‘Do you believe much in happy people? I think there are passions, vanities, titillations, desires, successes—those one sees in full motion on the earth, like animalculæ in a drop of water; but happiness, I imagine, died with Paul et Virginie, with Chactas and Atala. To be happy, you must be capable of being unhappy. We never reach that point; we are only irritable, or grow anémique, according to the variety of our constitutions.’
‘I knew a perfectly happy woman once,’ said Melville; ‘happy all her life, and she lived long.’
‘Oh, you mean some nun,’ said Nadine Napraxine, with impatience. ‘That is not happiness; it is only a form of hysteria or hypogastria.’
‘Not a nun,’ replied Melville, making himself a cigarette, while the sun played on the red sash of his gown, the gown which Raffael designed for Leo. ‘Not a nun. The woman I mean was a servant in a little dirty village near Grenoble; she had been in the service of two cross, miserly people ever since she was fifteen. At the time I knew her first she was forty-seven. The old people had a small shop of general necessaries; she attended to the shop, cooked, and cleaned, and washed, and spun, dug, too, in a vegetable garden, and took care of a donkey, and pigs, and fowls. When she was about thirty, the old man first, and then the old woman, became incapable, from paralysis. Rose—her name was Rose—worked on harder than ever. She had many offers of better service, even offers of marriage, for she was a famous housewife, but she refused them; she would not leave the old people. They were poor; they had never been good or grateful to her; they had even beaten her when she was a girl; but she would never leave them. She had been a foundling, and theirs had been the only form of human ties that she had ever known. She was perfectly happy all the day long, and she even found time to do many a good turn for neighbours worse off than herself. She had never had more than twenty francs a year in money, but then “you see, I live well, I want nothing,” she said to me once. And such living! Black cabbage and black bread! Well, she was perfectly happy, as I say. You do not seem to believe it?’
‘Oh, yes; so is a snail,’ said the Princess Nadine. ‘Besides, you know, if she had been a pretty woman——’
Melville felt almost angry.
‘You are very cruel. Why will you divorce beauty and virtue?’
‘I do not divorce them, nature usually does,’ she answered, amused. ‘Perhaps they divorce themselves. Well, what became of this paragon?’
‘She was no paragon,’ said Melville, annoyed. ‘ She was a hard-working, good, honest woman, perfectly content with a horrible lot, and loyal unto death to two tyrannical old brutes who never thanked her. When they died they left all the little they had to a nephew in the Jura, who had taken no notice of them all their days—a rich tradesman. Poor Rose, at fifty-three years old, was sent adrift on the world. She cried her heart out to have to leave the house, and the ass, and the chickens. I got her the grant from the Prix Montyon, and she was set up in a tiny shop of her own in her own village, but she did not live long. “Quand on a été heureuse, après—c’est long,” she said in her dying hour. She was afraid to seem ungrateful, but “sans mes vieux,” as she said, apologetically, her life was done. It seems a terrible life to us, but I can solemnly declare that it was one of the few happy ones of which I have ever been witness. There is a sustaining, vivifying force in duty, like the heat of the sun, for those who accept it.’
‘For those who accept it, no doubt,’ said Nadine Napraxine, drily; ‘but then, you see, my dear and reverend Melville, it requires some organ in one’s brain—superstition, I think, or credulity—before one can do that. Every one is not blessed with that organ. Pray believe,’ she resumed, with her softer smile, perceiving a vexed shadow on his face, ‘I am not insensible to the quiet unconscious heroism of those lowly lives of devotion. They are always touching. Those revelations which the discours of the Prix Montyon give from time to time always make one envious of so much belief, of so much endurance, of so much unobtrusive and unselfish goodness. But, though I dare say you will be very angry, I cannot help reminding you that what makes the sparrow very happy would have no sort of effect on the swallow, except that he would feel restless and uncomfortable; and also that—pray forgive me, for you are a priest—to be contented with doing one’s duty one must believe in duty as a Divine ordinance. To do that one must have—well, just that bump of credulity of which I spoke—of easy, unquestioning, unintelligent, credulity. Now, that it is a happy quality I am certain, but is it,—is it, an intellectual one?’