She and he; Lavinia; Memoir

by George Sand

Another consideration, too, which Laurent made the most of in his defence, and which seemed more weighty, was this, which he had already suggested in his letters.

"Probably," he said to her, "I was ill, although I did not know it, when I wronged you the first time. A brain-fever seems to strike you like the lightning, and yet it is impossible to believe that in a young, strong man there has not taken place, perhaps long beforehand, a terrible revolution by which his reason has already been disturbed, and under which his will has been unable to react. Is not that just what took place in me, my poor Thérèse, when that sickness was coming on which nearly killed me? Neither you nor I could understand it; and, as for myself, it often happened that I woke in the morning and thought of your grief of the preceding day, unable to distinguish between the dreams I had just dreamed and the reality. You know that I could not work, that the place where we were aroused an unhealthy aversion in my mind, that I had had an extraordinary hallucination in the forest of ——; and that, when you gently reproached me for certain cruel words and certain unjust accusations, I listened to you with a dazed air, thinking that you were the one who had dreamed it all. Poor woman! I accused you of being mad! You must see that I was mad, and can you not forgive involuntary offences? Compare my conduct after my illness with what it was before! Was it not like a reawakening of my heart? Did you not suddenly find me as trustful, as submissive, as devoted, as I had been cynical, irritable, and selfish, before that crisis which restored me to my senses? And have you had any reason to reproach me from that moment? Did I not bow to your marriage to Palmer as a punishment I had earned? You saw me almost dead with grief at the thought that I was going to lose you forever: did I say a word against your fiancé? If you had bade me run after him, and even to blow out my own brains in order to bring him back to you, I would have done it, so absolutely do my heart and my life belong to you! Do you want me to do it now? If my existence embarrasses you or makes you unhappy, say but a word, I am ready to put an end to it. Say a word, Thérèse, and you will never again hear the name of this wretched creature, who has no other desire than to live or die for you."

Thérèse's character had grown weaker in this twofold love, which, in fact, had been simply two acts of the same drama; except for that outraged, shattered passion, Palmer would never have thought of marrying her, and the effort that she had made to pledge herself to him was, perhaps, nothing more than the reaction of despair. Laurent had never disappeared from her life, since Palmer's constant argument, in seeking to convince her, had been to refer to the deplorable results of that liaison which he wished to make her forget and which he seemed fatally impelled to recall to her mind over and over again.

And then the renewal of friendship after the rupture had been, so far as Laurent was concerned, a genuine renewal of passion; whereas, to Thérèse, it had been a new phase of devotion, more refined and more touching than love itself. She had suffered from Palmer's desertion, but not in a cowardly way. She still had strength to meet injustice; indeed, we may say that was her whole strength. She was not one of those women who are everlastingly suffering and complaining, overflowing with useless regrets and insatiable longings. A violent reaction was taking place in her, and her intelligence, which was abundantly developed, naturally helped it on. She conceived an exalted idea of moral liberty, and when another's love and faith failed her, she had the righteous pride not to dispute the tattered compact, shred by shred. She even took pleasure in the idea of restoring freedom and repose, generously and without reproach, to whoever reclaimed them.

But she had become much weaker than in her earlier womanhood, in the sense that she had recovered the craving to love and to have faith, which had been long benumbed by a disaster of exceptional severity. She had fancied for a long time that she could live thus, and that art would be her only passion. She had made a mistake, and she could no longer indulge in any illusions concerning the future. It was necessary for her to love, and her greatest misfortune was that it was necessary for her to love gently and self-sacrificingly, and to satisfy at any price the maternal impulse which was, as it were, a fatal element of her nature and her life. She had become accustomed to suffering for some one, she longed to suffer still, and if that longing, strange, it is true, but well characterized in certain women, and in certain men as well, had made her less merciful to Palmer than to Laurent, it was because Palmer had seemed to her too strong himself to need her devotion. So that Palmer had erred in offering her support and consolation. Thérèse had missed the feeling that she was necessary to that man, who wished her to think of no one but herself.

Laurent, who was more ingenuous, had that peculiar charm of which she was fatally enamored—weakness! He made no secret of it, he proclaimed that touching infirmity of his genius with transports of sincerity and inexhaustible emotion. Alas! he, too, erred. He was not really weak, any more than Palmer was really strong. He had his hours, he always talked like a child of heaven, and as soon as his weakness had won the day, he recovered his strength to make others suffer, as is the wont of all the children whom we adore.

Laurent was in the clutches of an inexorable fatality. He said so himself in his lucid moments. It seemed as if, born of the intercourse of two angels, he had nursed at the breast of a Fury, and had retained in his blood a leaven of frenzy and despair. He was one of those persons, more plentiful than is generally supposed in the human race, in both sexes, who, although endowed with all sublimity of thought and all the noble impulses of the heart, never attain the full extent of their faculties without falling at once into a sort of intellectual epilepsy.

And then, too, he was, like Palmer, inclined to undertake the impossible, which is to try to graft happiness upon despair, and to taste the divine joys of conjugal faith and of sacred friendship upon the ruins of a newly devastated past. Those two hearts, bleeding from the wounds they had received, were sadly in need of repose: Thérèse implored it with the sorrow born of a ghastly presentiment; but Laurent fancied that he had lived ten centuries during the ten months of their separation, and he became ill with the exuberance of a desire of the heart, which should have terrified Thérèse more than a desire of the senses.

Unfortunately, she allowed herself to be reassured by the nature of that desire. Laurent seemed to be so far regenerated as to have restored moral love to the place it should occupy in the front rank, and he was once more alone with Thérèse, but did not worry her as before by his outbreaks of frenzy. He was able to talk with her for hours at a time with the most sublime affection—he who had long believed that he was dumb, he said, and who at last felt his genius spreading its wings and taking its flight to a loftier realm! He made himself a part of Thérèse's future by constantly pointing out to her that she had a sacred duty to perform toward him, the duty of sheltering him from the mad impulses of youth, from the unworthy ambitions of middle life, and the depraved selfishness of old age. He talked to her of himself, always of himself. Why not? He talked so well! Through her means, he would be a great artist, a great heart, a great man; she owed him that, because she had saved his life! And Thérèse, with the fatal simplicity of loving hearts, came at last to look upon this reasoning as irrefutable, and to regard as a duty what she had at first been implored to grant as a proof of forgiveness.

So Thérèse at last consented to weld anew that fatal chain; but she was happily inspired to postpone the marriage, desiring to test Laurent's resolution on that point, and fearing an irrevocable engagement for his sake. If her own happiness alone had been involved, the imprudent creature would have bound herself forever.