“My beloved daughter,” wrote my father, “do not allow yourself to be doomed to unhappiness. The man whom they wish you to marry is a sceptic; he desires to unite the attraction of your person to his own, to advance him in society, and to better a position to which he aspires. He is not a man to love you, or whom you will ever love. They cannot marry you without my consent, do not forget it. Should I be obliged to lose forever what tranquillity remains to me, on account of this, I will not sacrifice you. If you should let yourself be led astray, and should ask my consent to this marriage, I should only have to add the despair of my private experience to the hopelessness of my public life.”
How shall I relate my struggles, which lasted for long months? They can be imagined. My grandmother and my mother desired this marriage for different, but equally selfish motives, which blinded their eyes. The former wished not to lose me entirely, Monsieur Lamessine having promised her that she should live with us during the winter, in Paris, so soon as we should be settled there; my mother desired the match in order to remove me from my father.
Poor father! He was often a prey to his wild fits of anger, and threw himself again headlong into politics, making himself conspicuous, compromising himself, thinking only of falling on some enemy, no matter whom it might be, of giving battle, of fighting, and of escaping from his present sufferings by other sufferings.
He succeeded, and his name soon figured at the head of a new list of convicts to be sent from the Aisne department. When they came to arrest him, in 1852, he was so seriously ill in bed that he could not be removed. This delay gave my grandmother time to write to my friend Charles, who, after having left Flocon, to rally himself to Bonapartism, had become an influential man. He succeeded in having my father’s name erased from the list of convicts, but implored my grandmother to make him keep quiet, for he would not be able to save him a second time, he wrote, “if his democratic-socialistic follies pointed him out again as dangerous.”
Alas! when this letter reached grandmother my father had brain fever, which endangered his life for a week. As soon as my grandfather heard the news of his illness he hurried to Blérancourt, installed himself by his son-in-law’s bedside, and by devoted care snatched him from death.
When my father was out of danger my mother and my grandmother dared not refuse the poor convalescent his desire to see me again.
I went, but how sad we both were, and in what suspicion did we feel ourselves held! Grandmother accompanied me there, and neither she nor my mother would leave me alone with my father for a moment.
I said to him, before my two stern guardians: “Dear father, I think it would be better, after all, for me to consent to this marriage, because when I am married I shall be at liberty to ask you to come to me, and to talk with you a little alone, heart to heart.”
“No, no!” he replied; “I would rather see you dead than delivered over to certain unhappiness!”
And yet it was he who delivered me over to the unhappiness he foresaw.