THE TRUE STORY OF A HALLUCINATION.
The career of the Abbé Gérard had been an eminently successful one—successful in every way; and even he himself was forced to acknowledge it to be so as he reviewed his past life, sitting by a blazing fire in his comfortable apartment in the Rue Miromeuil previous to dressing for the Duc de Frontignan's dinner-party. Born of poor parents in the south of France, entering the priesthood at an early age, having received but a meagre education, and that chiefly confined to a superficial knowledge of the most elementary treatises on theology, he had, in twenty-five years, and solely by his own exertions, unaided by patronage, obtained a most desirable berth in one of the leading Paris churches, thereby becoming the recipient of a handsome salary and being enabled to indulge his tastes as a dilettante and homme du monde. The few hours snatched from those absorbed by his parochial duties he had ever devoted to study, and his application and determination had borne him golden fruit. Moreover, he had so cultivated his mind, and made such good use of the rare opportunities afforded him in early life of associating with gentlemen, that when now at length he found his presence in demand at every house in the "Faubourg" where wit and graceful learning were appreciated, no one would ever have suspected he had not been bred according to the strictest canons of social refinement.
But in his upward progress such had been his experience of life that when, during the brief intervals of breathing time he allowed himself, he would look below and above, he was forced to confess that at every step a belief, an illusion had been destroyed and trodden under foot, and he would wonder, while bracing himself for a new effort, how it would all end, and whether the mitre he lusted for would not after all, perhaps, be placed upon a head that doubted even the existence of a God. He was not a bad man, but merely one of that class who have embraced the priesthood merely as a means of raising themselves from obscurity to eminence, and have in their intercourse with the world discovered many flaws and blemishes in what they may at one time have considered perfect. When his reason rejected many of the fables hitherto cherished and believed in, the Abbé Gérard was at the beginning inclined to abandon in despair the attempt to discern the true from the false, and this all the more that he saw the time thus spent was, in a worldly sense, but wasted, and that the good things of this world come to such reapers as gather wheat and tares alike, well knowing there is a market for them both.
During a certain period, therefore, of his struggle upward, while his worldly ambition was aiding by sly insinuations and comparisons the deadly work already begun by the destruction of his dreams, Henri Gérard was nigh being an atheist. But the nature of the man was too finely sensual for this phase to be lasting, and when at length he found himself so far successful in his worldly aspirations as to be tolerably sure of their complete fulfilment; when at length he found time to examine spiritual matters apart from their direct bearing upon his social altitude, his æsthetic sense—which by this time had necessarily developed—he was struck by the exquisite beauty of Christianity, and thus, as a shallow philosophy had nearly induced him to become an atheist, a deep and sensual spirit of sentimentality nearly made him a Christian. His Madonna was the Madonna of Raphael, not that of Albert Dürer: the woman whose placid grace of countenance creates an emotion more subtly voluptuous than desire; not she in whose face can be discerned the human mother of the Man of Sorrows and of Him divinely acquainted with all grief. The Holy Spirit he adored was not the Friend of the broken-hearted or the Healer of the blind Bartimœus, but He "who feedeth among the lilies"—the Alpha and Omega of all æsthetic conception. Christianity he looked upon as the highest moral expression of artistic perfection, and he regarded it with the same admiration he accorded to the Antinous and the Venus of Milo. He was not, however, by nature a pagan as some men are—men who, in the words of De Musset, "Sont venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux"; but the atmosphere in which his early years had been spent had been so antagonistic to the impulses of his nature, his inner life had been so cramped in and starved, that when at length the key of gold opening the prison door let in the outer air, his spirit revelled in all the wild extravagance so often accompanying sudden and long wished-for emancipation. His nature was perhaps not one that could have been attuned to a perfect harmony with that of a Greek or Roman of the golden days, but one better calculated to enjoy the hybrid atmosphere of the Italian Renaissance; and he would have been in his element in the Rucellai Gardens, conversing with feeble little Cosimino, or laughing with Buondelmonte and Luigi Alamanni. He did not believe in the narrative of the Bible, but its precepts and tendencies he appreciated and admired, although, it must be confessed, he did not always put himself out to follow them. In his heart he utterly rejected all idea of a future life, since it was incompatible with his conception of the artistic unity of this; but he would blandly acknowledge to himself that there are perhaps things we cannot comprehend, and that beauty may have no term. He assimilated, so far as in him lay, his duties as a priest with his ideas as a man of culture; and his sermons were ever of love; sermons which, winged as they were with impassioned eloquence, were deservedly popular with all: from the scholar, who delighted in them as intellectual feasts, to the fashionable Paris woman of the second empire, who was enchanted at finding in the quasi-fatalistic and broadly charitable views enunciated therein means whereby her vulgar amours might be considered in a light more pleasing to herself and more consoling to her husband.
On the Sunday afternoon preceding the evening on which we introduce him to the reader the Abbé had departed from his usual custom, and, by especial request of his curé, had preached a most remarkable sermon upon the Personality of Satan. It is a vulgar error to suppose that men succeed best when their efforts are enlivened by a real belief in the matter in hand. Not only some men have such a superabundance of fervid imagination that they can, for the time being, provoke themselves into a pseudo belief in what they know in their saner moments to be false, but moreover a large class of men are endowed with minds so restless and so finely strung that they can play with a sophism with marvellous dexterity and skill, while lacking that vigorous and comprehensive grasp of mind which the lucid exposition of a hidden truth necessitates. The Abbé Gérard belonged a little to both these classes of beings; and moreover, his vanity as an intellectual man provoked him to extraordinary exertions in cases wherein he fancied he might win for himself the glory of strengthening and verifying matters which in themselves perhaps lacked almost the elements of existence. "Spiritual truths," he once cynically remarked to Sainte-Beuve, whom, by the way, he detested, "will take care of themselves; it is the nursing of spiritual falsehood which needs all the care of the clergy." On the Sunday in question he had surpassed himself. With biting irony he had annihilated the disbelievers in Divine punishment, and then, with persuasive and overwhelming eloquence, he had urged the necessity of believing not only in hell, but in the personality of the Prince of Evil. Women had fainted in their terror; men had been frightened into seeking the convenient solace of the confessional, and the Archbishop had written him a letter of the warmest thanks.
It was a triumph which a man of the nature of the Abbé Gérard particularly enjoyed. The idea of finding himself the successful reviver of an inanimate doctrine, while secretly conscious that he was, in reality, a skeptic in matters of dogmatically vital importance, was to a mind so prone to delight in paradoxes eminently agreeable. It pleased him to see the letter of the Archbishop lying upon a volume of Strauss, and to read the glowing and extravagant praise lavished on him in the pages of the "Univers" after having enjoyed a sparkling draught of Voltaire.
Such was the Abbé Gérard—the type of a class. The Duc de Frontignan, with whom he was dining on the evening this story opens, was or rather is in many ways a no less remarkable personage in Paris society. Possessing rank, birth, and a splendid income, he had inherited more than a fair share of the good gifts of Providence, being endowed not only with considerable mental power, but with the tact to use that power to the best advantage. Although beyond doubt clever, he was universally esteemed a much more intellectual man than he really was, and this through no voluntary deceitfulness on his part, but owing to a method he had unconsciously adopted of exhibiting his wares with their most favorable aspect to the front. He was well read, but not deeply read, and yet all Paris considered him a profound scholar; he was quick and epigrammatic in his appreciation and expression of ideas, as men of cultivation and varied experience are apt to be, but he enjoyed the reputation of being a wit, and finally having merely lounged through the world, impelled by a spirit of restlessness, begotten of great wealth and idleness, society looked upon him as a bold and adventurous traveller. One gift he most certainly possessed: he was vastly amusing and entertaining, and resembled in one respect the Abbé Galiani, as described by Diderot; for he was indeed "a treasure on rainy days, and if the cabinet-makers made such things, everybody would have one in the country." He not only knew everybody in Paris, but he possessed an extraordinary faculty of drawing people out, and forcing them to make themselves amusing. No man was in his society long before he discovered himself openly discussing his most cherished hobby, or airily scattering as seed for trivial conversation the fruit of long years of experience and reflection. His hotel in the Rue de Varenne was the resort of all that was most remarkable and extraordinary in the fashionable, the artistic, the diplomatic, and the scientific world. His intimacy with the Abbé Gérard was one of long standing: they mutually amused each other; the keen intellect of the priest found much that was interesting in the shallow but attractive and brilliant nature of the layman; while the Duke entertained feelings of the warmest admiration for a man who, having risen from nothing, enlivened the most exclusive coteries with his graceful learning and charming wit.
It was one of the peculiar whims of Octave de Frontignan never to have an even number of guests at his dinner table. His soirées indeed were attended by hundreds, but his dinner parties rarely exceeded seven (including himself), and in many cases he only invited two. On this especial occasion the only guest asked to meet the Abbé Gérard was the celebrated diplomatist and millionaire the Prince Paul Pomerantseff. This most extraordinary personage had for the past six years kept Europe in a constant state of excitement by reason of his munificence and power. Brought up under the direct personal supervision of the Emperor of Russia, he had done a little of everything and succeeded in all he had undertaken. He had distinguished himself as a diplomatist and as a soldier, and had left traces of his indomitable will in many State papers as on many an enemy's face during the period of the Crimean war. In London, but perhaps more especially in "the shires," his face was well known and liked. Duchesses' daughters had sighed for him, but in vain; and the continuance of his celibacy appeared to be as certain as the splendor of his fortune. The Abbé Gérard had known him for many years, and proved no exception to the general rule, for although their friendship had never ripened into great intimacy, there was perhaps no man in the wide circle of his acquaintance in whose society the priest took a more lively pleasure.
"Late as usual!" cried the Duke, as Gérard hurried into the room ten minutes after the appointed hour. "Prince, if you were so unpunctual in your diplomatic duties as the Abbé is in his social (and I fear in his spiritual!), where would the world be?"
The Abbé stopped short, pulled out his watch, and looked at it with a comically contrite air.