Fenwick's Career

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

CHAPTER X

Eugénie de Pastourelles was sitting on the terrace at Versailles. Or rather she was established in one of the deep embrasures between the windows, on the western side. The wind was cold, but again a glorious sun bathed the terrace and the château. It was a day of splendour—a day when heaven and earth seemed to have conspired to flatter and to adorn the vast creation of Louis Quatorze, this white, flaming palace, amid the gold and bronze of its autumn trees, and the blue of its waters. Superb clouds, of a royal sweep and amplitude, sailed through the brilliant sky; the woods that girdled the horizon were painted broadly and solidly in the richest colour upon an immense canvas steeped in light. In some of the nearer alleys which branch from the terrace, the eye travelled, through a deep magnificence of shade, to an arched and framed sunlight beyond, embroidered with every radiant or sparkling colour; in others, the trees, almost bare, met lightly arched above a carpet of intensest green—a tapis vert stretching toward a vaporous distance, and broken by some god, or nymph, on whose white shoulders the autumn leaves were dropping softly one by one.

Wide horizons, infinitely clear—a blazing intensity of light, beating on the palace, the gardens, the statues, and the distant water of the 'Canal de Versailles'—each tint and outline, sharp and vehement, full-bodied and rich—the greenest greens, the bluest blues, the most dazzling gold:—this was Versailles, as Eugénie saw it, on this autumn day. And through it all, the blowing of a harsh and nipping wind sounded the first approach of winter, still defied, as it were, by these bright woods decked for a last festival.

It was the 5th of October—the very anniversary of the day when Marie Antoinette, sitting alone beside the lake at Trianon, was startled by a page from the château bringing the news of the arrival of the Paris mob, and the urgent summons to return at once;—the day when she passed the Temple of Love, gleaming amid the quiet streams, for the last time, and fled back through the leafy avenues leading to Versailles, under a sky—cloudy and threatening rain—which was remembered by a later generation as blending fitly with the first act of that most eminent tragedy—'The Fall of the House of France.'

Madame de Pastourelles had in her hand a recent book in which a French man of letters, both historian and poet, had told once again the most piteous of stories; a story, however, which seemed then, and still seems, to be not even yet ripe for history—so profound and living are the sympathies and the passions which to this day surround it in France.

Eugénie had closed the book, and her eyes, as they looked out upon the astonishing light and shade of the terrace and its surroundings, had filled unconsciously with tears, not so much for Marie Antoinette, as for all griefs!—for this duped, tortured, struggling life of ours—for the 'mortalia' which grip all hearts, which none escape—pain, and separation, and remorse, hopes deceived, and promise mocked, decadence in one's self, change in others, and that iron gentleness of death which closes all.

For nearly a year she had been trying to recover her forces after an experience which had shaken her being to its depths. Not because, when she went to nurse his last days, she had any love left, in the ordinary sense, for her ruined and debased husband; but because of that vast power of pity, that genius for compassion to which she was born. Not a tremor of body or soul, not a pang of physical or spiritual fear, but she had passed through them, in common with the man she upheld; a man who, like Louis the Well-Beloved, former master of the building beneath whose shadow she was sitting, was ready to grovel for her pardon, when threatened with a priest and the last terrors, and would have recalled his mistress, rejoicing, with the first day of recovered health.

He and she had asked for respite in vain, however; and M. de
Pastourelles slept with his fathers.

Since his death, her strength had failed her. There had been no definite illness, but a giving way for some six or seven months of nature's resisting powers. Also—significant sign of the strength of all her personal affections!—in addition to the moral and physical strain she had undergone, she had suffered much about this time from the loss of her maid, an old servant and devoted friend, who left her shortly after M. de Pastourelles' death—incited, forced thereto by Eugénie—in order to marry and go out to Canada. Eugénie had missed her sorely; and insensibly, the struggle to get well had been the harder. The doctors ordered travel and change, and she had wandered from place to place; only half-conscious, as it often seemed to her; the most docile of patients; accompanied now by one member of the family, now by another; standing as it were, like the bather who has wandered too far from shore, between the onward current which means destruction, and that backward struggle of the will which leads to life. And little by little the tide of being had turned. After a winter in Egypt, strength had begun to come back; since then Switzerland and high air had quickened recovery; and now, physically, Eugénie was almost herself again.

But morally, she retained a deep and lasting impress of what she had gone through. More than ever was she a creature of tenderness, of the most delicate perceptions, of a sensibility, as our ancestors would have called it, too great for this hurrying world. Her unselfishness, always one of her cradle-gifts, had become almost superhuman; and had she been of another temperament, the men and women about her might have instinctively shrunk from her, as too perfect—now—for human nature's daily food. But from that she was saved by a score of most womanish, most mundane qualities. Nobody knew her, luckily, for the saint she was; she herself least of all. As her strength renewed itself, her soft fun, too, came back, her gentle, inexhaustible delight in the absurdities of men and things, which gave to her talk and her personality a kind of crackling charm, like the crispness of dry leaves upon an autumn path. Naturally, and invincibly, she loved life and living; all the high forces and emotions called to her, but also all the patches, stains, and follies of this queer world; and there is no saint, man or woman, of whom this can be said, that has ever repelled the sinners. It is the difference between St. Francis and St. Dominic!