She and he; Lavinia; Memoir

by George Sand

Palmer had to submit, and he submitted with a good grace. He hoped to regain Thérèse's confidence, which he felt that he had shaken by his own fault.

[X]

A few days later, Thérèse received a letter from Geneva. Laurent accused himself, in writing, of all that he had previously accused himself of in speech, as if he had determined to perpetuate thus the testimony of his repentance.

"No," he wrote, "I was not capable of deserving you. I was unworthy of such a generous, pure, and unselfish affection. I tired out your patience, O my sister, my mother! Even the angels would have been tired of me! Ah! Thérèse, as I return to health and life, my memory becomes clearer, and I look into my past as into a mirror, which shows me the spectre of a man whom I once knew, but whom I no longer understand. Surely, that poor devil was mad; don't you think, Thérèse, that, as I drew nearer to that ghastly physical illness from which you saved me, I may have been, even three or four months beforehand, in the grasp of a moral illness which took from me all consciousness of my words and my acts? Ah! if that were so, should you not have forgiven me? But what I am saying lacks common-sense, alas! What is wrong-doing, if not a moral malady? Could not the man who kills his father allege the same excuse that I do? Good, evil—this is the first time that idea has ever bothered me. Before I knew you and made you suffer, my poor love, I had never thought of it. Evil was to my mind a monster of low estate, the apocalyptic beast that soils with his hideous caresses the offscourings of mankind in the unhealthy bogs of society; could evil come near me, the man of fashion, the Parisian beau, the son of the Muses? Ah! fool that I was, I imagined, because my beard was perfumed and my hands neatly gloved, that my caresses would purify the great harlot of the nations, debauchery, my fiancée, who had bound me to her with chains as noble as those with which convicts are bound in the galleys! And I sacrificed you, my poor, sweet mistress, in my brutal egotism, and after that I held my head erect, saying: 'It was my right, she belonged to me; nothing that I have the right to do can be evil!'—Ah! miserable, miserable creature that I am! my behavior was criminal; and I never suspected it! Nothing would make me understand it but to lose you, you, my only treasure, the only mortal who had ever loved me and who was capable of loving the insane and ungrateful child that I was! Not until I saw my guardian angel veil her face and resume her flight heavenward did I realize that I was forever alone and abandoned on earth!"

A large part of this first letter was written in a lofty tone, the sincerity of which was confirmed by realistic touches and abrupt changes of manner, characteristic of Laurent.

"Would you believe that, on my arrival at Geneva, the first thing that I did, even before I thought of writing to you, was to go out and buy a waistcoat? Yes, a summer waistcoat, a very pretty one, on my word, and very well made, which I found at a French tailor's,—a most agreeable find for a traveller in great haste to leave this city of watchmakers and naturalists! Behold me, therefore, parading the streets of Geneva, delighted with my new waistcoat, and halting in front of a book-shop where an edition of Byron, bound in exquisite taste, offered an irresistible temptation to me. What am I to read while travelling? I cannot endure books of travel, unless they treat of countries which I shall never be able to visit. I prefer the poets, who take you into the world of their dreams, and I purchased this edition. And then I followed aimlessly a very pretty girl in a short dress who passed me, and whose ankle seemed to me a masterpiece of jointing. I followed her, thinking much more of my waistcoat than of her. Suddenly she turned to the right and I to the left without noticing it, and I found myself back at my hotel, where, as I went to put my new books in my trunk, I discovered the double violets that you strewed in my cabin on the Ferruccio when we parted. I picked them up, one by one, with great care, and kept them as a relic; but they made me weep like a waterspout, and, glancing at my new waistcoat, which had been the principal event of my morning, I said to myself:

"'And yet this is the child that poor woman loved!'"

Elsewhere he said:

"You made me promise to take care of my health. 'As it was I who gave it back to you,' you said, 'it belongs to me in a measure, and I have the right to forbid you to throw it away.'—Alas! my Thérèse, what do you expect me to do with this infernal health, which begins to intoxicate me like new wine? The spring is at hand, it is the season for loving, I know; but is it in my power to love? You were unable to inspire true love in my heart, and do you suppose that I shall meet a woman capable of performing the miracle that you could not perform? Where am I to find this magician? In society? No, surely not: there are no women there but those who do not choose to risk or sacrifice anything. They are quite right, no doubt, and you could tell them, my poor dear, that those for whom a woman sacrifices herself seldom deserve it; but it is not my fault if I can no more readily make up my mind to share with a husband than with a lover. But should I love a maiden? and marry her? Oh! surely, Thérèse, you cannot think of that without laughing—or without trembling. Think of me, chained by the law, when even my own desires are powerless to chain me!

"I once had a friend who loved a grisette and who believed that she was true to him. I paid court to that faithful light-o'-love, and she was mine for a green parrot which her lover would not give her. She said, artlessly: 'Dame! 'tis his own fault; why didn't he give me that parrot!' And from that day I have sworn never to love a kept woman, that is to say, a woman who longs for everything her lover does not give her.

"Thus, in the way of mistresses, there seems to be nothing left but an adventuress, such as we meet on the high-roads, who are all born princesses but have had misfortunes. Too many misfortunes, thank you! I am not rich enough to fill the gulf of those past lives.—A famous actress? That idea has often tempted me; but my mistress must renounce the public, and the public is a lover that I do not feel the strength to replace. No, no, Thérèse, I cannot love! I ask too much, and I ask what I cannot give back; so I shall have to return to my former life. I prefer that, because your image in my heart will never be contaminated by possible comparisons. Why should my life not be arranged thus: women for the passions, and a mistress for my heart? It is not in your power nor in mine, Thérèse, to effect that you should be that mistress, that ideal which I have dreamed of, lost, and wept for, and of which I dream now more longingly than ever. I will never suggest such a thing to you, for you may take offence. I will love you in my secret thoughts so that no one will know it and no other woman can ever say: 'I have replaced that Thérèse!'

"My dear, you must grant me a favor which you denied me during those last dear, sweet days that we passed together; you must tell me something of Palmer. You have thought that would increase my pain. But you are mistaken. It would have killed me the first time that I questioned you about him angrily; I was still sick and a little mad; but, when my reason returned, when you let me guess the secret that you were not obliged to confide to me, I felt, in the midst of my grief, that by being reconciled to your happiness I should atone for all my wrong-doing. I watched closely your manner when you were together; I saw that he loved you passionately, and that he seemed, nevertheless, to have a fatherly affection for me. That was too much for me, Thérèse. I had no conception of such generosity, such grandeur in love. Lucky Palmer! how sure he is of you, how fully he understands you, and consequently deserves you! It reminded me of the time when I said to you: 'Love Palmer, you will do me a great favor!'—Ah! what a hateful sentiment I had in my heart at that time! I longed to be delivered from your love, which overwhelmed me with remorse, and yet, if you had answered me then: 'I do love him,' I would have killed you!

"And he, that great, warm heart, already loved you, and was not afraid to devote his life to you, when perhaps you still loved me! Under such circumstances, I would never have dared to take the risk. I had too large a dose of that pride which we parade so haughtily, we men of the world, and which was invented by fools to prevent us from striving to win happiness at any risk to ourselves, or from even knowing enough to grasp it when it is slipping from us.

"Yes, I propose to confess to the end, my poor dear. When I said to you: 'Love Palmer,' I believed, at times, that you already loved him, and that is what finally drew me apart from you. In the last days, there were many hours when I was on the point of throwing myself at your feet; I was kept from it by this thought: 'It is too late, she loves another. It was my wish, but she should not have consented. Therefore she is unworthy of me!'

"That is how I reasoned in my madness, and yet I am sure now that if I had come back to you in all sincerity, even though you had begun to love Dick, you would have sacrificed him to me. You would have entered anew upon that martyrdom which I forced on you. Tell me, did I not do well to run away? I felt that I did, when I left you. Yes, Thérèse, that was what gave me strength to run away to Florence without a word to you. I felt that I was killing you day by day, and that there was no other way to undo the wrong I had done you than to leave you with a man who really loved you.

"That was what sustained my courage at Spezzia, too, during that day when I might have made another attempt to obtain my pardon; but that detestable thought did not once occur to me, I give you my word, my friend. I don't know whether you had told that boatman not to lose sight of us; but it was quite unnecessary. I would have thrown myself into the sea rather than try to betray the confidence in me which Palmer displayed in leaving us together.

"Say to him, then, that I love him dearly, as much as I can love. Tell him that it is to him as much as to you that I am indebted for having condemned and executed myself as I have done. I suffered terribly, God knows, in committing that suicide of the old man! But I am proud of myself now. All my former friends would consider that I had been a fool or a coward not to try to kill my rival in a duel, and then to abandon the woman who had betrayed me, spitting in her face. Yes, Thérèse, that is the judgment which I myself should probably have pronounced upon another man for conducting himself as I have conducted myself toward you and Palmer with so much resolution and delight. I am not a brute, thank God! I am not good for much, but I understand how little I am good for, and I do myself justice.

"So write me about Palmer, and do not be afraid that it will hurt me; far from it; it will be my consolation in my hours of spleen. It will be my strength, too; for your poor child is still sadly weak, and, when he begins to think of what he might have been and what he actually is to you, his head becomes still more confused. But tell me that you are happy, and I will say, proudly: 'I might have disturbed, combated, and perhaps destroyed her happiness; I did not do it. So it is my work to some extent, and I am entitled now to Thérèse's friendship."

Thérèse replied affectionately to her poor child. That was the title under which he was thenceforth buried and, as it were, embalmed in the sanctuary of the past. Thérèse loved Palmer; at least, she wished to love him, and believed that she did. It did not seem to her that she could ever regret the time when, as she afterward said, she looked up every morning when she woke to see if the house were not falling about her ears.