History has made much stir about certain devoted attachments; no devotion could have been purer or more disinterested than the unnoticed devotion of this young girl, all the more complete that she crowned it with her death.
A subject of this nature is either stated in three brief lines of bald fact, or is extended over a couple of volumes as a psychological study. Poor Adèle! We have but four lines, and the memory of your devotion to offer you! Her death drove Rabbe to despair; from that time dates the most abandoned period of his life. Rabbe found out not only that the seeds of destruction were in him, but that they emanated from him. His wails of despair from that moment became bitter and frequent; and his thoughts turned incessantly towards suicide so that they might become accustomed to the idea. Certain memoranda hung always in his sight; he called them his pain des forts; they were, indeed, the spiritual bread he fed himself on.
We will give a few examples of his most remarkable thoughts from this lugubrious diary:—
"The whole life of man is but one journey towards death."
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"Man, from whence comes thy pride? It was a mistake for thee to have been conceived; thy birth is a misfortune; thy life a labour; thy death inevitable."
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"Thou living corpse! When wilt thou return to the dust? O solitude! O death! I have drunk deep of thy austere delights. You are my loves! the only ones that are faithful to me!"
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"Every hour that passes by drives us towards the tomb and is hastened by the advance of those that precede it."
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"Bitter and cruel is the absence of God's face from me. How much longer wilt Thou make me suffer?"
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"Reflect in the morning that by night you may be no longer here; and at night, that by morning you may have died."
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"Sometimes there is a melancholy remembrance of the glorious days of youth, of that happiness which never seems so great or so bitter as when remembered in the days of misfortune; at times, such collections confront the unfortunate wretch whose aspirations are towards death. Then, his despair turns to melancholy—almost even to hope."
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"But these illusions of the beautiful days of youth pass and vanish away! Oh! what bitterness fills my soul! Inexorable nature, fate, destiny of providence give me back the cup of life and of happiness! My lips had scarcely touched it before you snatched it out of my trembling hands. Give me back the cup! Give it back! I am consumed by burning thirst; I have deceived myself; you have deceived me; I have never drunk, I have never satisfied my thirst, for the liquid evaporated like blue flame, which leaves behind it nothing but the smell of sulphur and volcanoes."
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"Lightning from heaven! Why dost thou not rather strike the lofty tops of those oaks and fir trees whose robust old age has already braved a hundred winters? They, at least, have lived; and have satiated themselves with the sweets of the earth!"
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"I have been struck down in my prime; for nine years I have been a prey, fighting against death.... Miserable wretch why has not the hand of God which smote me annihilated me altogether?"
Then, in consequence of his pains, the soul of the unhappy Rabbe rises to the level of prayer; he, the sceptic, loses faith in unbelief and returns to God—
"O my God!" he exclaims in the solitudes of night, which carries the plaint of his groans and tears to the ears of his neighbours. "O my God! If Thou art just, Thou must have a better world in store for us! O my God! Thou who knowest all the thoughts that I bare here before Thee and the remorse to which my scalding tears give expression; O my God! if the groanings of an unfortunate soul are heard by Thee, Thou must understand, O my God! the heart that Thou didst give me, thou knowest the wishes it formed, and the insatiable desires that still possess it. Oh! if afflictions have broken it, if the absence of all consolation and tenderness, if the most horrible solitude, have withered it, O my God! help Thy wretched creature; give me faith in a better world to come! Oh! may I find beyond the grave what my soul, unrecognised and bewildered, has unceasingly craved for on this earth...."
Then God took pity on him. He did not restore his health or hope, his youth, beauty and loves in this life; those three illusions vanished all too soon: but God granted him the gift of tears. And he thanked God for it. Towards the close of the year 1829, the disease made such progress that Rabbe resolved he would not live to see the opening of the year 1830. Thus, as he had addressed God, as he had addressed his soul, so he now addresses death—
DEATH
"Thou diest! Thou hast reached the limit to which all things comes at last; the end of thy miseries, the beginning of thy happiness. Behold, death stands face to face with thee! Thou wilt not longer be able to wish for, nor to dread it. Pains and weakness of body, sad heart-searchings, piercing spiritual anguish, devouring griefs, all are over! Thou wilt never suffer them again; thou goest in peace to brave the insolent pride of the successful evil-doer, the despising of fools and the abortive pity of those who dare to style themselves good.
"The deprivation of many evils will not be an evil in itself; I have seen thee chafing at thy bit, shaking the humiliating chains of an adverse fate in despair; I have often heard the distressing complaints which issued from the depths of thy oppressed heart.... Thou art satisfied at last. Haste thee to empty the cup of an unfortunate life, and perish the vase from which thou wast compelled to drink such bitter draughts.
"But thou dost stop and tremble! Thou dost curse the duration of thy suffering and yet dost dread and regret that the end has come! Thou apprisest without reason or justice, and dost lament equally both what things are and what they cease to be. Listen, and think for one moment.
"In dying, thou dost but follow the path thy forefathers have trodden; thousands of generations before thee have fallen into the abyss into which thou hast to descend; many thousands will fall into it after thee. The cruel vicissitude of life and death cannot be altered for thee alone. Onward then towards thy journey's end, follow where others have gone, and be not afraid of straying from it or losing thyself when thou hast so many other travelling companions. Let there be no signs of weakness, no tears! The man who weeps over his own death is the vilest and most despicable of all beings. Submit unmurmuringly to the inevitable; thou must die, as thou hast had to live, without will of thy own. Give back, therefore, without anxiety, thy life which thou receivest unconsciously. Neither birth nor death are in thy power. Rather rejoice, for thou art at the beginning of an immortal dawn. Those who surround thy deathbed, all those whom thou hast ever seen, of whom thou hast heard speak or read, the small number of those thou hast known especially well, the vast multitude of those who have lived formerly or been born or are to be born in ages to come throughout the world, all these have gone or will go the road thou art going. Look with wise eyes upon the long caravan of successive generations which have crossed the deserts of life, fighting as they travel across the burning sands for one drop of the water which inflames their thirst more than it appeases it! Thou art swallowed up in the crowd directly thou fallest: but look how many others are falling too at the same time with thee!
"Wouldst thou desire to live for ever? Wouldst thou only wish thy life to last for a thousand years? Remember the long hours of weariness in thy short career, thy frequent fainting under the burden. Thou wast aghast at the limited horizon of a short, uncertain and fugitive life: what wouldst thou have said if thou hadst seen an immeasurable, inevitably long future of weariness and sorrow stretch before thy eyes!
"O mortals! you weep over death, as though life were something great and precious! And yet the vilest insects that crawl share this rare treasure of life with you! All march towards death because all yearn towards rest and perfect peace.
"Behold! the approach of the day that thou fain wouldst have tried to bring nearer by thy prayers, if a jealous fate had not deferred it; for which thou didst often sigh; behold the moment which is to remove the capricious yoke of fortune from the trammels of human society, from the venomous attacks of thy fellow-creatures. Thou thinkest thou wilt cease to exist and that thought torments thee.... Well, but what proves to thee that thou wilt be annihilated? All the ages have retained a hope in immortality. The belief in a spiritual life was not merely a dogma of a few religious creeds; it was the need and the cry of all nations that have covered the face of the earth. The European, in the luxuries of his capital towns, the aboriginal American-Indian under his rude huts, both equally dream of an immortal state; all cry to the tribunal of nature against the incompleteness of this life.
"If thou sufferest, it is well to die; if thou art happy or thinkest thou art so, thou wilt gain by death since thy illusion would not have lasted long. Thou passest from a terrestrial habitation to a pure and celestial one. Why look back when thy foot is upon the threshold of its portals? The eternal distributor of good and evil, our Sovereign Master, calls thee to Himself; it is by His desire thy prison flies open; thy heavy chains are broken and thy exile is ended; therefore rejoice! Thou wilt soar to the throne of thy King and Saviour!
"Ah! if thou art not shackled with the weight of some unexpiated crime, thou wilt sing as thou diest; and, like the Roman emperor, thou wilt rise up in thy agony at the very thought, and thou wouldst die standing with eyes turned towards the promised land!
"O Saint Preux and Werther! O Jacob Ortis! how far were you from reaching such heights as that! Orators even to the death agony, your brains alone it is which lament; man in his death throes, this actually dying creature, it is his heart that groans, his flesh that cries out, his spirit which doubts. Oh! how well one feels that all that hollow philosophising does not reassure him as to the pain of the supreme moment, and especially against that terror of annihilation, which brought drops of sweat to the brow of Hamlet!
"One more cry—the last, then silence shall fall on him who suffered much."
Moreover, Alphonse Rabbe wished there to be no doubt of how he died; hear this, his will, which he signed; there was to his mind no dishonour in digging himself a grave with his own hands between those of Cato of Utica and of Brutus—