St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century

by William Godwin

The restoration of my health was greatly retarded by the melancholy impressions which necessarily offered themselves to my mind when recollection resumed her seat. It was fortunate for me that this sort of retrospection appears not to be the first thing that occurs after a paroxysm of insanity. When the tide of incoherent ideas subsides, the soul is left in a state of exhaustion; and seems, by a sort of instinct, to shun the influx of tumultuous emotions, and to dwell upon such feelings as are mild, tranquil, and restorative. Once, however, when I was nearly recovered, the thought of what I had been, and the recollection of what I was, violently suggesting themselves to my mind, brought on a relapse, attended with more alarming and discouraging symptoms than my original alienation. At that moment Marguerite was, for the first time, irresistibly struck with the conception that mine was an incurable lunacy; and, as she afterwards assured me, at no period down to that instant had she felt herself so truly inconsolable. But even a sentiment of the last despair was incapable of superseding the active beneficence of Marguerite. Her assiduities, so far as related to this fatal calamity, were at length crowned with success. Her gloomy prognostics were not realised, and the distemper of my understanding quitted me for ever.

Wretched, however, as I have already remarked, beyond all common notions of wretchedness, were my thoughts, when my soul returned to its proper bias, and I fully surveyed the nature of my present situation. Marguerite, who, by her sagacity and patience, had recovered me from a state of the most dreadful disease, now exerted herself to effect the more arduous task of reconciling me to myself. She assured me that she forgave me from her inmost heart; nay, that she was thankful to Providence, which, in the midst of what the world calls great calamities, had preserved to her what she most valued, my affection, entire. She contrasted what had been the subject of her apprehensions before she came to Paris, with what had proved to be the state of the case afterwards. She averred, that the worst that had happened was trivial and tolerable, compared with the image that her fears had delineated. She had feared to find my heart alienated from her, and herself a widowed mother to orphan children. She dreaded lest I should have proved myself worthless in her eyes, lest I should have been found to have committed to oblivion the most sacred of all duties; and, for the gratification of a low and contemptible caprice, to have sacrificed all pretensions to honour and character. For that, indeed, her heart would have bled; against that, all the pride she derived from her ancestry and my own would have revolted; that would have produced a revulsion of her frame, snapping the chain of all her habits, and putting a violent close upon all the sentiments she had most fondly nourished. She dreaded, indeed, that she should not have survived it. But the mistake I had committed was of a very different nature. I had neither forgotten that I was a husband nor a father; I had only made an injudicious and unfortunate choice of the way of discharging what was due to these characters. What had passed was incapable of impeaching either the constancy of my affections or the integrity of my principles. She forgave me, and it was incumbent upon me to forgive myself.

She assured me that poverty, in her apprehension, was a very slight evil; and she appealed to my own understanding for the soundness of her judgment. She bid me look round upon the peasantry of the neighbourhood, upon a footing with whom we were now placed, and ask my own heart whether they were not happy. One disadvantage, indeed, they were subjected to,—the absence of cultivation and learning. She could never bring herself to believe that ignorance was a benefit; she saw the contrary of this practically illustrated in her own case, in mine, and in that of all the persons to whom, through life, she had been most ardently attached. She wished her children to attain intellectual refinement, possess fully the attributes of a rational nature, and to be as far removed as possible from the condition of stocks and stones, by accumulating a magazine of thoughts, and by a rich and cultivated sensibility. But the want of fortune did not in our case, as in the case of so many others, shut them out from this advantage: it was in our own power to bestow it upon them.

It was the part of a reasonable man, she told me, not to waste his strength in useless regrets for what was past, and had already eluded his grasp; but to advert to the blessings he had still in possession. If we did this in our present situation, we should find every reason for contentment and joy. Our pleasure in each other, and the constancy of our attachment, was unassailed and unimpaired. Where were there two married persons, she would venture to ask, who had more reason to applaud their connection, or to whom their connection was pregnant with so various gratifications? From ourselves we had only to turn our thoughts to our children; and we were surely as singularly fortunate in this respect as in each other. Charles, who had always been the subject of our pride, had lately exhibited such an example of patient sympathy and filial affection, as perhaps had never been equalled in a child so young. The sensibility of Julia, the understanding of Louisa, and the vivacity of Marguerite, were all of them so many growing sources of inexhaustible delight. Our children were intelligent, affectionate, and virtuous. Thus circumstanced, she entreated me not to indulge that jaundice of the imagination, which should create to itself a sentiment of melancholy and discontent in the midst of this terrestrial paradise.

Most virtuous of women, now perhaps the purest and the brightest among the saints in heaven! why was I deaf to the soundness of your exhortations, and the generosity of your sentiments? Deaf, indeed, I was! A prey to the deepest dejection, they appeared to me the offspring of misapprehension and paradox! Supposing, in the mean time, that they were reasonable and just in the mouth of her who uttered them, I felt them as totally foreign to my own situation. The language, as they were, of innocence; it was not wonderful that to an innocent heart they spoke tranquillity and peace. Marguerite looked round upon the present rusticity and plainness of our condition, and every thing that she saw talked to her of her merit and her worth. If we were reduced, she was in no way accountable for that reduction; it had been the test of her magnanimity, her patience, and the immutableness of her virtue. She smiled at the assaults of adversity, and felt a merit in her smiles. How different was my situation! Every thing that I saw reminded me of my guilt, and upbraided me with crimes that it was hell to recollect. My own garb, and that of my wife and children, the desertion in which we lived, the simple benches, the unhewn rafters, the naked walls, all told me what it was I had done, and were so many echoes to my conscience, repeating, without intermission and without end, its heart-breaking reproaches. Sleep was almost a stranger to me; these incessant monitors confounded my senses in a degree scarcely short of madness itself. It is the property of vice to convert every thing that should be consolation into an additional source of anguish. The beauty, the capacity, and the virtue of my children, the affection with which they regarded me, the patience and attentiveness and forbearance of their excellent mother, were all so many aggravations of the mischief I had perpetrated. I could almost have wished to have been the object of their taunts and execration. I could have wished to have been disengaged from the dearest charities of our nature, and to have borne the weight of my crimes alone. It would have been a relief to me if my children had been covered with the most loathsome diseases, deformed and monstrous. It would have been a relief to me, if they had been abortive in understanding, and odious in propensities, if their hearts had teemed with every vice, and every day had marked them the predestined victims of infamy. The guilt of having stripped them of every external advantage would then have sat light upon me. But thus to have ruined the most lovely family perhaps that existed on the face of the earth, the most exemplary of women, and children in whom I distinctly marked the bud of every excellence and every virtue, was a conduct that I could never forgive even to myself. Oh, Damville, Damville! best of men! truest of friends! why didst thou put thy trust in such a wretch as I am! Hadst thou no presentiment of the fatal consequences? Wert thou empowered to commit thy only child and all her possible offspring to so dreadful a risk? Indeed, it was not well done! It was meant in kindness; but it was the cruellest mischief that could have been inflicted on me. I was not a creature qualified for such dear and tender connections. I was destined by nature to wander a solitary outcast on the face of the earth. For that only, that fearful misery, was I fitted. Why, misguided, misjudging man! didst thou not leave me to my fate? Even that would have been less dreadful than what I have experienced!—Wretch that I am! Why do I reproach my best benefactor? No, let me turn the whole current of my invective upon myself! Damville was actuated by the noblest and most generous sentiment that ever entered the human mind. What a return then have I made, and to what a benefit!

All the previous habits of my mind had taught me to feel my present circumstances with the utmost acuteness. Marguerite, the generous Marguerite, stood, with a soul almost indifferent, between the opposite ideas of riches and poverty. Not so her husband. I had been formed, by every accident of my life, to the love of splendour. High heroic feats, and not the tranquillity of rural retirement, or the pursuits of a character professedly literary, had been the food of my imagination, ever since the faculty of imagination was unfolded in my mind. The field of the cloth of gold, the siege and the battle of Pavia, were for ever present to my recollection. Francis the First, Bayard, and Bourbon, eternally formed the subject of my visions and reveries. These propensities had indeed degenerated into an infantine taste for magnificence and expense; but the roots did not embrace their soil the less forcibly, because the branches were pressed down and diverted from their genuine perpendicular. That from a lord, descended from some of the most illustrious houses in France, and myself amply imbued with the high and disdainful spirit incident to my rank, I should become a peasant, was itself a sufficient degradation. But I call the heavens to witness that I could have endured this with patience, if I had endured it alone. I should have regarded it as the just retribution of my follies, and submitted with the most exemplary resignation. But I could not, with an equal mind, behold my wife and children involved in my punishment. I turned my eyes upon the partner of my life, and recalled with genuine anguish the magnificence to which she was accustomed, and the hopes to which she was born. I looked upon my children, the fruit of my loins, and once the pride of my heart, and recollected that they were paupers, rustics, exiles. I could foresee no return to rank, but for them and their posterity an interminable succession of obscurity and meanness. A real parent can support the calamity of personal degradation, but he cannot bear to witness and anticipate this corruption of his blood. At some times I honoured Marguerite for her equanimity. At others I almost despised her for this integrity of her virtues. I accused her in my heart of being destitute of the spark of true nobility. Her patience I considered as little less than meanness and vulgarity of spirit. It would have become her better, I thought, like me, to have cursed her fate, and the author of that fate; like me, to have spurned indignant at the slavery to which we were condemned; to have refused to be pacified; and to have wasted the last dregs of existence in impatience and regret. I could act that which had involved us in this dire reverse; but I could not encounter the consequences of my act.

The state of my mind was in the utmost degree dejected and forlorn. I carried an arrow in my heart, which the kindness of my wife and children proved inadequate to extract, and the ranklings of which time itself had not the power to assuage. The wound was not mortal; but, like the wound of Philoctetes, poisoned with the blood of the Lernean hydra, I dragged it about with me from year to year, and it rendered my existence a galling burden hardly to be supported. A great portion of my time was passed in a deep and mournful silence, which all the soothings that were addressed to me could not prevail on me to break. Not that in this silence there was the least particle of ill humour or sullenness. It was a mild and passive situation of the mind; affectionate, as far as it was any thing, to the persons around me; but it was a species of disability; my soul had not force enough to give motion to the organs of speech, or scarcely to raise a finger. My eye only, and that only for a moment at a time, pleaded for forbearance and pardon. I seemed like a man in that species of distemper, in which the patient suffers a wasting of the bones, and at length presents to us the shadow, without the powers, of a human body.

This was at some times my condition. But my stupor would at others suddenly subside. Mechanically, and in a moment, as it were, I shook off my supineness, and sought the mountains. The wildness of an untamed and savage scene best accorded with the temper of my mind. I sprung from cliff to cliff among the points of the rock. I rushed down precipices that to my sobered sense appeared in a manner perpendicular, and only preserved my life, with a sort of inborn and unelective care, by catching at the roots and shrubs which occasionally broke the steepness of the descent. I hung over the tops of rocks still more fearful in their declivities, and courted the giddiness and whirl of spirit which such spectacles are accustomed to produce. I could not resolve to die: death had too many charms to suit the self-condemnation that pursued me. I found a horrible satisfaction in determining to live, and to avenge upon myself the guilt I had incurred. I was far from imagining that the evils I had yet suffered were a mere sport and ostentation of misery, compared with those that were in reserve for me.

The state of mind I am here describing was not madness, nor such as could be mistaken for madness. I never forgot myself, and what I was. I was never in that delirium of thought, in which the patient is restless and active without knowing what it is that he does, and from which, when roused, he suddenly starts, shakes off the dream that engaged him, and stands astonished at himself. Mine was a rage, guided and methodised by the discipline of despair. I burst into no fits of raving; I attempted no injury to any one. Marguerite therefore could not reconcile herself to the placing me under any restraint. I frequently returned home, with my clothes smeared with the soil, and torn by the briars. But my family soon became accustomed to my returning in personal safety; and therefore, whatever was the uneasiness my wife felt from my excursions, she preferred the enduring it, to the idea of imposing on me any species of violence.

The state of my family presented a singular contrast with that of its head. Marguerite was certainly not insensible to the opposition between her former and her present mode of life; but she submitted to the change with such an unaffected cheerfulness and composure, as might have extorted admiration from malignity itself. She would perhaps have dismissed from her thoughts all retrospect to our former grandeur, had not the dejection and despair that seemed to have taken possession of my mind forcibly and continually recalled it to her memory. For my sufferings I am well assured she felt the truest sympathy; but there was one consideration attending them that imperiously compelled her to task her fortitude. They deprived me of the ability of in any degree providing for and superintending my family; it became therefore incumbent upon her to exert herself for the welfare of all. Had we never fallen under this astonishing reverse, I might have spent my whole life in daily intercourse with this admirable woman, without becoming acquainted with half the treasures of her mind. She was my steward; and from the result of her own reflections made the most judicious disposition of my property. She was my physician; not by administering medicines to my body, but by carefully studying and exerting herself to remove the distemper of mind. Unfortunately no distempers are so obstinate as mental ones; yet, had my distemper had any lighter source than an upbraiding conscience, I am persuaded the wisdom of Marguerite would have banished it. She was the instructor of my children; her daughters felt no want of a governess; and I am even ready to doubt whether the lessons of his mother did not amply supply to Charles his loss of an education in the university of Paris. The love of order, the activity, the industry, the cheerfulness of, let me say, this illustrious matron, became contagious to all the inhabitants of my roof. Once and again have I stolen a glance at them, or viewed them from a distance busied, sometimes gravely, sometimes gaily, in the plain, and have whispered to my bursting heart, “How miserable am I! how happy they! So insurmountable is the barrier that divides innocence from guilt. They may breathe the same air; they may dwell under the same roof; they may be of one family and one blood; they may associate with each other every day and every hour; but they can never assimilate, never have any genuine contact. Is there a happier family than mine in all the valley of this far-famed republic? Is there a family more virtuous, or more cultivated with all the refinements that conduce to the true dignity of man? I, I only am its burden and its stain! The pleasure with which I am surrounded on every side finds a repellent quality in my heart that will not suffer its approach. To whatever is connected with me I communicate misfortune. Whenever I make my appearance, those countenances that at all other times spoke contentment and hilarity fall into sadness. Like a pestilential wind, I appear to breathe blast to the fruits of nature, and sickliness to its aspect.”