Long before Maurice Barrès wrote his apology for the churches of France, the author of Mademoiselle Cloque showed how a great monument may be a liberal education, may raise an illiterate mind to heights where it apprehends the mystery which extends beneath, beyond, appearances; he, too, affirmed that the prayer of an old woman in her parish church may rank with the meditation of the man of science and with the inspired presentiment of the poet.
La Becquée followed Mademoiselle Cloque. It is impossible to read this long, slow, humorous, enchanting book, without seeing a resemblance (a moral resemblance, for the setting, of course, is widely different since the setting is Touraine), still, a strong moral resemblance to the English novel of Victorian days. Tante Félicie and her nephew, Riquet Nadaud, remind us, though so unlike, of Aunt Betsy Trotwood and little David Copperfield. It seems to me that those who love the one might, at least, like the other? I shall speak again of Riquet Nadaud in my chapter on the Novel of Childhood.
A great part of the charm of these stories is the atmosphere of Touraine, so marvellously captured. I do not mean only the physical atmosphere: M. Boylesve is above all things a man for whom the inner world is important. Twenty years ago, French literature was positive, objective, and, if I may say so, visual. But now our younger masters are men for whom the invisible world exists; they are chiefly occupied with the interior sphere. Some while ago, René Boylesve described this change of front very happily to a reporter of the Revue des Français (September 25, 1912). He said:—
‘In my young days, I used to visit Alphonse Daudet whom I greatly admired. He was very encouraging, and we would talk of literature; he used to say to me gently: “I have never described anything that I have not seen.” He was very kind, very discreet, and I would go away despairing, for I felt he was offering me a suggestion, a piece of good advice. And for long afterwards I was incapable of writing anything, since at every turn I caught myself on the point of describing things I had never seen, could never see!’
These unseen things—emotions, beliefs, traditions, opinions, all that makes up the moral atmosphere of a society—are the peculiar sphere of M. Boylesve. On this occasion he showed our journalist the plan, or scenario, for a novel which was lying on his writing-table: no project of a plot, no list of personages, but a sequence of maxims and reflections. ‘Take care of the moral atmosphere,’ he seems to say, ‘and the characters will take care of themselves.’ So soon as he begins to write, he forgets these notes, which transpose themselves into persons and events; but his preliminary care is to invent the moral world which naturally brings them forth.
The classic grace of his native province, its sober delicacy, its quiet order, do not exclude a latent energy, an amorous ardour, decently dissimulated under the discretion and retinue of a civilised and courtly tradition. The Tourangeau is sensual as well as temperate; he is never perverse; he is seldom excessive; none the less, if his name be often Descartes or Berthelot, he may by chance be called Ronsard, or Rabelais, or Balzac. How should he live in a world of such good things, such an earthly paradise, and not know—though he discipline them—the pleasures of sense? His purity is not austere and his piety no flaming romantic enthusiasm.
All the delicate sensibility, all this impassioned moderation of his native place, M. Boylesve has put into the human, touching figure of his Jeune Fille Bien Élevée. It is the story of a refined and gentle girl, convent bred, pious, reared in all the old-fashioned dignities and delicacies of a small provincial society in Touraine. Her parents combine for her a sensible match—a mariage de raison with a Parisian architect who, visiting Chinon, has espied the white sequestered lily; he marries the dowerless Madeleine for her perfect manners, her charming grace, her moral solidity—et parce qu’il ne veut pas être.... Poor Madeleine in her wedding veil has overheard the unthinkable word!
M. Serpe has evidently a great opinion of that moral solidity which he so much admires, for, during their married life in Paris, he takes no pains at all to shield it, plunging his young wife into the busy, frivolous circle of contractors, speculators, money-makers, and pleasure-hunters that eddied round the great Exhibition of 1889. This is the subject of Madeleine, Jeune Femme, which is the continued history of his heroine—M. Boylesve’s novels have the broad full flow and lengthy winding course of his native Loire!
Madeleine passes unscathed among the booths of Vanity Fair. But by a friendly hearth (the one spot which recalls the peaceful surroundings of her early years) she meets a man of letters, a student of subtle moral problems, a lover of Pascal, an inhabitant of her own intellectual world, yet in his private life just as much an average sensual man as any bachelor of the Boulevards. Madeleine succumbs at once almost without resistance to the charm of M. Juillet—she succumbs morally, we mean, and in secret; for in the world of fact she never succumbs at all, and her would-be seducer retires, rebuffed and ashamed, persuaded that she is one of those impregnable fortresses it were a waste of time to besiege, while Madeleine is half enraged by that inalienable aureole, or aspect of virtue, which so efficiently protects her. The flood of sentiment which invades the charmed, the passive soul of Madeleine, its mysterious regression, and the final triumph of her old ideals—Duty, Order, the Interior Altar—are evoked with a magic which touches in the reader’s heart a secret spring, and makes him share in Madeleine’s temptation, her danger, her reluctant escape.
If Madeleine does not succumb, it was not the beautiful quality of her soul that saved her (our author seems to say) but the regularity and discipline of her early education; and, to point his moral still clearer, he places in front of Madeleine a charming madcap, a dear little modern hoyden, Pipette Voulasne. Pipette has not a bad instinct in her composition, but neither has she a principle; she has never heard of the spiritual combat. Pipette, too, falls in love with the irresistible M. Juillet. Pipette is sweet and twenty, rich, unmarried and M. Juillet is a bachelor; but the lover of Pascal hesitates at the idea of marriage with a romp whose ideas of fun is to dress up as a seal at a fancy ball and swim in the pond.