The Minister's Wooing

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Madame de Frontignac laid her forehead on Mary’s knee, and her long chestnut hair drooped down over her face.

‘He was going somewhere with my husband, to explore out in the regions of the Ohio, where he had some splendid schemes of founding a state; and I was all interest; and one day, as they were preparing, Monsieur de Frontignac gave me a quantity of papers to read and arrange, and among them was a part of a letter; I never could imagine how it got there; it was to one of his confidential friends; I read it at first, wondering what it meant, till I came to two or three sentences about me.’ Madame de Frontignac paused a moment; and then said, rising with sudden energy, ‘Mary, that man never loved me; he cannot love; he does not know what love is; what I felt he cannot know; he cannot even dream of it, because he never felt anything like it; such men never know us women; we are as high as heaven above them; it is true enough that my heart was wholly in his power, but why? Because I adored him as something divine, incapable of dishonour, incapable of selfishness, incapable of even a thought that was not perfectly noble and heroic. If he had been all that, I would have been proud to have been even a poor little flower that should exhale away, to give him an hour’s pleasure; I would have offered my whole life to God as a sacrifice for such a glorious soul; and all this time, what was he thinking of me?

‘He was using my feelings to carry his plans; he was admiring me like a picture; he was considering what he should do with me; and were it not for his interests with my husband, he would have tried his power to make me sacrifice this world and the next to his pleasure. But he does not know me. My mother was a Montmorenci, and I have the blood of her house in my veins; we are princesses; we can give all; but he must be a god that we give it for.’

Mary’s enchanted eye followed the beautiful narrator, as she enacted before her this poetry and tragedy of real life, so much beyond what dramatic art can ever furnish. Her eyes grew splendid in their depths and brilliancy; sometimes they were full of tears, and sometimes they flashed out like lightnings; her whole form seemed to be a plastic vehicle which translated every emotion of her soul; and Mary sat and looked at her with the intense absorption that one gives to the highest and deepest in art or nature.

‘Enfin—que faire?’ she said at last, suddenly stopping, and drooping in every limb. ‘Mary, I have lived on this dream so long—never thought of anything else—now all is gone, and what shall I do? I think,’ she added, pointing to the nest in the tree, ‘Mary, I see my life in many things. My heart was once still and quiet, like the round little eggs that were in your nest,—now it has broken out of its shell, and cries with cold and hunger: I want my dream again,—I wish it all back,—or that my heart could go back into its shell. If I only could drop this year out of my life, and care for nothing, as I used to,—I have tried to do that—I can’t—I cannot get back where I was before.’

‘Would you do it, dear Verginie,’ said Mary; ‘would you if you could?’

‘It was very noble and sweet, all that,’ said Verginie; ‘it gave me higher thoughts than ever I had before. I think my feelings were beautiful,—but now they are like little birds that have no mother—they kill me with their crying.’

‘Dear Verginie, there is a real friend in heaven, who is all you can ask or think,—nobler, better, purer, who cannot change, and cannot die, and who loved you and gave himself for you.’

‘You mean Jesus,’ said Verginie. ‘Ah, I know it; and I say the offices to him daily, but my heart is very wild and starts away from my words. I say, “My God, I give myself to you,”—and after all, I don’t give myself, and I don’t feel comforted. Dear Mary, you must have suffered too—for you loved really—I saw it,—when we feel a thing ourselves we can see very quick the same in others,—and it was a dreadful blow to come so all at once.’