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

by George Sand

A few days of this judicious conduct served to restore my tranquillity. I had never been more manly, more cheerful, and, as Salomé said, more comely than in my neat and modest clothes, with my amiable expression and my sun-burned hands. Everybody had accorded me confidence and esteem once more, and I was again the recipient of the innumerable little attentions which I formerly enjoyed. Pretty Alezia, who had the greatest respect for the judgment of her Jewish governess, allowed me to kiss the ends of her black braids, embellished with scarlet ribbons and fine pearls.

A single person remained depressed and unhappy—the signora herself. I constantly surprised her lovely blue eyes, filled with tears, fastened upon me with an indescribable expression of affection and grief. She could not accustom herself to see me working so. If I had been her own son she could not have been more grieved to see me carrying burdens and standing in the rain. Indeed, her solicitude vexed me a little, and the efforts she made to conceal it made it even more painful to her. An entirely unforeseen revolution of sentiment had taken place in her. That love which had hitherto been, as she herself told me, her torment and her joy, seemed now to cause her naught but shame and consternation. She no longer avoided opportunities to be alone with me, as she used to do; on the contrary, she sought them; but, as soon as I knelt at her feet, she would burst into sobs and change the hours promised to the joys of love into hours of painful emotion. I strove in vain to understand what was taking place in her heart. I could obtain nothing but vague replies, always kind and affectionate, but incoherent, which caused me the utmost perplexity. I had no idea what to do to comfort her and strengthen that discouraged heart. I was consumed by desire, and it seemed to me that an hour of mutual effusion and passion would have been more eloquent than all that talk and all those tears; but I felt too much respect and devotion for her not to sacrifice my transports of passion to her. I felt that it would be very easy to take her by surprise, weak as she was in body and mind; but I dreaded the tears of the next day too much, and I wished to owe my happiness to her confidence and love alone. That day did not come, and I must say, to the discredit of feminine weakness, that, if I had shown less delicacy and unselfishness, my desires would have been fully gratified. I had hoped that Bianca would encourage me; I soon discovered that, on the contrary, she was afraid of me, and that she shuddered at my approach, as if crime and remorse approached with me. I succeeded in reassuring her only to see her plunge into still deeper dejection, and upbraid fate, as if it had not been in her power to put a better face upon her destiny. Then, too, a secret sense of shame helped to crush that shrinking heart. Religion took possession of her more and more completely; her confessor controlled her and terrified her. He forbade her to have lovers, and, although she resisted him when it was a question of Signor Lanfranchi and Signor Montalegri, she had not the same courage with respect to me. I succeeded little by little in extorting from her a confession of all her sufferings and internal struggles. She had confessed to the confessor all the details of our love, and he had declared that that low, criminal affection was a heinous crime. He had forbidden her to think of marriage with me, even more peremptorily than to give way to her passion; and he had frightened her so by threatening to cast her out from the bosom of the Church, that her gentle, timid mind, torn between the desire to make me happy and the fear of destroying her own soul, was suffering veritable agony.

Hitherto Signora Aldini's piety had been so pliant, so tolerant, so truly Italian, that I was not a little surprised to see it become serious just at the height of one of those paroxysms of passion which seem most inconsistent with such changes. I worked hard with my poor inexperienced brain to understand this phenomenon, and I succeeded. Bianca probably loved me more than she had loved the count and the prince; but she had not sufficient courage nor a sufficiently enlightened mind to rise above public opinion. She complained of the arrogance of other people; but she gave real value to that arrogance by her fear of it. In a word, she was more submissive than anybody else to the prejudice which she had attempted for an instant to defy. She had hoped to find in the church, through the sacrament, and by redoubling her pious fervor, the strength which she failed to find in herself, and which she had not needed with her former lovers, because they were patricians and society was on their side. But now the church threatened her, society would heap maledictions upon her; to fight against the church and society at the same time was a task beyond her strength.

Then too, it may be that her love subsided as soon as I became worthy of it; perhaps, instead of appreciating the grandeur of soul which had led me to descend of my own motion from the salon to the servant's quarters, she had fancied that she could detect in that courageous behavior a lack of dignity and an inborn liking for servitude. She believed too that the threats and sarcasms of her other servants had frightened me. She was astonished to find that I was not ambitious, and that very absence of ambition seemed to her an indication of an inert or timid spirit. She did not admit all this to me; but as soon as I was once on the track I divined it all. I was not angry. How could she understand my noble pride and my sensitive honor, she who had accepted and returned the love of an Aldini and a Lanfranchi?

Doubtless she ceased to consider me handsome when I refused to wear lace and ribbons. My hands, calloused in her service, no longer seemed to her worthy to press hers. She had loved me as a gondolier, in the thought and hope of transforming me into an attractive cicisbeo; but the instant that I insisted upon reverting to the system of a fair exchange of services between her and myself, all her illusions vanished, and she saw in me only the vulgar fisherman's son of Chioggia, a species of stupid and hard-working beast of burden.

As these discoveries cleared the mists away from my mind, the violence of my passions diminished. If I had had to deal with a great soul, or even with a forceful nature, it would have been in my eyes a glorious task to efface the distressing memories left behind in that heart by my predecessors. But to succeed such men simply to be misunderstood, and in all probability to be some day cast aside and forgotten like them, was a happiness which I no longer cared to purchase at the cost of an enormous expenditure of passion and will-power. Signora Aldini was a sweet and lovely woman; but could I not find in a cottage at Chioggia beauty and sweetness united, without causing tears to flow, without causing remorse, and above all without leaving shame behind me?

My mind was soon made up. I resolved not only to leave the signora, but to cease to be a servant. So long as I had been in love with her harp and her person, I had had no time to reflect seriously on my condition. But, as soon as I abandoned my foolish aspirations, I realized how difficult it is to retain one's dignity unimpaired under the protection of the great, and I recalled the salutary arguments which my father had urged upon me, and to which I had paid little heed.

When I gave her an inkling of my purpose, I saw, although she opposed it, that she was greatly relieved; happiness might return and dwell once more in that affectionate and beneficent heart. The charming frivolity which was the basis of her character would reappear on the surface with the first lover who should be able to push aside her confessor, her servants, and society. A great passion would have shattered her system; a succession of mild passions and a multitude of lukewarm attachments would keep her alive in her natural element.

I forced her to admit all that I had divined. She had never studied herself very much, and she was always most sincere. If there was no heroism in her character, neither was there any pretension to heroism, nor the overbearing despotism which is its consequence. She approved my determination, but she wept and was dismayed at the thought of the blank my departure would leave in her life; for she loved me still, I am sure, with all the strength of her nature.

She attempted to worry and fret about what was to become of me. I would not allow it. The abrupt and haughty tone in which I interrupted her when she spoke of offering her services closed her mouth once for all in that respect. I would not even take the clothes she had had made for me. On the day before I was to take my leave, I purchased the complete outfit of a sailor of Chioggia, new, but of the coarsest materials; and in that guise I appeared before her for the last time.