To Monsieur de Canalis:
My friend,—Suffer me to give you that name,—you have delighted
me; I would not have you other than you are in this letter, the
first—oh, may it not be the last! Who but a poet could have
excused and understood a young girl so delicately?
I wish to speak with the sincerity that dictated the first lines
of your letter. And first, let me say that most fortunately you do
not know me. I can joyfully assure you than I am neither that
hideous Mademoiselle Vilquin nor the very noble and withered
Mademoiselle d’Herouville who floats between twenty and forty
years of age, unable to decide on a satisfactory date. The
Cardinal d’Herouville flourished in the history of the Church at
least a century before the cardinal of whom we boast as our only
family glory,—for I take no account of lieutenant-generals, and
abbes who write trumpery little verses.
Moreover, I do not live in the magnificent villa Vilquin; there is
not in my veins, thank God, the ten-millionth of a drop of that
chilly blood which flows behind a counter. I come on one side from
Germany, on the other from the south of France; my mind has a
Teutonic love of reverie, my blood the vivacity of Provence. I am
noble on my father’s and on my mother’s side. On my mother’s I
derive from every page of the Almanach de Gotha. In short, my
precautions are well taken. It is not in any man’s power, nor even
in the power of the law, to unmask my incognito. I shall remain
veiled, unknown.
As to my person and as to my “belongings,” as the Normans say,
make yourself easy. I am at least as handsome as the little girl
(ignorantly happy) on whom your eyes chanced to light during your
visit to Havre; and I do not call myself poverty-stricken,
although ten sons of peers may not accompany me on my walks. I
have seen the humiliating comedy of the heiress sought for her
millions played on my account. In short, make no attempt, even on
a wager, to reach me. Alas! though free as air, I am watched and
guarded,—by myself, in the first place, and secondly, by people
of nerve and courage who would not hesitate to put a knife in your
heart if you tried to penetrate my retreat. I do not say this to
excite your courage or stimulate your curiosity; I believe I have
no need of such incentives to interest you and attach you to me.
I will now reply to the second edition, considerably enlarged, of
your first sermon.
Will you have a confession? I said to myself when I saw you so
distrustful, and mistaking me for Corinne (whose improvisations
bore me dreadfully), that in all probability dozes of Muses had
already led you, rashly curious, into their valleys, and begged
you to taste the fruits of their boarding-school Parnassus. Oh!
you are perfectly safe with me, my friend; I may love poetry, but
I have no little verses in my pocket-book, and my stockings are,
and will remain, immaculately white. You shall not be pestered
with the “Flowers of my Heart” in one or more volumes. And,
finally, should it ever happen that I say to you the word “Come!”
you will not find—you know it now—an old maid, no, nor a poor
and ugly one.
Ah! my friend, if you only knew how I regret that you came to
Havre! You have lowered the charm of what you call my romance. God
alone knew the treasure I was reserving for the man noble enough,
and trusting enough, and perspicacious enough to come—having
faith in my letters, having penetrated step by step into the
depths of my heart—to come to our first meeting with the
simplicity of a child: for that was what I dreamed to be the
innocence of a man of genius. And now you have spoiled my
treasure! But I forgive you; you live in Paris and, as you say,
there is always a man within a poet.
Because I tell you this will you think me some little girl who
cultivates a garden-full of illusions? You, who are witty and
wise, have you not guessed that when Mademoiselle d’Este received
your pedantic lesson she said to herself: “No, dear poet, my first
letter was not the pebble which a vagabond child flings about the
highway to frighten the owner of the adjacent fruit-trees, but a
net carefully and prudently thrown by a fisherman seated on a rock
above the sea, hoping and expecting a miraculous draught.”
All that you say so beautifully about the family has my approval.
The man who is able to please me, and of whom I believe myself
worthy, will have my heart and my life,—with the consent of my
parents, for I will neither grieve them, nor take them unawares:
happily, I am certain of reigning over them; and, besides, they
are wholly without prejudice. Indeed, in every way, I feel myself
protected against any delusions in my dream. I have built the
fortress with my own hands, and I have let it be fortified by the
boundless devotion of those who watch over me as if I were a
treasure,—not that I am unable to defend myself in the open, if
need be; for, let me say, circumstances have furnished me with
armor of proof on which is engraved the word “Disdain.” I have the
deepest horror of all that is calculating,—of all that is not
pure, disinterested, and wholly noble. I worship the beautiful,
the ideal, without being romantic; though I HAVE been, in my heart
of hearts, in my dreams. But I recognize the truth of the various
things, just even to vulgarity, which you have written me about
Society and social life.
For the time being we are, and we can only be, two friends. Why
seek an unseen friend? you ask. Your person may be unknown to me,
but your mind, your heart I know; they please me, and I feel an
infinitude of thoughts within my soul which need a man of genius
for their confidant. I do not wish the poem of my heart to be
wasted; I would have it known to you as it is to God. What a
precious thing is a true comrade, one to whom we can tell all! You
will surely not reject the unpublished leaflets of a young girl’s
thoughts when they fly to you like the pretty insects fluttering
to the sun? I am sure you have never before met with this good
fortune of the soul,—the honest confidences of an honest girl.
Listen to her prattle; accept the music that she sings to you in
her own heart. Later, if our souls are sisters, if our characters
warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving-man shall await
you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the
castle, the palace—I don’t know yet what sort of bower it will
be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be
possible; but you will admit, will you not? that it is poetic, and
that Mademoiselle d’Este has a complying disposition. Has she not
left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the
salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high
emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time?
No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me
when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I
have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear
friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have
known through the experience of another all the horrors and the
delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can
contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have
no illusions; but I have something better, something real,—I have
beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.
Whoever I marry—provided I choose him for myself—may sleep in
peace or go to the East Indies sure that he will find me on his
return working at the tapestry which I began before he left me;
and in every stitch he shall read a verse of the poem of which he
has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to
follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the
divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why
should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the
life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that
woman be who thwarts the man she loves?—an illness, a disease,
not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour
a pleasure.
But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.
Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an
expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family
life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is
possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as
women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now
no longer a chimera.
Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the
reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable
fortress. I have read your last verses in the “Revue,”—ah! with
what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of
your secret soul.
Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;
that you are her solitary thought,—without a rival except in her
father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject
these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but
yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet
that your confidences—provided they are full and true—will
suffice for the happiness of your
O. d’Este M.
“Good heavens! can I be in love already?” cried the young secretary, when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more than an hour after reading it. “What shall I do? She thinks she is writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?”
Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard. La Briere allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent; and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through pique.
Mademoiselle,—Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in
the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him
if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless
regrets,—showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it
only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?
I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you
have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts. A man
can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines
such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with
so much feeling. Who would not wish to know you after reading your
first confidence? It requires a strong effort on my part to retain
my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble
the head or the heart of man. I therefore make the most of the
little self-possession you have left me to offer you my humble
remonstrances.
Do you really believe, mademoiselle, that letters, more or less
true in relation to the life of the writers, more or less
insincere,—for those which we write to each other are the
expressions of the moment at which we pen them, and not of the
general tenor of our lives,—do you believe, I say, that beautiful
as they may be, they can at all replace the representation that we
could make of ourselves to each other by the revelations of daily
intercourse? Man is dual. There is a life invisible, that of the
heart, to which letters may suffice; and there is a life material,
to which more importance is, alas, attached than you are aware of
at your age. These two existences must, however, be made to
harmonize in the ideal which you cherish; and this, I may remark
in passing, is very rare.
The pure, spontaneous, disinterested homage of a solitary soul
which is both educated and chaste, is one of those celestial
flowers whose color and fragrance console for every grief, for
every wound, for every betrayal which makes up the life of a
literary man; and I thank you with an impulse equal to your own.
But after this poetical exchange of my griefs for the pearls of
your charity, what next? what do you expect? I have neither the
genius nor the splendid position of Lord Byron; above all, I have
not the halo of his fictitious damnation and his false social
woes. But what could you have hoped from him in like
circumstances? His friendship? Well, he who ought to have felt
only pride was eaten up by vanity of every kind,—sickly,
irritable vanity which discouraged friendship. I, a thousand-fold
more insignificant than he, may I not have discordances of
character, and make friendship a burden heavy indeed to bear? In
exchange for your reveries, what will you gain? The
dissatisfaction of a life which will not be wholly yours. The
compact is madness. Let me tell you why. In the first place, your
projected poem is a plagiarism. A young German girl, who was not,
like you, semi-German, but altogether so, adored Goethe with the
rash intoxication of girlhood. She made him her friend, her
religion, her god, knowing at the same time that he was married.
Madame Goethe, a worthy German woman, lent herself to this worship
with a sly good-nature which did not cure Bettina. But what was
the end of it all? The young ecstatic married a man who was
younger and handsomer than Goethe. Now, between ourselves, let us
admit that a young girl who should make herself the handmaid of a
man of genius, his equal through comprehension, and should piously
worship him till death, like one of those divine figures sketched
by the masters on the shutters of their mystic shrines, and who,
when Germany lost him, should have retired to some solitude away
from men, like the friend of Lord Bolingbroke,—let us admit, I
say, that the young girl would have lived forever, inlaid in the
glory of the poet as Mary Magdalene in the cross and triumph of
our Lord. If that is sublime, what say you to the reverse of the
picture? As I am neither Goethe nor Lord Byron, the colossi of
poetry and egotism, but simply the author of a few esteemed
verses, I cannot expect the honors of a cult. Neither am I
disposed to be a martyr. I have ambition, and I have a heart; I am
still young and I have my career to make. See me for what I am.
The bounty of the king and the protection of his ministers give me
sufficient means of living. I have the outward bearing of a very
ordinary man. I go to the soirees in Paris like any other
empty-headed fop; and if I drive, the wheels of my carriage do not
roll on the solid ground, absolutely indispensable in these days,
of property invested in the funds. But if I am not rich, neither do
I have the reliefs and consolations of life in a garret, the toil
uncomprehended, the fame in penury, which belong to men who are
worth far more than I,—D’Arthez, for instance.
Ah! what prosaic conclusions will your young enthusiasm find to
these enchanting visions. Let us stop here. If I have had the
happiness of seeming to you a terrestrial paragon, you have been
to me a thing of light and a beacon, like those stars that shine
for a moment and disappear. May nothing ever tarnish this episode
of our lives. Were we to continue it I might love you; I might
conceive one of those mad passions which rend all obstacles, which
light fires in the heart whose violence is greater than their
duration. And suppose I succeeded in pleasing you? we should end
our tale in the common vulgar way,—marriage, a household,
children, Belise and Henriette Chrysale together!—could it be?
Therefore, adieu.
CHAPTER X. THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS
To Monsieur de Canalis:
My Friend,—Your letter gives me as much pain as pleasure. But
perhaps some day we shall find nothing but pleasure in writing to
each other. Understand me thoroughly. The soul speaks to God and
asks him for many things; he is mute. I seek to obtain in you the
answers that God does not make to me. Cannot the friendship of
Mademoiselle de Gournay and Montaigne be revived in us? Do you not
remember the household of Sismonde de Sismondi in Geneva? The most
lovely home ever known, as I have been told; something like that
of the Marquis de Pescaire and his wife,—happy to old age. Ah!
friend, is it impossible that two hearts, two harps, should exist
as in a symphony, answering each other from a distance, vibrating
with delicious melody in unison? Man alone of all creation is in
himself the harp, the musician, and the listener. Do you think to
find me uneasy and jealous like ordinary women? I know that you go
into the world and meet the handsomest and the wittiest women in
Paris. May I not suppose that some one of those mermaids has
deigned to clasp you in her cold and scaly arms, and that she has
inspired the answer whose prosaic opinions sadden me? There is
something in life more beautiful than the garlands of Parisian
coquetry; there grows a flower far up those Alpine peaks called
men of genius, the glory of humanity, which they fertilize with
the dews their lofty heads draw from the skies. I seek to
cultivate that flower and make it bloom; for its wild yet gentle
fragrance can never fail,—it is eternal.
Do me the honor to believe that there is nothing low or
commonplace in me. Were I Bettina, for I know to whom you allude,
I should never have become Madame von Arnim; and had I been one of
Lord Byron’s many loves, I should be at this moment in a cloister.
You have touched me to the quick. You do not know me, but you
shall know me. I feel within me something that is sublime, of
which I dare speak without vanity. God has put into my soul the
roots of that Alpine flower born on the summits of which I speak,
and I cannot plant it in an earthen pot upon my window-sill and
see it die. No, that glorious flower-cup, single in its beauty,
intoxicating in its fragrance, shall not be dragged through the
vulgarities of life! it is yours—yours, before any eye has
blighted it, yours forever! Yes, my poet, to you belong my
thoughts,—all, those that are secret, those that are gayest; my
heart is yours without reserve and with its infinite affection. If
you should personally not please me, I shall never marry. I can
live in the life of the heart, I can exist on your mind, your
sentiments; they please me, and I will always be what I am, your
friend. Yours is a noble moral nature; I have recognized it, I
have appreciated it, and that suffices me. In that is all my
future. Do not laugh at a young and pretty handmaiden who shrinks
not from the thought of being some day the old companion of a
poet,—a sort of mother perhaps, or a housekeeper; the guide of
his judgment and a source of his wealth. This handmaiden—so
devoted, so precious to the lives of such as you—is Friendship,
pure, disinterested friendship, to whom you will tell all, who
listens and sometimes shakes her head; who knits by the light of
the lamp and waits to be present when the poet returns home soaked
with rain, or vexed in mind. Such shall be my destiny if I do not
find that of a happy wife attached forever to her husband; I smile
alike at the thought of either fate. Do you believe France will be
any the worse if Mademoiselle d’Este does not give it two or three
sons, and never becomes a Madame Vilquin-something-or-other? As
for me, I shall never be an old maid. I shall make myself a
mother, by taking care of others and by my secret co-operation in
the existence of a great man, to whom also I shall carry all my
thoughts and all my earthly efforts.
I have the deepest horror of commonplaceness. If I am free, if I
am rich (and I know that I am young and pretty), I will never
belong to any ninny just because he is the son of a peer of
France, nor to a merchant who could ruin himself and me in a day,
nor to a handsome creature who would be a sort of woman in the
household, nor to a man of any kind who would make me blush twenty
times a day for being his. Make yourself easy on that point. My
father adores my wishes; he will never oppose them. If I please my
poet, and he pleases me, the glorious structure of our love shall
be built so high as to be inaccessible to any kind of misfortune.
I am an eaglet; and you will see it in my eyes.
I shall not repeat what I have already said, but I will put its
substance in the least possible number of words, and confess to
you that I should be the happiest of women if I were imprisoned by
love as I am now imprisoned by the wish and will of a father. Ah!
my friend, may we bring to a real end the romance that has come to
us through the first exercise of my will: listen to its
argument:—
A young girl with a lively imagination, locked up in a tower, is
weary with longing to run loose in the park where her eyes only
are allowed to rove. She invents a way to loosen her bars; she
jumps from the casement; she scales the park wall; she frolics
along the neighbor’s sward—it is the Everlasting comedy. Well,
that young girl is my soul, the neighbor’s park is your genius. Is
it not all very natural? Was there ever a neighbor that did not
complain that unknown feet broke down his trellises? I leave it to
my poet to answer.
But does the lofty reasoner after the fashion of Moliere want
still better reasons? Well, here they are. My dear Geronte,
marriages are usually made in defiance of common-sense. Parents
make inquiries about a young man. If the Leander—who is supplied
by some friend, or caught in a ball-room—is not a thief, and has
no visible rent in his reputation, if he has the necessary
fortune, if he comes from a college or a law-school and so fulfils
the popular ideas of education, and if he wears his clothes with a
gentlemanly air, he is allowed to meet the young lady, whose
mother has ordered her to guard her tongue, to let no sign of her
heart or soul appear on her face, which must wear the smile of a
danseuse finishing a pirouette. These commands are coupled with
instructions as to the danger of revealing her real character, and
the additional advice of not seeming alarmingly well educated. If
the settlements have all been agreed upon, the parents are
good-natured enough to let the pair see each other for a few
moments; they are allowed to talk or walk together, but always
without the slightest freedom, and knowing that they are bound by
rigid rules. The man is as much dressed up in soul as he is in body,
and so is the young girl. This pitiable comedy, mixed with bouquets,
jewels, and theatre-parties is called “paying your addresses.” It
revolts me: I desire that actual marriage shall be the result of a
previous and long marriage of souls. A young girl, a woman, has
throughout her life only this one moment when reflection, second
sight, and experience are necessary to her. She plays her liberty,
her happiness, and she is not allowed to throw the dice; she risks
her all, and is forced to be a mere spectator. I have the right,
the will, the power to make my own unhappiness, and I use them, as
did my mother, who, won by beauty and led by instinct, married the
most generous, the most liberal, the most loving of men. I know
that you are free, a poet, and noble-looking. Be sure that I
should not have chosen one of your brothers in Apollo who was
already married. If my mother was won by beauty, which is perhaps
the spirit of form, why should I not be attracted by the spirit
and the form united? Shall I not know you better by studying you
in this correspondence than I could through the vulgar experience
of “receiving your addresses”? This is the question, as Hamlet
says.
But my proceedings, dear Chrysale, have at least the merit of not
binding us personally. I know that love has its illusions, and
every illusion its to-morrow. That is why there are so many
partings among lovers vowed to each other for life. The proof of
love lies in two things,—suffering and happiness. When, after
passing through these double trials of life two beings have shown
each other their defects as well as their good qualities, when
they have really observed each other’s character, then they may go
to their grave hand in hand. My dear Argante, who told you that
our little drama thus begun was to have no future? In any case
shall we not have enjoyed the pleasures of our correspondence?
I await your orders, monseigneur, and I am with all my heart,
Your handmaiden,
O. d’Este M.
To Mademoiselle O. d’Este M.,—You are a witch, a spirit, and I
love you! Is that what you desire of me, most original of girls?
Perhaps you are only seeking to amuse your provincial leisure with
the follies which are you able to make a poet commit. If so, you
have done a bad deed. Your two letters have enough of the spirit
of mischief in them to force this doubt into the mind of a
Parisian. But I am no longer master of myself; my life, my future
depend on the answer you will make me. Tell me if the certainty of
an unbounded affection, oblivious of all social conventions, will
touch you,—if you will suffer me to seek you. There is anxiety
enough and uncertainty enough in the question as to whether I can
personally please you. If your reply is favorable I change my
life, I bid adieu to all the irksome pleasures which we have the
folly to call happiness. Happiness, my dear and beautiful unknown,
is what you dream it to be,—a fusion of feelings, a perfect
accordance of souls, the imprint of a noble ideal (such as God
does permit us to form in this low world) upon the trivial round
of daily life whose habits we must needs obey, a constancy of
heart more precious far than what we call fidelity. Can we say
that we make sacrifices when the end in view is our eternal good,
the dream of poets, the dream of maidens, the poem which, at the
entrance of life when thought essays its wings, each noble
intellect has pondered and caressed only to see it shivered to
fragments on some stone of stumbling as hard as it is vulgar?—for
to the great majority of men, the foot of reality steps instantly
on that mysterious egg so seldom hatched.
I cannot speak to you any more of myself; not of my past life, nor
of my character, nor of an affection almost maternal on one side,
filial on mine, which you have already seriously changed—an
effect upon my life which must explain my use of the word
“sacrifice.” You have already rendered me forgetful, if not
ungrateful; does that satisfy you? Oh, speak! Say to me one word,
and I will love you till my eyes close in death, as the Marquis de
Pescaire loved his wife, as Romeo loved Juliet, and faithfully.
Our life will be, for me at least, that “felicity untroubled”
which Dante made the very element of his Paradiso,—a poem far
superior to his Inferno. Strange, it is not myself that I doubt in
the long reverie through which, like you, I follow the windings of
a dreamed existence; it is you. Yes, dear, I feel within me the
power to love, and to love endlessly,—to march to the grave with
gentle slowness and a smiling eye, with my beloved on my arm, and
with never a cloud upon the sunshine of our souls. Yes, I dare to
face our mutual old age, to see ourselves with whitening heads,
like the venerable historian of Italy, inspired always with the
same affection but transformed in soul by our life’s seasons. Hear
me, I can no longer be your friend only. Though Chrysale, Geronte,
and Argante re-live, you say, in me, I am not yet old enough to
drink from the cup held to my lips by the sweet hands of a veiled
woman without a passionate desire to tear off the domino and the
mask and see the face. Either write me no more, or give me hope.
Let me see you, or let me go. Must I bid you adieu? Will you
permit me to sign myself,
Your Friend?
To Monsieur de Canalis,—What flattery! with what rapidity is the
grave Anselme transformed into a handsome Leander! To what must I
attribute such a change? to this black which I put upon this
white? to these ideas which are to the flowers of my soul what a
rose drawn in charcoal is to the roses in the garden? Or is it to
a recollection of the young girl whom you took for me, and who is
personally as like me as a waiting-woman is like her mistress?
Have we changed roles? Have I the sense? have you the fancy? But a
truce with jesting.
Your letter has made me know the elating pleasures of the soul;
the first that I have known outside of my family affections. What,
says a poet, are the ties of blood which are so strong in ordinary
minds, compared to those divinely forged within us by mysterious
sympathies? Let me thank you—no, we must not thank each other for
such things—but God bless you for the happiness you have given
me; be happy in the joy you have shed into my soul. You explain to
me some of the apparent injustices in social life. There is
something, I know not what, so dazzling, so virile in glory, that
it belongs only to man; God forbids us women to wear its halo, but
he makes love our portion, giving us the tenderness which soothes
the brow scorched by his lightnings. I have felt my mission, and
you have now confirmed it.
Sometimes, my friend, I rise in the morning in a state of
inexpressible sweetness; a sort of peace, tender and divine, gives
me an idea of heaven. My first thought is then like a benediction.
I call these mornings my little German wakings, in opposition to
my Southern sunsets, full of heroic deeds, battles, Roman fetes
and ardent poems. Well, after reading your letter, so full of
feverish impatience, I felt in my heart all the freshness of my
celestial wakings, when I love the air about me and all nature,
and fancy that I am destined to die for one I love. One of your
poems, “The Maiden’s Song,” paints these delicious moments, when
gaiety is tender, when aspiration is a need; it is one of my
favorites. Do you want me to put all my flatteries into one?—well
then, I think you worthy to be me!
Your letter, though short, enables me to read within you. Yes, I
have guessed your tumultuous struggles, your piqued curiosity,
your projects; but I do not yet know you well enough to satisfy
your wishes. Hear me, dear; the mystery in which I am shrouded
allows me to use that word, which lets you see to the bottom of my
heart. Hear me: if we once meet, adieu to our mutual
comprehension! Will you make a compact with me? Was the first
disadvantageous to you? But remember it won you my esteem, and it
is a great deal, my friend, to gain an admiration lined throughout
with esteem. Here is the compact: write me your life in a few
words; then tell me what you do in Paris, day by day, with no
reservations, and as if you were talking to some old friend. Well,
having done that, I will take a step myself—I will see you, I
promise you that. And it is a great deal.
This, dear, is no intrigue, no adventure; no gallantry, as you men
say, can come of it, I warn you frankly. It involves my life, and
more than that,—something that causes me remorse for the many
thoughts that fly to you in flocks—it involves my father’s and my
mother’s life. I adore them, and my choice must please them; they
must find a son in you.
Tell me, to what extent can the superb spirits of your kind, to
whom God has given the wings of his angels, without always adding
their amiability,—how far can they bend under a family yoke, and
put up with its little miseries? That is a text I have meditated
upon. Ah! though I said to my heart before I came to you, Forward!
Onward! it did not tremble and palpitate any the less on the way;
and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor
the Alpine difficulties I had to encounter. I thought of all in my
long, long meditations. Do I not know that eminent men like you
have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which
they themselves have felt; that they have had many romances in
their lives,—you particularly, who send forth those airy visions
of your soul that women rush to buy? Yet still I cried to myself,
“Onward!” because I have studied, more than you give me credit
for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you
tell me are so cold. Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were
the colossi of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared
a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you
perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to
escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for
the development of personal character, but you must not. Neither
Lord Byron, nor Goethe, nor Walter Scott, nor Cuvier, nor any
inventor, belongs to himself, he is the slave of his idea. And
this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman; it sucks their
blood, it makes them live, it makes them die for its sake. The
visible developments of their hidden existence do seem, in their
results, like egotism; but who shall dare to say that the man who
has abnegated self to give pleasure, instruction, or grandeur to
his epoch, is an egoist? Is a mother selfish when she immolates
all things to her child? Well, the detractors of genius do not
perceive its fecund maternity, that is all. The life of a poet is
so perpetual a sacrifice that he needs a gigantic organization to
bear even the ordinary pleasures of life. Therefore, into what
sorrows may he not fall when, like Moliere, he wishes to live the
life of feeling in its most poignant crises; to me, remembering
his personal life, Moliere’s comedy is horrible.
The generosity of genius seems to me half divine; and I place you
in this noble family of alleged egoists. Ah! if I had found
self-interest, ambition, a seared nature where I now can see my
best loved flowers of the soul, you know not what long anguish I
should have had to bear. I met with disappointment before I was
sixteen. What would have become of me had I learned at twenty that
fame is a lie, that he whose books express the feelings hidden in
my heart was incapable of feeling them himself? Oh! my friend, do
you know what would have become of me? Shall I take you into the
recesses of my soul? I should have gone to my father and said,
“Bring me the son-in-law whom you desire; my will abdicates,—marry
me to whom you please.” And the man might have been a notary,
banker, miser, fool, dullard, wearisome as a rainy day, common as
the usher of a school, a manufacturer, or some brave soldier without
two ideas,—he would have had a resigned and attentive servant in
me. But what an awful suicide! never could my soul have expanded
in the life-giving rays of a beloved sun. No murmur should have
revealed to my father, or my mother, or my children the suicide of
the creature who at this instant is shaking her fetters, casting
lightnings from her eyes, and flying towards you with eager wing.
See, she is there, at the angle of your desk, like Polyhymnia,
breathing the air of your presence, and glancing about her with a
curious eye. Sometimes in the fields where my husband would have
taken me to walk, I should have wept, apart and secretly, at sight
of a glorious morning; and in my heart, or hidden in a
bureau-drawer, I might have kept some treasure, the comfort of poor
girls ill-used by love, sad, poetic souls,—but ah! I have you, I
believe in you, my friend. That belief straightens all my thoughts
and fancies, even the most fantastic, and sometimes—see how far
my frankness leads me—I wish I were in the middle of the book we
are just beginning; such persistency do I feel in my sentiments,
such strength in my heart to love, such constancy sustained by
reason, such heroism for the duties for which I was created,—if
indeed love can ever be transmuted into duty.
If you were able to follow me to the exquisite retreat where I
fancy ourselves happy, if you knew my plans and projects, the
dreadful word “folly!” might escape you, and I should be cruelly
punished for sending poetry to a poet. Yes, I wish to be a spring
of waters inexhaustible as a fertile land for the twenty years
that nature allows me to shine. I want to drive away satiety by
charm. I mean to be courageous for my friend as most women are for
the world. I wish to vary happiness. I wish to put intelligence
into tenderness, and to give piquancy to fidelity. I am filled
with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all
outside griefs by a wife’s gentleness, by her proud abnegation, to
take a lifelong care of the nest,—such as birds can only take for
a few weeks.
Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter? The
mysterious wind of will drove me to you, as the tempest brings the
little rose-tree to the pollard window. In your letter, which I
hold here upon my heart, you cried out, like your ancestor when he
departed for the Crusades, “God wills it.”
Ah! but you will cry out, “What a chatterbox!” All the people
round me say, on the contrary, “Mademoiselle is very taciturn.”