In a letter to M. Paul Juemper, dated March 15, 1838, Guérin describes his fiancée, with more accuracy perhaps than ardor, and yet there can be no doubt that the marriage was one of love and congeniality. In the latter part of his life Maurice appears to have concealed his deepest emotions as successfully as he had revealed them in earlier years.
"I find myself on my return better in health, and full of hope for the future. What does that mean? What novelty is this? Nothing but the most common event in the world, one which takes place every day in every country--namely marriage, here, in Paris, to a child who was born for me, eighteen years ago, six thousand leagues from Paris, in Batavia! She is named Caroline de Gervain, has great blue eyes that light up her delicate face, a very slender figure, a foot of oriental minuteness--in short (without any lover-like vanity), an exquisite and refined ensemble, that will suit you very well. Her fortune is in Indian trade: not large now, but with every prospect of development. The contracts are drawn up and everything is in order; we are only awaiting the arrival of some documents from Calcutta, indispensable to the celebration of a marriage, to tie the last knot. If you leave in May, you will be here in time to stand by the death-bed of my bachelorhood, and to see me cross the Rubicon."
Mlle. de Gervain lived with her aunt, Mlle. Martin-Laforêt, in a pavillion in the Rue Cherche-Midi, and it is from this charming Indian house that Eugénie's first Parisian letter is dated.
TO M. DE GUÉRIN.
Paris, Oct. 8, 1838.
Oh! how I slept in the little pink bed beside Caroline! I wished to write to you, dear papa, before going to bed, but they would not let me, and they said too that the mail would not go out before this morning, so that you would get the letter no sooner. I should have written to you at each relay if it had been possible, for I said to myself: "Now papa and Euphrasie, Mimi and Eran, are thinking of the traveller." How I thought of you all! you followed me the whole way. At last I am here, out of the way of dust, diligences and the annoyances of travelling, and welcomed and cosseted enough to compensate a thousand times over for the four long days of fatigue. I should like to tell you everything, but there are so many, many things;--how I left you, and bowled away towards Paris, and met them all and fell into a dozen arms. Why weren't you on the Place Notre Dame des Victoires when, just as I was driving off in a carriage with Charles, I saw Maurice and Caro and Aunt running and calling me, and kissing me, one through one window and another through the other? Oh! it was so nice!
No one ever entered Paris more pleasantly. We went as fast as we could to Rue du Cherche-Midi, talking, laughing and questioning. "How is papa? and his leg? is he as well as he was last year?" Maurice, poor fellow, cried as he looked at me, and talked of you all, Mimi, Eran, everybody, they all love you and ask after you. When I came down stairs, I distributed your letters, and then came breakfast, which was very welcome to me. Half through breakfast, Auguste entered, a little surprised that I had arrived so early, and full of kind inquiries for you all . . .
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I thought I should reach Paris ground to powder, and here I am as fresh as if I had just stepped out of a bandbox. The dust was suffocating during the thirty leagues of that tiresome Sologne, and the rumbling was like thunder on the paved road from Orleans to Paris. It was impossible to sleep that night, but during the others I took naps, and even slept several hours--but oh! the difference of sleeping in a rose-colored bed, and in a diligence, tossed and jerked about! It was dreadful in the Sologne, where we went at a snail's pace, but fortunately it did not rain--then the passengers have to get out sometimes and push the wheels.
After breakfast I went to mass at St. Sulpice, and then to the Tuileries when the king was absent. It was very grand and regal; the throne is superb, and with "my mind's eye" I saw Louis XIV. and Napoleon. There were a great many visitors, English people, and some brothers from the Christian schools. A friend of Maurice's had got us entrance tickets for yesterday, and as I don't often have a chance to see palaces, I was glad to get the opportunity.
Good-by, dear papa; to-day I say only two words of greeting. Maurice embraces you all as he embraced me yesterday. This is for Mimi and Eran. I send much love to Euphrasie from myself and from Maurice, who is delighted to know she is at Le Cayla. All sorts of kind messages to the parsonage and above all to the gimblette maker,--they were very welcome and every one liked them. They asked me if Augustine had grown tall and if she was mischievous, and I said yes and no;--yes for the height, you understand,--she is all virtue since her first communion.
M. Angler came to bid me welcome, and we are already acquainted; he looks good and is good. M. d'A. is coming this evening. I must leave you, dear papa. Keep well,--take care of yourself; and don't be uneasy you your traveller, who has but one trial, that she cannot see you, and knows you are two hundred leagues away. Two hundred leagues! but my thoughts ran every instant to Le Cayla. We are in such a quiet place that I think myself in the country, and I slept without waking once until six o'clock. Tell Jeanne-Marie and Miou that everyone asks after them. My compliments to the whole household and to all who are interested in me.
But this charming picture had its wrong side, only revealed by Eugénie to Mlle. Louise de Bayne, and to the cousin with whom she lived during part of her stay at Paris, Professor Auguste Raynaud. There was a worm at the heart of the bud, and she knew too well that it must wither without blooming. At the very meeting in the Place Notre Dame des Victoires, which she described so gaily in the letter to Le Cayla, the sight of Maurice's pallor aroused her anxiety, an anxiety that increased daily and marred the pleasure to which she had looked forward for months with ardent longing. "At the time of his marriage," says M. Barbey d'Aurevilly, an intimate friend of both brother and sister, "Maurice was already attacked with the disease of which he died a short time after. He already felt its first sufferings, its first illusions and early symptoms, which made his style of beauty more than ever touching; for among imaginary heads he had that beauty which we may attribute to the last of the Abencerrages. Now what others did not see in the joy and excitement of that day, she saw, with those sad, prophetic eyes that see everything when they love!"
"I want for nothing, my friend," she wrote to Louise de Bayne; "they love me and treat me most cordially at my future sister-in-law's, and here my kind cousin and his wife vie with each other in friendly attention. My sister-in-law gets my dresses, gives me a pink bed, and a jewel of an oratory next my room, where one would pray for mere pleasure. Oh! there is enough to make me happy, and yet I am beginning to weary of it, and to say that happiness is nowhere. Write to me; tell me what you are doing in the mountains. I am waiting impatiently for news from Le Cayla. I long to hear about them all, and to see them in thought. Write to Marie sometime, it will please her, and papa too, who loves you, you know, but do not speak of Maurice's health, for I say nothing to them on the subject, thinking it useless to alarm them when the trouble may pass off."
This was the one uneasiness that disturbed her enjoyment in Paris, "the drop of wormwood with which God wets the lips of his elect, that they be robust in virtue and suffering," as d'Aurevilly said.
TO MME. DE MAISTRE.
Oct. 23.
I have seen many churches, new and old, and I prefer the old. Notre Dame, Saint Eustache, Saint Roch, and others whose names I forget, please me more than the Madeline with its pagan form, without belfry or confessionals, expressive of an unbelieving age; and Notre Dame de Lorette, pretty as a boudoir. I like churches that make one think of God, with vaulted roofs leading to contemplation, where one neither sees nor hears people. I am perfectly contented in l'Abbaye-aux-Bois, a simple little church that reminds me of the one at Andillac. I go there because it is in our parish, and then, too, I've found an excellent priest there, gentle, devout, and enlightened, a disciple of M. Dupanloup. I should have liked to go to him, but they told me that he lived at a distance, and I must have everything within my reach, for I am still like a bird just let out of a cage, hardly daring to stir; I should have lost myself a hundred times in one quarter if I had not always had a companion. However, I have scoured Paris thoroughly in every direction; first mounting the towers of Notre Dame, whence the eye reaches over the immense city and takes in its general plan, after which they took me to the Invalides, the Louvre, and the Bois de Boulogne. The dome of the Invalides, Notre Dame, and the picture galleries, struck me most. You ask for my impressions of Paris--it is all admirable, but nothing astonishes me. At every step the eye and mind are arrested, but in the country, too, I paused over flowers, grass, and wonderful little creatures. Every place has its wonders--here those of man, there those of God, which are very beautiful, and will not pass away. Kings may see their palaces decay, but the ants will always have their dwelling places. Having made these reflections I will leave you, and work on a dress. . . .
TO MLLE. LOUISE DE BAYNE.
All Saints' Day, 1838.
. . . . I do not send you news. I ought to write to you of what goes on within and around me, that you might know my life, and it would be charming to write so, but time flies like a bird and carries me off on its wings. In the morning: church, breakfast, a little work; in the afternoon: a walk or drive, dinner at five o'clock, conversation, music--the day is gone, and nine and ten o'clock come to make us wonder where it went. We go to bed at ten, just like good country folk. In that and many other things I follow my usual habits, and live in Paris as if I were not there. Good by, the bell is ringing.
Seven o'clock. Here I am, pen in hand, sitting by the fire, with the piano sounding, people reading, Pitt (our Criquet) asleep, and memories of you mingling with all these things in this Paris salon. . . . It is not apropos, but I take my recollections of things as they come, and I must not fail to tell you what pleasure you gave me at the Spanish museum of painting where I met you. It was you, Louise: a head full of life, oval face, arch expression, and your eyes looking at me, your cheeks that I longed to kiss. I was so charmed with the likeness that I passed by again to see my dear Spanish maiden. Certainly there must be something Spanish about you, for I see you in St. Theresa, and in this noble and beautiful unknown.
The museum amused, or rather interested me extremely, for one does not get amusement from beautiful things, or among wonderful works with ascetic faces such as compose this museum of painting. And what shall I tell you of the mummies, the thousand fantastic and grotesque Egyptian gods--cats and crocodiles--a paradise of idolatry that no one would care to enter? I looked long at some cloth four or five thousand years old, and at a piece of muslin and a little skein of thread, all framed under glass--how many ages have they been in existence? I should never end if I were learned and could describe these curiosities and antiquities by the thousand--Etruscan vases, exquisite in form and color, that look as if they were made yesterday. The ancients certainly possessed the secret of eternal works.
This is my life, seeing and admiring, and then entering into myself, or going in search of those I love to tell them all that I see and feel. If I could I would write to you forever, which means very often, and what should I not scribble? what do I not scribble? Know that I am writing in the midst of musicians, under Maurice's eye as he sits laughing over my journal, and adds for its embellishment the expression of his homage to the ladies of Rayssac. It was he who noticed that picture first and pointed it out to me. He knows what gives me pleasure and leads me to it.
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We always go out together when the weather is good, sometimes to the Tuileries, sometimes to the Luxembourg; but I like the Tuileries best with its pretty things-sculpture, flowers, children playing about, swans in a basin, and looking down on it all the royal château illuminated by the setting sun. I begin to know my way about a little in the streets and gardens, and I look upon it as a great triumph to be able to go to l'Abbaye-aux-Bois alone, which is a great convenience, for I can go to week-day mass without troubling any one, which was a restraint upon me. One can go about here as safely as in Albi or Gaillac. They had frightened me about the dangers of Paris, when there are really none except for imprudent or crazy people. No one speaks to any person going about his own business. In the evening it is different. I would not go out alone then for the world, especially on the boulevards, where they say the devil leads the dance. We pass through sometimes returning from Mme. Raynaud's, and nothing has ever struck me except the illumination of gas in the cafés, running along the streets like a thread of fire. I annoyed a Parisian by saying that the glow-worms in our hedges were quite as effective. "Mademoiselle, what an insult to Paris!" It made us laugh, as one does laugh sometimes at nothing. Now I am going to the concert; I want to know what music is, and tell you my impressions.