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

by Alphonse de Lamartine

We fancied we saw the young vagrant in his tattered clothes, knocking at the gate and delivering, with a blush, his letter of recommendation to the fair recluse, in the lonely path that leads from the house to the church. They were so present to our fancy, that it seemed as though they were expecting us, and that we should see them at the window or in the garden walks of Les Charmettes. We would walk on, then stop again; the spot seemed to attract and to repel us by turns, as a place where love had been revealed, but where love had been profaned also. It presented no such perils to us. We were destined to carry away our love from thence as pure and as divine as we had brought it there within us.

"Oh," I inwardly exclaimed, "were I a Rousseau, what might not this other Madame de Warens have made me; she who is as superior to her of Les Charmettes as I am inferior to Rousseau, not in feeling, but in genius."

Absorbed in these thoughts, we walked up a shelving greensward upon which a few walnut-trees were scattered here and there. These trees had seen the lovers beneath their shade. To the right, where the pass narrows so as to appear to form a barrier to the traveller, stands the house of Madame de Warens on a high terrace of rough and ill-cemented stones. It is a little square building of gray stone, with two windows and a door opening on the terrace, and the same on the garden side; there are three low rooms on the upper story, and a large room on the ground floor with no other furniture than a portrait of Madame de Warens in her youth. Her lovely face beams forth from the dust-covered and dingy canvas with beauty, sportiveness, and pensive grace. Poor charming woman! Had she not met that wandering boy on the highway; had she not opened to him her house and heart, his sensitive and suffering genius might have been extinguished in the mire. The meeting seemed like the effect of chance, but it was predestination meeting the great man under the form of his first love. That woman saved him; she cultivated him; she excited him in solitude, in liberty, and in love, as the houris of the East through pleasure raise up martyrs in their young votaries. She gave him his dreamy imagination, his almost feminine soul, his tender accents, his passion for nature. Her pensive fancy imparted to him enthusiasm,—the enthusiasm of women, of young men, of lovers, of all the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy of his day. She gave him the world, and he proved ungrateful…. She gave him fame, and he bequeathed opprobrium…. But posterity should be grateful to them, and forgive a weakness that gave us the prophet of liberty. When Rousseau wrote those odious pages against his benefactress, he was no longer Rousseau, he was a poor madman. Who knows if his morbid and disordered imagination, which made him at that time see an insult in every benefit and hatred in all friendship, did not show him likewise the courtesan in the loving woman, and wantonness instead of love? I have always suspected it. I defy any rational man to recompose, with a semblance of probability, the character Rousseau gives to the woman he loved, from the contradictory elements which he describes in her. Those elements exclude each other: if she had soul enough to adore Rousseau, she did not at the same time love Claude Anet; if she grieved for Claude Anet and Rousseau, she did not love the young hair-dresser. If she was pious she did not glory in her weakness, but must have deplored it; if engaging, handsome, and frail, as Rousseau depicts her, she could not be reduced to look for admirers among the vagrants of the streets, or on the highways. If she affected devotion with such a life, she was a calculating hypocrite; and if a hypocrite, she was not the frank, open, and unreserved creature of the "Confessions." The likeness cannot be true; it is a fancy head and a fancy heart. There is some hidden mystery here, which must be attributed rather to the misguided hand of the artist than to the nature of the woman whom he wished to represent. We must neither accuse the painter whose discernment was at that time impaired, nor believe in the portrait which has disfigured the sketch he at first made of an adorable creature.

For my part I never could believe that Madame de Warens would have recognized herself in the questionable pages of Rousseau's old age. In my fancy, I have always restored her to what she was, or what she appeared at Annecy to the young poet,—lovely, feeling, tender, frail though really pious, prodigal of kindness, thirsting after love, and desirous of blending the tender names of mother and of mistress in her affection for the youth that Providence had confided to her, and whom her love had adopted. This is the true portrait, such as the old men of Chambéry and Annecy have told me that their fathers had transmitted to them. Rousseau's mind itself bears witness against his own accusations. Whence would he have derived his sublime and tender piety, his feminine melancholy, his exquisite and delicate touches of feeling, if a woman had not bestowed them with her heart. No, the woman who called into existence such a man was not a cynical courtesan, but rather a fallen Héloise—an Héloise fallen by love and not by vice or depravity. I appeal from Rousseau the morose old man, calumniating human nature, to Rousseau, the young and ardent lover; and when I go, as I often do, to muse at Les Charmettes, I seek a Madame de Warens far more touching and attractive in my imagination than in his.

XLIV.

A poor woman made us some fire in Madame de Warens' room; accustomed to the visit of strangers, and to their long conversations on the scene of the early days of a celebrated man, she attended to her usual work in the kitchen and in the yard, and left us at liberty to warm ourselves, or to saunter backwards and forwards from the house to the garden. This little sunny garden, surrounded by a wall which separated it from the vineyards, and overrun with nettles, mallows, and weeds of all kinds, resembled one of those village churchyards where the peasants assemble to bask in the rays of the sun, leaning against the church-walls, with their feet on the graves of the dead. The walks, so neatly gravelled once, were now covered with damp earth and yellow moss, and showed the neglect that had followed on absence. How we would have wished to discover the print of the footsteps of Madame de Warens, when she used to go, basket in hand, from tree to tree, from vine to vine, gathering the pears of the orchard or the grapes of the vineyard, and indulging in merry frolic with, the pupil or the confessor. But there is no trace of them in their house, save their memory. That is enough; their name, their remembrance, their image, the sun they saw, the air they breathed, which seems still beaming with their youth, warm with their breath, and filled with their voices, give one back the light, the dreams, the sounds, which shed enchantment round their spring of life.

I saw by Julie's pensive countenance, and her silent thoughtfulness, that the sight of this sanctuary of love and genius impressed her as deeply as myself. At times she shunned me, and remained wrapped in her own thoughts as if she feared to communicate them; she would go into the house to warm herself when I was in the garden, and return to sit on the stone bench in the arbor when I joined her at the fireside. At length I went to her in the arbor; the last yellow leaves hung loosely from the vine, and allowed the sun to penetrate and envelop her with its rays.

"What is it you wish to think of without me?" I said in a tone of tender reproach. "Do I ever think alone?" "Alas!" she answered, "you will not believe me, but I was thinking, that I could wish to be Madame de Warens for you, during one single season, even though I were to be forsaken for the remainder of my days, and though shame were to attach to my memory like hers; even though you proved yourself as ungrateful and calumniating as Rousseau!…. How happy she was," she continued, gazing up at the sky as though she sought the image of the strange creature she envied,—"how happy she was! she sacrificed herself for him she loved."

"What ingratitude and what profanation of yourself and of our happiness!" I answered, walking slowly back with her towards the house, upon the dry leaves, that rustled beneath our feet.

"Have I then ever, by a single word, or look, or by a single sigh, shown that aught was wanting to my bitter but complete felicity? Cannot you, in your angelic fancy, imagine for another Rousseau (if Nature could have produced two) another Madame de Warens?—a Madame de Warens, young and pure, angel, lover, sister, all at once, bestowing her whole soul, her immaculate and immortal soul, instead of her perishable charms; bestowing it on a brother who was lost and is found, who was young, misled, and wandering too in this world, like the son of the watch-maker; throwing open to that brother, instead of her house and garden, the bright treasures of her affection, purifying him in her rays, cleansing him from his first pollutions by her tears, deterring him forever from any grosser pleasure than that of inward possession and contemplation, teaching him to value his very privations far above the sensual enjoyment that man shares with brutes, pointing out to him his course through life, inciting him to glory and to virtue, and rewarding his sacrifices by this one thought,—that fame, virtue, and sacrifices were all taken into account in the heart of his beloved, all accumulate in her love, are multiplied by her gratitude, and are added to that treasure of tenderness which is ever increasing here below, to be expended only in heaven?"