Part 8

I jest, but there certainly is no reason for it, for I have never suffered so much, and these last two months have seemed to me like two years, two centuries rather. There has been an inflow and outflow of uncertainties in my head, well adapted to confuse the strongest brain; I have been so violently agitated and pulled in every direction, I have had such frenzied impulses, such deathly prostration, such extravagant hopes, and such profound despair that I really do not know why it has not killed me. That idea has engrossed me and filled my thoughts so completely that I have wondered that it could not be seen clearly through my body, like a candle in a lantern, and I have been in mortal fear that some one would discover who was the object of this insensate passion.--However, Rosette, who is the one person in the world who has the most interest in watching the movements of my heart, has not seemed to notice anything; I think that she has been too much absorbed herself in her love for Théodore to observe my coldness to her; or else I must be a past-master in the art of dissimulation and I am not conceited enough to think that.--Théodore himself has never shown until to-day that he had the slightest suspicion of the state of my mind, and he has always talked with me in a friendly, familiar way, as a well-bred young man talks with a young man of his own age--nothing more.--His conversation with me has touched indifferently upon all sorts of subjects, art, poetry and other kindred matters; but nothing private or with a direct reference to him or myself.

Perhaps the motives that forced him to adopt this disguise no longer exist and he proposes soon to resume his proper attire: that I cannot say; it is a fact, however, that Rosalind delivered certain sentences with a significant intonation and emphasized in a very marked way all those passages in her part which were of ambiguous meaning and could be twisted in that direction.

In the scene of the rendezvous, from the moment when she reproaches Orlando for not having arrived two hours earlier, as becomes a genuine lover, but two hours after, to the dolorous sigh she utters, terrified at the extent of her passion, as she throws herself into Aliena's arms: "O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathoms deep I am in love!" she displayed miraculous talent. There was an irresistible mixture of tenderness, melancholy, and love; her voice trembled with emotion, and behind the laugh one could feel that the most violent love was ready to explode; add to this all the piquancy and peculiarity of the transposition, and the novelty of seeing a young man pay court to his mistress, whom he takes for a man and who has every appearance of being one.

Expressions which would have seemed ordinary and commonplace enough under other circumstances, assumed peculiar significance then, and all the small change of similes and amorous protestations, which is current on the stage, seemed to have been recoined with new dies; indeed if the thoughts, instead of being unique and charming as they are, had been as threadbare as a judge's gown or the saddle-cloth of a hired donkey, the way in which they were expressed would have made them seem wonderfully keen and bright and in the best possible taste.

I have forgotten to tell you that Rosette, after declining the rôle of Rosalind, had good-humoredly undertaken the secondary rôle of Phœbe; Phœbe is a shepherdess in the forest of Arden, madly loved by the shepherd Sylvius, whom she cannot endure and whom she treats with consistent and crushing cruelty. Phœbe is as cold as the moon for whom she is named; she has a heart of snow that does not melt in the fire of the most ardent sighs, but whose frozen crust grows thicker and thicker and becomes as hard as the diamond; but she has no sooner seen Rosalind in the costume of the comely page, Ganymede, than all that ice dissolves in tears and the diamond becomes softer than wax. The haughty Phœbe, who laughed at love, is in love herself; she suffers now the torments she had inflicted on others. Her pride humbles itself so far as to make all the advances, and she sends to Rosalind, by poor Sylvius, a burning letter which contains a declaration of her passion in most humble and suppliant terms. Rosalind, moved to pity for Sylvius, and having, moreover, most excellent reasons for not responding to Phœbe's love, subjects her to the most cruel treatment and makes sport of her with unparalleled mercilessness and ferocity. Phœbe prefers these insults, however, to the most touching and most passionate flattery of her unhappy shepherd; she follows the fair stranger everywhere and with all her importunity succeeds in extorting from him nothing but the promise that if he ever marries a woman she shall surely be the one; meanwhile he urges her to treat Sylvius kindly and not depend upon a too flattering hope.

Rosette acted her part with a melancholy and caressing grace, a sorrowful, resigned tone that went to the heart;--and when Rosalind said to her: "I would love you, if I could," the tears were ready to overflow, and she could hardly hold them back, for Phœbe's story is her own, as Orlando's is mine, with this difference, that everything turns out happily for Orlando, and that Phœbe, disappointed in her love, is compelled to marry Sylvius instead of the charming ideal she longed to embrace. Such is life: that which affords happiness to one necessarily causes another unhappiness. It is very fortunate for me that Théodore is a woman, it is very unfortunate for Rosette that he is not a man, and she is now wallowing in the slough of amorous impossibilities in which I recently went astray.

At the end of the play Rosalind lays aside the doublet of the page Ganymede for the garments of her own sex, is recognized by her father as his daughter, by Orlando as his mistress: the god Hymen arrives with his saffron-colored livery and his legitimate torches.--Three weddings take place.--Orlando marries Rosalind, Phœbe Sylvius, and the clown Touchstone the artless Audrey.--Then the epilogue has its say and the curtain falls.

All this has interested us exceedingly and engrossed our minds; there was, in a certain sense, a play within the play, a drama invisible to the other spectators and unsuspected by them, which we played for ourselves alone, and which, in symbolic phrases, summed up our whole lives and expressed our most secret desires.--Except for Rosalind's strange prescription I should be sicker than ever, having not even a distant hope of cure, and I should have continued to wander sadly through the winding paths of the dark forest.

And yet I have only a moral certainty; I lack proofs and I can remain no longer in this state of uncertainty; I absolutely must speak to Théodore in more definite terms. I have approached him twenty times with a sentence ready on my lips, but have not succeeded in saying it to him--I dare not; I have many opportunities to speak to him alone, either in the park or in my room, or in his, for he comes to see me and I go to see him, but I let them pass without profiting by them, although the next moment I feel a mortal regret and fly into a terrible rage with myself. I open my mouth, and in spite of all I can do, other words take the places of the words I intended to say; instead of declaring my love, I discourse upon the rain, the fine weather or some other similarly stupid subject. And the season is drawing to a close and soon we shall return to the town; the facilities which present themselves according to my wishes here will be renewed nowhere else:--perhaps we shall lose sight of each other and opposite currents will carry us in opposite directions, I doubt not.

The free and easy life of the country is such a delightful and convenient thing! the trees, even though the foliage is not quite so dense in the autumn, afford such delicious shade for the reveries of nascent love! it is difficult to resist the lovely natural surroundings! the birds sing so languorously, the flowers give forth such intoxicating odors, the turf is so soft and so golden on the hillsides! Solitude inspires countless voluptuous thoughts which the hurly-burly of the world would have scattered here and there, and the instinctive impulse of two creatures who hear their hearts beat in the silence of a deserted country-side, is to entwine their arms more tightly and to cleave to each other as if they were in truth the only living creatures in the world.

I took a walk this morning; the air was soft and damp, not the slightest particle of blue sky could be seen, and yet it was neither dark nor threatening. Two or three different shades of pearl-gray, harmoniously blended, enveloped the sky from horizon to horizon, and against that vaporous background fleecy clouds floated slowly like great pieces of wadding; they were impelled by the dying breath of a light breeze, hardly strong enough to move the tops of the most restless aspens: patches of mist rose between the tall chestnuts and indicated the course of the stream in the distance. When the breeze took breath once more, a few dry red leaves blew excitedly about and ran along the path before me like swarms of timid sparrows; then as the breeze fell, they subsided a few steps farther on: a true image of those winds that one mistakes for birds flying freely with wings outspread, but which are, after all, naught but leaves withered by the morning frost, which the slightest passing breeze takes for its plaything and its sport.

Distant points were so blurred by vapors, and the fringes of the horizon tapered away so on the edges, that it was hardly possible to tell where the sky began and the earth ended: a little darker gray, a little denser haze, indicated vaguely the separation and dividing line between the two. Through that curtain, the willows with their ashen heads seemed more like spectral trees than real trees; the irregularities of the hills resembled rather the undulations of a mass of heaped-up clouds than the lay of solid ground. The outlines of objects trembled as you looked at them, and a sort of gray woof of indescribable fineness, like a spider's web, stretched between the foreground of the landscape and the receding depths of the atmosphere; in shaded places the lines stood out much more clearly, and allowed the meshes of the net to be seen; where the light was brighter, the streak of mist was imperceptible and lost itself in a diffused light. There was in the air something drowsy, something warm and soft and dull that predisposed one strangely to melancholy.

As I walked I reflected that autumn had come for me also, and that the radiant summer had passed, never to return; the tree of my mind was even more stripped of its leaves perhaps than the trees in the forest; hardly one tiny green leaf remained on the topmost branch, swaying to and fro and trembling, all sad to see its sisters leave it one by one.

Remain upon the tree, O little leaf of the color of hope, cling to the branch with all the strength of thy nerves and fibres; be not alarmed by the whistling of the wind, O dear little leaf! for when thou hast left me, who will be able to distinguish whether I am a dead or living tree, and who will prevent the wood-cutter from cutting through my foot with his axe and making firewood of my branches?--It is not yet the time when the trees shed all their leaves, and the sun may still throw off the swaddling-clothes of mist that surround it.

The spectacles of the dying season made a deep impression upon me. I reflected that time was passing swiftly and that I might die without having pressed my ideal to my heart.

When I returned to my room I had formed a resolution.--As I cannot make up my mind to speak, I wrote my whole destiny upon a slip of paper.--It is absurd perhaps to write to a person who is living in the same house with yourself, whom you can see every day, at any hour; but I am beyond caring whether it is absurd or not.

I sealed my letter, not without trembling and changing color; then, selecting a moment when Théodore had gone out, I placed it in the middle of his table and fled, as disturbed as if I had committed a most outrageous act.

[Footnote 1: _As You Like It._]

[Footnote 2: The last word in this quotation, which justifies the succeeding epithets, is not in the English version of the play.]

XII

I promised you the sequel of my adventures; but really I am so sluggish about writing that I must love you as the apple of my eye and know you to be more curious than Eve or Psyche, to place myself in front of a table with a huge sheet of white paper which I must make black, and an inkstand deeper than the sea, each drop in which is destined to turn into thoughts, or at least into something resembling thoughts, without forming a sudden resolution to mount my horse and ride at full speed the eighty endless leagues that lie between us, in order to tell you _viva voce_ what I propose to write in imperceptible fly-tracks, so that I may not be dismayed myself by the prodigious volume of my _picaresque_ odyssey.

Eighty leagues! to think that there is all that space between myself and the person I love best in the world!--I have an intense longing to tear up my letter and order my horse to be saddled.--But I will think no more of it--with the clothes I am wearing, I could not approach you and resume the familiar life we led together when we were very artless and innocent little girls; if ever I go back to my petticoats it will certainly be for that purpose.

I left you, I believe, as we were leaving the inn where I passed such an amusing night and where my virtue thought it was going to be shipwrecked upon leaving the harbor.--We rode away together, going in the same direction.--My companions went into ecstasies over the beauty of my horse, which is a thoroughbred and one of the fastest horses in the world;--that fact increased my stature at least half a cubit in their estimation, and they added the merits of my steed to my own merits.--They seemed to be afraid, however, that he was too frisky and high-spirited for me.--I told them they need have no fear, and to show them that there was no danger I made him prance and curvet--then I jumped a wall of considerable height and put him at a gallop.

The party tried in vain to overtake me; I turned when I was some distance ahead of them and rode back at full speed; just before I met them, I checked my horse when all four feet were in the air and stopped him short: which is, as you may or may not know, a genuine feat.

From esteem they passed without transition to the most profound respect. They did not suspect that a young student, recently graduated from the University, was so accomplished a horseman as that. That discovery served me better than if they had discovered in me all the cardinal virtues; instead of treating me as a boy, they addressed in a tone of obsequious familiarity that pleased me.

In laying aside my clothing, I had not laid aside my pride:--being a woman no longer, I determined to be a thorough man and not to be content to have simply the external appearance of one.--I had determined to achieve as a cavalier, the triumphs I could no longer aspire to as a woman. What disturbed me most was to ascertain how I should set about procuring a stock of courage; for courage and skill in bodily exercises are the means by which a man most easily establishes a reputation. It is not that I am timid for a woman, and I have not the idiotic pusillanimity that we see in some women; but it is a long distance to the reckless, fierce brutality that is the glory of the men, and it was my intention to become a young blood, a swash-buckler, like my gentlemen of the upper circles, in order to secure a good footing in society and to enjoy all the advantages of my metamorphosis.

But I saw in the sequel that nothing was easier and that the receipt was of the simplest.

I will not tell you, according to the custom of travellers, that I made so many leagues on such a day, that I went from this place to another place, that the roast meat I ate at the Cheval-Blanc or Croix-de-Fer inn was raw or burned; that the wine was sour and the bed I slept in had curtains with flowered or figured designs: those are very important details which should be preserved for posterity; but posterity will have to do without them this time, and you must resign yourself to be left in ignorance of the number of dishes of which my dinner was composed, and whether I slept well or ill during my wanderings. Nor shall I give you an accurate description of the different landscapes, the fields of grain, the forests, the various crops and the hillsides covered with villages which have passed successively before my eyes; those things are easily imagined; take a little earth, plant a few trees and a few blades of grass, daub behind it all a bit of gray or pale-blue sky, and you will have a very adequate idea of the changing background against which our little caravan moved on.--If I went into some details of this nature in my first letter, pray excuse me, I will not fall into the same error again: as I had never been abroad before, the most trivial things seemed to me of vast importance.

One of the party, my bedfellow, he whose sleeve I came so near pulling on the memorable night whose agonies I have described to you at length, conceived an ardent passion for me and kept his horse beside mine all the time.

With the exception that I would not have taken him for a lover even if he had brought me the fairest crown on earth, I did not find him particularly disagreeable; he was well-informed and lacked neither wit nor good-humor: but, when he spoke of women, it was in a disdainful, ironical tone, for which I could readily have torn the eyes out of his head, especially as there were many things in what he said that were cruelly true, although exaggerated, and my male costume compelled me to acknowledge their accuracy.

He asked me so urgently and so persistently to go with him to see one of his sisters, who was just at the end of her mourning for her husband, and was at that moment living with an aunt in an old chateau, that I could not refuse.--I made some objections for form's sake, for in reality I was as ready to go there as anywhere, and I could attain my object in that way as well as any other; and as he told me that he should take it very ill of me if I did not give him at least a fortnight, I answered that I would gladly do so, and that it was a bargain.

At a fork in the road, my friend said to me, pointing to the right arm of the natural Y: "That is our road."--The others shook hands with us and went in the other direction.

After riding for some hours we reached our destination.

A ditch of considerable width, but filled with dense and abundant vegetation instead of water, separated the park from the high road; the walls were of a hewn stone and, at the angles, bristled with gigantic iron artichokes and thistles which seemed to have grown like natural plants between the disjointed blocks of the wall; a small bridge of a single arch crossed this dry canal and led to the park gate.

An avenue of tall elms, rounded like a cradle-top and trimmed in the old style, was the first thing I saw; and after following it for some time, we came to a sort of circular clearing.

The trees had the appearance of being old-fashioned rather than old; they seemed to wear wigs and to be powdered; only a little circle of foliage had been preserved at the top of their heads; all the rest was carefully pruned, so that you might have taken them for plumes of abnormal size stuck in the ground at regular intervals.

Having crossed the clearing, which was covered with fine grass carefully rolled, we had to pass under another curious arrangement of foliage adorned with pots of fire, pyramids, and columns of a rustic order, all done by skilful handling of scissors and sickles in a great clump of boxwood.--Through different vistas you could see, at the right and left, a half-ruined chateau, the moss-covered stairway of a dry cascade, or it might be a vase or a statue of a nymph or a shepherd with nose and fingers broken and with doves perching on the head and shoulders.

A large flower-garden on the French plan was laid out in front of the chateau; all the squares were marked out with holly and box with absolute symmetry; it had quite as much the appearance of a carpet as of a garden: huge flowers in ball-dresses with majestic carriage and serene expression, like duchesses preparing to dance a minuet, bent their heads slightly as you passed. Others, apparently less courteous, stood straight and stiff, like dowagers embroidering. Shrubs of all possible shapes, excepting always their natural shape, round, square, pointed, triangular, in green and gray boxes, seemed to march in procession along the broad avenue and to lead you by the hand to the first steps of the entrance.

A few turrets, half surrounded by more recent buildings, towered above the roof-line of the main structure to the height of their slate-covered, extinguisher-like peaks, and their zinc vanes, cut in the shape of swallows' tails, bore witness to an honorable antiquity. The windows of the central building all opened upon a common balcony with an iron balustrade of elaborate workmanship and great beauty, and the other windows were set in stone frames with carved ciphers and figures.

Four or five huge dogs ran out, barking at the top of their lungs and leaping wildly about. They gambolled around the horses and jumped at their noses: they paid especial attention to my companion's horse, which they probably visited frequently in the stable or accompanied on the road.

All this uproar finally called out a sort of valet, half laborer, half groom, who took our horses by the reins and led them away.--I had not as yet seen a living being except a little peasant girl, timid and wild as a deer, who ran away at sight of us and crouched in a furrow behind some hemp, although we called her several times and did everything in our power to reassure her.

No one appeared at the windows; you would have said the chateau was uninhabited, or that its only occupants were spirits; for not the slightest sound could be heard outside.

We were beginning to ascend the steps, making considerable noise with our spurs, for our legs were a little tired, when we heard a sound as of doors opening and shutting within, as if some one were hurrying to meet us.

In a moment a young woman appeared at the top of the steps, rushed down to my companion and threw herself on his neck. He kissed her very affectionately and, putting his arm about her waist, lifted her up and carried her so to the landing.

"Do you know that you are very amiable and gallant for a brother, my dear Alcibiades?--Surely, monsieur, it is altogether useless for me to tell you that he's my brother, for he really does not stand on ceremony?" said the young woman, turning to me.

To which I replied that it was possible to misinterpret his actions, and that it was in a certain sense a misfortune to be her brother and thus to be excluded from the category of her adorers; that, as for myself, if I were her brother, I should be at once the unhappiest and the happiest cavalier on earth."--Whereat she smiled sweetly.