“Be happy, my children! you have earned the right,” said the poor father in heart-rending tones. “You may love without one bitter thought.”
As he said these words he took his wife’s hands and kissed them with a sacred and admiring effect which touched Constance more than the brightest gaiety. When they reached the house where Pillerault, the Ragons, the Abbe Loraux, and Popinot the judge were waiting for them, these five choice people assumed an air and manner and speech which put Cesar at his ease; for all were deeply moved to see him still on the morrow of his great disaster.
“Go and take a walk in the Aulnay woods,” said Pillerault, putting Cesar’s hand into that of Constance; “go with Anselme and Cesarine! but come back by four o’clock.”
“Poor souls, we should be a restraint upon them,” said Madame Ragon, touched by the deep grief of her debtor. “He will be very happy presently.”
“It is repentance without sin,” said the Abbe Loraux.
“He could rise to greatness only through adversity,” said the judge.
To forget is the great secret of strong, creative natures,—to forget, in the way of Nature herself, who knows no past, who begins afresh, at every hour, the mysteries of her untiring travail.
Feeble existences, like that of Birotteau, live sunk in sorrows, instead of transmuting them into doctrines of experience: they let them saturate their being, and are worn-out, finally, by falling more and more under the weight of past misfortunes.
When the two couples reached the path which leads to the woods of Aulnay, placed like a crown upon the prettiest hillside in the neighborhood of Paris, and from which the Vallee-aux-Loups is seen in all its coquetry, the beauty of the day, the charm of the landscape, the first spring verdure, the delicious memory of the happiest day of all his youth, loosened the tight chords in Cesar’s soul; he pressed the arm of his wife against his beating heart; his eye was no longer glassy, for the light of pleasure once more brightened in it.
“At last,” said Constance to her husband, “I see you again, my poor Cesar. I think we have all behaved well enough to allow ourselves a little pleasure now and then.”