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

by Alphonse de Lamartine

XL.

I strove to speak, but could not. My sobs spoke, and my tears promised. We got up to join the muleteers, and returned at sunset by the long avenue of leafless poplars, where we had passed before, when she held my hand so long in the palanquin. As we went through the straggling faubourg of cottages, at the entrance of the town, and crossed the Place to enter the steep street of Aix, sad faces were seen greeting us at the windows and at the doors; as kind souls watch the departure of two belated swallows, who are the last to leave the walls which have sheltered them. Poor women rose from the stone bench where they were spinning before their houses; children left the goats and donkeys which they were driving home; all came to address a word, a look, or even a silent bow of recognition to the young lady, and the one they supposed to be her brother. She was so beautiful, so gracious to all, so loved, it seemed as though the last ray of the year was retiring from the valley.

When we had reached the top of the town, we got down from our mules and dismissed the children. As we did not wish to lose an hour of this last day that still shone on the rose-tinted snows of the Alps, we climbed slowly, and alone, up a narrow path which leads to the garden terrace of a house called the Maison Chevalier. From this terrace, which seems like a platform erected in the centre of a panorama, the eye embraces the town, the lake, the passes of the Rhône, and all the peaks of the Alpine landscape. We sat down on the fallen trunk of a tree, and leaned on the parapet wall of the terrace; we remained mute and motionless, looking by turns at all the different spots, that for the last six weeks had witnessed our looks and steps, our twofold dreams, and our sighs. When all these had one by one faded away in the dim shade of twilight; when there was only one corner of the horizon, to westward, where a faint light remained,—we started up with one accord, and fled precipitately, casting vain and sorrowing looks behind as if some invisible hand had driven us out of this Eden, and pitilessly effaced on our steps all the scene of our happiness and love.

XLI.

We returned home and spent a sad evening, although I was to accompany Julie as far as Lyons on the box of her carriage. When the hand of her little portable clock marked midnight, I retired, to let her take some rest before morning. She accompanied me to the door; I opened it, and said as I kissed her hand in the passage, "Good-bye, till the morrow!" She did not answer, but I heard her murmur, with a sob, behind the closing door, "There is no morrow for us!"

There were a few days more, but they were short and bitter, as the last dregs of a drained cup. We started for Chambery very early in the morning, not to show our pale cheeks and swollen eyelids in broad daylight, and passed the day there in a small inn of the Italian faubourg. The wooden galleries of the inn overlooked a garden with a stream running through it, and for a few hours we cheated ourselves into the belief that we were once more in our home at Aix, with its galleries, its silence, and its solitude.

XLII.

We wished before we left Chambéry and the valley we so much loved to visit together the humble dwelling of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Warens, at Les Charmettes. A landscape is but a man or a woman. What is Vaucluse without Petrarch? Sorrento without Tasso? What is Sicily without Theocritus, or the Paraclet without Heloise? What is Annecy without Madame de Warens? What is Chambéry without Jean Jacques Rousseau? A sky without rays, a voice without echo, a landscape without life! Man does not only animate his fellow-men, he animates all nature. He carries his own immortality with him into heaven, but bequeaths another to the spots that he has consecrated by his presence; it is only there we can trace his course, and really converse with his memory. We took with us the volume of the "Confessions" in which the poet of Les Charmettes describes this rustic retreat. Rousseau was wrecked there by the first storms of his fate, and was rescued by a woman, young, lovely, and adventurous, wrecked and lost like himself. This woman seems to have been a compound of virtues and weaknesses, sensibility and license, piety and independence of thought, formed expressly by Nature to cherish and develop the strange youth, whose mind comprehended that of a sage, a lover, a philosopher, a legislator, and a madman. Another woman might perhaps have produced another life. In a man we can always trace the woman whom he first loved. Happy would he have been who had met Madame de Warens before her profanation! She was an idol to be adored, but the idol had been polluted. She herself debased the worship that a young and loving heart tendered her. The amours of this woman and Rousseau appear like a leaf torn from the loves of Daphnis and Chloe, and found soiled and defiled on the bed of a courtesan. It' matters not; it was the first love, or the first delirium, if you will, of the young man. The birthplace of that love, the arbor where Rousseau made his first avowal, the room where he blushed at his first emotions, the yard where he gloried in the most humble offices to serve his beloved protectress, the spreading chestnut-trees beneath which they sat together to speak of God, and intermingled their sportive theology with bursts of merriment and childish caresses, the landscape, mysterious and wild as they, which seems so well adapted to them,—have all, for the lover, the poet, or the philosopher, a deep and hidden attraction. They yield to it without knowing why. For poets this was the first page of that life which was a poem; for philosophers it was the cradle of a revolution; for lovers it is the birthplace of first love.

XLIII.

We followed the stony path at the bottom of the ravine which leads to Les Charmettes, still talking of this love. We were alone. The goat-herds even had forsaken the dried-up pastures and the leafless hedges. The sun shone now and then between the passing clouds, and its concentrated rays were warmer within the sheltered sides of the ravine. The redbreasts hopped about the bushes almost within our reach. Every now and then we would sit on the southern bank of the road to read a page or two of the "Confessions," and identify ourselves with the place.