Raphael; Or, Pages of the Book of Life at Twenty

by Alphonse de Lamartine

I wound the fisherman's ropes which I found in the boat several times round her body and mine, which were bound as in the same winding sheet. I took her up in my arms, which I had left disengaged in order to precipitate her with me into the lake.

At the very instant that I was taking the spring which would forever have buried us in the waters, I saw her turn pale, her head drooped, its lifeless weight sank upon my shoulder, and I felt her knees give way beneath her body. Excessive emotion and the joy of dying together had forestalled death. She had fainted in my arms. The idea of taking advantage of her insensible state to hurry her, unknown to herself, and perhaps against her will, into my grave, struck me with horror. I fell back into the boat with my burden; I loosed the ropes that bound us, and laid her on the seat; I dipped my hands into the lake and sprinkled the cold drops of water on her lips and forehead. I know not how long she remained thus without color, voice, or motion. When she first opened her eyes and regained consciousness, night was coming on, and the slow drift of the boat had carried us into the middle of the lake.

"God wills it not," I said. "We live; what we thought the privilege of our love was a double crime. Is there no one to whom we belong on earth? No one in heaven?" I added looking upwards reverentially, as though I had seen in the firmament the sovereign Judge and Lord of our destinies. "Speak no more of it," she said in a low and hurried tone; "never speak of it again! You have chosen that I should live; I will live; my crime was not in dying, but in taking you with me!" There was something of bitterness and tender reproach in her tone and in her look. "It may be," said I, replying to her thoughts,—"it may be that heaven itself has no such hours as those we have just passed; but life has,—that is enough to make me love it." She soon recovered her bloom and her serenity. I seized the oars, and slowly rowed back to the little sandy beach, where we heard the voices of the boatmen, who had lighted a fire beneath a projecting rock. We recrossed the lake, and returned home silently and thoughtfully.

XXXVI.

In the evening, when I went into her room, I found her seated in tears before her little table, where several open letters were lying scattered among the tea things. "We had better have died at once, for here is the lingering death of separation, which begins for me," she said, pointing to some letters which bore the postmark of Paris and Geneva.

Her husband wrote that he began to be very anxious at her long absence at a season of the year when the weather might become inclement from day to day; that he felt himself gradually declining and that he wished to embrace and bless her before he died. His mournful entreaties were intermingled with many expressions of paternal fondness, and some sportive allusions to the fair young brother, who made her forget her other friends. The other letter was from the Genevese doctor, who was to have come to take her back to Paris. He wrote to say that he was obliged unexpectedly to leave home to attend a German prince who required his care, and that he sent in his stead a respectable, trustworthy man, who would accompany her to Paris and act as her courier on the road. This man had arrived, and her departure was fixed for the day after the morrow.

Although this news had been long foreseen, it affected us as though it had been quite unexpected. We passed a long evening and nearly half the night in silence, leaning opposite to one another on the little table, and neither daring to look at each other, or to speak, for fear of bursting into tears. We strove to interrupt the speechless agony of our hearts by a few unconnected words, but these were said in a deep and hollow voice, which resounded in the room like tear-drops on a coffin. I had instantly determined to go also.

XXXVII.

The next day was the eve of our separation. The morning, as if to mock us, rose more bright and warm than in the fairest days of October.

While the trunks were being packed, and the carriage got ready, we started with the mules and guides. We visited both hill and valley, to say farewell, and to make, as it were, a pilgrimage of love to all the spots where we had first seen each other, then met and walked; where we had sat, and talked, and loved, during the long and heavenly intercourse between ourselves and lonely Nature. We began by the lovely hill of Tresserves which rises like a verdant cliff between the valley of Aix and the lake; its sides, that rise almost perpendicularly from the water's edge, are covered with chestnut-trees, rivalling those of Sicily, through their branches, which overhang the water, one sees snatches of the blue lake or of the sky, according as one looks high or low. It was on the velvet of the moss-covered roots of these noble trees, which have seen successive generations of young men and women pass like ants beneath their shade, that we in our contemplative hours had dreamed our fairest dreams. From thence we descended by a steep declivity to a small solitary chateau called Bon Port. This little castle is so embosomed in the chestnut-trees of Tresserves on the land side, and so well hidden on the water side in the deep windings of a sheltered bay, that it is difficult to see it either from the mountain or from the little sea of Bourget. A terrace with a few fig-trees divides the château from the sandy beach, where the gentle waves continually come rippling in, to lick the shore and murmuringly expire. Oh, how we envied the fortunate possessors of this retreat unknown to men, hidden in the trees and waters, and only visited by the birds of the lake, the sunshine and the soft south wind. We blessed it a thousand times in its repose, and prayed that it might shelter hearts like ours.