always
managed to put several miles between myself and my pursuers. Catherine
used to bring me food during the night; if she did not find me I always
found the bread and wine in a hole covered with a rock.”

This recollection of his wandering and criminal life, which might have
injured Farrabesche with some persons, met with the most indulgent pity
from Madame Graslin. She rode hastily on toward the Gabou, followed by
her guide. While she measured with her eye this opening, through which
could be seen the long valley, so smiling on one side, so ruined on the
other, and at its lower end, a league away, the terraced hill-sides back
of Montegnac, Farrabesche said:--

“There’ll be a famous rush of water in a few days.”

“And next year, on this day, not a drop shall flow there. Both sides
belong to me, and I will build a dam solid enough and high enough to
stop the freshet. Instead of a valley yielding nothing, I will have a
lake twenty, thirty, forty feet deep over an extent of three or four
miles,--an immense reservoir, which shall supply the flow of irrigation
with which I will fertilize the plain of Montegnac.”

“Ah, madame! the rector was right, when he said to us as we finished our
road, ‘You are working for a mother.’ May God shed his blessing on such
an undertaking.”

“Say nothing about it, Farrabesche,” said Madame Graslin. “The idea was
Monsieur Bonnet’s.”

They returned to the cottage, where Veronique picked up Maurice, with
whom she rode hastily back to the chateau. When Madame Sauviat and Aline
saw her they were struck with the change in her countenance; the hope of
doing good in the region she now owned gave her already an appearance of
happiness. She wrote at once to Monsieur Grossetete, begging him to ask
Monsieur de Grandville for the complete release of the returned convict,
on whose conduct she gave him assurances which were confirmed by a
certificate from the mayor of Montegnac and by a letter from Monsieur
Bonnet. To this request she added information about Catherine Curieux,
begging Grossetete to interest the _procureur-general_ in the good work
she wished to do, and persuade him to write to the prefecture of police
in Paris to recover traces of the girl. The circumstance of Catherine’s
having sent money to Farrabesche at the galleys ought to be clew enough
to furnish information. Veronique was determined to know why it was that
the young woman had not returned to her child and to Farrabesche, now
that he was free. She also told her old friend of her discovery about
the torrent of the Gabou, and urged him to select an able engineer, such
as she had already asked him to procure for her.

The next day was Sunday, and for the first time since her installation
at Montegnac Veronique felt able to hear mass in church; she accordingly
went there and took possession of the bench that belonged to her in
the chapel of the Virgin. Seeing how denuded the poor church was, she
resolved to devote a certain sum yearly to the needs of the building
and the decoration of the altars. She listened to the sweet, impressive,
angelic voice of the rector, whose sermon, though couched in simple
language suited to the rustic intellects before him, was sublime in
character. Sublimity comes from the heart, intellect has little to do
with it; religion is a quenchless source of this sublimity which has no
dross; for Catholicism entering and changing all hearts, is itself all
heart. Monsieur Bonnet took his text from the epistle for the day,
which signified that, sooner or later, God accomplishes all promises,
assisting His faithful ones, encouraging the righteous. He made plain
to every mind the great things which might be accomplished by wealth
judiciously used for the good of others,--explaining that the duties of
the poor to the rich were as widely extended as those of the rich to the
poor, and that the aid and assistance given should be mutual.

Farrabesche had made known to a few of those who treated him in a
friendly manner (the result of the Christian charity which Monsieur
Bonnet had put in practice among his parishioners) the benevolent acts
Madame Graslin had done for him. Her conduct in this matter had been
talked over by all the little groups of persons assembled round the
church door before the service, as is the custom in country places.
Nothing could have been better calculated to win the friendship and
good-will of these eminently susceptible minds; so that when Veronique
left the church after service she found nearly all the inhabitants of
the parish formed in two hedges through which she was expected to pass.
One and all they bowed respectfully in profound silence. She was deeply
touched by this reception, without knowing the actual cause of it.
Seeing Farrabesche humbly stationed among the last, she stopped and said
to him:--

“You are a good hunter; do not forget to supply me with game.”

A few days later Veronique went to walk with the rector through the part
of the forest that was nearest the chateau, wishing to descend with him
the terraced slopes she had seen from the house of Farrabesche. In
doing this she obtained complete certainty as to the nature of the upper
affluents of the Gabou. The rector saw for himself that the streams
which watered certain parts of upper Montegnac came from the mountains
of the Correze. This chain of hills joined the barren slopes we have
already described, parallel with the chain of the Roche-Vive.

On returning from this walk the rector was joyful as a child; he
foresaw, with the naivete of a poet, the prosperity of his dear
village--for a poet is a man, is he not? who realizes hopes before they
ripen. Monsieur Bonnet garnered his hay as he stood overlooking that
barren plain from Madame Graslin’s upper terrace.




XV. STORY OF A GALLEY-SLAVE

The next day Farrabesche and his son came to the chateau with game. The
keeper also brought, for Francis, a cocoanut cup, elaborately carved, a
genuine work of art, representing a battle. Madame Graslin was walking
at the time on the terrace, in the direction which overlooked Les
Tascherons. She sat down on a bench, took the cup in her hand and looked
earnestly at the deft piece of work. A few tears came into her eyes.

“You must have suffered very much,” she said to Farrabesche, after a few
moments’ silence.

“How could I help it, madame?” he replied; “for I was there without the
hope of escape, which supports the life of most convicts.”

“An awful life!” she said in a tone of horror, inviting Farrabesche by
word and gesture to say more.

Farrabesche took the convulsive trembling and other signs of emotion
he saw in Madame Graslin for the powerful interest of compassionate
curiosity in himself.

Just then Madame Sauviat appeared, coming down a path as if she meant to
join them; but Veronique drew out her handkerchief and made a negative
sign; saying, with an asperity she had never before shown to the old
woman:--

“Leave me, leave me, mother.”

“Madame,” said Farrabesche, “for ten years I wore there (holding out
his leg) a chain fastened to a great iron ring which bound me to another
man. During my time I had to live thus with three different convicts.
I slept on a wooden bench; I had to work extraordinarily hard to earn
a little mattress called a _serpentin_. Each dormitory contains eight
hundred men. Each bed, called a _tolard_, holds twenty-four men, chained
in couples. Every night the chain of each couple is passed round another
great chain which is called the _filet de ramas_. This chain holds all
the couples by the feet, and runs along the bottom of the _tolard_. It
took me over two years to get accustomed to that iron clanking, which
called out incessantly, ‘Thou art a galley-slave!’ If I slept an instant
some vile companion moved or quarrelled, reminding me of where I was.
There is a terrible apprenticeship to make before a man can learn how
to sleep. I myself could not sleep until I had come to the end of my
strength and to utter exhaustion. When at last sleep came I had the
nights in which to forget. Oh! to _forget_, madame, that was something!
Once there, a man must learn to satisfy his needs, even in the smallest
things, according to the ways laid down by pitiless regulations.
Imagine, madame, the effect such a life produced on a lad like me, who
had lived in the woods with the birds and the squirrels! If I had not
already lived for six months within prison-walls, I should, in spite of
Monsieur Bonnet’s grand words--for he, I can truly say, is the father of
my soul--I should, ah! I must have flung myself into the sea at the
mere sight of my companions. Out-doors I still could live; but in the
building, whether to sleep or to eat,--to eat out of buckets, and each
bucket filled for three couples,--it was life no longer, it was
death; the atrocious faces and language of my companions were always
insufferable to me. Happily, from five o’clock in summer, and from
half-past seven o’clock in winter we went, in spite of heat or cold and
wind or rain, on ‘fatigue,’ that is, hard-labor. Thus half this life was
spent in the open air; and the air was sweet after the close dormitory
packed with eight hundred convicts. And that air, too, is sea-air! We
could enjoy the breezes, we could be friends with the sun, we could
watch the clouds as they passed above us, we could hope and pray for
fine weather! As for me, I took an interest in my work--”

Farrabesche stopped; two heavy tears were rolling down his mistress’s
face.

“Oh! madame, I have only told you the best side of that life,” he
continued, taking the expression of her face as meant for him. “The
terrible precautions taken by the government, the constant spying of the
keepers, the blacksmith’s inspection of the chains every day, night and
morning, the coarse food, the hideous garments which humiliate a man at
all hours, the comfortless sleep, the horrible rattling of eight hundred
chains in that resounding hall, the prospect of being shot or blown to
pieces by cannon if ten of those villains took a fancy to revolt, all
those dreadful things are nothing,--nothing, I tell you; that is the
bright side only. There’s another side, madame, and a decent man, a
bourgeois, would die of horror in a week. A convict is forced to live
with another man; obliged to endure the company of five other men
at every meal, twenty-three in his bed at night, and to hear their
language! The great society of galley-slaves, madame, has its secret
laws; disobey them and you are tortured; obey them, and you become a
torturer. You must be either victim or executioner. If they would kill
you at once it would at least be the cure of life. But no, they are
wiser than that in doing evil. It is impossible to hold out against
the hatred of these men; their power is absolute over any prisoner who
displeases them, and they can make his life a torment far worse than
death. The man who repents and endeavors to behave well is their common
enemy; above all, they suspect him of informing; and an informer is put
to death, often on mere suspicion. Every hall and community of eight
hundred convicts has its tribunal, in which are judged the crimes
committed against that society. Not to obey the usages is criminal, and
a man is liable to punishment. For instance, every man must co-operate
in escapes; every convict has his time assigned him to escape, and all
his fellow-convicts must protect and aid him. To reveal what a comrade
is doing with a view to escape is criminal. I will not speak to you
of the horrible customs and morals of the galleys. No man belongs to
himself; the government, in order to neutralize the attempts at revolt
or escape, takes pains to chain two contrary natures and interests
together; and this makes the torture of the coupling unendurable; men
are linked together who hate or distrust each other.”

“How was it with you?” asked Madame Graslin.

“Ah! there,” replied Farrabesche, “I had luck; I never drew a lot to
kill a convict; I never had to vote the death of any one of them; I
never was punished; no man took a dislike to me; and I got on well with
the three different men I was chained to; they all feared me but liked
me. One reason was, my name was known and famous at the galleys before I
got there. A _chauffeur_! they thought me one of those brigands. I have
seen _chauffing_,” continued Farrabesche after a pause, in a low voice,
“but I never either did it myself, or took any of the money obtained
by it. I was a refractory, I evaded the conscription, that was all.
I helped my comrades, I kept watch; I was sentinel and brought up the
rear-guard; but I never shed any man’s blood except in self-defence. Ah!
I told all to Monsieur Bonnet and my lawyer, and the judges knew well
enough that I was no murderer. But, all the same, I am a great criminal;
nothing that I ever did was morally right. However, before I got there,
as I was saying, two of my comrades told of me as a man able to do
great things. At the galleys, madame, nothing is so valuable as that
reputation, not even money. In that republic of misery murder is a
passport to tranquillity. I did nothing to destroy that opinion of me.
I was sad, resigned, and they mistook the appearance of it. My gloomy
manner, my silence, passed for ferocity. All that world, convicts,
keepers, young and old, respected me. I was treated as first in my hall.
No one interfered with my sleep; I was never suspected of informing;
I behaved honorably according to their ideas; I never refused to do
service; I never testified the slightest repugnance; I howled with the
wolves outside, I prayed to God within. My last companion in chains
was a soldier, twenty-two years of age, who had committed a theft and
deserted in consequence of it. We were chained together for four years,
and we were friends; wherever I may be I am certain to meet him when his
time is up. This poor devil, whose name is Guepin, is not a scoundrel,
he is merely heedless; his punishment may reform him. If my comrades had
discovered that religion led me to submit to my trials,--that I meant,
when my time was up, to live humbly in a corner, letting no one know
where I was, intending to forget their horrible community and never to
cross the path of any of them,--they would probably have driven me mad.”

“Then,” said Madame Graslin, “if a poor young man, a tender soul,
carried away by passion, having committed a murder, was spared from
death and sent to the galleys--”

“Oh! madame,” said Farrabesche, interrupting her, “there is no sparing
in that. The sentence may be commuted to twenty years at the galleys,
but for a decent young man, that is awful! I could not speak to you of
the life that awaits him there; a thousand times better die. Yes, to die
upon the scaffold is happiness in comparison.”

“I dared not think it,” murmured Madame Graslin.

She had turned as white as wax. To hide her face she laid her forehead
on the balustrade, and kept it there several minutes. Farrabesche did
not know whether he ought to go or remain.

Madame Graslin raised her head at last, looked at Farrabesche with an
almost majestic air, and said, to his amazement, in a voice that stirred
his heart:--

“Thank you, my friend. But,” she added, after a pause, “where did you
find courage to live and suffer?”

“Ah! madame, Monsieur Bonnet put a treasure within my soul! and for that
I love him better than all else on earth.”

“Better than Catherine?” said Madame Graslin, smiling with a sort of
bitterness.

“Almost as well, madame.”

“How did he do it?”

“Madame, the words and the voice of that man conquered me. Catherine
brought him to that hole in the ground I showed you on the common; he
had come fearlessly alone. He was, he said, the new rector of Montegnac;
I was his parishioner, he loved me; he knew I was only misguided, not
lost; he did not intend to betray me, but to save me; in short, he said
many such things that stirred my soul to its depths. That man, madame,
commands you to do right with as much force as those who tell you to
do wrong. It was he who told me, poor dear man, that Catherine was
a mother, and that I was dooming two beings to shame and desertion.
‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘they are like me; I have no future.’ He answered
that I had a future, two bad futures, before me--one in another world,
one in this world--if I persisted in not changing my way of life. In
this world, I should die on the scaffold. If I were captured my defence
would be impossible. On the contrary, if I took advantage of the
leniency of the new government toward all crimes traceable to the
conscription, if I delivered myself up, he believed he could save my
life; he would engage a good lawyer, who would get me off with ten years
at the galleys. Then Monsieur Bonnet talked to me of the other life.
Catherine wept like the Magdalen--See, madame,” said Farrabesche,
holding out his right arm, “her face was in that hand, and I felt it wet
with tears. She implored me to live. Monsieur Bonnet promised to secure
me, when I had served my sentence, a peaceful life here with my child,
and to protect me against affront. He catechised me as he would a little
child. After three such visits at night he made me as supple as a glove.
Would you like to know how, madame?”

Farrabesche and Madame Graslin looked at each other, not explaining to
themselves their mutual curiosity.

“Well,” resumed the poor liberated convict, “when he left me the first
time, and Catherine had gone with him to show the way, I was left alone.
I then felt within my soul a freshness, a calmness, a sweetness, I had
never known since childhood. It was like the happiness my poor Catherine
had given me. The love of this dear man had come to _seek me_; that,
and his thought for me, for my future, stirred my soul to its depths;
it changed me. A light broke forth in my being. As long as he was there,
speaking to me, I resisted. That’s not surprising; he was a priest,
and we bandits don’t eat of their bread. But when I no longer heard
his footsteps nor Catherine’s, oh! I was--as he told me two days
later--enlightened by divine grace. God gave me thenceforth strength
to bear all,--prison, sentence, irons, parting; even the life of the
galleys. I believed in his word as I do in the Gospel; I looked upon
my sufferings as a debt I was bound to pay. When I seemed to suffer too
much, I looked across ten years and saw my home in the woods, my little
Benjamin, my Catherine. He kept his word, that good Monsieur Bonnet. But
one thing was lacking. When at last I was released, Catherine was not
at the gate of the galleys; she was not on the common. No doubt she has
died of grief. That is why I am always sad. Now, thanks to you, I shall
have useful work to do; I can employ both body and soul,--and my boy,
too, for whom I live.”

“I begin to understand how it is that the rector has changed the
character of this whole community,” said Madame Graslin.

“Nothing can resist him,” said Farrabesche.

“Yes, yes, I know it!” replied Veronique, hastily, making a gesture of
farewell to her keeper.

Farrabesche withdrew. Veronique remained alone on the terrace for a good
part of the day, walking up and down in spite of a fine rain which fell
till evening. When her face was thus convulsed, neither her mother nor
Aline dared to interrupt her. She did not notice in the dusk that her
mother was talking in the salon to Monsieur Bonnet; the old woman,
anxious to put an end to this fresh attack of dreadful depression, sent
little Francis to fetch her. The child took his mother’s hand and led
her in. When she saw the rector she gave a start of surprise in which
there seemed to be some fear. Monsieur Bonnet took her back to the
terrace, saying:--

“Well, madame, what were you talking about with Farrabesche?”

In order not to speak falsely, Veronique evaded a reply; she questioned
Monsieur Bonnet.

“That man was your first victory here, was he not?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered; “his conversion would, I thought, give me all
Montegnac--and I was not mistaken.”

Veronique pressed Monsieur Bonnet’s hand and said, with tears in her
voice, “I am your penitent from this day forth, monsieur; I shall go
to-morrow to the confessional.”

Her last words showed a great internal effort, a terrible victory won
over herself. The rector brought her back to the house without saying
another word. After that he remained till dinner-time, talking about the
proposed improvements at Montegnac.

“Agriculture is a question of time,” he said; “the little that I know of
it makes me understand what a gain it would be to get some good out of
the winter. The rains are now beginning, and the mountains will soon
be covered with snow; your operations cannot then be begun. Had you not
better hasten Monsieur Grossetete?”

Insensibly, Monsieur Bonnet, who at first did all the talking, led
Madame Graslin to join in the conversation and so distract her thoughts;
in fact, he left her almost recovered from the emotions of the day.
Madame Sauviat, however, thought her daughter too violently agitated to
be left alone, and she spent the night in her room.




XVI. CONCERNS ONE OF THE BLUNDERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The following day an express, sent from Limoges by Monsieur Grossetete
to Madame Graslin, brought her the following letter:--

  To Madame Graslin:

  My dear Child,--It was difficult to find horses, but I hope you
  are satisfied with those I sent you. If you want work or draft
  horses, you must look elsewhere. In any case, however, I advise
  you to do your tilling and transportation with oxen. All the
  countries where agriculture is carried on with horses lose capital
  when the horse is past work; whereas cattle always return a profit
  to those who use them.

  I approve in every way of your enterprise, my child; you will thus
  employ the passionate activity of your soul, which was turning
  against yourself and thus injuring you.

  Your second request, namely, for a man capable of understanding
  and seconding your projects, requires me to find you a _rara avis_
  such as we seldom raise in the provinces, where, if we do raise
  them, we never keep them. The education of that high product is
  too slow and too risky a speculation for country folks.

  Besides, men of intellect alarm us; we call them “originals.” The
  men belonging to the scientific category from which you will have
  to obtain your co-operator do not flourish here, and I was on the
  point of writing to you that I despaired of fulfilling your
  commission. You want a poet, a man of ideas,--in short, what we
  should here call a fool, and all our fools go to Paris. I have
  spoken of your plans to the young men employed in land surveying,
  to contractors on the canals, and makers of the embankments, and
  none of them see any “advantage” in what you propose.

  But suddenly, as good luck would have it, chance has thrown in my
  way the very man you want; a young man to whom I believe I render
  a service in naming him to you. You will see by his letter,
  herewith enclosed, that deeds of beneficence ought not to be done
  hap-hazard. Nothing needs more reflection than a good action. We
  never know whether that which seems best at one moment may not
  prove an evil later. The exercise of beneficence, as I have lived
  to discover, is to usurp the role of Destiny.

As she read that sentence Madame Graslin let fall the letter and was
thoughtful for several minutes.

“My God!” she said at last, “when wilt thou cease to strike me down on
all sides?”

Then she took up the letter and continued reading it:

  Gerard seems to me to have a cool head and an ardent heart; that’s
  the sort of man you want. Paris is just now a hotbed of new
  doctrines; I should be delighted to have the lad removed from the
  traps which ambitious minds are setting for the generous youth of
  France. While I do not altogether approve of the narrow and
  stupefying life of the provinces, neither do I like the passionate
  life of Paris, with its ardor of reformation, which is driving
  youth into so many unknown ways. You alone know my opinions; to my
  mind the moral world revolves upon its own axis, like the material
  world. My poor protege demands (as you will see from his letter)
  things impossible. No power can resist ambitions so violent, so
  imperious, so absolute, as those of to-day. I am in favor of low
  levels and slowness in political change; I dislike these social
  overturns to which ambitious minds subject us.

  To you I confide these principles of a monarchical and prejudiced
  old man, because you are discreet. Here I hold my tongue in the
  midst of worthy people, who the more they fail the more they
  believe in progress; but I suffer deeply at the irreparable evils
  already inflicted on our dear country.

  I have replied to the enclosed letter, telling my young man that a
  worthy task awaits him. He will go to see you, and though his
  letter will enable you to judge of him, you had better study him
  still further before committing yourself,--though you women
  understand many things from the mere look of a man. However, all
  the men whom you employ, even the most insignificant, ought to be
  thoroughly satisfactory to you. If you don’t like him don’t take
  him; but if he suits you, my dear child, I beg you to cure him of
  his ill-disguised ambition. Make him take to a peaceful, happy,
  rural life, where true beneficence is perpetually exercised; where
  the capacities of great and strong souls find continual exercise,
  and they themselves discover daily fresh sources of admiration in
  the works of Nature, and in real ameliorations, real progress, an
  occupation worthy of any man.

  I am not oblivious of the fact that great ideas give birth to
  great actions; but as those ideas are necessarily few and far
  between, I think it may be said that usually things are more
  useful than ideas. He who fertilizes a corner of the earth, who
  brings to perfection a fruit-tree, who makes a turf on a thankless
  soil, is far more useful in his generation than he who seeks new
  theories for humanity. How, I ask you, has Newton’s science
  changed the condition of the country districts? Oh! my dear, I
  have always loved you; but to-day I, who fully understand what you
  are about to attempt, I adore you.

  No one at Limoges forgets you; we all admire your grand resolution
  to benefit Montegnac. Be a little grateful to us for having soul
  enough to admire a noble action, and do not forget that the first
  of your admirers is also your first friend.


F. Grossetete.


The enclosed letter was as follows:--

  To Monsieur Grossetete:

  Monsieur,--You have been to me a father when you might have been
  only a mere protector, and therefore I venture to make you a
  rather sad confidence. It is to you alone, you who have made me
  what I am, that I can tell my troubles.

  I am afflicted with a terrible malady, a cruel moral malady. In my
  soul are feelings and in my mind convictions which make me utterly
  unfit for what the State and society demand of me. This may seem
  to you ingratitude; it is only the statement of a condition. When
  I was twelve years old you, my generous god-father, saw in me, the
  son of a mere workman, an aptitude for the exact sciences and a
  precocious desire to rise in life. You favored my impulse toward
  better things when my natural fate was to stay a carpenter like my
  father, who, poor man, did not live long enough to enjoy my
  advancement. Indeed, monsieur, you did a good thing, and there is
  never a day that I do not bless you for it. It may be that I am
  now to blame; but whether I am right or wrong it is very certain
  that I suffer. In making my complaint to you I feel that I take
  you as my judge like God Himself. Will you listen to my story and
  grant me your indulgence?

  Between sixteen and eighteen years of age I gave myself to the
  study of the exact sciences with an ardor, you remember, that made
  me ill. My future depended on my admission to the Ecole
  Polytechnique. At that time my studies overworked my brain, and I
  came near dying; I studied night and day; I did more than the
  nature of my organs permitted. I wanted to pass such satisfying
  examinations that my place in the Ecole would be not only secure,
  but sufficiently advanced to release me from the cost of my
  support, which I did not want you to pay any longer.

  I triumphed! I tremble to-day as I think of the frightful
  conscription (if I may so call it) of brains delivered over yearly
  to the State by family ambition. By insisting on these severe
  studies at the moment when a youth attains his various forms of
  growth, the authorities produce secret evils and kill by midnight
  study many precious faculties which later would have developed
  both strength and grandeur. The laws of nature are relentless;
  they do not yield in any particular to the enterprises or the
  wishes of society. In the moral order as in the natural order all
  abuses must be paid for; fruits forced in a hot-house are produced
  at the tree’s expense and often at the sacrifice of the goodness
  of its product. La Quintinie killed the orange-trees to give Louis
  XIV. a bunch of flowers every day at all seasons. So it is with
  intellects. The strain upon adolescent brains discounts their
  future.

  That which is chiefly wanting to our epoch is legislative genius.
  Europe has had no true legislators since Jesus Christ, who, not
  having given to the world a political code, left his work
  incomplete. Before establishing great schools of specialists and
  regulating the method of recruiting for them, where were the great
  thinkers who could bear in mind the relation of such institutions
  to human powers, balancing advantages and injuries, and studying
  the past for the laws of the future? What inquiry has been made as
  to the condition of exceptional men, who, by some fatal chance,
  knew human sciences before their time? Has the rarity of such
  cases been reckoned--the result examined? Has any enquiry been
  made as to the means by which such men were enabled to endure the
  perpetual strain of thought? How many, like Pascal, died
  prematurely, worn-out by knowledge? Have statistics been gathered
  as to the age at which those men who lived the longest began their
  studies? Who has ever known, does any one know now, the interior
  construction of brains which have been able to sustain a premature
  burden of human knowledge? Who suspects that this question
  belongs, above all, to the physiology of man?

  For my part, I now believe the true general law is to remain a
  long time in the vegetative condition of adolescence; and that
  those exceptions where strength of organs is produced during
  adolescence result usually in the shortening of life. Thus the
  man of genius who is able to bear up under the precocious exercise
  of his faculties is an exception to an exception.

  If I am right, if what I say accords with social facts and medical
  observations, then the system practised in France in her technical
  schools is a fatal impairment and mutilation (in the style of La
  Quintinie) practised upon the noblest flower of youth in each
  generation.

  But it is better to continue my history, and add my doubts as the
  facts develop themselves.

  When I entered the Ecole Polytechnique, I worked harder than ever
  and with even more ardor, in order to leave it as triumphantly as
  I had entered it. From nineteen to twenty-one I developed every
  aptitude and strengthened every faculty by constant practice.
  Those two years were the crown and completion of the first three,
  during which I had only prepared myself to do well. Therefore my
  pride was great when I won the right to choose the career that
  pleased me most,--either military or naval engineering, artillery,
  or staff duty, or the civil engineering of mining, and _ponts et
  chaussees_.[*] By your advice, I chose the latter.

    [*] Department of the government including everything connected
    with the making and repairing of roads, bridges, canals, etc.

  But where I triumphed how many others fail! Do you know that from
  year to year the State increases the scientific requirements of
  the Ecole? the studies are more severe, more exacting yearly. The
  preparatory studies which tried me so much were nothing to the
  intense work of the school itself, which has for its object to put
  the whole of physical science, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry,
  and all their nomenclatures into the minds of young men of
  nineteen to twenty-one years of age. The State, which seems in
  France to wish to substitute itself in many ways for the paternal
  authority, has neither bowels of compassion nor fatherhood; it
  makes its experiments _in anima vili_. Never does it inquire into
  the horrible statistics of the suffering it causes. Does it know
  the number of brain fevers among its pupils during the last
  thirty-six years; or the despair and the moral destruction which
  decimate its youth? I am pointing out to you this painful side of
  the State education, for it is one of the anterior contingents of
  the actual result.

  You know that scholars whose conceptions are slow, or who are
  temporarily disabled from excess of mental work, are allowed to
  remain at the Ecole three years instead of two; they then become
  the object of suspicions little favorable to their capacity. This
  often compels young men, who might later show superior capacity,
  to leave the school without being employed, simply because they
  could not meet the final examination with the full scientific
  knowledge required. They are called “dried fruits”; Napoleon made
  sub-lieutenants of them. To-day the “dried fruits” constitute an
  enormous loss of capital to families and of time to individuals.

  However, as I say, I triumphed. At twenty-one years of age I knew
  the mathematical sciences up to the point to which so many men of
  genius have brought them, and I was impatient to distinguish
  myself by carrying them further. This desire is so natural that
  almost every pupil leaving the Ecole fixes his eyes on that moral
  sun called Fame. The first thought of all is to become another
  Newton, or Laplace, or Vauban. Such are the efforts that France
  demands of the young men who leave her celebrated school.

  Now let us see the fate of these men culled with so much care from
  each generation. At one-and-twenty we dream of life, and expect
  marvels of it. I entered the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees; I was a
  pupil-engineer. I studied the science of construction, and how
  ardently! I am sure you remember that. I left the school in 1827,
  being then twenty-four years of age, still only a candidate as
  engineer, and the government paid me one hundred and fifty francs
  a month; the commonest book-keeper in Paris earns that by the time
  he is eighteen, giving little more than four hours a day to his
  work.

  By a most unusual piece of luck, perhaps because of the
  distinction my devoted studies won for me, I was made, in 1828,
  when I was twenty-five years old, engineer-in-ordinary. I was
  sent, as you know, to a sub-prefecture, with a salary of
  twenty-five hundred francs. The question of money is nothing.
  Certainly my fate has been more brilliant than the son of a
  carpenter might expect; but where will you find a grocer’s boy,
  who, if thrown into a shop at sixteen, will not in ten years be
  on the high-road to an independent property?

  I learned then to what these terrible efforts of mental power,
  these gigantic exertions demanded by the State were to lead. The
  State now employed me to count and measure pavements and heaps of
  stones on the roadways; I had to keep in order, repair, and
  sometimes construct culverts, one-arched bridges, regulate
  drift-ways, clean and sometimes open ditches, lay out bounds, and
  answer questions about the planting and felling of trees. Such are
  the principal and sometimes the only occupations of ordinary
  engineers, together with a little levelling which the government
  obliges us to do ourselves, though any of our chain-bearers with
  their limited experience can do it better than we with all our
  science.

  There are nearly four hundred engineers-in-ordinary and pupil
  engineers; and as there are not more than a hundred or so of
  engineers-in-chief, only a limited number of the sub-engineers can
  hope to rise. Besides, above the grade of engineer-in-chief, there
  is no absorbent class; for we cannot count as a means of
  absorption the ten or fifteen places of inspector-generals or
  divisionaries,--posts that are almost as useless in our corps as
  colonels are in the artillery, where the battery is the essential
  thing. The engineer-in-ordinary, like the captain of artillery,
  knows the whole science. He ought not to have any one over him
  except an administrative head to whom no more than eighty-six
  engineers should report,--for one engineer, with two assistants is
  enough for a department.

  The present hierarchy in these bodies results in the subordination
  of active energetic capacities to the worn-out capacities of old
  men, who, thinking they know best, alter or nullify the plans
  submitted by their subordinates,--perhaps with the sole aim of
  making their existence felt; for that seems to me the only
  influence exercised over the public works of France by the
  Council-general of the _Ponts et Chaussees_.

  Suppose, however, that I become, between thirty and forty years of
  age, an engineer of the first-class and an engineer-in-chief
  before I am fifty. Alas! I see my future; it is written before my
  eyes. Here is a forecast of it:--

  My present engineer-in-chief is sixty years old; he issued with
  honors, as I did, from the famous Ecole; he has turned gray doing
  in two departments what I am doing now, and he has become the most
  ordinary man it is possible to imagine; he has fallen from the
  height to which he had really risen; far worse, he is no longer on
  the level of scientific knowledge; science has progressed, he has
  stayed where he was. The man who came forth ready for life at
  twenty-two years of age, with every sign of superiority, has
  nothing left to-day but the reputation of it. In the beginning,
  with his mind specially turned to the exact sciences and
  mathematics by his education, he neglected everything that was not
  his specialty; and you can hardly imagine his present dulness in
  all other branches of human knowledge. I hardly dare confide even
  to you the secrets of his incapacity sheltered by the fact that he
  was educated at the Ecole Polytechnique. With that label attached
  to him and on the faith of that prestige, no one dreams of
  doubting his ability. To you alone do I dare reveal the fact that
  the dulling of all his talents has led him to spend a million on a
  single matter which ought not to have cost the administration more
  than two hundred thousand francs. I wished to protest, and was
  about to inform the prefect; but an engineer I know very well
  reminded me of one of our comrades who was hated by the
  administration for doing that very thing. “How would you like,” he
  said to me, “when you get to be engineer-in-chief to have your
  errors dragged forth by your subordinate? Before long your
  engineer-in-chief will be made a divisional inspector. As soon as
  any one of us commits a serious blunder, as he has done, the
  administration (which can’t allow itself to appear in the wrong)
  will quietly retire him from active duty by making him inspector.”

  That’s how the reward of merit devolves on incapacity. All France
  knew of the disaster which happened in the heart of Paris to the
  first suspension bridge built by an engineer, a member of the
  Academy of Sciences; a melancholy collapse caused by blunders such
  as none of the ancient engineers--the man who cut the canal at
  Briare in Henri IV.’s time, or the monk who built the Pont Royal
  --would have made; but our administration consoled its engineer
  for his blunder by making him a member of the Council-general.

  Are the technical schools vast manufactories of incapables? That
  subject requires careful investigation. If I am right they need
  reforming, at any rate in their method of proceeding,--for I am
  not, of course, doubting the utility of such schools. Only, when
  we look back into the past we see that France in former days never
  wanted for the great talents necessary to the State; but now she
  prefers to hatch out talent geometrically, after the theory of
  Monge. Did Vauban ever go to any other Ecole than that great
  school we call vocation? Who was Riquet’s tutor? When great
  geniuses arise above the social mass, impelled by vocation, they
  are nearly always rounded into completeness; the man is then not
  merely a specialist, he has the gift of universality. Do you think
  that an engineer from the Ecole Polytechnique could ever create
  one of those miracles of architecture such as Leonardo da Vinci
  knew how to build,--mechanician, architect, painter, inventor of
  hydraulics, indefatigable constructor of canals that he was?

  Trained from their earliest years to the baldness of axiom and
  formula, the youths who leave the Ecole have lost the sense of
  elegance and ornament; a column seems to them useless; they return
  to the point where art begins, and cling to the useful.

  But all this is nothing in comparison to the real malady which is
  undermining me. I feel an awful transformation going on within me;
  I am conscious that my powers and my faculties, formerly
  unnaturally taxed, are giving way. I am letting the prosaic
  influence of my life get hold of me. I who, by the very nature of
  my efforts, looked to do some great thing, I am face to face with
  none but petty ones; I measure stones, I inspect roads, I have not
  enough to really occupy me for two hours in my day. I see my
  colleagues marry, and fall into a situation contrary to the spirit
  of modern society. I wanted to be useful to my country. Is my
  ambition an unreasonable one? The country asked me to put forth
  all my powers; it told me to become a representative of science;
  yet here I am with folded arms in the depths of the provinces. I
  am not even allowed to leave the locality in which I am penned, to
  exercise my faculties in planning useful enterprises. A hidden but
  very real disfavor is the certain reward of any one of us who
  yields to an inspiration and goes beyond the special service laid
  down for him.

  No, the favor a superior man has to hope for in that case is that
  his talent and his presumption may not be noticed, and that his
  project may be buried in the archives of the administration. What
  think you will be the reward of Vicat, the one among us who has
  brought about the only real progress in the practical science of
  construction? The Council-general of the _Ponts et Chaussees_,
  composed in part of men worn-out by long and sometimes honorable
  service, but whose only remaining force is for negation, and who
  set aside everything they no longer comprehend, is the
  extinguisher used to snuff out the projects of audacious spirits.
  This Council seems to have been created to paralyze the arm of
  that glorious youth of France, which asks only to work and to be
  useful to its country.

  Monstrous things are done in Paris. The future of a province
  depends on the mere signature of men who (through intrigues I have
  no time to explain to you) often stop the execution of useful and
  much-needed work; in fact, the best plans are often those which
  offer most to the cupidity of commercial companies or speculators.

  Another five years and I shall no longer be myself; my ambition
  will be quenched, my desire to use the faculties my country
  ordered me to exercise gone forever; the faculties themselves are
  rusting out in the miserable corner of the world in which I
  vegetate. Taking my chances at their best, the future seems to me
  a poor thing. I have just taken advantage of a furlough to come to
  Paris; I mean to change my profession and find some other way to
  put my energy, my knowledge, and my activity to use. I shall send
  in my resignation and go to some other country, where men of my
  special capacity are wanted.

  If I find I cannot do this, then I shall throw myself into the
  struggle of the new doctrines, which certainly seem calculated to
  produce great changes in the present social order by judiciously
  guiding the working-classes. What are we now but workers without
  work, tools on the shelves of a shop? We are trained and organized
  as if to move the world, and nothing is given us to do. I feel
  within me some great thing, which is decreasing daily, and will
  soon vanish; I tell you so with mathematical frankness. Before
  making the change I want your advice; I look upon myself as your
  child, and I will never take any important step without consulting
  you, for your experience is equal to your kindness.

  I know very well that the State, after obtaining a class of
  trained men, cannot undertake for them alone great public works;
  there are not three hundred bridges needed a year in all France;
  the State can no more build great buildings for the fame of its
  engineers than it can declare war merely to win battles and bring
  to the front great generals; but, then, as men of genius have
  never failed to present themselves when the occasion called for
  them, springing from the crowd like Vauban, can there be any
  greater proof of the uselessness of the present institution? Can’t
  they see that when they have stimulated a man of talent by all
  those preparations he will make a fierce struggle before he allows
  himself to become a nonentity? Is this good policy on the part of
  the State? On the contrary, is not the State lighting the fire of
  ardent ambitions, which must find fuel somewhere.

  Among the six hundred young men whom they put forth every year
  there are exceptions,--men who resist what may be called their
  demonetization. I know some myself, and if I could tell you their
  struggles with men and things when armed with useful projects and
  conceptions which might bring life and prosperity to the half-dead
  provinces where the State has sent them, you would feel that a man
  of power, a man of talent, a man whose nature is a miracle, is a
  hundredfold more unfortunate and more to be pitied than the man
  whose lower nature lets him submit to the shrinkage of his
  faculties.

  I have made up my mind, therefore, that I would rather direct some
  commercial or industrial enterprise, and live on small means while
  trying to solve some of the great problems still unknown to
  industry and to society, than remain at my present post.

  You will tell me, perhaps, that nothing hinders me from employing
  the leisure that I certainly have in using my intellectual powers
  and seeking in the stillness of this commonplace life the solution
  of some problem useful to humanity. Ah! monsieur, don’t you know
  the influence of the provinces,--the relaxing effect of a life
  just busy enough to waste time on futile labor, and not enough to
  use the rich resources our education has given us? Don’t think me,
  my dear protector, eaten up by the desire to make a fortune, nor
  even by an insensate desire for fame. I am too much of a
  calculator not to know the nothingness of glory. Neither do I want
  to marry; seeing the fate now before me, I think my existence a
  melancholy gift to offer any woman. As for money, though I regard
  it as one of the most powerful means given to social man to act
  with, it is, after all, but a means.

  I place my whole desire and happiness on the hope of being useful
  to my country. My greatest pleasure would be to work in some
  situation suited to my faculties. If in your region, or in the
  circle of your acquaintances, you should hear of any enterprise
  that needed the capacities you know me to possess, think of me; I
  will wait six months for your answer before taking any step.

  What I have written here, dear sir and friend, others think. I
  have seen many of my classmates or older graduates caught like me
  in the toils of some specialty,--geographical engineers,
  captain-professors, captains of engineers, who will remain captains
  all their lives, and now bitterly regret they did not enter active
  service with the army. Reflecting on these miserable results, I
  ask myself the following questions, and I would like your opinion
  on them, assuring you that they are the fruit of long meditation,
  clarified in the fires of suffering:--

  What is the real object of the State? Does it truly seek to obtain
  fine capacities? The system now pursued directly defeats that end;
  it has crated the most thorough mediocrities that any government
  hostile to superiority could desire. Does it wish to give a career
  to its choice minds? As a matter of fact, it affords them the
  meanest opportunities; there is not a man who has issued from the
  Ecoles who does not bitterly regret, when he gets to be fifty or
  sixty years of age, that he ever fell into the trap set for him by
  the promises of the State. Does it seek to obtain men of genius?
  What man of genius, what great talent have the schools produced
  since 1790? If it had not been for Napoleon would Cachin, the man
  of genius to whom France owes Cherbourg, have existed? Imperial
  despotism brought him forward; the constitutional regime would
  have smothered him. How many men from the Ecoles are to be found
  in the Academy of Sciences? Possibly two or three. The man of
  genius develops always outside of the technical schools. In the
  sciences which those schools teach genius obeys only its own laws;
  it will not develop except under conditions which man cannot
  control; neither the State nor the science of mankind,
  anthropology, understands them. Riquet, Perronet, Leonardo da
  Vinci, Cachin, Palladio, Brunelleschi, Michel-Angelo, Bramante,
  Vauban, Vicat, derive their genius from causes unobserved and
  preparatory, which we call chance,--the pet word of fools. Never,
  with or without schools, are mighty workmen such as these wanting
  to their epoch.

  Now comes the question, Does the State gain through these
  institutions the better doing of its works of public utility, or
  the cheaper doing of them? As for that, I answer that private
  enterprises of a like kind get on very well without the help of
  our engineers; and next, the government works are the most
  extravagant in the world, and the additional cost of the vast
  administrative staff of the _Ponts et Chaussees_ is immense. In
  all other countries, in Germany, England, Italy, where
  institutions like ours do not exist, works of this character are
  better done and far less costly than in France. Those three
  nations are remarkable for new and useful inventions in this line.
  I know it is the fashion to say, in speaking of our Ecoles, that
  all Europe envies them; but for the last fifteen years Europe,
  which closely observes us, has not established others like them.
  England, that clever calculator, has better schools among her
  working population, from which come practical men who show their
  genius the moment they rise from practice to theory. Stephenson
  and MacAdam did not come from schools like ours.

  But what is the good of talking? When a few young and able
  engineers, full of ardor, solve, at the outset of their career,
  the problem of maintaining the roads of France, which need some
  hundred millions spent upon them every quarter of a century (and
  which are now in a pitiable state), they gain nothing by making
  known in reports and memoranda their intelligent knowledge; it is
  immediately engulfed in the archives of the general Direction,--
  that Parisian centre where everything enters and nothing issues;
  where old men are jealous of young ones, and all the posts of
  management are used to shelve old officers or men who have
  blundered.

  This is why, with a body of scientific men spread all over the
  face of France and constituting a part of the administration,--a
  body which ought to enlighten every region on the subject of its
  resources,--this is why we are still discussing the practicability
  of railroads while other countries are making theirs. If ever
  France was to show the excellence of her institution of technical
  schools, it should have been in this magnificent phase of public
  works, which is destined to change the face of States and nations,
  to double human life, and modify the laws of space and time.
  Belgium, the United States of America, England, none of whom have
  an Ecole Polytechnique, will be honeycombed with railroads when
  French engineers are still surveying ours, and selfish interests,
  hidden behind all projects, are hindering their execution.

  Thus I say that as for the State, it derives no benefit from its
  technical schools; as for the individual pupil of those schools,
  his earnings are poor, his ambition crushed, and his life a cruel
  deception. Most assuredly the powers he has displayed between
  sixteen and twenty-six years of age would, if he had been cast
  upon his own resources, have brought him more fame and more wealth
  than the government in whom he trusted will ever give him. As a
  commercial man, a learned man, a military man, this choice
  intellect would have worked in a vast centre where his precious
  faculties and his ardent ambition would not be idiotically and
  prematurely repressed.

  Where, then, is progress? Man and State are both kept backward by
  this system. Does not the experience of a whole generation demand
  a reform in the practical working of these institutions? The duty
  of culling from all France during each generation the choice minds
  destined to become the learned and the scientific of the nation is
  a sacred office, the priests of which, the arbiters of so many
  fates, should be trained by special study. Mathematical knowledge
  is perhaps less necessary to them than physiological knowledge.
  And do you not think that they need a little of that second-sight
  which is the witchcraft of great men? As it is, the examiners are
  former professors, honorable men grown old in harness, who limit
  their work to selecting the best themes. They are unable to do
  what is really demanded of them; and yet their functions are the
  noblest in the State and demand extraordinary men.

  Do not think, dear sir and friend, that I blame only the Ecole
  itself; no, I blame the system by which it is recruited. This
  system is the _concours_, competition,--a modern invention,
  essentially bad; bad not only in science, but wherever it is
  employed, in arts, in all selections of men, of projects, of
  things. If it is a reproach to our great Ecoles that they have not
  produced men superior to other educational establishments, it is
  still more shameful that the _grand prix_ of the Institute has not
  as yet furnished a single great painter, great musician, great
  architect, great sculptor; just as the suffrage for the last
  twenty years has not elected out of its tide of mediocrities a
  single great statesman. My observation makes me detect, as I
  think, an error which vitiates in France both education and
  politics. It is a cruel error, and it rests on the following
  principle, which organizers have misconceived:--

  _Nothing, either in experience or in the nature of things, can
  give a certainty that the intellectual qualities of the adult
  youth will be those of the mature man._

  At this moment I am intimate with a number of distinguished men
  who concern themselves with all the moral maladies which are now
  afflicting France. They see, as I do, that our highest education
  is manufacturing temporary capacities,--temporary because they
  are without exercise and without future; that such education is
  without profit to the State because it is devoid of the vigor of
  belief and feeling. Our whole system of public education needs
  overhauling, and the work should be presided over by some man of
  great knowledge, powerful will, and gifted with that legislative
  genius which has never been met with among moderns, except perhaps
  in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  Possibly our superfluous numbers might be employed in giving
  elementary instruction so much needed by the people. The
  deplorable amount of crime and misdemeanors shows a social disease
  directly arising from the half-education given the masses, which
  tends to the destruction of social ties by making the people
  reflect just enough to desert the religious beliefs which are
  favorable to social order, and not enough to lift them to the
  theory of obedience and duty, which is the highest reach of the
  new transcendental philosophy. But as it is impossible to make a
  whole nation study Kant, therefore I say fixed beliefs and habits
  are safer for the masses than shallow studies and reasoning.

  If I had my life to begin over again, perhaps I would enter a
  seminary and become a simple village priest, or the teacher of a
  country district. But I am too far advanced in my profession now
  to be a mere primary instructor; I can, if I leave my present
  post, act in a wider range than that of a school or a country
  parish. The Saint-Simonians, to whom I have been tempted to ally
  myself, want now to take a course in which I cannot follow them.
  Nevertheless, in spite of their mistakes, they have touched on
  many of the sore spots which are the fruits of our present
  legislation, and which the State will only doctor by insufficient
  palliatives,--merely delaying in France the moral and political
  crisis that must come.

  Adieu, dear Monsieur Grossetete; accept the assurance of my
  respectful attachment, which, notwithstanding all these
  observations, can only increase.


Gregoire Gerard.


According to his old habit as a banker, Grossetete had jotted down his
reply on the back of the letter itself, heading it with the sacramental
word, _Answered_.

  It is useless, my dear Gerard, to discuss the observations made in
  your letter, because by a trick of chance (I use the term which
  is, as you say, the pet word of fools) I have a proposal to make
  to you which may result in withdrawing you from the situation you
  find so bad. Madame Graslin, the owner of the forests of Montegnac
  and of a barren plateau extending from the base of a chain of
  mountains on which are the forests, wishes to improve this vast
  domain, to clear her timber properly, and cultivate the stony
  plain.

  To put this project into execution she needs a man of your
  scientific knowledge and ardor, and one who has also your
  disinterested devotion and your ideas of practical utility. It
  will be little money and much work! a great result from small
  means! a whole region to be changed fundamentally! barren places
  to be made to gush with plenty! Isn’t that precisely what you
  want,--you who are dreaming of constructing a poem? From the tone
  of sincerity which pervades your letter, I do not hesitate to bid
  you come and see me at Limoges. But, my good friend, don’t send in
  your resignation yet; get leave of absence only, and tell your
  administration that you are going to study questions connected
  with your profession outside of the government works. In this way,
  you will not lose your rights, and you will have time to judge for
  yourself whether the project conceived by the rector of Montegnac
  and approved by Madame Graslin is feasible.

  I will explain to you by word of mouth the advantages you will
  find in case this great scheme can be carried out. Rely on the
  friendship of


Yours, etc, T. Grossetete.


Madame Graslin replied to Grossetete in few words: “Thank you, my
friend; I shall expect your _protege_.” She showed the letter to the
rector, saying,--

“One more wounded man for the hospital.”

The rector read the letter, reread it, made two or three turns on the
terrace silently; then he gave it back to Madame Graslin, saying,--

“A fine soul, and a superior man. He says the schools invented by the
genius of the Revolution manufacture incapacities. For my part, I say
they manufacture unbelievers; for if Monsieur Gerard is not an atheist,
he is a protestant.”

“We will ask him,” she said, struck by an answer.




XVII. THE REVOLUTION OF JULY JUDGED AT MONTEGNAC

A fortnight later, in December, and in spite of the cold, Monsieur
Grossetete came to the chateau de Montegnac, to “present his protege,”
 whom Veronique and Monsieur Bonnet were impatiently awaiting.

“I must love you very much, my dear child,” said the old man, taking
Veronique’s two hands in his, and kissing them with that gallantry of
old men which never displeases women, “yes, I must love you well, to
come from Limoges in such weather. But I wanted to present to you myself
the gift of Monsieur Gregoire Gerard here present. You’ll find him a
man after your own heart, Monsieur Bonnet,” added the banker, bowing
affectionately to the rector.

Gerard’s external appearance was not prepossessing. He was of middle
height, stocky in shape, the neck sunk in the shoulders, as they say
vulgarly; he had yellow hair, and the pink eyes of an albino, with
lashes and eyebrows almost white. Though his skin, like that of all
persons of that description, was amazingly white, marks of the small-box
and other very visible scars had destroyed its original brilliancy.
Study had probably injured his sight, for he wore glasses.

When he removed the great cloak of a gendarme in which he was wrapped,
it was seen that his clothing did not improve his general appearance.
The manner in which his garments were put on and buttoned, his untidy
cravat, his rumpled shirt, were signs of the want of personal care with
which men of science, all more or less absent-minded, are charged. As
in the case of most thinkers, his countenance and his attitude, the
development of his bust and the thinness of his legs, betrayed a sort
of bodily debility produced by habits of meditation. Nevertheless, the
ardor of his heart and the vigor of his mind, proofs of which were given
in this letter, gleamed from his forehead, which was white as Carrara
marble. Nature seemed to have reserved to herself that spot in order to
place there visible signs of the grandeur, constancy, and goodness of
the man. The nose, like that of most men of the true Gallic race, was
flattened. His mouth, firm and straight, showed absolute discretion
and the instinct of economy. But the whole mask, worn by study, looked
prematurely old.

“We must begin by thanking you, monsieur,” said Madame Graslin,
addressing the engineer, “for being willing to direct an enterprise in
a part of the country which can offer you no other pleasure than the
satisfaction of knowing that you are doing a real good.”

“Madame,” he replied, “Monsieur Grossetete has told me enough about your
enterprise as we came along to make me already glad that I can in any
way be useful to you; the prospect of living in close relations with
you and Monsieur Bonnet seems to me charming. Unless I am dismissed from
this region, I expect to end my days here.”

“We will try not to let you change your mind,” replied Madame Graslin,
smiling.

“Here,” said Grossetete, addressing Veronique, whom he took aside,
“are the papers which the _procureur-general_ gave to me. He was quite
surprised that you did not address your inquiry about Catherine Curieux
to him. All that you wished has been done immediately, with the utmost
promptitude and devotion. Three months hence Catherine Curieux will be
sent to you.”

“Where is she?” asked Veronique.

“She is now in the hospital Saint-Louis,” replied the old man; “they are
awaiting her recovery before sending her from Paris.”

“Ah! is the poor girl ill?”

“You will find all necessary information in these papers,” said
Grossetete, giving Veronique a packet.

Madame Graslin returned to her guests to conduct them into the
magnificent dining-room on the ground-floor. She sat at table, but did
not herself take part in the dinner; since her arrival at Montegnac
she had made it a rule to take her meals alone, and Aline, who knew the
reason of this withdrawal, faithfully kept the secret of it till her
mistress was in danger of death.

The mayor, the _juge de paix_, and the doctor of Montegnac had been
invited.

The doctor, a young man twenty-seven years of age, named Roubaud, was
extremely desirous of knowing a woman so celebrated in Limoges. The
rector was all the more pleased to present him at the chateau because he
wanted to gather a little society around Veronique to distract her mind
and give it food. Roubaud was one of those thoroughly well-trained
young physicians whom the Ecole de Medecine in Paris sends forth to the
profession. He would undoubtedly have shone on the vast stage of the
capital; but frightened by the clash of ambitions in Paris, and knowing
himself more capable than pushing, more learned than intriguing, his
gentle disposition led him to choose the narrow career of the provinces,
where he hoped to be sooner appreciated than in Paris.

At Limoges, Roubaud came in contact with the settled practice of the
regular physicians and the habits of the people; he therefore let
himself be persuaded by Monsieur Bonnet, who, judging by the gentle and
winning expression of his face, thought him well-suited to co-operate
in his own work at Montegnac. Roubaud was small and fair; his general
appearance was rather insipid, but his gray eyes betrayed the depths of
the physiologist and the patient tenacity of a studious man. There was
no physician in Montegnac except an old army-surgeon, more devoted to
his cellar than to his patients, and too old to continue with any vigor
the hard life of a country doctor. At the present time he was dying.

Roubaud had been in Montegnac about eighteen months, and was much liked
there. But this young pupil of Desplein and the successors of Cabanis
did not believe in Catholicism. He lived in a state of profound
indifference as to religion, and did not desire to come out of it. The
rector was in despair. Not that Roubaud did any wrong; he never spoke
against religion, and his duties were excuse enough for his absence from
church; besides, he was incapable of trying to undermine the faith of
others, and indeed behaved outwardly as the best of Catholics; he simply
prohibited himself from thinking of a problem which he considered above
the range of human thought. When the rector heard him say that pantheism
had been the religion of all great minds he set him down as inclining to
the doctrine of Pythagoras on reincarnation.

Roubaud, who saw Madame Graslin for the first time, experienced a
violent sensation when he met her. Science revealed to him in her
expression, her attitude, in the ravages of her face, untold sufferings
both moral and physical, a nature of almost superhuman force, great
faculties which would support her under the most conflicting trials;
he detected all,--even the darkest corners of that nature so carefully
hidden. He felt that some evil, some malady, was devouring the heart of
that fine creature; for just as the color of a fruit shows the
presence of a worm within it, so certain tints in the human face enable
physicians to detect a poisoning thought.

From this moment Monsieur Roubaud attached himself so deeply to Madame
Graslin that he became afraid of loving her beyond the permitted line
of simple friendship. The brow, the bearing, above all, the glance of
Veronique’s eye had a sort of eloquence that men invariably understand;
it said as plainly that she was dead to love as other women say the
contrary by a reversal of the same eloquence. The doctor suddenly vowed
to her, in his heart, a chivalrous worship.

He exchanged a rapid glance with the rector, who thought to himself,
“Here’s the thunderbolt which will convert my poor unbeliever; Madame
Graslin will have more eloquence than I.”

The mayor, an old countryman, amazed at the luxury of this dining-room
and surprised to find himself dining with one of the richest men in the
department, had put on his best clothes, which rather hampered him, and
this increased his mental awkwardness. Moreover, Madame Graslin in her
mourning garments seemed to him very imposing; he was therefore mute.
After living all his life as a farmer at Saint-Leonard, he had bought
the only habitable house in Montegnac and cultivated with his own hands
the land belonging to it. Though he knew how to read and write, he would
have been incapable of fulfilling his functions were it not for the help
of his clerk and the _juge de paix_, who prepared his work for him. He
was very anxious to have a notary established in Montegnac, in order
that he might shift the burden of his responsibility on to that
officer’s shoulders. But the poverty of the village and its outlying
districts made such a functionary almost useless, and the inhabitants
had recourse when necessary to the notaries of the chief town of the
arrondissement.

The _juge de paix_, named Clousier, was formerly a lawyer in Limoges,
where cases had deserted him because he insisted on putting into
practice that fine axiom that the lawyer is the best judge of the client
and the case. In 1809 he obtained his present post, the meagre salary of
which just enabled him to live. He had now reached a stage of honorable
but absolute poverty. After a residence of twenty-one years in this poor
village the worthy man, thoroughly countrified, looked, top-coat and
all, exactly like the farmers about him.

Under this coarse exterior Clousier hid a clear-sighted mind, given to
lofty meditation on public policy, though he himself had fallen into a
state of complete indifference, derived from his intimate knowledge
of men and their interests. This man, who baffled for a long time the
rector’s perspicacity and who might in a higher sphere have proved
another l’Hopital, incapable of intrigue like all really profound
persons, was by this time living in the contemplative state of an
ancient hermit. Independent through privation, no personal consideration
acted on his mind; he knew the laws and judged impartially. His life,
reduced to the merest necessaries, was pure and regular. The peasants
loved Monsieur Clousier and respected him for the disinterested fatherly
care with which he settled their differences and gave them advice in
their daily affairs. The “goodman Clousier” as all Montegnac called him,
had a nephew with him as clerk, an intelligent young man, who afterwards
contributed much to the prosperity of the district.

Old Clousier’s personal appearance was remarkable for a broad, high
forehead and two bushes of white hair which stood out from his head
on either side of it. His highly colored complexion and well-developed
corpulence might have made persons think, in spite of his actual
sobriety, that he cultivated Bacchus as well as Troplong and Toullier.
His half-extinct voice was the sign of an oppressive asthma. Perhaps
the dry air of Montegnac had contributed to fix him there. He lived in
a house arranged for him by a well-to-do cobbler to whom it belonged.
Clousier had already seen Veronique at church, and he had formed his
opinion of her without communicating it to any one, not even to Monsieur
Bonnet, with whom he was beginning to be intimate. For the first time
in his life the _juge de paix_ was to be thrown in with persons able to
appreciate him.

When the company were seated round a table handsomely appointed
(for Veronique had sent all her household belongings from Limoges to
Montegnac) the six guests felt a momentary embarrassment. The doctor,
the mayor and the _juge de paix_ knew nothing of Grossetete and Gerard.
But during the first course, old Grossetete’s hearty good-humor broke
the ice of a first meeting. In addition to this, Madame Graslin’s
cordiality led on Gerard, and encouraged Roubaud. Under her touch these
souls full of fine qualities recognized their relation, and felt they
had entered a sympathetic circle. So, by the time the dessert appeared
on the table, when the glass and china with gilded edges sparkled, and
the choicer wines were served by Aline and Champion and Grossetete’s
valet, the conversation became sufficiently confidential to allow
these four choice minds, thus meeting by chance, to express their real
thoughts on matters of importance, such as men like to discuss when they
can do so and be sure of the discretion of their companions.

“Your furlough came just in time to let you witness the revolution of
July,” said Grossetete to Gerard, with an air as if he asked an opinion
of him.

“Yes,” replied the engineer. “I was in Paris during the three famous
days. I saw all; and I came to sad conclusions.”

“What were they?” said the rector, eagerly.

“There is no longer any patriotism except under dirty shirts,” replied
Gerard. “In that lies the ruin of France! July was the voluntary defeat
of all superiorities,--name, fortune, talent. The ardent, devoted masses
carried the day against the rich and the intelligent, to whom ardor and
devotion are repugnant.”

“To judge by what has happened during the past year,” said Monsieur
Clousier, “this change of government is simply a premium given to
an evil that is sapping us,--individualism. Fifteen years hence
all questions of a generous nature will be met by, _What is that to
me?_--the great cry of Freedom of Will descending from the religious
heights where Luther, Calvin, Zwinglius, and Knox introduced it, into
even political economy. _Every one for himself_; _every man his own
master_,--those two terrible axioms form, with the _What is that to
me?_ a trinity of wisdom to the burgher and the small land-owner. This
egotism results from the vices of our present civil legislation (too
hastily made), to which the revolution of July has just given a terrible
confirmation.”

The _juge de paix_ fell back into his usual silence after thus
expressing himself; but the topics he suggested must have occupied the
minds of those present. Emboldened by Clousier’s words, and moved by the
look which Gerard exchanged with Grossetete, Monsieur Bonnet ventured to
go further.

“The good King Charles X.,” he said, “has just failed in the most
far-sighted and salutary enterprise a monarch ever planned for the
welfare of the people confided to him; and the Church ought to feel
proud of the part she took in his councils. But the upper classes
deserted him in heart and mind, just as they had already deserted him
on the great question of the law of primogeniture,--the lasting honor of
the only bold statesman the Restoration has produced, namely, the Comte
de Peyronnet. To reconstitute the nation through the family; to
take from the press its venomous action and confine it to its real
usefulness; to recall the elective Chamber to its true functions; and
to restore to religion its power over the people,--such were the four
cardinal points of the internal policy of the house of Bourbon. Well,
twenty years from now all France will have recognized the necessity
of that grand and sound policy. Charles X. was in greater peril in the
situation he chose to leave than in that in which his paternal power has
been defeated. The future of our noble country--where all things will
henceforth be brought periodically into question, where our rulers
will discuss incessantly instead of acting, where the press, become a
sovereign power, will be the instrument of base ambitions--this future
will only prove the wisdom of the king who has just carried away with
him the true principles of government; and history will bear in mind the
courage with which he resisted his best friends after having probed
the wound and seen the necessity of curative measures, which were not
sustained by those for whose sake he put himself into the breach.”

“Ah! monsieur,” cried Gerard, “you are frank; you go straight to your
thought without disguise, and I won’t contradict you. Napoleon in his
Russian campaign was forty years in advance of the spirit of his age;
he was never understood. The Russia and England of 1830 explains the
campaign of 1812. Charles X. has been misunderstood in the same way. It
is quite possible that in twenty-five years from now his ordinances may
become the laws of the land.”

“France, too eloquent not to gabble, too full of vanity to bow down
before real talent, is, in spite of the sublime good sense of its
language and the mass of its people, the very last nation in which two
deliberative chambers should have been attempted,” said the _juge de
paix_. “Or, at any rate, the weaknesses of our national character should
have been guarded against by the admirable restrictions which Napoleon’s
experience laid upon them. Our present system may succeed in a country
whose action is circumscribed by the nature of its soil, like England;
but the law of primogeniture applied to the transmission of land
is absolutely necessary; when that law is suppressed the system of
legislative representation becomes absurd. England owes her existence to
the quasi-feudal law which entails landed property and family mansions
on the eldest son. Russia is based on the feudal right of autocracy.
Consequently those two nations are to-day on the high-road of startling
progress. Austria could only resist our invasions and renew the way
against Napoleon by virtue of that law of primogeniture which preserves
in the family the active forces of a nation, and supplies the great
productions necessary to the State. The house of Bourbon, feeling that
it was slipping to the third rank in Europe, by reason of liberalism,
wanted to regain its rightful place and there maintain itself, and the
nation has thrown it over at the very time it was about to save the
nation. I am sure I don’t know how low down the present system will drop
us.”

“If we have a war, France will be without horses, as Napoleon was in
1813, when, being reduced to those of France only, he could not profit
by his two victories of Lutzen and Botzen, and so was crushed at
Leipzig,” cried Grossetete. “If peace continues, the evil will only
increase. Twenty-five years from now the race of cattle and horses will
have diminished in France by one half.”

“Monsieur Grossetete is right,” remarked Gerard. “So that the work
you are undertaking here, madame,” he added, addressing Veronique, “is
really a service done to the country.”

“Yes,” said the _juge de paix_, “because Madame has but one son, and
the inheritance will not be divided up; but how long will that condition
last? For a certain length of time the magnificent culture which you are
about to introduce will, let us hope, belong to only one proprietor, who
will continue to breed horned beasts and horses; but sooner or later the
day must come when these forests and fields will be divided up and sold
in small parcels. Divided and redivided, the six thousand acres of that
plain will have a thousand or twelve hundred owners, and thenceforth--no
more horses and cattle!”

“Oh! as for those days”--began the mayor.

“There! don’t you hear the _What is that to me?_ Monsieur Clousier
talked of?” cried Monsieur Grossetete. “Taken in the act! But,
monsieur,” resumed the banker, gravely addressing the dumfounded mayor,
“those days have really come. In a radius of thirty miles round Paris
the land is so divided up into small holdings that milch cows are no
longer seen. The Commune of Argenteuil contains thirty-eight thousand
eight hundred and eighty-five parcels of land, many of which do not
return a farthing of revenue. If it were not for the rich refuse of
Paris, which produces a fodder of strong quality, I don’t know how
dairymen would get along. As it is, this over-stimulating food and
confinement in close stables produce inflammatory diseases, of which the
cows often die. They use cows in the neighborhood of Paris as they do
horses in the street. Crops more profitable than hay--vegetables, fruit,
apple orchards, vineyards--are taking the place of meadow-lands. In a
few years we shall see milk sent to Paris by the mail-coaches as they
now send fish. What is going on around Paris is also going on round all
the large cities of France; the land will thus be used up before many
years are gone. Chaptel states that in 1800 there were barely two
million acres of vineyard in France; a careful estimate would give
ten million to-day. Divided _ad infinitum_ by our present system of
inheritance, Normandy will lose half her production of horses and
cattle; but she will have a monopoly of milk in Paris, for her climate,
happily, forbids grape culture. We shall soon see a curious phenomenon
in the progressive rise in the cost of meat. In twenty years from now,
in 1850, Paris, which paid seven to eleven sous for a pound of beef in
1814, will be paying twenty--unless there comes a man of genius who can
carry out the plan of Charles X.”

“You have laid your finger on the mortal wound of France,” said the
_juge de paix_. “The root of our evils lies in the section relating to
inheritance in the Civil Code, in which the equal division of property
among heirs is ordained. That’s the pestle that pounds territory into
crumbs, individualizes fortunes, and takes from them their needful
stability; decomposing ever and never recomposing,--a state of things
which must end in the ruin of France. The French Revolution emitted a
destructive virus to which the July days have given fresh activity. This
vitiating element is the accession of the peasantry to the ownership of
land. In the section ‘On Inheritance’ is the principle of the evil, the
peasant is the means through which it works. No sooner does that class
get a parcel of land into its maw than it begins to subdivide it, till
there are scarcely three furrows left in each lot. And even then the
peasant does not stop! He divides the three furrows across their length,
as Monsieur Grossetete has just shown us at Argenteuil. The unreasonable
price which the peasant attaches to the smallest scrap of his land makes
it impossible to repurchase and restore a fine estate. Monsieur,” he
went on, indicating Grossetete, “has just mentioned the diminution in
the raising of horses and cattle; well, the Code has much to do with
that. The peasant-proprietor owns cows; he looks to them for his means
of living; he sells the calves, he sells his butter; he never dreams
of raising cattle, still less of raising horses; but as he cannot raise
enough fodder to support his cows through a dry season, he sends them to
market when he can feed them no longer. If by some fatal chance the hay
were to fail for two years running, you would see a startling change the
third year in the price of beef, but especially in that of veal.”

“That may put a stop to ‘patriotic banquets,’” said the doctor,
laughing.

“Oh!” exclaimed Madame Graslin, looking at Roubaud, “can’t politics get
on without the wit of journalism, even here?”

“In this lamentable business, the bourgeoisie plays the same _role_ as
the pioneers of America,” continued Clousier. “It buys up great estates,
which the peasantry could not otherwise acquire. It cuts them up and
then sells, either at auction or in small lots at private sale, to the
peasants. Everything is judged by figures in these days, and I know none
more eloquent than these. France has ninety-nine million acres, which,
subtracting highways, roads, dunes, canals, and barren, uncultivated
regions deserted by capital, may be reduced to eighty millions. Now out
of eighty millions of acres to thirty-two millions of inhabitants we
find one hundred and twenty-five millions of small lots registered on
the tax-list (I don’t give fractions). Thus, you will observe, we have
gone to the utmost limit of agrarian law, and yet we have not seen the
last of poverty or dissatisfaction. Those who divide territory into
fragments and lessen production have, of course, plenty of organs to
cry out that true social justice consists in giving every man a life
interest, and no more, in a parcel of land; perpetual ownership, they
say, is robbery. The Saint-Simonians are already proclaiming that
doctrine.”

“The magistrate has spoken,” said Grossetete, “and here’s what the
banker adds to those bold considerations. The fact that the peasantry
and the lesser bourgeoisie can now acquire land does France an injury
which the government seems not even to suspect. We may estimate the
number of peasant families, omitting paupers, at three millions. These
families subsist on wages. Wages are paid in money, and not in kind--”

“Yes, that’s another blunder of our laws!” cried Clousier, interrupting
the banker. “The right to pay in kind might have been granted in 1790;
now, if we attempted to carry such a law, we should risk a revolution.”

“Therefore, as I was about to say, the proletary draws to himself the
money of the country,” resumed Grossetete. “Now the peasant has no other
passion, desire, or will, than to die a land-owner. This desire, as
Monsieur Clousier has well shown, was born of the Revolution, and is the
direct result of the sale of the National domain. A man must be ignorant
indeed of what is going on all over France in the country regions if he
is not aware that these three million families are yearly hoarding at
least fifty francs, thus subtracting a hundred and fifty millions from
current use. The science of political economy has made it an axiom
that a five-franc piece, passing through a hundred hands in one day, is
equivalent to five hundred francs. Now, it is perfectly plain to all of
us who live in the country and observe the state of affairs, that every
peasant has his eye on the land he covets; he is watching and waiting
for it, and he never invests his savings elsewhere; he buries them. In
seven years the savings thus rendered inert and unproductive amount to
eleven hundred million francs. But since the lesser bourgeoisie bury
as much more, with the same purpose, France loses every seven years the
interest of at least two thousand millions,--that is to say, about one
hundred millions; a loss which in forty-two years amounts to six hundred
million francs. But she not only loses six hundred millions, she fails
to create with that money manufacturing or agricultural products, which
represent a loss of twelve hundred millions; for, if the manufactured
product were not double in value to its cost price, commerce could not
exist. The proletariat actually deprives itself of six hundred millions
in wages. These six hundred millions of dead loss (representing to a
stern economist a loss of twelve hundred millions, through lack of the
benefits of circulation) explain the condition of inferiority in which
our commerce, our merchant service, and our agriculture stand,
as compared with England. In spite of the difference of the two
territories, which is more than two thirds in our favor, England could
remount the cavalry of two French armies, and she has meat for every
man. But there, as the system of landed property makes it almost
impossible for the lower classes to obtain it, money is not hoarded;
it becomes commercial, and is turned over. Thus, besides the evil of
parcelling the land, involving that of the diminution of horses, cattle,
and sheep, the section of the Code on inheritance costs us six hundred
millions of interest, lost by the hoarding of the money of the peasantry
and bourgeoisie, and twelve hundred millions, at least, of products; or,
including the loss from non-circulation, three thousand millions in half
a century!”

“The moral effect is worse than the material effect,” cried the rector.
“We are making beggar-proprietors among the people and half-taught
communities of the lesser bourgeoisie; and the fatal maxim ‘Each for
himself,’ which had its effect upon the upper classes in July of this
year, will soon have gangrened the middle classes. A proletariat devoid
of sentiment, with no other god than envy, no other fanaticism than
the despair of hunger, without faith, without belief, will come forward
before long and put its foot on the heart of the nation. Foreigners, who
have thriven under monarchical rule, will find that, having royalty,
we have no king; having legality, we have no laws; having property,
no owners; no government with our elections, no force with freedom, no
happiness with equality. Let us hope that before that day comes God may
raise up in France a providential man, one of those Elect who give a new
mind to nations, and like Sylla or like Marius, whether he comes from
above or rises from below, remakes society.”

“He would be sent to the assizes,” said Gerard. “The sentence pronounced
against Socrates and Jesus Christ would be rendered against them in
1831. In these days as in the old days, envious mediocrity lets thinkers
die of poverty, and so gets rid of the great political physicians who
have studied the wounds of France, and who oppose the tendencies of
their epoch. If they bear up under poverty, common minds ridicule them
or call them dreamers. In France, men revolt in the moral world against
the great man of the future, just as they revolt in the political world
against a sovereign.”

“In the olden time sophists talked to a limited number of men; to-day
the periodical press enables them to lead astray a nation,” cried the
_juge de paix_; “and that portion of the press which pleads for right
ideas finds no echo.”

The mayor looked at Monsieur Clousier in amazement. Madame Graslin, glad
to find in a simple _juge de paix_ a man whose mind was occupied with
serious questions, said to Monsieur Roubaud, her neighbor, “Do you know
Monsieur Clousier?”

“Not rightly until to-day, madame. You are doing miracles,” he answered
in a whisper. “And yet, look at his brow, how noble in shape! Isn’t it
like the classic or traditional brow given by sculptors to Lycurgus
and the Greek sages? The revolution of July has an evidently retrograde
tendency,” said the doctor (who might in his student days have made
a barricade himself), after carefully considering Grossetete’s
calculation.

“These ideas are threefold,” continued Clousier. “You have talked of law
and finance, but how is it with the government itself? The royal power,
weakened by the doctrine of national sovereignty, in virtue of which
the election of August 9, 1830, has just been made, will endeavor to
counteract that rival principle which gives to the people the right
to saddle the nation with a new dynasty every time it does not fully
comprehend the ideas of its king. You will see that we shall then have
internal struggles which will arrest for long periods together the
progress of France.”

“All these reefs have been wisely evaded by England,” remarked Gerard.
“I have been there; I admire that beehive, which sends its swarms over
the universe and civilizes mankind,--a people among whom discussion is
a political comedy, which satisfies the masses and hides the action
of power, which then works freely in its upper sphere; a country where
elections are not in the hands of a stupid bourgeoisie, as they are in
France. If England were parcelled out into small holdings the nation
would no longer exist. The land-owning class, the lords, guide the
social mechanism. Their merchant-service, under the nose of Europe,
takes possession of whole regions of the globe to meet the needs of
their commerce and to get rid of their paupers and malcontents. Instead
of fighting capacities, as we do, thwarting them, nullifying them, the
English aristocratic class seeks out young talent, rewards it, and is
constantly assimilating it. Everything which concerns the action of
the government, in the choice of men and things, is prompt in England,
whereas with us all is slow; and yet the English are slow by nature,
while we are impatient. With them money is bold and actively employed;
with us it is timid and suspicious. What Monsieur Grossetete has said of
the industrial losses which the hoarding peasantry inflict on France has
its proof in a fact I will show to you in two words: English capital,
by its perpetual turning over, has created ten thousand millions of
manufacturing and interest-bearing property; whereas French capital,
which is far more abundant, has not created one tenth of that amount.”

“And that is all the more extraordinary,” said Roubaud, “because they
are lymphatic, and we, as a general thing, are sanguine and energetic.”

“Ah! monsieur,” said Clousier, “there you touch a great question,
which ought to be studied: How to find institutions properly adapted
to repress the temperament of a people! Assuredly Cromwell was a great
legislator. He alone made the England of to-day, by inventing the
‘Navigation Act,’ which has made the English enemies of all the world,
and infused into them a ferocious pride and self-conceit, which is their
mainstay. But, in spite of their Malta citadel, if France and Russia
will only comprehend the part the Mediterranean and the Black Sea ought
to be made to play in the future, the road to Asia through Egypt or by
the Euphrates, made feasible by recent discoveries, will kill England,
as in former times the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope killed
Venice.”

“Not one word of God’s providence in all this!” cried the rector.
“Monsieur Clousier and Monsieur Roubaud are oblivious of religion. How
is it with you, monsieur?” he added, turning to Gerard.

“Protestant,” put in Grossetete.

“You guessed it,” cried Veronique, looking at the rector as she took
Clousier’s arm to return to the salon.

The prejudice Gerard’s appearance excited against him had been quickly
dispelled, and the three notables congratulated themselves on so good an
acquisition.

“Unfortunately,” said Monsieur Bonnet, “there is a cause of
antagonism between Russia and the Catholic countries which border the
Mediterranean, in the very unimportant schism which separates the Greek
religion from the Latin religion; and it is a great misfortune for
humanity.”

“We all preach our own saint,” said Madame Graslin. “Monsieur Grossetete
thinks of the lost millions; Monsieur Clousier, of the overthrow
of rights; the doctor here regards legislation as a question of
temperaments; and the rector sees an obstacle to the good understanding
of France and Russia in religion.”

“Add to that, madame,” said Gerard, “that I see, in the hoarding of
capital by the peasant and the small burgher, the postponement of the
building of railroads in France.”

“Then what is it you all want?” she asked.

“We want the wise State councillors who, under the Emperor, reflected
on the laws, and a legislative body elected by the intelligence of the
country as well as by the land-owners, whose only function would be to
oppose bad legislation and capricious wars. The Chamber, as constituted
to-day, will proceed, as you will soon see, to govern, and that is the
first step to legal anarchy.”

“Good God!” cried the rector, in a flush of sacred patriotism, “how can
such enlightened minds as these,” and he motioned to Clousier, Roubaud,
and Gerard, “how can they see evil so clearly and suggest remedies
without first looking within and applying a remedy to themselves? All of
you, who represent the attacked classes, recognize the necessity of
the passive obedience of the masses of the State, like that of soldiers
during a war; you want the unity of power, and you desire that it
shall never be brought into question. What England has obtained by the
development of her pride and self-interest (a part of her creed) cannot
be obtained in France but through sentiments due to Catholicism, and
none of you are Catholics! Here am I, a priest, obliged to leave my own
ground and argue with arguers. How can you expect the masses to become
religious and obedient when they see irreligion and want of discipline
above them? All peoples united by any faith whatever will inevitably
get the better of peoples without any faith at all. The law of public
interest, which gives birth to patriotism, is destroyed by the law
of private interest, which it sanctions, but which gives birth to
selfishness. There is nothing solid and durable but that which is
natural; and the natural thing in human policy is the Family. The family
must be the point of departure for all institutions. A universal effect
proves a universal cause; and what you have just been setting forth as
evident on all sides comes from the social principle itself; which is
now without force because it has taken for its basis independence of
thought and will, and such freedom is the parent of individualism. To
make happiness depend on the stability, intelligence, and capacity of
all is not as wise as to make happiness depend on the stability and
intelligence of institutions and the capacity of a single head. It is
easier to find wisdom in one man than in a whole nation. Peoples have
heart and no eyes; they feel, and see not. Governments ought to see,
and not determine anything through sentiment. There is, therefore, an
evident contradiction between the impulses of the multitude and the
action of power whose function it is to direct and unify those impulses.
To meet with a great prince is certainly a rare chance (to use your
term), but to trust to a whole assembly, even though it is composed
of honest men only, is folly. France is committing that folly at this
moment. Alas! you are just as much convinced of that as I am. If all
right-minded men, like yourselves, would only set an example around
them, if all intelligent hands would raise, in the great republic of
souls, the altars of the one Church which has set the interests of
humanity before her, we might again behold in France the miracles our
fathers did here.”

“But the difficulty is, monsieur,” said Gerard,--“if I may speak to you
with the freedom of the confessional,--I look upon faith as a lie we
tell to ourselves, on hope as a lie we tell about the future, and on
charity as a trick for children to keep them good by the promise of
sugar-plums.”

“Still, we sleep better for being rocked by hope, monsieur,” said Madame
Graslin.

This speech stopped Roubaud, who was about to reply; its effect was
strengthened by a look from Grossetete and the rector.

“Is it our fault,” said Clousier, “that Jesus Christ had not the time
to formulate a government in accordance with his moral teaching, as did
Moses and Confucius, the two greatest human law-givers?--witness the
existence, as a nation, of the Jews and Chinese, the former in spite of
their dispersion over the whole earth, and the latter in spite of their
isolation.”

“Ah! dear me! what work you are cutting out for me!” cried the rector
naively. “But I shall triumph, I shall convert you all! You are much
nearer to the true faith than you think you are. Truth always lurks
behind falsehood; go on a step, turn round, and then you’ll see it.”

This little outburst of the good rector had the effect of changing the
conversation.




XVIII. CATHERINE CURIEUX

Before taking his departure the next day, Monsieur Grossetete promised
Veronique to associate himself in all her plans, as soon as the
realization of them was a practicable thing. Madame Graslin and Gerard
accompanied his carriage on horseback, and did not leave him till
they reached the junction of the high-road of Montegnac with that from
Bordeaux to Lyon. The engineer was so impatient to see the land he was
to reclaim, and Veronique was so impatient to show it to him, that they
had planned this expedition the evening before.

After bidding adieu to the kind old man, they turned off the road across
the vast plain, and skirted the mountain chain from the foot of the
rise which led to the chateau to the steep face of the Roche-Vive. The
engineer then saw plainly the shelf or barricade of rock mentioned
by Farrabesche; which forms, as it were, the lowest foundation of
the hills. By so directing the water that it should not overflow the
indestructible canal which Nature had built, and by clearing out the
accumulation of earth which choked it up, irrigation would be helped
rather than hindered by this natural sluice-way, which was raised, on
an average, ten feet above the plain. The first important point was to
estimate the amount of water flowing through the Gabou, and to make sure
whether or not the slopes of the valley allowed any to escape in other
directions.

Veronique gave Farrabesche a horse, and directed him to accompany the
engineer and to explain to him everything he had himself noticed. After
several days’ careful exploration, Gerard found that the base of the two
parallel slopes was sufficiently solid, though different in composition,
to hold the water, allowing none to escape. During the month of January,
which was rainy, he estimated the quantity of water flowing through the
Gabou. This quantity, added to that of three streams which could easily
be led into it, would supply water enough to irrigate a tract of land
three times as extensive as the plain of Montegnac. The damming of the
Gabou and the works necessary to direct the water of the three valleys
to the plain, ought not to cost more than sixty thousand francs; for the
engineer discovered on the commons a quantity of calcareous soil which
would furnish the lime cheaply, the forest was close at hand, the wood
and stone cost nothing, and the transportation was trifling. While
awaiting the season when the Gabou would be dry (the only time suitable
for the work) all the necessary preparations could be made so as to push
the enterprise through rapidly when it was once begun.

But the preparation of the plain was another thing; that according to
Gerard, would cost not less than two hundred thousand francs, without
including the sowing and planting. The plain was to be divided into
square compartments of two hundred and fifty acres each, where the
ground had to be cleared, not only of its stunted growths, but of rocks.
Laborers would have to dig innumerable trenches, and stone them up so as
to let no water run to waste, also to direct its flow at will. This part
of the enterprise needed the active and faithful arms of conscientious
workers. Chance provided them with a tract of land without natural
obstacles, a long even stretch of plain, where the waters, having a fall
of ten feet, could be distributed at will. Nothing hindered the finest
agricultural results, while at the same time, the eye would be gratified
by one of those magnificent sheets of verdure which are the pride and
the wealth of Lombardy. Gerard sent for an old and experienced foreman,
who had already been employed by him elsewhere in this capacity, named
Fresquin.

Madame Graslin wrote to Grossetete, requesting him to negotiate for her
a loan of two hundred and fifty thousand francs, secured on her income
from the Funds, which, if relinquished for six years, would be enough to
pay both capital and interest. This loan was obtained in March. By this
time the preliminary preparations carried on by Gerard and his foreman,
Fresquin, were fully completed; also, the surveying, estimating,
levelling, and sounding. The news of this great enterprise spreading
about the country, stimulated the laboring population. The indefatigable
Farrabesche, Colorat, Clousier, the mayor of Montegnac, Roubaud, and
others, interested either in the welfare of the neighborhood or in
Madame Graslin, selected such of these laborers as seemed the poorest,
or were most deserving of employment. Gerard bought for himself and for
Monsieur Grossetete a thousand acres on the other side of the high-road
to Montegnac. Fresquin, the foreman, bought five hundred, and sent for
his wife and children.

Early in April, 1832, Monsieur Grossetete came to see the land bought
for him by Gerard, though his journey was chiefly occasioned by the
advent of Catherine Curieux, who had come from Paris to Limoges by the
diligence. Grossetete now brought her with him to Montegnac. He found
Madame Graslin just starting for church. Monsieur Bonnet was to say
a mass to implore the blessing of heaven on the works that were then
beginning. All the laborers with their wives and children were present.

“Here is your protegee,” said the old gentleman, presenting to Veronique
a feeble, suffering woman, apparently about thirty years of age.

“Are you Catherine Curieux?” asked Madame Graslin.

“Yes, madame.”

Veronique looked at Catherine for a moment. She was rather tall,
well-made, and fair; her features wore an expression of extreme
gentleness which the beautiful gray tones of the eyes did not
contradict. The outline of the face, the shape of the brow had a
nobility both simple and august, such as we sometimes meet with in
country regions among very young girls,--a sort of flower of beauty,
which field labors, the constant cares of the household, the burning of
the sun, and want of personal care, remove with terrible rapidity. Her
movements had that ease of motion characteristic of country girls, to
which certain habits unconsciously contracted in Paris gave additional
grace. If Catherine had remained in the Correze she would by this time
have looked like an old woman, wrinkled and withered; her complexion,
once rosy, would have coarsened; but Paris, though it paled her, had
preserved her beauty. Illness, toil, and grief had endowed her with the
mysterious gifts of melancholy, the inward vitalizing thought, which is
lacking to poor country-folk whose lives are almost animal. Her dress,
full of that Parisian taste which all women, even the least coquettish,
contract so readily, distinguished her still further from an ordinary
peasant-woman. In her ignorance as to what was before her, and having no
means of judging Madame Graslin, she appeared very shy and shame-faced.

“Do you still love Farrabesche?” asked Veronique, when Grossetete left
them for a moment.

“Yes, madame,” she replied coloring.

“Why, then, having sent him a thousand francs during his imprisonment,
did you not join him after his release? Have you any repugnance to him?
Speak to me as though I were your mother. Are you afraid he has become
altogether corrupt; or did you fear he no longer wanted you?”

“Neither, madame; but I do not know how to read or write, and I was
serving a very exacting old lady; she fell ill and I had to nurse her.
Though I knew the time when Jacques would be released, I could not
get away from Paris until after the lady’s death. She did not leave
me anything, notwithstanding my devotion to her interests and to her
personally. After that I wanted to be cured of an ailment caused
by night-watching and hard work, and as I had used up my savings, I
resolved to go to the hospital of Saint-Louis, which I have just left,
cured.”

“Very good, my child,” said Madame Graslin, touched by this simple
explanation. “But tell me now why you abandoned your parents so
abruptly, why you left your child behind you, and why you did not send
any news of yourself, or get some one to write for you.”

For all answer Catherine wept.

“Madame,” she said at last, reassured by the pressure of Madame
Graslin’s hand, “I may have done wrong, but I hadn’t the strength to
stay here. I did not fear myself, but others; I feared gossip, scandal.
So long as Jacques was in danger, I was necessary to him and I stayed;
but after he had gone I had no strength left,--a girl with a child and
no husband! The worst of creatures was better than I. I don’t know what
would have become of me had I stayed to hear a word against my boy
or his father; I should have gone mad; I might have killed myself. My
father or my mother in a moment of anger might have reproached me. I am
too sensitive to bear a quarrel or an insult, gentle as I am. I have
had my punishment in not seeing my child, I who have never passed a day
without thinking of him in all these years! I wished to be forgotten,
and I have been. No one thought of me,--they believed me dead; and yet,
many a time, I thought of leaving all just to come here for a day and
see my child.”

“Your child--see, here he is.”

Catherine then saw Benjamin, and began to tremble violently.

“Benjamin,” said Madame Graslin, “come and kiss your mother.”

“My mother!” cried Benjamin, surprised. He jumped into Catherine’s arms
and she pressed him to her breast with almost savage force. But the boy
escaped her and ran off crying out: “I’ll go and fetch _him_.”

Madame Graslin made Catherine, who was almost fainting, sit down. At
this moment she saw Monsieur Bonnet and could not help blushing as she
met a piercing look from her confessor, which read her heart.

“I hope,” she said, trembling, “that you will consent to marry
Farrabesche and Catherine at once. Don’t you recognize Monsieur Bonnet,
my dear? He will tell you that Farrabesche, since his liberation has
behaved as an honest man; the whole neighborhood thinks well of him, and
if there is a place in the world where you may live happy and respected
it is at Montegnac. You can make, by God’s help, a good living as my
farmers; for Farrabesche has recovered citizenship.”

“That is all true, my dear child,” said the rector.

Just then Farrabesche appeared, pulled along by his son. He was pale and
speechless in presence of Catherine and Madame Graslin. His heart told
him actively benevolent the one had been, and how deeply the other had
suffered in his absence. Veronique led away the rector, who, on his
side, was anxious to talk with her alone.

As soon as they were far enough away not to be overheard, Monsieur
Bonnet looked fixedly at Veronique; she colored and dropped her eyes
like a guilty person.

“You degrade well-doing,” he said, sternly.

“How?” she asked, raising her head.

“Well-doing,” he replied, “is a passion as superior to that of love as
humanity is superior to the individual creature. Now, you have not done
this thing from the sole impulse and simplicity of virtue. You have
fallen from the heights of humanity to the indulgence of the individual
creature. Your benevolence to Farrabesche and Catherine carries with it
so many memories and forbidden thoughts that it has lost all merit in
the eyes of God. Tear from your heart the remains of the javelin evil
planted there. Do not take from your actions their true value. Come at
last to that saintly ignorance of the good you do which is the grace
supreme of human actions.”

Madame Graslin had turned away to wipe the tears that told the rector
his words had touched the bleeding wound that was still unhealed in her
heart.

Farrabesche, Catherine, and Benjamin now came up to thank their
benefactress, but she made them a sign to go away and leave her alone
with the rector.

“See how that grieves them,” she said to him as they sadly walked away.
The rector, whose heart was tender, recalled them by a sign.

“You shall be completely happy,” she then said, giving to Farrabesche
a paper which she was holding in her hand. “Here is the ordinance
which gives you back your rights of citizenship and exempts you from
humiliating inspection.”

Farrabesche respectfully kissed the hand held toward him and looked at
Veronique with an eye both tender and submissive, calm and devoted, the
expression of a devotion which nothing could ever change, the look of a
dog to his master.

“If Jacques has suffered, madame,” said Catherine, her fine eyes
lighting with pleasure, “I hope I can give him enough happiness to make
up for his pain, for, no matter what he has done, he is not bad.”

Madame Graslin turned away her head; she seemed overcome by the sight of
that happy family. The rector now left her to enter the church, whither
she dragged herself presently on the arm of Monsieur Grossetete.

After breakfast every one, even the aged people of the village,
assembled to see the beginning of the great work. From the slope leading
up to the chateau, Monsieur Grossetete and Monsieur Bonnet, between whom
was Veronique, could see the direction of the four first cuttings marked
out by piles of gathered stones. At each cutting five laborers were
digging out and piling up the good loam along the edges; clearing a
space about eighteen feet wide, the width of each road. On either side,
four other men were digging the ditches and also piling up the loam at
the sides to make a bank. Behind them, as the banks were made, two
men were digging holes in which others planted trees. In each of these
divisions, thirty old paupers, a score of women, and forty or more girls
and children were picking up stones, which special laborers piled in
heaps along the roadside so as to keep a record of the quantity gathered
by each group. Thus the work went on rapidly, with picked workmen full
of ardor. Grossetete promised Madame Graslin to send her some trees
and to ask her other friends to do the same; for the nurseries of
the chateau would evidently not suffice to supply such an extensive
plantation. Toward the close of the day, which was to end in a grand
dinner at the chateau, Farrabesche requested Madame Graslin to grant him
an audience for a few moments.

“Madame,” he said, presenting himself with Catherine, “you were so good
as to offer me the farm at the chateau. By granting me so great a favor
I know you intended to put me in the way of making my fortune. But
Catherine has ideas about our future which we desire to submit to you.
If I were to succeed and make money there would certainly be persons
envious of my good fortune; a word is soon said; I might have
quarrels,--I fear them; besides, Catherine would always be uneasy. In
short, too close intercourse with the world will not suit us. I have
come therefore to ask you to give us only the land at the opening of
the Gabou on the commons, with a small piece of the woodland behind
the Roche-Vive. In July you will have a great many workmen here, and it
would be very easy then to build a farmhouse in a good position on the
slope of the hill. We should be happy there. I will send for Guepin. My
poor comrade will work like a horse; perhaps I could marry him here. My
son is not a do-nothing either. No one would put us out of countenance;
we could colonize this corner of the estate, and I should make it
my ambition to turn it into a fine farm for you. Moreover, I want
to propose as farmer of your great farm near the chateau a cousin of
Catherine, who has money and would therefore be more capable than I
could be of managing such a large affair as that farm. If it please God
to bless your enterprise, in five years from now you will have five or
six thousand horned beasts or horses on that plain below, and it wants a
better head than mine to manage them.”

Madame Graslin agreed to his request, doing justice to the good sense of
it.

From the time the work on the plain began, Veronique’s life assumed the
regularity of country existence. In the morning she heard mass, took
care of her son, whom she idolized, and went to see her laborers. After
dinner she received her friends from Montegnac in the little salon to
the right of the clock-tower. She taught Roubaud, Clousier, and the
rector to play whist, which Gerard knew already. The rubbers usually
ended at nine o’clock, after which the company withdrew. This peaceful
life had no other events to mark it than the success of the various
parts of the great enterprise.

In June the torrent of the Gabou went dry, and Gerard established his
headquarters in the keeper’s house. Farrabesche had already built his
farmhouse, which he called Le Gabou. Fifty masons, brought from Paris,
joined the two mountains by a wall twenty feet thick, with a foundation
twelve feet deep and heavily cemented. The wall, or dam, rose nearly
sixty feet and tapered in until it was not more than ten feet thick at
the summit. Gerard backed this wall on the valley side with a cemented
slope, about twelve feet wide at its base. On the side toward the
commons a similar slope, covered with several feet of arable earth,
still further supported this great work, which no rush of water could
possibly damage. The engineer provided in case of unusual rains an
overflow at a proper height. The masonry was inserted into the flank of
each mountain until the granite or the hard-pan was reached, so that the
water had absolutely no outlet at the sides.

This dam was finished by the middle of August. At the same time Gerard
was preparing three canals in the principal valleys, and none of these
works came up to his estimated costs. The chateau farm could now be
finished. The irrigation channels through the plain, superintended by
Fresquin, started from the canal made by nature along the base of the
mountains on the plain side, through which culverts were cut to the
irrigating channels. Water-gates were fitted into those channels, the
sides of which the abundance of rock had enabled them to stone up, so as
to keep the flow of water at an even height along the plain.

Every Sunday after mass, Veronique, the engineer, the rector, the
doctor, and the mayor walked down through the park to see the course of
the waters. The winter of 1832 and 1833 was extremely rainy. The water
of the three streams which had been directed to the torrent, swollen
by the water of the rains, now formed three ponds in the valley of the
Gabou, carefully placed at different levels so as to create a steady
reserve in case of a severe drought. At certain places where the valley
widened Gerard had taken advantage of a few hillocks to make islands
and plant them with trees of varied foliage. These vast operations
completely changed the face of the country; but five or six years were
of course needed to bring out their full character. “The country was
naked,” said Farrabesche, “and madame has clothed it.”

Since these great undertakings were begun, Veronique had been called
“Madame” throughout the whole neighborhood. When the rains ceased in
June, 1833, they tried the irrigating channels through the planted
fields, and the young verdure thus nourished soon showed the superior
qualities of the _marciti_ of Italy and the meadows of Switzerland. The
system of irrigation, modelled on that of the farms in Lombardy, watered
the earth evenly, and kept the surface as smooth as a carpet. The nitre
of the snow dissolving in these channels no doubt added much to the
quality of the herbage. The engineer hoped to find in the products of
succeeding years some analogy with those of Switzerland, to which this
nitrous substance is, as we know, a source of perpetual riches.

The plantations along the roads, sufficiently moistened by the water
allowed to run through the ditches, made rapid growth. So that in 1838,
six years after Madame Graslin had begun her enterprise, the stony
plain, regarded as hopelessly barren by twenty generations, was
verdant, productive, and well planted throughout. Gerard had built five
farmhouses with their dependencies upon it, with a thousand acres to
each. Gerard’s own farm and those of Grossetete and Fresquin, which
received the overflow from Madame’s domains, were built on the same
plan and managed by the same methods. The engineer also built a charming
little house for himself on his own property. When all was completely
finished, the inhabitants of Montegnac, instigated by the present
mayor, who was anxious to retire, elected Gerard to the mayoralty of the
district.

In 1840 the departure of the first herd of cattle sent from Montegnac
to the Paris markets was made the occasion of a rural fete. The farms
of the plain raised fine beasts and horses; for it was found, after the
land was cleaned up, that there were seven inches of good soil which the
annual fall of leaves, the manure left by the pasturage of animals,
and, above all, the melting of the snows contained in the valley of the
Gabou, increased in fertility.

It was in this year that Madame Graslin found it necessary to obtain a
tutor for her son, who was now eleven years of age. She did not wish
to part with him, and yet she was anxious to make him a thoroughly
well-educated man. Monsieur Bonnet wrote to the Seminary. Madame
Graslin, on her side, said a few words as to her wishes and the
difficulty of obtaining the right person to Monsieur Dutheil, recently
appointed arch-bishop. The choice of such a man, who would live nine
years familiarly in the chateau, was a serious matter. Gerard had
already offered to teach mathematics to his friend Francis; but he
could not, of course, take the place of a regular tutor. This question
agitated Madame Graslin’s mind, and all the more because she knew that
her health was beginning to fail.

The more prosperous grew her dear Montegnac, the more she increased
the secret austerities of her life. Monseigneur Dutheil, with whom she
corresponded regularly, found at last the man she wanted. He sent her
from his late diocese a young professor, twenty-five years of age, named
Ruffin, whose mind had a special vocation for the art of teaching. This
young man’s knowledge was great, and his nature was one of deep
feeling, which, however, did not preclude the sternness necessary in
the management of youth. In him religion did not in any way hamper
knowledge; he was also patient, and extremely agreeable in appearance
and manner. “I make you a fine present, my dear daughter,” wrote the
prelate; “this young man is fit to educate a prince; therefore I think
you will be glad to arrange the future with him, for he can undoubtedly
be a spiritual father to your son.”

Monsieur Ruffin proved so satisfactory to Madame Graslin’s faithful
friends that his arrival made no change in the various intimacies that
grouped themselves around this beloved idol, whose hours and moments
were claimed by each with jealous eagerness.

By the year 1843 the prosperity of Montegnac had increased beyond all
expectation. The farm of the Gabou rivalled the farms of the plain, and
that of the chateau set an example of constant improvement to all. The
five other farms, increasing in value, obtained higher rent, reaching
the sum of thirty thousand francs for each at the end of twelve years.
The farmers, who were beginning to gather in the fruits of their
sacrifices and those of Madame Graslin, now began to improve the grass
of the plains, sowing seed of better quality, there being no longer any
occasion to fear drought.

During this year a man from Montegnac started a diligence between the
chief town of the arrondissement and Limoges, leaving both places each
day. Monsieur Clousier’s nephew sold his office and obtained a license
as notary in Montegnac. The government appointed Fresquin collector of
the district. The new notary built himself a pretty house in the upper
part of Montegnac, planted mulberries in the grounds, and became after a
time assistant-mayor to his friend Gerard.

The engineer, encouraged by so much success, now conceived a scheme of a
nature to render Madame Graslin’s fortune colossal,--she herself having
by this time recovered possession of the income which had been mortgaged
for the repayment of the loan. Gerard’s new scheme was to make a canal
of the little river, and turn into it the superabundant waters of the
Gabou. This canal, which he intended to carry into the Vienne, would
form a waterway by which to send down timber from the twenty thousand
acres of forest land belonging to Madame Graslin in Montegnac, now
admirably managed by Colorat, but which, for want of transportation,
returned no profit. A thousand acres could be cut over each year without
detriment to the forest, and if sent in this way to Limoges, would find
a ready market for building purposes.

This was the original plan of Monsieur Graslin himself, who had paid
very little attention to the rector’s scheme relating to the plain,
being much more attracted by that of turning the little river into a
canal.




XIX. A DEATH BLOW

At the beginning of the following year, in spite of Madame Graslin’s
assumption of strength, her friends began to notice symptoms which
foreshadowed her coming death. To all the doctor’s remarks, and to the
inquiries of the most clear-sighted of her friends, Veronique made
the invariable answer that she was perfectly well. But when the spring
opened she went round to visit her forests, farms, and beautiful meadows
with a childlike joy and delight which betrayed to those who knew her
best a sad foreboding.

Finding himself obliged to build a small cemented wall between the dam
of the Gabou and the park of Montegnac along the base of the hill called
especially La Correze, Gerard took up the idea of enclosing the whole
forest and thus uniting it with the park. Madame Graslin agreed to this,
and appointed thirty thousand francs a year to this work, which would
take seven years to accomplish and would then withdraw that fine forest
from the rights exercised by government over the non-enclosed forests
of private individuals. The three ponds of the Gabou would thus become
a part of the park. These ponds, ambitiously called lakes, had each its
island.

This year, Gerard had prepared, in collusion with Grossetete, a surprise
for Madame Graslin’s birthday. He had built a little hermitage on the
largest of the islands, rustic on the outside and elegantly arranged
within. The old banker took part in the conspiracy, in which
Farrabesche, Fresquin, Clousier’s nephew, and nearly all the well-to-do
people in Montegnac co-operated. Grossetete sent down some beautiful
furniture. The clock tower, copied from that at Vevay, made a charming
effect in the landscape. Six boats, two for each pond, were secretly
built, painted, and rigged during the winter by Farrabesche and Guepin,
assisted by the carpenter of Montegnac.

When the day arrived (about the middle of May) after a breakfast
Madame Graslin gave to her friends, she was taken by them across the
park--which was finely laid out by Gerard, who, for the last five years,
had improved it like a landscape architect and naturalist--to the pretty
meadow of the valley of the Gabou, where, at the shore of the first
lake, two of the boats were floating. This meadow, watered by several
clear streamlets, lay at the foot of the fine ampitheatre where the
valley of the Gabou begins. The woods, cleared in a scientific manner,
so as to produce noble masses and vistas that were charming to the eye,
enclosed the meadow and gave it a solitude that was grateful to the
soul. Gerard had reproduced on an eminence that chalet in the valley of
Sion above the road to Brieg which travellers admire so much; here were
to be the dairy and the cow-sheds of the chateau. From its gallery the
eye roved over the landscape created by the engineer which the three
lakes made worthy of comparison with the beauties of Switzerland.

The day was beautiful. In the blue sky, not a cloud; on earth, all the
charming, graceful things the soil offers in the month of May. The trees
planted ten years earlier on the banks--weeping willows, osier, alder,
ash, the aspen of Holland, the poplars of Italy and Virginia, hawthorns
and roses, acacias, birches, all choice growths arranged as their nature
and the lay of the land made suitable--held amid their foliage a few
fleecy vapors, born of the waters, which rose like a slender smoke. The
surface of the lakelet, clear as a mirror and calm as the sky, reflected
the tall green masses of the forest, the tops of which, distinctly
defined in the limpid atmosphere, contrasted with the groves below
wrapped in their pretty veils. The lakes, separated by broad causeways,
were three mirrors showing different reflections, the waters of which
flowed from one to another in melodious cascades. These causeways were
used to go from lake to lake without passing round the shores. From the
chalet could be seen, through a vista among the trees, the thankless
waste of the chalk commons, resembling an open sea and contrasting with
the fresh beauty of the lakes and their verdure.

When Veronique saw the joyousness of her friends as they held out their
hands to help her into the largest of the boats, tears came into her
eyes and she kept silence till they touched the bank of the first
causeway. As she stepped into the second boat she saw the hermitage with
Grossetete sitting on a bench before it with all his family.

“Do they wish to make me regret dying?” she said to the rector.

“We wish to prevent you from dying,” replied Clousier.

“You cannot make the dead live,” she answered.

Monsieur Bonnet gave her a stern look which recalled her to herself.

“Let me take care of your health,” said Roubaud, in a gentle, persuasive
voice. “I am sure I can save to this region its living glory, and to all
our friends their common tie.”

Veronique bowed her head, and Gerard rowed slowly toward the island
in the middle of the lake, the largest of the three, into which the
overflowing water of the first was rippling with a sound that gave a
voice to that delightful landscape.

“You have done well to make me bid farewell to this ravishing nature on
such a day,” she said, looking at the beauty of the trees, all so full
of foliage that they hid the shore. The only disapprobation her
friends allowed themselves was to show a gloomy silence; and Veronique,
receiving another glance from Monsieur Bonnet, sprang lightly ashore,
assuming a lively air, which she did not relinquish. Once more the
hostess, she was charming, and the Grossetete family felt she was again
the beautiful Madame Graslin of former days.

“Indeed, you can still live, if you choose!” said her mother in a
whisper.

At this gay festival, amid these glorious creations produced by the
resources of nature only, nothing seemed likely to wound Veronique, and
yet it was here and now that she received her death-blow.

The party were to return about nine o’clock by way of the meadows, the
road through which, as lovely as an English or an Italian road, was the
pride of its engineer. The abundance of small stones, laid aside when
the plain was cleared, enabled him to keep it in good order; in fact,
for the last five years it was, in a way, macadamized. Carriages were
awaiting the company at the opening of the last valley toward the plain,
almost at the base of the Roche-Vive. The horses, raised at Montegnac,
were among the first that were ready for the market. The manager of
the stud had selected a dozen for the stables of the chateau, and their
present fine appearance was part of the programme of the fete. Madame
Graslin’s own carriage, a gift from Grossetete, was drawn by four of the
finest animals, plainly harnessed.

After dinner the happy party went to take coffee in a little wooden
kiosk, made like those on the Bosphorus, and placed on a point of the
island from which the eye could reach to the farther lake beyond.
From this spot Madame Graslin thought she saw her son Francis near the
nursery-ground formerly planted by Farrabesche. She looked again, but
did not see him; and Monsieur Ruffin pointed him out to her, playing on
the bank with Grossetete’s children. Veronique became alarmed lest he
should meet with some accident. Not listening to remonstrance, she ran
down from the kiosk, and jumping into a boat, began to row toward
her son. This little incident caused a general departure. Monsieur
Grossetete proposed that they should all follow her and walk on the
beautiful shore of the lake, along the curves of the mountainous bluffs.
On landing there Madame Graslin saw her son in the arms of a woman in
deep mourning. Judging by the shape of her bonnet and the style of her
clothes, the woman was a foreigner. Veronique was startled, and called
to her son, who presently came toward her.

“Who is that woman?” she asked the children round about her; “and why
did Francis leave you to go to her?”

“The lady called him by name,” said a little girl.

At that instant Madame Sauviat and Gerard, who had outstripped the rest
of the company, came up.

“Who is that woman, my dear child?” asked Madame Graslin as soon as
Francis reached her.

“I don’t know,” he answered; “but she kissed me as you and grandmamma
kissed me--she cried,” whispered Francis in his mother’s ear.

“Shall I go after her?” asked Gerard.

“No!” said Madame Graslin, with an abruptness that was not usual in her.

With a delicacy for which Veronique was grateful, Gerard led away the
children and went back to detain the rest of the party, leaving Madame
Sauviat, Madame Graslin, and Francis alone.

“What did she say to you?” asked Madame Sauviat of her grandson.

“I don’t know; she did not speak French.”

“Couldn’t you understand anything she said?” asked Veronique.

“No; but she kept saying over and over,--and that’s why I remember
it,--_My dear brother_!”

Veronique took her mother’s arm and led her son by the hand, but she had
scarcely gone a dozen steps before her strength gave way.

“What is the matter? what has happened?” said the others, who now came
up, to Madame Sauviat.

“Oh! my daughter is in danger!” said the old woman, in guttural tones.

It was necessary to carry Madame Graslin to her carriage. She signed to
Aline to get into it with Francis, and also Gerard.

“You have been in England,” she said to the latter as soon as she
recovered herself, “and therefore no doubt you speak English; tell me
the meaning of the words, _my dear brother_.”

On being told, Veronique exchanged a look with Aline and her mother
which made them shudder; but they restrained their feelings.

The shouts and joyous cries of those who were assisting in the departure
of the carriages, the splendor of the setting sun as it lay upon the
meadows, the perfect gait of the beautiful horses, the laughter of her
friends as they followed her on horseback at a gallop,--none of these
things roused Madame Graslin from her torpor. Her mother ordered the
coachman to hasten his horses, and their carriage reached the chateau
some time before the others. When the company were again assembled, they
were told that Veronique had gone to her rooms and was unable to see any
one.

“I fear,” said Gerard to his friends, “that Madame Graslin has had some
fatal shock.”

“Where? how?” they asked.

“To her heart,” he answered.

The following day Roubaud started for Paris. He had seen Madame Graslin,
and found her so seriously ill that he wished for the assistance and
advice of the ablest physician of the day. But Veronique had only
received Roubaud to put a stop to her mother and Aline’s entreaties that
she would do something to benefit her; she herself knew that death had
stricken her. She refused to see Monsieur Bonnet, sending word to him
that the time had not yet come. Though all her friends who had come from
Limoges to celebrate her birthday wished to be with her, she begged them
to excuse her from fulfilling the duties of hospitality, saying that she
desired to remain in the deepest solitude. After Roubaud’s departure the
other guests returned to Limoges, less disappointed than distressed; for
all those whom Grossetete had brought with him adored Veronique. They
were lost in conjecture as to what might have caused this mysterious
disaster.

One evening, two days after the departure of the company, Aline brought
Catherine to Madame Graslin’s apartment. La Farrabesche stopped short,
horrified at the change so suddenly wrought in her mistress, whose face
seemed to her almost distorted.

“Good God, madame!” she cried, “what harm that girl has done! If we had
only foreseen it, Farrabesche and I, we would never have taken her
in. She has just heard that madame is ill, and sends me to tell Madame
Sauviat she wants to speak to her.”

“Here!” cried Veronique. “Where is she?”

“My husband took her to the chalet.”

“Very good,” said Madame Graslin; “tell Farrabesche to go elsewhere.
Inform that lady that my mother will go to her; tell her to expect the
visit.”

As soon as it was dark Veronique, leaning on her mother’s arm, walked
slowly through the park to the chalet. The moon was shining with all its
brilliancy, the air was soft, and the two women, visibly affected, found
encouragement, of a sort, in the things of nature. The mother stopped
now and then, to rest her daughter, whose sufferings were poignant, so
that it was well-nigh midnight before they reached the path that goes
down from the woods to the sloping meadow where the silvery roof of the
chalet shone. The moonlight gave to the surface of the quiet water, the
tint of pearls. The little noises of the night, echoing in the silence,
made softest harmony. Veronique sat down on the bench of the chalet,
amid this beauteous scene of the starry night. The murmur of two voices
and the footfall of two persons still at a distance on the sandy
shore were brought by the water, which sometimes, when all is still,
reproduces sounds as faithfully as it reflects objects on the surface.
Veronique recognized at once the exquisite voice of the rector, and the
rustle of his cassock, also the movement of some silken stuff that was
probably the material of a woman’s gown.

“Let us go in,” she said to her mother.

Madame Sauviat and her daughter sat down on a crib in the lower room,
which was intended for a stable.

“My child,” they heard the rector saying, “I do not blame you,--you are
quite excusable; but your return may be the cause of irreparable evil;
she is the soul of this region.”

“Ah! monsieur, then I had better go away to-night,” replied the
stranger. “Though--I must tell you--to leave my country once more is
death to me. If I had stayed a day longer in that horrible New York,
where there is neither hope, nor faith, nor charity, I should have died
without being ill. The air I breathed oppressed my chest, food did not
nourish me, I was dying while full of life and vigor. My sufferings
ceased the moment I set foot upon the vessel to return. I seemed to
be already in France. Oh! monsieur, I saw my mother and one of my
sisters-in-law die of grief. My grandfather and grandmother Tascheron
are dead; dead, my dear Monsieur Bonnet, in spite of the prosperity of
Tascheronville,--for my father founded a village in Ohio and gave it
that name. That village is now almost a town, and a third of all the
land is cultivated by members of our family, whom God has constantly
protected. Our tillage succeeded, our crops have been enormous, and we
are rich. The town is Catholic, and we have managed to build a Catholic
church; we do not allow any other form of worship, and we hope to
convert by our example the many sects which surround us. True religion
is in a minority in that land of money and selfish interests, where the
soul is cold. Nevertheless, I will return to die there, sooner than
do harm or cause distress to the mother of our Francis. Only, Monsieur
Bonnet, take me to-night to the parsonage that I may pray upon _his_
tomb, the thought of which has brought me here; the nearer I have come
to where _he_ is, the more I felt myself another being. No, I never
expected to feel so happy again as I do here.”

“Well, then,” said the rector, “come with me now. If there should come
a time when you might return without doing injury, I will write to
you, Denise; but perhaps this visit to your birthplace will stop the
homesickness, and enable you to live over there without suffering--”

“Oh! to leave this country, now so beautiful! What wonders Madame
Graslin has done for it!” she exclaimed, pointing to the lake as it
lay in the moonlight. “All this fine domain will belong to our dear
Francis.”

“You shall not go away, Denise,” said Madame Graslin, who was standing
at the stable door.

Jean-Francois Tascheron’s sister clasped her hands on seeing the spectre
which addressed her. At that moment the pale Veronique, standing in
the moonlight, was like a shade defined upon the darkness of the open
door-way. Her eyes alone shone like stars.

“No, my child, you shall not leave the country you have come so far to
see again; you shall be happy here, or God will refuse to help me; it is
He, no doubt, who has brought you back.”

She took the astonished Denise by the hand, and led her away by a path
toward the other shore of the lake, leaving her mother and the rector,
who seated themselves on the bench.

“Let her do as she wishes,” said Madame Sauviat.

A few moments later Veronique returned alone, and was taken back to the
chateau by her mother and Monsieur Bonnet. Doubtless she had formed some
plan which required secrecy, for no one in the neighborhood either saw
Denise or heard any mention of her.

Madame Graslin took to her bed that day and never but once left it
again; she went from bad to worse daily, and seemed annoyed and thwarted
that she could not rise,--trying to do so on several occasions, and
expressing a desire to walk out into the park. A few days, however,
after the scene we have just related, about the beginning of June, she
made a violent effort, rose, dressed as if for a gala day, and begged
Gerard to give her his arm, declaring that she was resolved to take
a walk. She gathered up all her strength and expended it on this
expedition, accomplishing her intention in a paroxysm of will which had,
necessarily, a fatal reaction.

“Take me to the chalet, and alone,” she said to Gerard in a soft voice,
looking at him with a sort of coquetry. “This is my last excursion; I
dreamed last night the doctors arrived and captured me.”

“Do you want to see your woods?” asked Gerard.

“For the last time, yes,” she answered. “But what I really want,” she
added, in a coaxing voice, “is to make you a singular proposition.”

She asked Gerard to embark with her in one of the boats on the second
lake, to which she went on foot. When the young man, surprised at her
intention, began to move the oars, she pointed to the hermitage as the
object of her coming.

“My friend,” she said, after a long pause, during which she had been
contemplating the sky and water, the hills and shores, “I have a strange
request to make of you; but I think you are a man who would obey my
wishes--”

“In all things, sure that you can wish only what is good.”

“I wish to marry you,” she answered; “if you consent you will accomplish
the wish of a dying woman, which is certain to secure your happiness.”

“I am too ugly,” said the engineer.

“The person to whom I refer is pretty; she is young, and wishes to live
at Montegnac. If you will marry her you will help to soften my last
hours. I will not dwell upon her virtues now; I only say her nature is
a rare one; in the matter of grace and youth and beauty, one look will
suffice; you are now about to see her at the hermitage. As we return
home you must give me a serious yes or no.”

Hearing this confidence, Gerard unconsciously quickened his oars, which
made Madame Graslin smile. Denise, who was living alone, away from all
eyes, at the hermitage, recognized Madame Graslin and immediately opened
the door. Veronique and Gerard entered. The poor girl could not help a
blush as she met the eyes of the young man, who was greatly surprised at
her beauty.

“I hope Madame Farrabesche has not let you want for anything?” said
Veronique.

“Oh no! madame, see!” and she pointed to her breakfast.

“This is Monsieur Gerard, of whom I spoke to you,” went on Veronique.
“He is to be my son’s guardian, and after my death you shall live
together at the chateau until his majority.”

“Oh! madame, do not talk in that way!”

“My dear child, look at me!” replied Veronique, addressing Denise, in
whose eyes the tears rose instantly. “She has just arrived from New
York,” she added, by way of introduction to Gerard.

The engineer put several questions about the new world to the young
woman, while Veronique, leaving them alone, went to look at the third
and more distant lake of the Gabou. It was six o’clock as Veronique and
Gerard returned in the boat toward the chalet.

“Well?” she said, looking at him.

“You have my promise.”

“Though you are, I know, without prejudices,” she went on, “I must not
leave you ignorant of the reason why that poor girl, brought back here
by homesickness, left the place originally.”

“A false step?”

“Oh, no!” said Veronique. “Should I offer her to you if that were so?
She is the sister of a workman who died on the scaffold--”

“Ah! Tascheron,” he said, “the murderer of old Pingret.”

“Yes, she is the sister of a murderer,” said Madame Graslin, in a bitter
tone; “you are at liberty to take back your promise and--”

She did not finish, and Gerard was obliged to carry her to the bench
before the chalet, where she remained unconscious for some little time.
When she opened her eyes Gerard was on his knees before her and he said
instantly:--

“I will marry Denise.”

Madame Graslin took his head in both hands and kissed him on the
forehead; then, seeing his surprise at so much gratitude, she pressed
his hand and said:

“Before long you will know the secret of all this. Let us go back to
the terrace, for it is late; I am very tired, but I must look my last on
that dear plain.”

Though the day had been insupportably hot, the storms which during
this year devastated parts of Europe and of France but respected the
Limousin, had run their course in the basin of the Loire, and the
atmosphere was singularly clear. The sky was so pure that the eye could
seize the slightest details on the horizon. What language can render the
delightful concert of busy sounds produced in the village by the return
of the workers from the fields? Such a scene, to be rightly given, needs
a great landscape artist and also a great painter of the human face.
Is there not, by the bye, in the lassitude of Nature and that of man a
curious affinity which is difficult to grasp? The depressing heat of a
dog-day and the rarification of the air give to the least sound made by
human beings all its signification. The women seated on their doorsteps
and waiting for their husbands (who often bring back the children)
gossip with each other while still at work. The roofs are casting up
the lines of smoke which tell of the evening meal, the gayest among the
peasantry; after which, they sleep. All actions express the tranquil
cheerful thoughts of those whose day’s work is over. Songs are heard
very different in character from those of the morning; in this the
peasants imitate the birds, whose warbling at night is totally unlike
their notes at dawn. All nature sings a hymn to rest, as it sang a hymn
of joy to the coming sun. The slightest movements of living beings seem
tinted then with the soft, harmonious colors of the sunset cast upon the
landscape and lending even to the dusty roadways a placid air. If any
dared deny the influence of this hour, the loveliest of the day, the
flowers would protest and intoxicate his senses with their penetrating
perfumes, which then exhale and mingle with the tender hum of insects
and the amorous note of birds.

The brooks which threaded the plain beyond the village were veiled
in fleecy vapor. In the great meadows through which the high-road
ran,--bordered with poplars, acacias, and ailanthus, wisely intermingled
and already giving shade,--enormous and justly celebrated herds of
cattle were scattered here and there, some still grazing, others
ruminating. Men, women, and children were ending their day’s work in the
hay-field, the most picturesque of all the country toils. The night air,
freshened by distant storms, brought on its wings the satisfying odors
of the newly cut grass or the finished hay. Every feature of this
beautiful panorama could be seen perfectly; those who feared a coming
storm were finishing in haste the hay-stacks, while others followed with
their pitchforks to fill the carts as they were driven along the rows.
Others in the distance were still mowing, or turning the long lines of
fallen grass to dry it, or hastening to pile it into cocks. The joyous
laugh of the merry workers mingling with the shouts of the children
tumbling each other in the hay, rose on the air. The eye could
distinguish the pink, red, or blue petticoats, the kerchiefs, and the
bare legs and arms of the women, all wearing broad-brimmed hats of a
coarse straw, and the shirts and trousers of the men, the latter almost
invariably white. The last rays of the sun were filtering through the
long lines of poplars planted beside the trenches which divided the
plain into meadows of unequal size, and caressing the groups of horses
and carts, men, women, children, and cattle. The cattlemen and the
shepherd-girls were beginning to collect their flocks to the sound of
rustic horns.

The scene was noisy, yet silent,--a paradoxical statement, which will
surprise only those to whom the character of country life is still
unknown. From all sides came the carts, laden with fragrant fodder.
There was something, I know not what, of torpor in the scene. Veronique
walked slowly and silently between Gerard and the rector, who had joined
her on the terrace.

Through the openings made by the rural lanes running down below the
terrace to the main street of Montegnac Gerard and Monsieur Bonnet could
see the faces of men, women, and children turned toward them; watching
more particularly, no doubt, for Madame Graslin. How much of tenderness
and gratitude was expressed on those faces! How many benedictions
followed Veronique’s footsteps! With what reverent attention were the
three benefactors of a whole community regarded! Man was adding a hymn
of gratitude to the other chants of evening.

While Madame Graslin walked on with her eyes fastened on the long,
magnificent green pastures, her most cherished creation, the priest
and the mayor did not take their eyes from the groups below, whose
expression it was impossible to misinterpret; pain, sadness, and regret,
mingled with hope, were plainly on all those faces. No one in Montegnac
or its neighborhood was ignorant that Monsieur Roubaud had gone to Paris
to bring the best physician science afforded, or that the benefactress
of the whole district was in the last stages of a fatal illness. In all
the markets through a circumference of thirty miles the peasants asked
those of Montegnac,--

“How is your good woman now?”

The great vision of death hovered over the land, and dominated that
rural picture. Afar, in the fields, more than one reaper sharpening his
scythe, more than one young girl, her arms resting on her fork, more
than one farmer stacking his hay, seeing Madame Graslin, stood mute and
thoughtful, examining that noble woman, the blessing of the Correze,
seeking some favorable sign or merely looking to admire her, impelled by
a feeling that arrested their work.

“She is out walking; therefore she must be better.”

These simple words were on every lip.

Madame Graslin’s mother, seated on the iron bench which Veronique had
formerly placed at the end of the terrace, studied every movement of her
daughter; she watched her step in walking, and a few tears rolled from
her eyes. Aware of the secret efforts of that superhuman courage, she
knew that Veronique at that moment was suffering the tortures of a
horrible agony, and only maintained herself erect by the exercise of her
heroic will. The tears--they seemed almost red--which forced their way
from those aged eyes, and furrowed that wrinkled face, the parchment of
which seemed incapable of softening under any emotion, excited those of
young Graslin, whom Monsieur Ruffin had between his knees.

“What is the matter, my boy?” said the tutor, anxiously.

“My grandmother is crying,” he answered.

Monsieur Ruffin, whose eyes were on Madame Graslin as she came toward
them, now looked at Madame Sauviat, and was powerfully struck by the
aspect of that old head, like that of a Roman matron, petrified with
grief and moistened with tears.

“Madame, why did you not prevent her from coming out?” said the tutor to
the old mother, august and sacred in her silent grief.

As Veronique advanced majestically with her naturally fine and graceful
step, Madame Sauviat, driven by despair at the thought of surviving her
daughter, allowed the secret of many things that awakened curiosity to
escape her.

“How can she walk like that,” she cried, “wearing a horrible horsehair
shirt, which pricks into her skin perpetually?”

The words horrified the young man, who was not insensible to the
exquisite grace of Veronique’s movements; he shuddered as he thought of
the constant and terrific struggle of the soul to maintain its empire
thus over the body.

“She has worn it thirteen years,--ever since she ceased to nurse the
boy,” said the old woman. “She has done miracles here, but if her whole
life were known they ought to canonize her. Since she came to Montegnac
no one has ever seen her eat, and do you know why? Aline serves her
three times a day a piece of dry bread, and vegetables boiled in water,
without salt, on a common plate of red earth like those they feed the
dogs on. Yes, that’s how the woman lives who has given new life to
this whole canton. She kneels to say her prayers on the edge of that
hair-shirt. She says she could not have that smiling air you know she
always has unless she practised these austerities. I tell you this,”
 added the old woman, sinking her voice, “so that you may repeat it
to the doctor that Monsieur Roubaud has gone to fetch. If they could
prevent my daughter from continuing these penances, perhaps they might
still save her, though death has laid its hand upon her head. See for
yourself! Ah! I must be strong indeed to have borne so many things these
fifteen years.”

The old woman took her grandson’s hand and passed it over her forehead
and cheeks as if the child’s touch shed a healing balm there; then she
kissed it with an affection the secret of which belongs to grandmothers
as much as it belongs to mothers.

Veronique was now only a few feet from the bench, in company with
Clousier, the rector, and Gerard. Illuminated by the glow of the setting
sun, she shone with a dreadful beauty. Her yellow forehead, furrowed
with long wrinkles massed one above the other like layers of clouds,
revealed a fixed thought in the midst of inward troubles. Her face,
devoid of all color, entirely white with the dead, greenish whiteness of
plants without light, was thin, though not withered, and bore the signs
of terrible physical sufferings produced by mental anguish. She
fought her soul with her body, and _vice versa_. She was so completely
destroyed that she no more resembled herself than an old woman resembles
her portrait as a girl. The ardent expression of her eyes declared the
despotic empire exercised by a devout will over a body reduced to what
religion requires it to be. In this woman the soul dragged the flesh
as the Achilles of profane story dragged Hector; for fifteen years
she dragged it victoriously along the stony paths of life around the
celestial Jerusalem she hoped to enter, not by a vile deception, but
with acclamation. No solitary that ever lived in the dry and arid
deserts of Africa was ever more master of his senses than was Veronique
in her magnificent chateau, among the soft, voluptuous scenery of that
opulent land, beneath the protecting mantle of that rich forest, whence
science, the heir of Moses’ wand, had called forth plenty, prosperity,
and happiness for a whole region. She contemplated the results of
twelve years’ patience, a work which might have made the fame of many a
superior man, with a gentle modesty such as Pontorno has painted in
the sublime face of his “Christian Chastity caressing the Celestial
Unicorn.” The mistress of the manor, whose silence was respected by
her companions when they saw that her eyes were roving over those vast
plains, once arid, and now fertile by her will, walked on, her arms
folded, with a distant look, as if to some far horizon, on her face.




XX. THE LAST STRUGGLE

Suddenly she stopped, a few feet from her mother, who looked at her as
the mother of Christ must have looked at her son upon the cross. She
raised her hand, and pointing to the spot where the road to Montegnac
branched from the highway, she said, smiling:--

“See that carriage with the post-horses; Monsieur Roubaud is returning
to us. We shall now know how many hours I have to live.”

“Hours?” said Gerard.

“Did I not tell you I was taking my last walk?” she replied. “I have
come here to see for the last time this glorious scene in all its
splendor!” She pointed first to the village where the whole population
seemed to be collected in the church square, and then to the beautiful
meadows glowing in the last rays of the setting sun. “Ah!” she said,
“let me see the benediction of God in the strange atmospheric condition
to which we owe the safety of our harvest. Around us, on all sides,
tempests, hail, lightning, have struck incessantly and pitilessly. The
common people think thus, why not I? I do so need to see in this a happy
augury for what awaits me after death!”

The child stood up and took his mother’s hand and laid it on his head.
Veronique, deeply affected by the action, so full of eloquence, took
up her son with supernatural strength, seating him on her left arm as
though he were still an infant at her breast, saying, as she kissed
him:--

“Do you see that land, my son? When you are a man, continue there your
mother’s work.”

“Madame,” said the rector, in a grave voice, “a few strong and
privileged beings are able to contemplate their coming death face to
face, to fight, as it were, a duel with it, and to display a courage
and an ability which challenge admiration. You show us this terrible
spectacle; but perhaps you have too little pity for us; leave us at
least the hope that you may be mistaken, and that God will allow you to
finish that which you have begun.”

“All I have done is through you, my friends,” she said. “I have been
useful, I can be so no longer. All is fruitful around us now; nothing
is barren and desolated here except my heart. You well know, my dear
rector, that I can only find peace and pardon _there_.”

She stretched her hand toward the cemetery. Never had she said as much
since the day of her arrival, when she was taken with sudden illness at
the same spot. The rector looked attentively at his penitent, and the
habit of penetration he had long acquired made him see that in those
simple words he had won another triumph. Veronique must have made a
mighty effort over herself to break her twelve years’ silence with a
speech that said so much. The rector clasped his hands with a fervent
gesture that was natural to him as he looked with deep emotion at the
members of this family whose secrets had passed into his heart.

Gerard, to whom the words “peace and pardon” must have seemed strange,
was bewildered. Monsieur Ruffin, with his eyes fixed on Veronique, was
stupefied. At this instant the carriage came rapidly up the avenue.

“There are five of them!” cried the rector, who could see and count the
travellers.

“Five!” exclaimed Gerard. “Can five know more than two?”

“Ah,” cried Madame Graslin suddenly, grasping the rector’s arm, “the
_procureur-general_ is among them! What is he doing here?”

“And papa Grossetete, too!” cried Francis.

“Madame,” said the rector, supporting Veronique, and leading her apart a
few steps, “show courage; be worthy of yourself.”

“But what can he want?” she replied, leaning on the balustrade.
“Mother!” (the old woman ran to her daughter with an activity that
belied her years.) “I shall see him again,” she said.

“As he comes with Monsieur Grossetete,” said the rector, “he can have
none but good intentions.”

“Ah! monsieur, my child will die!” cried Madame Sauviat, seeing the
effect of the rector’s words on her daughter’s face. “How can her heart
survive such emotions? Monsieur Grossetete has always hitherto prevented
that man from seeing Veronique.”

Madame Graslin’s face was on fire.

“Do you hate him so much?” said the Abbe Bonnet.

“She left Limoges to escape the sight of him, and to escape letting
the whole town into her secrets,” said Madame Sauviat, terrified at the
change she saw on Madame Graslin’s features.

“Do you not see that he will poison my few remaining hours? When I ought
to be thinking of heaven he will nail me to earth,” cried Veronique.

The rector took her arm and constrained her to walk aside with him. When
they were alone he stopped and gave her one of those angelic looks with
which he was able to calm the violent convulsions of the soul.

“If it is really so,” he said, “as your confessor, I order you to
receive him, to be kind and affectionate to him, to quit that garment of
wrath, and forgive him as God will forgive you. Can there still be the
remains of passion of a soul I believed to be purified. Burn this last
incense on the altar of your penitence, or else your repentance is a
lie.”

“There was still that effort to make--and it is made,” she answered,
wiping her eyes. “The devil lurked in that last fold of my heart, and
God, no doubt, put into Monsieur de Grandville’s mind the thought that
brings him here. Ah! how many times must God strike me?” she cried.

She stopped, as if to say a mental prayer; then she returned to Madame
Sauviat and said in a low voice:

“My dear mother, be kind and gentle to Monsieur de Grandville.”

The old woman clasped her hands with a feverish shudder.

“There is no longer any hope,” she said, seizing the rector’s hand.

The carriage, announced by the postilion’s whip, was now coming up the
last slope; the gates were opened, it entered the courtyard, and the
travellers came at once to the terrace. They were the illustrious
Archbishop Dutheil, who was on his way to consecrate Monseigneur Gabriel
de Rastignac, the _procureur-general_, Monsieur de Grandville, Monsieur
Grossetete, Monsieur Roubaud, and one of the most celebrated physicians
in Paris, Horace Bianchon.

“You are very welcome,” said Veronique, advancing toward them,--“you
particularly,” she added, offering her hand to Monsieur de Grandville,
who took it and pressed it.

“I counted on the intervention of Monseigneur and on that of my friend
Monsieur Grossetete to obtain for me a favorable reception,” said the
_procureur-general_. “It would have been a life-long regret to me if I
did not see you again.”

“I thank those who brought you here,” replied Veronique, looking at the
Comte de Grandville for the first time in fifteen years. “I have felt
averse to you for a very long time, but I now recognize the injustice of
my feelings; and you shall know why, if you can stay till the day after
to-morrow at Montegnac.” Then turning to Horace Bianchon and bowing to
him, she added: “Monsieur will no doubt confirm my apprehensions. God
must have sent you, Monseigneur,” she said, turning to the archbishop.
“In memory of our old friendship you will not refuse to assist me in my
last moments. By whose mercy is it that I have about me all the beings
who have loved and supported me in life?”

As she said the word _loved_ she turned with a gracious look to Monsieur
de Grandville, who was touched to tears by this mark of feeling. Silence
fell for a few moments on every one. The doctors wondered by what occult
power this woman could still keep her feet, suffering as she must have
suffered. The other three men were so shocked at the ravages disease had
suddenly made in her that they communicated their thoughts by their eyes
only.

“Allow me,” she said, with her accustomed grace, “to leave you now with
these gentlemen; the matter is urgent.”

She bowed to her guests, gave an arm to each of the doctors, and walked
toward the chateau feebly and slowly, with a difficulty which told only
too plainly of the coming catastrophe.

“Monsieur Bonnet,” said the archbishop, looking at the rector, “you have
accomplished a miracle.”

“Not I, but God, Monseigneur,” he replied.

“They said she was dying,” said Monsieur Grossetete, “but she is dead;
there is nothing left of her but spirit.”

“A soul,” said Gerard.

“And yet she is still the same,” cried the _procureur-general_.

“A stoic after the manner of the Porch philosophers,” said the tutor.

They walked in silence the whole length of the balustrade, looking at
the landscape still red with the declining light.

“To me who saw this scene thirteen years ago,” said the archbishop,
pointing to the fertile plain, the valley, and the mountains of
Montegnac, “this miracle is as extraordinary as that we have just
witnessed. But how comes it that you allow Madame Graslin to walk about?
She ought to be in her bed.”

“She was there,” said Madame Sauviat; “for ten days she did not leave
it; but to-day she insisted on getting up to take a last look at the
landscape.”

“I can understand that she wanted to bid farewell to her great
creation,” said Monsieur de Grandville; “but she risked expiring on this
terrace.”

“Monsieur Roubaud told us not to thwart her,” said Madame Sauviat.

“What a stupendous work! what a miracle has been accomplished!” said the
archbishop, whose eyes were roving over the scene before him. “She has
literally sown the desert! But we know, monsieur,” he added, turning
to Gerard, “that your scientific knowledge and your labors have a large
share in it.”

“They have been only the workmen,” replied the mayor. “Yes, the hands
only; she has been the thought.”

Madame Sauviat here left the group, to hear, if possible, the decision
of the doctors.

“We need some heroism ourselves,” said Monsieur de Grandville to the
rector and the archbishop, “to enable us to witness this death.”

“Yes,” said Monsieur Grossetete, who overheard him, “but we ought to do
much for such a friend.”

After several turns up and down the terrace, these persons, full of
solemn thoughts, saw two farmers approaching them, sent as a deputation
from the village, where the inhabitants were in a state of painful
anxiety to know the sentence pronounced by the physician from Paris.

“They are still consulting, and as yet we know nothing, my friends,”
 said the archbishop.

As he spoke, Monsieur Roubaud appeared coming toward them, and they all
hurried to meet him.

“Well?” said the mayor.

“She cannot live forty-eight hours longer,” replied Monsieur Roubaud.
“During my absence the disease has fully developed; Monsieur Bianchon
does not understand how it was possible for her to have walked. Such
phenomenal exhibitions of strength are always caused by great mental
exaltation. So, gentlemen,” said the doctor to the priests, “she belongs
to you now; science is useless, and my illustrious fellow-physician
thinks you have barely time enough for your last offices.”

“Let us go now and say the prayers for the forty hours,” said the rector
to his parishioners, turning to leave the terrace. “His Grace will
doubtless administer the last sacraments.”

The archbishop bowed his head; he could not speak; his eyes were full of
tears. Every one sat down, or leaned against the balustrade, absorbed in
his own thought. The church bells presently sent forth a few sad calls,
and then the whole population were seen hurrying toward the porch. The
gleam of the lighted tapers shone through the trees in Monsieur Bonnet’s
garden; the chants resounded. No color was left in the landscape but
the dull red hue of the dusk; even the birds had hushed their songs; the
tree-frog alone sent forth its long, clear, melancholy note.

“I will go and do my duty,” said the archbishop, turning away with a
slow step like a man overcome with emotion.

The consultation had taken place in the great salon of the chateau. This
vast room communicated with a state bedchamber, furnished in red damask,
in which Graslin had displayed a certain opulent magnificence. Veronique
had not entered it six times in fourteen years; the grand apartments
were quite useless to her, and she never received her friends there. But
now the effort she had made to accomplish her last obligation, and to
overcome her last repugnance had exhausted her strength, and she was
wholly unable to mount the stairs to her own rooms.

When the illustrious physician had taken the patient’s hand and felt her
pulse he looked at Monsieur Roubaud and made him a sign; then together
they lifted her and carried her into the chamber. Aline hastily opened
the doors. Like all state beds the one in this room had no sheets, and
the two doctors laid Madame Graslin on the damask coverlet. Roubaud
opened the windows, pushed back the outer blinds, and called. The
servants and Madame Sauviat went in. The tapers in the candelabra were
lighted.

“It is ordained,” said the dying woman, smiling, “that my death shall be
what that of a Christian should be--a festival!”

During the consultation she said:--

“The _procureur-general_ has done his professional duty; I was going,
and he has pushed me on.”

The old mother looked at her and laid a finger on her lips.

“Mother, I shall speak,” replied Veronique. “See! the hand of God is in
all this; I am dying in a red room--”

Madame Sauviat went out, unable to bear those words.

“Aline,” she said, “she will speak! she will speak!”

“Ah! madame is out of her mind,” cried the faithful maid, who was
bringing sheets. “Fetch the rector, madame.”

“Your mistress must be undressed,” said Bianchon to the maid.

“It will be very difficult to do it, monsieur; madame is wrapped in a
hair-cloth garment.”

“What! in the nineteenth-century can such horrors be revived?” said the
great doctor.

“Madame Graslin has never allowed me to touch her stomach,” said
Roubaud. “I have been able to judge of the progress of the disease only
from her face and her pulse, and the little information I could get from
her mother and the maid.”

Veronique was now placed on a sofa while the bed was being made. The
doctors spoke together in a low voice. Madame Sauviat and Aline made the
bed. The faces of the two women were full of anguish; their hearts were
wrung by the thought, “We are making her bed for the last time--she will
die here!”

The consultation was not long. But Bianchon exacted at the outset that
Aline should, in spite of the patient’s resistance, cut off the hair
shirt and put on a night-dress. The doctors returned to the salon while
this was being done. When Aline passed them carrying the instrument of
torture wrapped in a napkin, she said:--

“Madame’s body is one great wound.”

The doctors returned to the bedroom.

“Your will is stronger than that of Napoleon, madame,” said Bianchon,
after asking a few questions, to which Veronique replied very clearly.
“You keep your mind and your faculties in the last stages of a disease
which robbed the Emperor of his brilliant intellect. From what I know of
you I think I ought to tell you the truth.”

“I implore you to do so,” she said. “You are able to estimate what
strength remains to me; and I have need of all my vigor for a few
hours.”

“Think only of your salvation,” replied Bianchon.

“If God has given me grace to die in possession of all my faculties,”
 she said with a celestial smile, “be sure that this favor will be used
to the glory of his Church. The possession of my mind and senses is
necessary to fulfil a command of God, whereas Napoleon had accomplished
all his destiny.”

The doctors looked at each other in astonishment at hearing these words,
said with as much ease as though Madame Graslin were still presiding in
her salon.

“Ah! here is the doctor who is to cure me,” she said presently, when the
archbishop, summoned by Roubaud, entered the room.

She collected all her strength and rose to a sitting posture, in order
to bow graciously to Monsieur Bianchon, and beg him to accept something
else than money for the good news he gave her. She said a few words in
her mother’s ear, and Madame Sauviat immediately led away the doctors;
then Veronique requested the archbishop to postpone their interview till
the rector could come to her, expressing a wish to rest for a while.
Aline watched beside her.

At midnight Madame Graslin awoke, and asked for the archbishop and
rector, whom Aline silently showed her close at hand, praying for her.
She made a sign dismissing her mother and the maid, and, at another
sign, the two priests came to the bedside.

“Monseigneur, and you, my dear rector,” she said, “will hear nothing you
do not already know. You were the first, Monseigneur, to cast your eyes
into my inner self; you read there nearly all my past; and what you read
sufficed you. My confessor, that guardian angel whom heaven placed near
me, knows more; I have told him all. You, whose minds are enlightened
by the spirit of the Church, I wish to consult you as to the manner in
which I ought as a true Christian to leave this life. You, austere
and saintly spirits, think you that if God deigns to pardon one whose
repentance is the deepest, the most absolute, that ever shook a human
soul, think you that even then I have made my full expiation here
below?”

“Yes,” said the archbishop; “yes, my daughter.”

“No, my father, no!” she said rising in her bed, the lightning flashing
from her eyes. “Not far from here there is a grave, where an unhappy man
is lying beneath the weight of a dreadful crime; here in this sumptuous
home is a woman, crowned with the fame of benevolence and virtue. This
woman is blessed; that poor young man is cursed. The criminal is covered
with obloquy; I receive the respect of all. I had the largest share in
the sin; he has a share, a large share in the good which has won for me
such glory and such gratitude. Fraud that I am, I have the honor; he,
the martyr to his loyalty, has the shame. I shall die in a few hours,
and the canton will mourn me; the whole department will ring with my
good deeds, my piety, my virtue; but he died covered with insults, in
sight of a whole population rushing, with hatred to a murderer, to see
him die. You, my judges, you are indulgent to me; yet I hear within
myself an imperious voice which will not let me rest. Ah! the hand of
God, less tender than yours, strikes me from day to day, as if to warn
me that all is not expiated. My sins cannot be redeemed except by a
public confession. He is happy! criminal, he gave his life with ignominy
in face of earth and heaven; and I, I cheat the world as I cheated human
justice. The homage I receive humiliates me; praise sears my heart. Do
you not see, in the very coming of the _procureur-general_, a command
from heaven echoing the voice in my own soul which cries to me:
Confess!”

The two priests, the prince of the Church as well as the humble rector,
these two great lights, each in his own way, stood with their
eyes lowered and were silent. Deeply moved by the grandeur and the
resignation of the guilty woman, the judges could not pronounce her
sentence.

“My child,” said the archbishop at last, raising his noble head,
macerated by the customs of his austere life, “you are going beyond the
commandments of the Church. The glory of the Church is to make her dogma
conform to the habits and manners of each age; for the Church goes
on from age to age in company with humanity. According to her present
decision secret confession has taken the place of public confession.
This substitution has made the new law. The sufferings you have endured
suffice. Die in peace: God has heard you.”

“But is not this desire of a guilty woman in conformity with the law
of the first Church, which has enriched heaven with as many saints
and martyrs and confessing souls as there are stars in the firmament?”
 persisted Veronique, vehemently. “Who said: _Confess yourselves to one
another_? Was it not the disciples, who lived with the Saviour? Let
me confess my shame publicly on my knees. It will redeem my sin to the
world, to that family exiled and almost extinct through me. The world
ought to know that my benefactions are not an offering, but the payment
of a debt. Suppose that later, after my death, something tore from my
memory the lying veil which covers me. Ah! that idea is more than I can
bear, it is death indeed!”

“I see in this too much of calculation, my child,” said the archbishop,
gravely. “Passions are still too strong in you; the one I thought
extinct is--”

“Oh! I swear to you, Monseigneur,” she said, interrupting the prelate
and fixing her eyes, full of horror, upon him, “my heart is as purified
as that of a guilty and repentant woman can be; there is nothing now
within me but the thought of God.”

“Monseigneur,” said the rector in a tender voice, “let us leave
celestial justice to take its course. It is now four years since I have
strongly opposed this wish; it is the only difference that has ever come
between my penitent and myself. I have seen to the depths of that soul,
and I know this earth has no longer any hold there. Though the tears,
the remorse, the contrition of fifteen years relate to the mutual sin of
those two persons, believe me there are no remains of earthly passion
in this long and terrible bewailing. Memory no longer mingles its flames
with those of an ardent penitence. Yes, tears have at last extinguished
that great fire. I guarantee,” he said, stretching his hand over Madame
Graslin’s head, and letting his moistened eyes be seen, “I guarantee the
purity of that angelic soul. And also I see in this desire the thought
of reparation to an absent family, a member of which God has brought
back here by one of those events which reveal His providence.”

Veronique took the trembling hand of the rector and kissed it.

“You have often been very stern to me, dear pastor, but at this moment I
see where you keep your apostolic gentleness. You,” she said, looking at
the archbishop, “you, the supreme head of this corner of God’s kingdom,
be to me, in this moment of ignominy, a support. I must bow down as the
lowest of women, but you will lift me up pardoned and--possibly--the
equal of those who never sinned.”

The archbishop was silent, weighing no doubt all the considerations his
practised eye perceived.

“Monseigneur,” said the rector, “religion has had some heavy blows. This
return to ancient customs, brought about by the greatness of the sin and
its repentance, may it not be a triumph we have no right to refuse?”

“But they will say we are fanatics! They will declare we have exacted
this cruel scene!”

And again the archbishop was silent and thoughtful.

At this moment Horace Bianchon and Roubaud entered the room, after
knocking. As the door opened Veronique saw her mother, her son, and all
the servants of the household on their knees praying. The rectors of
the two adjacent parishes had come to assist Monsieur Bonnet, and also,
perhaps, to pay their respects to the great prelate, for whom the
French clergy now desired the honors of the cardinalate, hoping that
the clearness of his intellect, which was thoroughly Gallican, would
enlighten the Sacred College.

Horace Bianchon returned to Paris; before departing, he came to bid
farewell to the dying woman and thank her for her munificence. Slowly he
approached, perceiving from the faces of the priests that the wounds of
the soul had been the determining cause of those of the body. He took
Madame Graslin’s hand, laid it on the bed and felt the pulse. The deep
silence, that of a summer night in a country solitude, gave additional
solemnity to the scene. The great salon, seen through the double doors,
was lighted up for the little company of persons who were praying there;
all were on their knees except the two priests who were seated and
reading their brevaries. On either side of the grand state bed were the
prelate in his violet robes, the rector, and the two physicians.

“She is agitated almost unto death,” said Horace Bianchon, who, like all
men of great talent, sometimes used speech as grand as the occasion that
called it forth.

The archbishop rose as if some inward impulse drove him; he called to
Monsieur Bonnet, and together they crossed the room, passed through the
salon, and went out upon the terrace, where they walked up and down
for some moments. When they returned, after discussing this case of
ecclesiastical discipline, Roubaud met them.




XXI. CONFESSION AT THE GATES OF THE TOMB

At ten o’clock in the morning the archbishop, wearing his pontifical
robes, came into Madame Graslin’s chamber. The prelate, as well as the
rector, had such confidence in this woman that they gave her no advice
or instructions as to the limits within which she ought to make her
confession.

Veronique now saw an assemblage of clergy from all the neighboring
districts. Monseigneur was assisted by four vicars. The magnificent
vessels she had bestowed upon her dear parish church were brought to the
house and gave splendor to the ceremony. Eight choristers in their white
and red surplices stood in two rows from the bed to the door of the
salon, each holding one of the large bronze-gilt candelabra which
Veronique had ordered from Paris. The cross and the church banner were
held on either side of the bed by white-haired sacristans. Thanks to the
devotion of her servants, a wooden altar brought from the sacristy
had been erected close to the door of the salon, and so prepared and
decorated that Monseigneur could say mass upon it.

Madame Graslin was deeply touched by these attentions, which the Church,
as a general thing, grants only to royal personages. The folding doors
between the salon and the dining-room were open, and she could see a
vista of the ground-floor rooms filled with the village population. Her
friends had thought of everything; the salon was occupied exclusively
by themselves and the servants of the household. In the front rank and
grouped before the door of the bedroom were her nearest friends,
those on whose discretion reliance could be placed. MM. Grossetete, de
Grandville, Roubaud, Gerard, Clousier, Ruffin, took the first places.
They had arranged among themselves that they should rise and stand in a
group, thus preventing the words of the repentant woman from being heard
in the farther rooms; but their tears and sobs would, in any case, have
drowned her voice.

At this moment and before all else in that audience, two persons
presented, to an observer, a powerfully affecting sight. One was
Denise Tascheron. Her foreign garments, of Quaker simplicity, made her
unrecognizable by her former village acquaintance. The other was
quite another personage, an acquaintance not to be forgotten, and
his apparition there was like a streak of lurid light. The
_procureur-general_ came suddenly to a perception of the truth; the
part that he had played to Madame Graslin unrolled itself before him;
he divined it to its fullest extent. Less influenced, as a son of the
nineteenth century, by the religious aspect of the matter, Monsieur de
Grandville’s heart was filled with an awful dread; for he saw before
him, he contemplated the drama of that woman’s hidden self at the hotel
Graslin during the trial of Jean-Francois Tascheron. That tragic period
came back distinctly to his memory,--lighted even now by the mother’s
eyes, shining with hatred, which fell upon him where he stood, like
drops of molten lead. That old woman, standing ten feet from him,
forgave nothing. That man, representing human justice, trembled. Pale,
struck to the heart, he dared not cast his eyes upon the bed where lay
the woman he had loved so well, now livid beneath the hand of death,
gathering strength to conquer agony from the greatness of her sin and
its repentance. The mere sight of Veronique’s thin profile, sharply
defined in white upon the crimson damask, caused him a vertigo.

At eleven o’clock the mass began. After the epistle had been read by the
rector of Vizay the archbishop removed his dalmatic and advanced to the
threshold of the bedroom door.

“Christians, gather here to assist in the ceremony of extreme unction
which we are about to administer to the mistress of this house,” he
said, “you who join your prayers to those of the Church and intercede
with God to obtain from Him her eternal salvation, you are now to
learn that she does not feel herself worthy, in this, her last hour, to
receive the holy viaticum without having made, for the edification of
her fellows, a public confession of the greatest of her sins. We have
resisted her pious wish, although this act of contrition was long in use
during the early ages of Christianity. But, as this poor woman tells us
that her confession may serve to rehabilitate an unfortunate son of this
parish, we leave her free to follow the inspirations of her repentance.”

After these words, said with pastoral unction and dignity, the
archbishop turned aside to give place to Veronique. The dying woman came
forward, supported by her old mother and the rector,--the mother from
whom she derived her body, the Church, the spiritual mother of her soul.
She knelt down on a cushion, clasped her hands, and seemed to collect
herself for a few moments, as if to gather from some source descending
from heaven the power to speak. At this moment the silence was almost
terrifying. None dared look at their neighbor. All eyes were lowered.
And yet the eyes of Veronique, when she raised them, encountered those
of the _procureur-general_, and the expression on that blanched face
brought the color to hers.

“I could not die in peace,” said Veronique, in a voice of deep emotion,
“if I suffered the false impression you all have of me to remain. You
see in me a guilty woman, who asks your prayers, and who seeks to make
herself worthy of pardon by this public confession of her sin. That sin
was so great, its consequences were so fatal, that perhaps no penance
can atone for it. But the more humiliation I submit to here on earth,
the less I may have to dread the wrath of God in the heavenly kingdom to
which I am going. My father, who had great confidence in me, commended
to my care (now twenty years ago) a son of this parish, in whom he had
seen a great desire to improve himself, an aptitude for study, and fine
characteristics. I mean the unfortunate Jean-Francois Tascheron, who
thenceforth attached himself to me as his benefactress. How did the
affection I felt for him become a guilty one? I think myself excused
from explaining this. Perhaps it could be shown that the purest
sentiments by which we act in this world were insensibly diverted from
their course by untold sacrifices, by reasons arising from our human
frailty, by many causes which might appear to dismiss the evil of my
sin. But even if the noblest affections moved me, was I less guilty?
Rather let me confess that I, who by education, by position in the
world, might consider myself superior to the youth my father confided to
me, and from whom I was separated by the natural delicacy of our sex,--I
listened, fatally, to the promptings of the devil. I soon found myself
too much the mother of that young man to be insensible to his mute and
delicate admiration. He alone, he first, recognized my true value. But
perhaps a horrible calculation entered my mind. I thought how discreet a
youth would be who owed his all to me, and whom the chances of life
had put so far away from me, though we were born equals. I made even my
reputation for benevolence, my pious occupations, a cloak to screen my
conduct. Alas!--and this is doubtless one of my greatest sins--I hid my
passion under cover of the altar. The most virtuous of my actions--the
love I bore my mother, the acts of devotion which were sincere and true
in the midst of my wrong-doing--all, all were made to serve the ends of
a desperate passion, and were links in the chain that held me. My poor
beloved mother, who hears me now, was for a long time, ignorantly, an
accomplice in my sin. When her eyes were opened, too many dangerous
facts existed not to give her mother’s heart the strength to be silent.
Silence with her has been the highest virtue. Her love for her daughter
has gone beyond her love to God. Ah! I here discharge her solemnly from
the heavy burden of secrecy which she has borne. She shall end her days
without compelling either eyes or brow to lie. Let her motherhood stand
clear of blame; let that noble, sacred old age, crowned with virtue,
shine with its natural lustre, freed of that link which bound her
indirectly to infamy!”

Tears checked the dying woman’s voice for an instant; Aline gave her
salts to inhale.

“There is no one who has not been better to me than I deserve,” she
went on,--“even the devoted servant who does this last service; she has
feigned ignorance of what she knew, but at least she was in the secret
of the penances by which I have destroyed the flesh that sinned. I here
beg pardon of the world for the long deception to which I have been led
by the terrible logic of society. Jean-Francois Tascheron was not as
guilty as he seemed. Ah! you who hear me, I implore you to remember his
youth, and the madness excited in him partly by the remorse that seized
upon me, partly by involuntary seductions. More than that! it was a
sense of honor, though a mistaken honor, which caused the most awful
of these evils. Neither of us could endure our perpetual deceit. He
appealed, unhappy man, to my own right feeling; he sought to make our
fatal love as little wounding to others as it could be. We meant to hide
ourselves away forever. Thus I was the cause, the sole cause, of his
crime. Driven by necessity, the unhappy man, guilty of too much devotion
to an idol, chose from all evil acts the one which might be hereafter
reparable. I knew nothing of it till the moment of execution. At
that moment the hand of God threw down that scaffolding of false
contrivances--I heard the cries; they echo in my ears! I divined the
struggle, which I could not stop,--I, the cause of it! Tascheron was
maddened; I swear it.”

Here Veronique turned her eyes upon Monsieur de Grandville, and a sob
was heard to issue from Denise Tascheron’s breast.

“He lost his mind when he saw what he thought his happiness destroyed
by unforeseen circumstances. The unhappy man, misled by his love,
went headlong from a delinquent act to crime--from robbery to a double
murder. He left my mother’s house an innocent man, he returned a guilty
one. I alone knew that there was neither premeditation nor any of the
aggravating circumstances on which he was sentenced to death. A hundred
times I thought of betraying myself to save him; a hundred times
a horrible and necessary restraint stopped the words upon my lips.
Undoubtedly, my presence near the scene had contributed to give him the
odious, infamous, ignoble courage of a murderer. Were it not for me,
he would have fled. I had formed that soul, trained that mind, enlarged
that heart; I knew it; he was incapable of cowardice or meanness. Do
justice to that involuntarily guilty arm, do justice to him, whom God,
in his mercy, has allowed to sleep in his quiet grave, where you have
wept for him, suspecting, it may be, the extenuating truth. Punish,
curse the guilty creature before you! Horrified by the crime when
once committed, I did my best to hide my share in it. Trusted by my
father--I, who was childless--to lead a child to God, I led him to the
scaffold! Ah! punish me, curse me, the hour has come!”

Saying these words, her eyes shone with the stoic pride of a savage.
The archbishop, standing behind her, and as if protecting her with the
pastoral cross, abandoned his impassible demeanor and covered his eyes
with his right hand. A muffled cry was heard, as though some one were
dying. Two persons, Gerard and Roubaud, received and carried away in
their arms, Denise Tascheron, unconscious. That sight seemed for an
instant to quench the fire in Veronique’s eyes; she was evidently
uneasy; but soon her self-control and serenity of martyrdom resumed
their sway.

“You now know,” she continued, “that I deserve neither praise or
blessing for my conduct here. I have led in sight of Heaven, a secret
life of bitter penance which Heaven will estimate. My life before men
has been an immense reparation for the evils I have caused; I have
marked my repentance ineffaceably on the earth; it will last almost
eternally here below. It is written on those fertile fields, in the
prosperous village, in the rivulets brought from the mountains to water
the plain once barren and fruitless, now green and fertile. Not a tree
will be cut for a hundred years to come but the people of this region
will know of the remorse that made it grow. My repentant soul will still
live here among you. What you will owe to its efforts, to a fortune
honorably acquired, is the heritage of its repentance,--the repentance
of her who caused the crime. All has been repaired so far as society
is concerned; but I am still responsible for that life, crushed in its
bud,--a life confided to me and for which I am now required to render an
account.”

The flame of her eyes was veiled in tears.

“There is here, before me, a man,” she continued, “who, because he did
his duty strictly, has been to me an object of hatred which I thought
eternal. He was the first inflictor of my punishment. My feet were still
too deep in blood, I was too near the deed, not to hate justice. So
long as that root of anger lay in my heart, I knew there was still a
lingering remnant of condemnable passion. I had nothing to forgive
that man, I have only had to purify that corner of my heart where Evil
lurked. However hard it may have been to win that victory, it is won.”

Monsieur de Grandville turned a face to Veronique that was bathed in
tears. Human justice seemed at that moment to feel remorse. When
the confessing woman raised her head as if to continue, she met the
agonizing look of old man Grossetete, who stretched his supplicating
hands to her as if to say, “Enough, enough!” At the same instant a sound
of tears and sobs was heard. Moved by such sympathy, unable to bear the
balm of this general pardon, she was seized with faintness. Seeing that
her daughter’s vital force was gone at last, the old mother summoned the
vigor of her youth to carry her away.

“Christians,” said the archbishop, “you have heard the confession of
that penitent woman; it confirms the sentence of human justice. You
ought to see in this fresh reason to join your prayers to those of the
Church which offers to God the holy sacrifice of the mass, to implore
his mercy in favor of so deep a repentance.”

The services went on. Veronique, lying on the bed, followed them with a
look of such inward contentment that she seemed, to every eye, no longer
the same woman. On her face was the candid and virtuous expression of
the pure young girl such as she had been in her parents’ home. The dawn
of eternal life was already whitening her brow and glorifying her face
with its celestial tints. Doubtless she heard the mystic harmonies, and
gathered strength to live from her desire to unite herself once more
with God in the last communion. The rector came beside the bed and
gave her absolution. The archbishop administered the sacred oils with a
fatherly tenderness that showed to all there present how dear the lost
but now recovered lamb had been to him. Then, with the sacred anointing,
he closed to the things of earth those eyes which had done such evil,
and laid the seal of the Church upon the lips that were once too
eloquent. The ears, by which so many evil inspirations had penetrated
her mind, were closed forever. All the senses, deadened by repentance,
were thus sanctified, and the spirit of evil could have no further power
within her soul.

Never did assistants of this ceremony more fully understand the grandeur
and profundity of the sacrament than those who now saw the acts of the
Church justly following the confession of that dying woman.

Thus prepared, Veronique received the body of Jesus Christ with an
expression of hope and joy which melted the ice of unbelief against
which the rector had so often bruised himself. Roubaud, confounded in
all his opinions, became a Catholic on the spot. The scene was touching
and yet awesome; the solemnity of its every feature was so great that
painters might have found there the subject of a masterpiece.

When this funeral part was over, and the dying woman heard the priests
begin the reading of the gospel of Saint John, she signed to her mother
to bring her son, who had been taken from the room by his tutor. When
she saw Francis kneeling by the bedside the pardoned mother felt she
had the right to lay her hand upon his head and bless him. Doing so, she
died.

Old Madame Sauviat was there, at her post, erect as she had been
for twenty years. This woman, heroic after her fashion, closed her
daughter’s eyes--those eyes that had wept so much--and kissed them.
All the priests, followed by the choristers, surrounded the bed. By the
flaming light of the torches they chanted the terrible _De Profundis_,
the echoes of which told the population kneeling before the chateau, the
friends praying in the salon, the servants in the adjoining rooms, that
the mother of the canton was dead. The hymn was accompanied with moans
and tears. The confession of that grand woman had not been audible
beyond the threshold of the salon, and none but loving ears had heard
it.

When the peasants of the neighborhood, joining with those of Montegnac,
came, one by one, to lay upon their benefactress the customary palm,
together with their last farewell mingled with prayers and tears, they
saw the man of justice, crushed by grief, holding the hand of the woman
whom, without intending it, he had so cruelly but so justly stricken.

Two days later the _procureur-general_, Grossetete, the archbishop, and
the mayor, holding the corners of the black pall, conducted the body of
Madame Graslin to its last resting-place. It was laid in the grave in
deep silence; not a word was said; no one had strength to speak; all
eyes were full of tears. “She is now a saint!” was said by the peasants
as they went away along the roads of the canton to which she had given
prosperity,--saying the words to her creations as though they were
animate beings.

No one thought it strange that Madame Graslin was buried beside the body
of Jean-Francois Tascheron. She had not asked it; but the old mother,
as the last act of her tender pity, had requested the sexton to make the
grave there,--putting together those whom earth had so violently parted,
and whose souls were now reunited through repentance in purgatory.

Madame Graslin’s will was found to be all that was expected of it.
She founded scholarships and hospital beds at Limoges solely for
working-men; she assigned a considerable sum--three hundred thousand
francs in six years--for the purchase of that part of the village called
Les Tascherons, where she directed that a hospital should be built. This
hospital, intended for the indigent old persons of the canton, for
the sick, for lying-in women if paupers, and for foundlings, was to
be called the Tascheron Hospital. Veronique ordered it to be placed in
charge of the Gray Sisters, and fixed the salaries of the surgeon and
the physician at four thousand francs for each. She requested Roubaud to
be the first physician of this hospital, placing upon him the choice
of the surgeon, and requesting him to superintend the erection of
the building with reference to sanitary arrangements, conjointly with
Gerard, who was to be the architect. She also gave to the village of
Montegnac an extent of pasture land sufficient to pay all its taxes.
The church, she endowed with a fund to be used for a special purpose,
namely: watch was to be kept over young workmen, and cases discovered in
which some village youth might show a disposition for art, or science,
or manufactures; the interest of the fund was then to be used in
fostering it. The intelligent benevolence of the testatrix named the sum
that should be taken for each of these encouragements.

The news of Madame Graslin’s death, received throughout the department
as a calamity, was not accompanied by any rumor injurious to the memory
of this woman. This discretion was a homage rendered to so many virtues
by the hard-working Catholic population, which renewed in this little
corner of France the miracles of the “Lettres Edifiantes.”

Gerard, appointed guardian of Francis Graslin, and obliged, by terms of
the will, to reside at the chateau, moved there. But he did not marry
Denise Tascheron until three months after Veronique’s death. In her,
Francis found a second mother.




ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

     Bianchon, Horace
       Father Goriot
       The Atheist’s Mass
       Cesar Birotteau
       The Commission in Lunacy
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       The Secrets of a Princess
       The Government Clerks
       Pierrette
       A Study of Woman
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       Honorine
       The Seamy Side of History
       The Magic Skin
       A Second Home
       A Prince of Bohemia
       Letters of Two Brides
       The Muse of the Department
       The Imaginary Mistress
       The Middle Classes
       Cousin Betty
     In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
       Another Study of Woman
       La Grande Breteche

     Brezacs (The)
       The Government Clerks

     Grandville, Vicomte de
       A Second Home
       A Daughter of Eve

     Grossetete (younger brother of F. Grossetete)
       The Muse of the Department

     Navarreins, Duc de
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       Colonel Chabert
       The Muse of the Department
       The Thirteen
       Jealousies of a Country Town
       The Peasantry
       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
       The Magic Skin
       The Gondreville Mystery
       The Secrets of a Princess

     Rastignac, Monseigneur Gabriel de
       Father Goriot
       A Daughter of Eve






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