The Piccinino, Volume 2 (of 2); The last of Aldinis

by George Sand

"Dear signora, I beg you to go on."

"Very well! Understand that I have never forgotten that incident: that it has caused all the sorrows and all the joys of my life. I realized that I must never question my mother on the subject nor mention it to anyone. You are the first person to whom I have ever told it, not excepting my dear nurse Salomé, or my foster sister Lila, to whom I tell everything. My pride suffered from my mother's error, which seemed to rebound upon me. However, I adored her just the same. Perhaps, indeed, I loved her all the more, the more I felt that she was weak and exposed to the secret maledictions of my relatives on my father's side. But my hatred for the common people increased in the same proportion as my love for her.

"My sentiments remained unchanged until I was fourteen years old, and my mother had apparently ceased to pay any heed to them. In the bottom of her heart she was pained by my contempt for the lower classes, and one day she made up her mind to reproach me timidly on that subject. I made no reply, which must have surprised her, for I was in the habit of arguing obstinately with everybody and on every subject. But I felt that there was a mountain between my mother and myself, and that we could not argue impartially on either side. Seeing that I listened to her reproaches with extraordinary resignation, she took me on her knees, and, fondling me with unutterable affection, talked to me about my father in the most unexceptionable terms; but she told me many things that I did not know. I had always retained a sort of enthusiastic respect, entirely without foundation, for that father of mine, whom I had hardly known. When I learned that he had married my poor mother solely for her fortune, and that, after marrying her, he had looked down on her because of her obscure birth and inferior education, there was a great reaction in my heart, and I soon hated him as intensely as I had loved him. My mother said many other things which seemed very strange to me and impressed me deeply, concerning the misfortune of marrying purely for convenience; and I fancied that I could see that she was not much happier with her new husband than she had been with him of whom she was speaking to me.

"This conversation made a profound impression on me, and I began to reflect upon the necessity of making marriage a matter of business, and upon the humiliation of being courted because of a name or a dowry. I resolved not to marry, and some time afterward, as I was talking with my mother again, I made known my determination to her, thinking that she would approve of it. She smiled and said that the time was not far away when my heart would feel the need of a different love from hers. I assured her of the contrary; but by slow degrees I came to realize that I had spoken rashly; for I was assailed by the most intolerable ennui when we laid aside our pleasant and secluded life at Venice, to travel about and mingle in the brilliant society of other cities. Then, as I was very tall and very far advanced for my years, it seemed as if I had hardly ceased to be a child before they were already talking to me about choosing a husband and about an establishment; and every day I overheard discussions as to the merits and drawbacks of some new suitor. I had not as yet felt the repugnance and terror which men without heart or mind inspire in well-born women. I was hard to suit. Having lived always with such a dear mother and been idolized by her, what a paragon of a man I must have met in order not to regret most bitterly her gentle yoke and her loving protection! My pride, already so irritable in itself, became more and more sensitive every day at the appearance of the vain, stilted, empty-headed creatures who presumed to pay court to me. I clung to the virtues of noble birth, because I had imagined up to that time that illustrious families were superior to others in courage, merit, courtesy and liberality. I had not seen the nobility except in the portrait gallery of the Aldini Palace. There my ancestors appeared before me in all their glory, with all their great feats of arms or pious deeds recorded on oaken bas-reliefs. This one had ransomed three hundred slaves from barbarian pirates and bestowed true religion and freedom upon them; that one had sacrificed all his property in war for the salvation of his country; a third had shed all his blood for her on some glorious field. So that my admiration for them was justifiable, and I felt that the blood in my veins was no less warm and generous than theirs. But how shockingly the descendants of other patricians seemed to me to have degenerated! They retained none of the qualities of their race except insufferable incompetency and sickening presumption. I asked myself what had become of the nobility; I found it only on armorial bearings and on the doorways of palaces. I determined to become a nun, and I urged my mother so persistently to allow me to enter a convent, that she consented. She wept bitterly when she left me there. Prince Grimani approved of my whim; for since he had unearthed, in some corner of Lombardy, a sort of nephew who might become rich at my expense, and bear magnificently, thanks to my dowry, the imperishable name of Grimani, his only thought was to make me obedient to his wishes, and he flattered himself that religion would make my character more pliable. What fervent piety, what a thirst for martyrdom one must have in order to accept Hector! They took me away from the convent three months ago; the fact is that I was dying with ennui there, and the rigid discipline to which I had to submit was beyond my strength. And then I was so happy to return to my mother and she to have me with her! But six weeks of convent life had wrought a great change in my ideas. I had come to understand Jesus, to whom I had always prayed with my lips alone. In my hours of solitude, in church, in the earnest outpouring of my heart in prayer, I had learned that the son of Mary was the friend of the hard-working poor, and that he had justly scorned the grandeurs of this world. And how shall I tell you? at the same time that I opened my heart to new sympathies, the thing that in my childhood I used mentally to call my mother's shame presented itself to me under very different colors, and I thought of it only with deep emotion. What took place within me? I cannot say; but I said to myself: 'If I should do as mamma did, if I should fall in love with a man of a different station in life from my own, the whole world would throw stones at me, all except mamma.' She would take me in her arms, and hiding my blushes in her bosom she would say: 'Obey your heart, so that you may be happier than I was after breaking mine.'—You are touched, Lelio! O heaven! it was a tear that just fell on my hand. You are beaten, my dear! You see that I am neither mad, nor wicked; now you will say yes, and you will come and take me to-morrow. Swear it!"

I tried to speak, but I could not find a word; I was shuddering from head to foot. I felt as if I were about to faint. With her eyes fixed upon me she anxiously awaited my reply. For my own part, I was completely crushed. At the very first words of her story, I had been struck by its strange resemblance to my own; but when she came to those incidents which it was impossible for me not to recognize, I was completely bewildered and dazzled, as if the lightning had struck close beside me. A thousand conflicting and sinister thoughts took possession of my brain. I saw images of crime and despair fluttering about before me like ghosts. Deeply moved by the memory of what had been, appalled at the thought of what might be, I imagined myself the mother's lover and the daughter's husband at the same time. Alezia, that child whom I had seen in her cradle, stood before me, talking in the same breath of her love and her mother's.

A world of recollections crowded into my mind, and little Alezia appeared there as the object, even then, of a timid and unjoyful affection. I recalled her pride, her hatred of me, and the words she had said to me one day when she saw her father's ring on my finger. "Who can say," I thought, "that she has renounced her prejudices forever? It may be that if she should learn at this moment that I am Nello, her former servant, she would blush for loving me."

"Signora," I said to her, "you used, you say, to be fond of piercing the hearts of your dolls with a long pin. Why did you do that?"

"What do you care? why does that detail impress you particularly?"

"Because my heart aches, and your pins naturally came to my mind."

"I will tell you why it was, to show you that it was not a mere barbarous whim," she replied. "I used to hear it said, when a man did a cowardly thing, 'that's what it is to have no blood in the heart;' and I took that metaphorical expression literally. So when I scolded my dolls, I would say to them: 'you are cowards, and I am going to look and see if you have any blood in your hearts.'"