Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring, and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto. To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first.
MON AMIE
I
She was French from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, but she was of that France which few Americans, I think, know or imagine. She belonged to that France which Jean-Christophe found in his friend Olivier, a world of flashing ideas and enthusiasms, a golden youth of ideals.
She had picked me out for an exchange of conversation, as the custom is, precisely because I had left my name at the Sorbonne as a person who wrote a little. I had put this bait out, as it were, deliberately, with the intention of hooking a mind that cared for a little more than mere chatter, but I had hardly expected to find it in the form of a young girl who, as she told me in her charmingly polished note, was nineteen and had just completed her studies.
These studies formed a useful introduction when she received me in the little old-fashioned apartment in the Batignolles quarter on my first visit. She had made them ever since she was five years old in a wonderful old convent at Bourges; and in the town had lived her grandmother, a very old lady, whom she had gone lovingly to see, as often as she could be away from the watchful care of the nuns. In her she had found her real mother, for her parents had been far away in Brittany. When the old lady died, my friend had to face an empty world, and to become acquainted all over again with a mother whom she confessed she found “little sympathetic.” But she was a girl of devoir, and she would do nothing to wound her.
She told me one afternoon as we took our first walk through the dusky richness of the Musée Cluny, that the shock of death had disclosed to her how fleeting life was, how much she thought of death, and how much she feared it. I used the lustiness of her grandmother’s eighty-four years to convince her as to how long she might have to postpone her dread, but her fragile youth seemed already to feel the beating wings about her. As she talked, her expression had all that wistful seriousness of the French face which has not been devitalized by the city, that sense of the nearness of unutterable things which runs, a golden thread, through their poetry. Though she had lived away from Brittany, in her graver moments there was much in her of the patient melancholy of the Breton. For her father’s people had been sea-folk,—not fishermen, but pilots and navigators on those misty and niggardly shores,—and the long defeat and ever-trustful suffering was in her blood. She would interpret to me the homely pictures at the Luxembourg which spoke of coast and peasant life; and her beautiful articulateness brought the very soul of France out of the canvases of Cottet and Breton and Carrière. She understood these people.
But she was very various, and, if at first we plumbed together the profoundest depths of her, we soon got into shallower waters. The fluency of her thought outran any foreign medium, and made anything but her flying French impossible. Her meager English had been learned from some curious foreigner with an accent more German than French, and we abandoned it by mutual consent. Our conversation became an exchange of ideas and not of languages. Or rather her mind became the field where I explored at will.
I think I began by assuming a Catholic devotion in her, and implied that her serious outlook on life might lead her into the church. She scoffed unmitigatedly at this. The nuns were not unkindly, she said, but they were hard and narrow and did not care for the theater and for books, which she adored.
She believed in God. “Et le théâtre!” I said, which delighted her hugely. But these Christian virtues made unlovely characters and cut one off so painfully from the fascinating moving world of ideas outside. But surely after fourteen years of religious training and Christian care, did she not believe in the Church, its priesthood and its dogmas?