Chapter 14

I saw him, too, die, some years later, the death of the righteous and the just. He had learned how to die at many deathbeds; and when stretched motionless on his, during six months of agony, his eye counted on a little clock, which stood at the foot of his bed, the hours that divided him from eternity. He pressed upon his bosom, with his crossed hands, a crucifix, emblem of patience, and his look never quitted that celestial friend, as though he had conversed at the foot of the cross. When he suffered beyond his powers of endurance he requested that the crucifix might be approached to his lips, and his prayers were then mingled with thanksgiving. At last he slept, supported to the end by his hopes and the memory of the good he had done. He had given the poor and the sick an accumulated treasure of good works to carry before him into the presence of the God of the merciful. He died on a wretched bed in a garret, leaving no inheritance. The poor bore his body to the grave, and, in their turn, gave him the burial of charity in the common earth. O blessed soul, that in memory, I still see smiling on that kind countenance, lighted with inward joy, can so much virtue have been to thee but a deception? Hast thou vanished like the reflection of my lamp upon thy portrait, when my hand withdraws the light that allowed me to contemplate it? No, no; God is faithful, and cannot have deceived thee, who wouldst not have deceived a child!

XC.

The doctor took a deep and friendly interest in me. It seemed as if Julie had imparted to him a portion of her tenderness. He understood my complaint, though he concealed his knowledge from me, and was too deeply read in human passion not to recognize its symptoms in us. He ordered me to depart under penalty of death, and induced Julie herself to enforce his commands by communicating to her his fears. He invoked the tender authority of love to tear me from love. He tried to mitigate the pang of separation by the allurement of hope, and ordered me to breathe some time my native air, and then return to the baths of Savoy, where Julie should join me, by his advice, in the beginning of autumn. His principles did not seem startled by the symptoms of mutual passion which he had not failed to perceive between us. Our pure flame was in his eyes a fault, but it was also its own purification. His countenance only expressed the indulgence of man, and the compassion of God. He thus endeavored to save us by loosening the tie which threatened to draw us to one common death. I at length consented to be the first to depart, and Julie swore to follow me soon. Alas, her tears, her pale face, and trembling lips said more than any vows! It was settled that I should leave Paris as soon as my strength permitted me to travel. The eighteenth of May was the day fixed for my departure.

When once we had resolved on our approaching separation we began to reckon the minutes as hours, the hours as days. We would have amassed and concentrated years into the short space of a second, to wrest from time the happiness from which we were to be debarred during so many months. These days were days of rapture, but they had their anguish and their agony; the approaching morrow cast its gloom upon each interview, each look and word, each pressure of the hand. Joys such as these are not joys, but disguised pangs of love and tortures of the heart. We devoted the whole day preceding my departure to our adieus. We wished not to say our last farewell within the shadow of walls, which weigh down the soul, or beneath the eyes of the indifferent, which throw back the feelings on the heart, but beneath the sky, in the open air, in the light, in solitude, and in silence. Nature sympathizes with all the emotions of man; she understands, and, as an invisible confidant, seems to share them. She garners them in heaven, and renders them divine.

XCI.

In the morning, a carriage, which I had hired for the day, conveyed us to Monceau. The windows were down, the blinds closed. We traversed the almost deserted streets of the more elevated parts of Paris, leading to the high walls of the park. This garden was at that time almost exclusively reserved for their own use by the princes to whom it belonged, and could only be entered on presenting tickets of admission, which were very parsimoniously distributed to a few foreigners or travellers desirous of admiring its wonderful vegetation. I had obtained some of these tickets, through one of my mother's early friends who was attached to the prince's household. I had selected this solitude because I knew its owners were absent, that no admissions were then given, and that the very gardeners would be away enjoying the leisure of a holiday.

This magnificent desert, studded with groves of trees, interspersed with meadows, and traversed by limpid streams, is also embellished by monuments, columns, and ivy-covered ruins, imitations of time in which art has copied the old age of stone. That day we knew it would be visited only by the bright sunbeams, the insects, the birds, and us. Alas, never were its leaves and its green turf to be watered by so many tears!

The warm and glowing sky, the light and shade dancing fitfully on the grass driven by the summer breeze, as the shadow of the wings of one bird pursuing another; the clear note of the nightingale ringing through the sonorous air; the distinctness with which the lilies of the valley, the daisies, and the blue periwinkles which carpeted the sloping banks of the clear waters, were reflected in their polished mirror,--all this gladness of Nature saddened us, and this luminous serenity of a spring morning only seemed to contrast the more with the dark cloud which weighed upon our hearts. In vain we sought to deceive ourselves even for a moment by expatiating on the beauty of the landscape, the brilliant tints of the flowers, the perfumes of the air, the depth of the shade, the stillness of those solitudes in which the happiness of a whole world of love might have been sheltered. We carelessly threw on them an unheeding glance, which quickly fell to the ground; our voices, when answering with their vain formulas of joy and admiration, betrayed the hollowness of words and the absence of our thoughts, which were elsewhere. It was in vain we sought a resting-place to pass the long hours of this our last interview; seating ourselves alternately beneath the most fragrant lilacs, or the green branches of the loftiest cedars, on the fluted fragments of columns half-buried in ivy, or by the side of those waters that lay most still within their grassy banks, for scarcely had we chosen one of these sites when some vague disquietude drove us away in search of another. Here it was the shade, and there the light; further on, the importunate murmur of the cascade, or the persisting song of the nightingale over our heads,--that turned into bitterness all this exuberance of joy, and made it odious in our eyes. When our heart is sad within us, all creation jars upon our feelings, and it could but have added fresh pangs to the grief of two lovers, had the garden of Eden been the scene of their parting.

At last, worn out by wandering for two hours, and finding no shelter against ourselves, we sat down near a small bridge across a stream; a little apart, as if the very sound of each other's breathing had been painful, or as if we had wished instinctively to conceal from one another the suppressed sobs which were bursting from our hearts. We long watched abstractedly the green and slimy water as it was slowly swept beneath the narrow arch of the bridge. It carried along on its surface sometimes the white petals of the lily, and sometimes an empty and downy bird's nest which the wind had blown from a tree. We soon saw the body of a poor little swallow, turned on its back, and with extended wings, floating down. It had, doubtless, been drowned when skimming over the water before its wings were strong enough to bear it on the surface; it reminded us of the swallow which had one day fallen at our feet, from the top of the dismantled tower of the old castle on the borders of the lake, and which had saddened us as an omen. The dead bird passed slowly before us, and the unruffled sheet of water rolled and engulfed it in the deep darkness below the bridge. When the bird had disappeared, we saw another swallow pass and repass a hundred times beneath the bridge, uttering its little sharp cry of distress, and dashing against the wooden beams of the arch. Involuntarily we looked at each other; I cannot tell what our eyes expressed as they met, but the despair of the poor bird found us with our eyelids so overcharged, and our hearts so nearly bursting, that we both turned away at the same moment, and throwing ourselves with our faces to the ground, sobbed aloud. One tear called forth another tear, one thought another thought, one foreboding another foreboding, each sob another sob. We often strove to speak, but the broken voice of the one only made that of the other still more inaudible, and we ended by yielding to nature, and pouring forth in silence, during hours marked by the shadows alone, all the tears that rose from their hidden springs. They fell on the grass, sank into the earth, were dried by the winds of heaven, absorbed by the rays of the sun,--God took them into account! No drop of anguish remained in our hearts when we rose face to face though almost hidden from each other by the tearful veil of our eyes. Such was our farewell,--a funereal image, an ocean of tears, an eternal silence. Thus we parted without another look, lest that look should strike us to the earth. Never will the mark of my footsteps be again traced in that desert scene of our love and of our parting.

XCII.

The next morning I was rolling along, sad and silent, wrapped in my cloak, among the barren hills on the road that leads from Paris towards the south. I was stowed away in a public coach, with five or six unknown fellow-travellers who were gayly discussing the quality of the wine and the price of the last dinner at the inn. I never once opened my lips during that long, sad journey.

My mother received me with that serene and resigned tenderness which might have made even misfortune happy in her company. Her diamond had been spent in vain to advance my fortunes; and I returned home, with shattered health and broken hopes, consumed with melancholy that she attributed to my unoccupied youth and restless imagination, but of which I carefully concealed the real cause, for fear of adding an irremediable sorrow to all her other griefs.

I spent the summer alone in an almost deserted valley enclosed between barren hills, where my father had a little farm, which was worked by a poor family. My mother had sent me there, and commended me to the care of these good people, that I might have a change of air and the benefit of milk diet. My whole occupation was to reckon the days which must intervene before I could join Julie in our dear Alpine valley. Her letters, received and replied to daily, confirmed me in my security, and dispelled, by their sportive gayety and caressing words, the gloomy and sinister forebodings our last farewell had raised in my heart. Now and then some desponding word or expression of sadness which seemed to have unguardedly escaped, or been involuntarily overlooked among her vistas of happiness, as a dry leaf in the midst of the foliage of spring, struck me as being in contradiction with the calm and blooming health she spoke of. But I attributed these discrepancies to some vision of memory or to her impatience at the slowness of time which might have flitted like shadows across the paper as she wrote.

The bracing mountain air, sleep at night, and exercise by day, the healthy employment of working in the garden and in the farm, soon restored me to health; but, above all, the approach of autumn, and the certainty of soon seeing her once more who by her looks would give me life. The only remaining trace of my sufferings was a gentle and pensive melancholy which overspread my countenance; it was as the mist of a summer's morning. My silence seemed to conceal some mystery, and my instinctive love of solitude made the superstitious peasants of the mountains believe that I conversed with the Genii of the woods.

All ambition had been extinguished in me by my love. I had made up my mind for life to my hopeless poverty and obscurity, and my mother's serene and pious resignation had entered into my heart with her holy and gentle words. I only indulged the dream of working during ten or eleven months of the year manually, or with my pen to earn sufficiently thereby to spend a month or two with Julie every year. I thought that if the old man's protection were one day to fail, I would devote myself to her service as a slave, like Rousseau to Madame de Warens; we would take shelter in some secluded cottage of these mountains, or in the well-known chalets of our Savoy; I would live for her, as she would live for me, without looking back with regret to the empty world, and asking of love no other reward than the happiness of loving.

XCIII.

I was, however, often recalled harshly from my dreamy region by the cruel penury of my home, which was partly attributable to the unavailing expense incurred for me. Crops had failed during successive years, and reverses of fortune had changed the humble mediocrity of my parents into comparative want. When on Sundays I went to see my mother, she spoke of her distress, and before me shed tears that she concealed from my father and my sisters. I, too, was reduced to extreme destitution. I lived at the little farm on brown bread, milk, and eggs, and had in secret sold successively in the neighboring town all the books and clothes I had brought from Paris, to procure wherewithal to pay the postage of Julie's letters, for which I would have sold my life's blood.

The month of September was drawing to a close. Julie wrote me that her anxiety on the score of her husband's daily declining health (O pious fraud of love to conceal her own sufferings and lighten my cares) would detain her longer in Paris than she had expected. She pressed me to start at once, and await her in Savoy, where she would join me without fail towards the end of October. The letter was one of tender advice, as that of a sister to a beloved brother. She implored and ordered me, with the sovereign authority of love, to beware of that insidious disease which lurks beneath the flowery surface of youth, and often withers and consumes us at the very moment we think that we have overcome its power. Enclosed, she sent a consultation and a prescription from good Dr. Alain, ordering me in the most imperative terms, and with most alarming threats, to remain during a long season at the baths of Aix. I showed this prescription to my mother, to account for my departure, and she was so disquieted by it that she added her entreaties to the injunctions of the doctor to induce me to go. Alas! I had in vain applied to a few friends as poor as myself, and to some pitiless usurers, to obtain the trifling sum of twelve louis required for my journey. My father had been absent six months, and my mother would on no account have aggravated his distress and anxiety by asking him for money. In borrowing he would have exposed his poverty, by which he was already too much humbled. I had made up my mind to start with two or three louis only in my purse, in the hope of borrowing the remainder from my friend L----, at Chambéry; when, a few days before my departure, my mother, during a sleepless night, had found in her heart a resource that a mother's heart could alone have furnished.

XCIV.

In one of the comers of the little garden that surrounded our house there stood a cluster of trees, comprising a few evergreen oaks, two or three lime trees, and seven or eight twisted elms, which were the remains of a wood, planted centuries ago, and had, doubtless, been respected as the _local Genius_ when the hill had been cleared, the house built, and the garden first walled in. These lofty trees in summer time served as a family saloon, in the open air. Their buds in spring, their tints in autumn, and their dry leaves in winter, which were succeeded by the hoar frost hanging from their branches like white hair, had marked the seasons for us. Their shadows, rolled back upon their very feet, or stretched out to the grassy border around, told us the hours better than a dial. Beneath their foliage our mother had nursed us, lulled us to rest, and taught us our first steps. My father sat there, book in hand, when he returned from shooting; his shining gun suspended from a branch, his panting dogs crouching beneath the bench. I, too, had spent there the fairest hours of my boyhood, with Homer or Telemachus lying open on the grass before me. I loved to lie flat on the warm turf, my elbows resting on the volume, of which a passing fly or lizard would sometimes hide the lines. The nightingales among the branches sang for our home, though we could never find their nest, or even see the branch from which their song burst forth. This grove was the pride, the recollection, the love of all. The idea of converting it into a small bag of money, which would leave no memory in the heart, no perpetual joy and shade, would have occurred to no one, save to a mother, trembling with anxiety for the life of an only son. My mother conceived the thought; and, with the readiness and firmness of resolve that distinguished her, called for the woodcutters as soon as morning came,--fearing lest she should feel remorse, or my entreaties stop her, if she first consulted me. She saw the axe laid to their roots, and wept, and turned away her head not to hear their moan, or witness the fall of these leafy protectors of her youth on the echoing and desolate soil of the garden.

XCV.

When I returned to M---- on the following Sunday, I looked round from the top of the mountain for the clump of trees that stood out so pleasantly on the hillside, screening from the sun a portion of the gray wall of the house; and it seemed as a dream when in their wonted place I perceived only heaps of hewn-down trunks whose barked and bleeding branches strewed the earth around. A sawing-trestle stood there like an instrument of torture, on which the saw with its grinding teeth divided the trees. I hurried on with extended arms towards the outer wall, and trembled as I opened the little garden door.... Alas! the evergreen oak, one lime-tree, and the oldest elm alone were standing, and the bench had been drawn in beneath their shade. "They are sufficient," said my mother, as she advanced towards me, and, to conceal her tears, threw herself into my arms; "the shade of one tree is worth that of a whole forest. Besides, to me what shade can equal yours? Do not be angry. I wrote to your father that the trees were dying from the top, and that they were hurtful to the kitchen-garden. Speak no more of them!"... Then leading me into the house, she opened her desk and drew forth a bag half-filled with money. "Take this," she said, "and go. The trees will have been amply paid me if you return well and happy."

I blushed, and with a stifled sob took the bag. There were six hundred francs in it, which I resolved to bring back untouched to my poor mother.

I started on foot, like a sportsman, with leathern gaiters on my feet, and my gun on my shoulder, and took from the bag only one hundred francs, which I added to the little I had remaining from the proceeds of my last sale. I could not bear to spend the price of the trees, and therefore concealed the remainder of the money at the farm, that on my return I might restore it to her who had so heroically torn it from her heart for me. I ate and slept at the humblest inns in the villages through which I passed, and was taken for a poor Swiss student returning from the University of Strasbourg. I was never charged but the strict value of the bread I ate, of the candle I burned, and of the pallet on which I slept. I had brought but one book with me, which I read at evening on the bench before the inn door; it was Werther, in German; and the unknown characters confirmed my hosts in the idea that I was a foreign traveller.

I thus wandered through the long and picturesque gorges of Bugey, and crossed the Rhône at the foot of the rock of Pierre-Châtel. The narrowed river eternally rushes past the base of this rock, with a current wearing as the grindstone and cutting as the knife, as if to undermine and overthrow the state-prison, whose gloomy shadow saddens its waters. I slowly ascended the Mont du Chat by the paths of the chamois-hunters; arrived at its summit, I perceived stretched out before me in the distance the valleys of Aix, Chambéry, and Annecy; and at my feet the lake, dappled with rosy tints by the floating rays of the setting sun. One single image filled for me the immensity of this horizon; it rose from the chalets where we had met; from the doctor's garden, the pointed slate roof of whose house I could recognize above the smoke of the town; from the fig-trees of the little castle of Bon-Port at the bottom of the opposite creek; from the chestnut-trees on the hill of Tresserves; from the woods of St. Innocent; from the island of Châtillon; from the boats which were returning to their moorings, from all this earth, from all this sky, from all these waves. I fell on my knees before this horizon filled with one image. I spread out my arms and folded them again, as if I could have embraced her spirit by clasping the air which, had swept over these scenes of our happiness, over all the traces of her footsteps.

I then sat down behind a rock which screened me even from the sight of the goatherds, as they passed along the path. There I remained, sunk in contemplation, and reveling in remembrances, till the sun was almost dipping behind the snow-clad tops of Nivolex. I did not wish to cross the lake, or enter the town by daylight, as the homeliness of my dress, the scantiness of my purse, and the frugality of life to which I was constrained, in order to live some months near Julie, would have seemed strange to the inmates of the old doctor's house. They formed too great a contrast with my elegance in dress and habits of life during the preceding season. I should have made those blush whom I had accosted in the streets, in the garb of one who had not even the means of locating himself in a decent hotel in this abode of luxury. I had, therefore, resolved to slip by night into the humble suburb, bordering a rivulet which runs through the orchards below the town.