M. Deviolaine was a great dignitary in my eyes, not so much because of the above-mentioned reason, but because, in virtue of the position he held, he could grant leave to shoot in the forest, and to go hunting freely some day in that forest was one of the ambitions of my childhood.
This ambition, among several others, has since been realised; and I should add that it has been one that has yielded the least disappointment in the fulfilment.
In comparison with the small rooms to which we had been confined since my father's death, M. Deviolaine's house seemed a palace; and I, poor child, greatly appreciated the change, for, brought up as I had been at the châteaux of Fossés and of Antilly, and running wild in the walks and over the lawns, I seemed to live on air and sunshine. M. Deviolaine's house contained first and foremost a suite of rooms covering a considerable area, stables and coach-houses, yards and a charming garden, partly English, partly French, partly picturesque, partly kitchen garden. The English garden contained waterfalls, pools, and weeping-willow trees; the fruit garden was full of pears, peaches, greengages, artichokes, and melons, and then it opened upon a fine park, which you could see through the railings, and which you could walk into through a gateway.
This park, planted by François I., was cut down by Louis-Philippe.
Grand trees they were! Under their shade François I. had lain by the side of Madame d'Étampes, Henri II. with his Diane de Poitiers, Henri IV. with Gabrielle: it was natural to expect that a Bourbon would have reverenced these trees, and permitted the long life of beeches and oaks; that birds would have sung on their dead and leafless boughs as they sang on them when green and in full leaf! Unluckily, there is a material value attached to them, besides the inestimable one of poetry and memories. You glorious beeches, with your polished, silvery trunks, you fine oaks with your dark and rugged bark—you were worth 100,000 crowns! The King of France, who thought himself too poor to keep you standing, and had his twelve millions from the civil list besides his private fortune of six millions, must needs sell you! Had you been my sole means of fortune, I would have kept you; for, being a poet, I love the murmur of the wind through your leaves above all the gold earth can give; the shadows that flicker under my tread; the delicious visions, the lovely phantoms, which, at eventide, between day and night, in the dubious hour of twilight, glide in and out between your venerable trunks, as flit the shades of the ancient race of Abencérage between the myriad columns of Cordova's royal mosque.
There was not the least idea of this in the mind of that other poet, Demoustier, when he wrote on the bark of one of these trees the following verse: with the trees has it also disappeared, and perhaps I alone remember it:—
"Ce bois fut l'asile chéri
De l'amour autrefois fidèle;
Tout l'y rappelle encore, et le coeur attendri
Soupire en se disant: C'est ici que Henri
Soupirait près de Gabrielle."
And notwithstanding all this the king destroyed the forest, the man who believed himself more firmly fixed to the throne than the trees were to the earth. Nothing did he understand of the really great; everything was stripped of the glamour of imagination, and only its material value did he appraise. He said to himself, "Every man can be bought, just as every tree can be sold. I possess vast forests, I will sell the trees, and I will purchase men."
Sire, you were self-deceived. There are other things in life than algebra and mathematics: there is faith, there is belief; you put no faith in others, and others therefore put no faith in you; you breathed scorn on the past, and now the past scorns you.
What a long way we have travelled, though, from the home of M. Deviolaine—which to me seemed such a palace!