Luc listened patiently, but no advice could have shown less understanding of his character; even while he listened his heart was throbbing and his blood tingling with the desire of life, of liberty, of action, of glory. The very moment he had stepped across the threshold of his father’s house he had felt the ordered, sluggish days fall round him like a chain; he saw the years stretch ahead in an uneventful avenue, with an undistinguished tomb at the end, and every nerve in his being cried out against it. His fruitless journey, the heavy disappointment caused by coming into actual contact with one of the men ruling France and finding him like M. de Richelieu, the persecution, the degradation, the misery he had witnessed in riding through Languedoc were but so many goads to urge him to a further attempt on fortune.
Paris blazed even brighter in his visions, and he thought long and often on the name of M. de Voltaire.
To please his parents, he still retained the forms of Christianity, and never hinted that he held that doctrine of free-thinking which his father so abhorred. But this reserve was another chain: he desired to be with those with whom he could exchange ideas, from whom he could gain wisdom, experience, and encouragement; not to have to be for ever deferring to those opinions, habits, and traditions that he no longer shared nor admired.
Hence the very affection that surrounded him at Aix, and which he had often longed for when with the army, became first a useless thing to him, and then another burden, another chain to hamper and clog him.
As, gradually and day by day, his father’s love made insidious demands on him, as almost imperceptibly he found his native sweetness giving way on many little points of difference, as he perceived affection laying hands on the most secret sensations of his soul, he began to revolt against this obligation of affection, of duty, of respect; he longed to stand, a free man, with his own life to make according to his own standards, unhindered by this fear of giving pain to those who loved him—the fear which had already made him deny his beliefs, and which now urged him to abandon his choicest hopes. His soul rose up against this exacting, tender love, that burdened him with responsibility; morally and mentally he stood alone, not desiring support, and strong to meet anything, yet through his heart and affections he was made captive to his father’s chair and his mother’s apron.
Autumn passed into winter. Joseph married and left home; this was another reason for Luc to remain. His mother clung to him with piteous fondness; his father deferred to him in matters of business, relied on him, treated him with courteous affection, dismissed all idea of his leaving them—had not M. de Biron and M. de Richelieu both declared politics hopeless?
Luc listened and waited; the chains became heavier every day. The Marquise was preparing another in the shape of Clémence de Séguy, a good girl, beautiful and well-dowered. Luc, looking into her fair countenance, knew that she had never known an aspiration nor a sorrow in all her life; she bloomed in Aix like the late lilies he had seen in the garden the day of his return; pure flowers, modest with their own sweetness, they kept their heads bent towards the earth, and never lifted their petals towards heaven or the sun. Luc never looked at Clémence that he did not think of the Countess Carola; red like the trellis roses he pictured her, and, like them, for ever climbing and breathing perfume to the utmost clouds.
Yet these days were not wholly wasted; in the evenings, he would revive his forgotten knowledge of music, and play the clavichord to his mother’s harp; and then his thoughts would fly wide, and drink at immortal wells of unquenchable longing, and see the ineffable hues of skies only to be glimpsed at by mortals.
Sometimes, when he was playing thus in the dark parlour, he would have flashing premonitions of immortality in which this life seemed a mere nothing that he could afford to waste; there was all eternity in which to join Hippolyte and Georges in the quest for glory.
In these moments he felt an unbounded ecstasy, and his playing would take on a richness and colour that transfigured the light music he interpreted; then a veil would be dropped over the vision, and there would come unbidden thoughts of the hopelessness of all high endeavour, the sad end, the open failure of all noble, unselfish lives, the uselessness of all great enthusiasms, all the gallant efforts of the pure minorities of the world, all the eager aspirations of reformers, preachers, prophets, swept away and forgotten in the commonplace corruptions, needs, vices, failings, and blindness of humanity. And these reflections were as a bitter blankness of soul to Luc, and the comfortable room would darken round him like the jaw of hell itself.