Appreciations, with an Essay on Style Part 10

[219] IN his latest novel M. Octave Feuillet adds two charming people to that chosen group of personages in which he loves to trace the development of the more serious elements of character amid the refinements and artifices of modern society, and which make such good company. The proper function of fict.i.tious literature in affording us a refuge into a world slightly better--better conceived, or better finished--than the real one, is effected in most instances less through the imaginary events at which a novelist causes us to a.s.sist, than by the imaginary persons to whom he introduces us. The situations of M.

Feuillet's novels are indeed of a real and intrinsic importance:--tragic crises, inherent in the general conditions of human nature itself, or which arise necessarily out of the special conditions of modern society. Still, with him, in the actual result, they become subordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life, to the characters they help to form. Often, his most attentive reader will have forgotten the actual details of his plot; while [220] the soul, tried, enlarged, shaped by it, remains as a well-fixed type in the memory. He may return a second or third time to Sibylle, or Le Journal d'une Femme, or Les Amours de Philippe, and watch, surprised afresh, the clean, dainty, word-sparing literary operation (word-sparing, yet with no loss of real grace or ease) which, sometimes in a few pages, with the perfect logic of a problem of Euclid, complicates and then unravels some moral embarra.s.sment, really worthy of a trained dramatic expert. But the characters themselves, the agents in those difficult, revealing situations, such a reader will recognise as old acquaintances after the first reading, feeling for them as for some gifted and attractive persons he has known in the actual world--Raoul de Chalys, Henri de Lerne, Madame de Tecle, Jeanne de la Roche-Ermel, Maurice de Fremeuse, many others; to whom must now be added Bernard and Aliette de Vaudricourt.

"How I love those people!" cries Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, of Madame de Sevigne and some other of her literary favourites in the days of the Grand Monarch. "What good company! What pleasure they took in high things! How much more worthy they were than the people who live now!"--What good company! That is precisely what the admirer of M.

Feuillet's books feels as one by one he places them on his book-shelf, to be sought again. What is proposed here is not to tell his last story, [221] but to give the English reader specimens of his most recent effort at characterisation.

It is with the journal of Bernard himself that the story opens, September 187-. Bernard-Maurice Hugon de Montauret, Vicomte de Vaudricourt, is on a visit to his uncle, the head of his family, at La Saviniere, a country-house somewhere between Normandy and Brittany.

This uncle, an artificial old Parisian in manner, but honest in purpose, a good talker, and full of real affection for his heir Bernard, is one of M. Feuillet's good minor characters--one of the quietly humorous figures with which he relieves his more serious company. Bernard, with whom the refinements of a man of fashion in the Parisian world by no means disguise a powerful intelligence cultivated by wide reading, has had thoughts during his tedious stay at La Saviniere of writing a history of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, the library of a neighbouring chateau being rich in memoirs of that period. Finally, he prefers to write his own story, a story so much more interesting to himself; to write it at a peculiar crisis in his life, the moment when his uncle, unmarried, but anxious to perpetuate his race, is bent on providing him with a wife, and indeed has one in view.

The accomplished Bernard, with many graces of person, by his own confession, takes nothing seriously. As to that matter of religious beliefs, "the breeze of the age, and of science, has blown [222] over him, as it has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty s.p.a.ce there." Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departing from him, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from all intelligent male Parisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, a gaiety, serene and imperturbable, has been the mainstay of his happily const.i.tuted character. The girl to whom his uncle desires to see him united--odd, quixotic, intelligent, with a sort of pathetic and delicate grace, and herself very religious--belongs to an old-fashioned, devout family,.

resident at Varaville, near by. M. Feuillet, with half a dozen fine touches of his admirable pencil makes us see the place. And the enterprise has at least sufficient interest to keep Bernard in the country, which the young Parisian detests. "This piquant episode of my life," he writes, "seems to me to be really deserving of study; to be worth etching off, day by day, by an observer well informed on the subject."

Recognising in himself, though as his one real fault, that he can take nothing seriously in heaven or earth, Bernard de Vaudricourt, like all M. Feuillet's favourite young men, so often erring or corrupt, is a man of scrupulous "honour." He has already shown disinterestedness in wishing his rich uncle to marry again. His friends at Varaville think so well-mannered a young man more of a Christian than he really is; and, at all events, he will never owe his happiness to a falsehood. If he has great faults, [223] hypocrisy at least is no part of them. In oblique paths he finds himself ill at ease. Decidedly, as he thinks, he was born for straight ways, for loyalty in all his enterprises; and he congratulates himself upon the fact.

In truth, Bernard has merits which he ignores, at least in this first part of his journal: merits which are necessary to explain the influence he is able to exercise from the first over such a character as Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. His charm, in fact, is in the union of that gay and apparently wanton nature with a genuine power of appreciating devotion in others, which becomes devotion in himself.

With all the much-cherished elegance and worldly glitter of his personality, he is capable of apprehending, of understanding and being touched by the presence of great matters. In spite of that happy lightness of heart, so jealously fenced about, he is to be wholly caught at last, as he is worthy to be, by the serious, the generous influence of things. In proportion to his immense worldly strength is his capacity for the immense pity which breaks his heart.

In a few life-like touches M. Feuillet brings out, as if it were indeed a thing of ordinary existence, the simple yet delicate life of a French country-house, the ideal life in an ideal France. Bernard is paying a morning visit at the old turreted home of the "prehistoric" Courteheuse family. Mademoiselle Aliette de Courteheuse, a studious girl, though a bold and excellent rider [224] --Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, "with her hair of that strange colour of fine ashes"--has conducted her visitor to see the library:

One day she took me to see the library, rich in works of the seventeenth century and in memoirs relating to that time. I remarked there also a curious collection of engravings of the same period.

"Your father," I observed, "had a strong predilection for the age of Louis the Fourteenth."

"My father lived in that age," she answered gravely. And as I looked at her with surprise, and a little embarra.s.sed, she added, "He made me live there too, in his company."

And then the eyes of this singular girl filled with tears. She turned away, took a few steps to suppress her emotion, and returning, pointed me to a chair. Then seating herself on the step of the book-case, she said, "I must explain my father to you."

She was half a minute collecting her thoughts: then, speaking with an expansion of manner not habitual with her, hesitating, and blushing deeply, whenever she was about to utter a word that might seem a shade too serious for lips so youthful:--"My father," she proceeded, "died of the consequences of a wound he had received at Patay. That may show you that he loved his country, but he was no lover of his own age. He possessed in the highest degree the love of order; and order was a thing nowhere to be seen. He had a horror of disorder; and he saw it everywhere. In those last years, especially, his reverence, his beliefs, his tastes, all alike were ruffled to the point of actual suffering, by whatever was done and said and written around him.

Deeply saddened by the conditions of the present time, he habituated himself to find a refuge in the past, and the seventeenth century more particularly offered him the kind of society in which he would have wished to live--a society, well-ordered, polished, lettered, believing.

More and more he loved to shut himself up in it. More and more also he loved to make the moral discipline and the literary tastes of that favourite age prevail in his own household. You may even have remarked that he carried his predilection into minute matters of arrangement and decoration. You can see from this window the straight paths, the box in [225] patterns, the yew trees and clipped alleys of our garden. You may notice that in our garden-beds we have none but flowers of the period--lilies, rose-mallows, immortelles, rose-pinks, in short what people call parsonage flowers--des fleurs de cure. Our old silvan tapestries, similarly, are of that age. You see too that all our furniture, from presses and sideboards, down to our little tables and our arm-chairs, is in the severest style of Louis the Fourteenth. My father did not appreciate the dainty research of our modern luxury. He maintained that our excessive care for the comforts of life weakened mind as well as body. That," added the girl with a laugh,--"that is why you find your chair so hard when you come to see us."

Then, with resumed gravity--"It was thus that my father endeavoured, by the very aspect and arrangement of outward things, to promote in himself the imaginary presence of the epoch in which his thoughts delighted. As for myself--need I tell you that I was the confidant of that father, so well-beloved: a confidant touched by his sorrows, full of indignation at his disappointments, charmed by his consolations.

Here, precisely--surrounded by those books which we read together, and which he taught me to love--it is here that I have pa.s.sed the pleasantest hours of my youth. In common we indulged our enthusiasm for those days of faith; of the quiet life; its blissful hours of leisure well-secured; for the French language in its beauty and purity; the delicate, the n.o.ble urbanity, which was then the honour and the special mark of our country, but has ceased to be so."

She paused, with a little confusion, as I thought, at the warmth of her last words.

And then, just to break the silence, "You have explained," I said, "an impression which I have experienced again and again in my visits here, and which has sometimes reached the intensity of an actual illusion, though a very agreeable one. The look of your house, its style, its tone and keeping, carried me two centuries back so completely that I should hardly have been surprised to hear Monsieur le Prince, Madame de la Fayette, or Madame de Sevigne herself, announced at your drawing-room door."

"Would it might be!" said Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. [226] "Ah!

Monsieur, how I love those people! What good company! What pleasure they took in high things! How much more worthy they were than the people who live now!" I tried to calm a little this retrospective enthusiasm, so much to the prejudice of my contemporaries and of myself. "Most truly, Mademoiselle," I said, "the age which you regret had its rare merits--merits which I appreciate as you do. But then, need one say that that society, so regular, so choice in appearance, had, like our own, below the surface, its troubles, its disorders? I see here many of the memoirs of that time. I can't tell exactly which of them you may or may not have read, and so I feel a certain difficulty in speaking."

She interrupted me: "Ah!" she said, with entire simplicity, "I understand you. I have not read all you see here. But I have read enough of it to know that my friends in that past age had, like those who live now, their pa.s.sions, their weaknesses, their mistakes. But, as my father used to say to me, all that did but pa.s.s over a ground of what was solid and serious, which always discovered itself again anew.

There were great faults then; but there were also great repentances.

There was a certain higher region to which everything conducted--even what as evil." She blushed deeply: then rising a little suddenly, "A long speech!" she said: "Forgive me! I am not usually so very talkative. It is because my father was in question; and I should wish his memory to be as dear and as venerable to all the rest of the world as it is to me."

We pa.s.s over the many little dramatic intrigues and misunderstandings, with the more or less adroit interferences of the uncle, which raise and lower alternately Bernard's hopes. M. Feuillet has more than once tried his hand with striking success in the portraiture of French ecclesiastics. He has drawn none better than the Bishop of Saint-Meen, uncle of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, to whose interests he is devoted.

Bernard feels that to gain the influence of this prelate [227] would be to gain his cause; and the opportunity for an interview comes.

Monseigneur de Courteheuse would seem to be little over fifty years of age: he is rather tall, and very thin: the eyes, black and full of life, are encircled by a ring of deep brown. His speech and gesture are animated, and, at times, as if carried away. He adopts frequently a sort of furious manner which on a sudden melts into the smile of an honest man. He has beautiful silvery hair, flying in vagrant locks over his forehead, and beautiful bishop's hands. As he becomes calm he has an imposing way of gently resettling himself in his sacerdotal dignity. To sum up: his is a physiognomy full of pa.s.sion, consumed with zeal, yet still frank and sincere.

I was hardly seated, when with a motion of the hand he invited me to speak.

"Monseigneur!" I said, "I come to you (you understand me?) as to my last resource. What I am now doing is almost an act of despair; for it might seem at first sight that no member of the family of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse must show himself more pitiless than yourself towards the faults with which I am reproached. I am an unbeliever: you are an apostle! And yet, Monseigneur, it is often at the hands of saintly priests, such as yourself, that the guilty find most indulgence. And then, I am not indeed guilty: I have but wandered. I am refused the hand of your niece because I do not share her faith--your own faith.

But, Monseigneur, unbelief is not a crime, it is a misfortune. I know people often say, a man denies G.o.d when by his own conduct he has brought himself into a condition in which he may well desire that G.o.d does not exist. In this way he is made guilty, or, in a sense, responsible for his incredulity. For myself, Monseigneur, I have consulted my conscience with an entire sincerity; and although my youth has been amiss, I am certain that my atheism proceeds from no sentiment of personal interest. On the contrary, I may tell you with truth that the day on which I perceived my faith come to nought, the day on which I lost hope in G.o.d, I shed the bitterest tears of my life. In spite of appearances, I am not so light a spirit as people think. I am not one of those for whom G.o.d, when He disappears, [228] leaves no sense of a void place. Believe me!--a man may love sport, his club, his worldly habits, and yet have his hours of thought, of self-recollection. Do you suppose that in those hours one does not feel the frightful discomfort of an existence with no moral basis, without principles, with no outlook beyond this world? And yet, what can one do? You would tell me forthwith, in the goodness, the compa.s.sion, which I read in your eyes; Confide to me your objections to religion, and I will try to solve them. Monseigneur, I should hardly know how to answer you.

My objections are 'Legion!' They are without number, like the stars in the sky: they come to us on all sides, from every quarter of the horizon, as if on the wings of the wind; and they leave in us, as they pa.s.s, ruins only, and darkness. Such has been my experience, and that of many others; and it has been as involuntary as it is irreparable."

"And I--Monsieur!" said the bishop, suddenly, casting on me one of his august looks, "Do you suppose that I am but a play-actor in my cathedral church?"

"Monseigneur!"

"Yes! Listening to you, one would suppose that we were come to a period of the world in which one must needs be either an atheist or a hypocrite! Personally, I claim to be neither one nor the other."

"Need I defend myself on that point, Monseigneur? Need I say that I did not come here to give you offence?"

"Doubtless! doubtless! Well, Monsieur, I admit; not without great reserves, mind! for one is always more or less responsible for the atmosphere in which he lives, the influences to which he is subject, for the habitual turn he gives to his thoughts; still, I admit that you are the victim of the incredulity of the age, that you are altogether guiltless in your scepticism, your atheism! since you have no fear of hard words. Is it therefore any the less certain that the union of a fervent believer, such as my niece, with a man like yourself would be a moral disorder of which the consequences might be disastrous? Do you think it could be my duty, as a relative of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, her spiritual father, as a prelate of the Church, to lend my hands to such disorder, to preside over the shocking union of two souls separated by the whole width of heaven?"

[229] The bishop, in proposing that question, kept his eyes fixed ardently on mine.

"Monseigneur," I answered, after a moment's embarra.s.sment, "you know as well as, and better than I, the condition of the world, and of our country, at this time. You know that unhappily I am not an exception: that men of faith are rare in it. And permit me to tell you my whole mind. If I must needs suffer the inconsolable misfortune of renouncing the happiness I had hoped for, are you quite sure that the man to whom one of these days you will give your niece may not be something more than a sceptic, or even an atheist?"

"What, Monsieur?"

"A hypocrite, Monseigneur! Mademoiselle de Courteheuse is beautiful enough, rich enough, to excite the ambition of those who may be less scrupulous than I. As for me, if you now know that I am a sceptic, you know also that I am a man of honour: and there is something in that!"

"A man of honour!" the bishop muttered to himself, with a little petulance and hesitation. "A man of honour! Yes, I believe it!"

Then, after an interval, "Come, Monsieur," he said gently, "your case is not as desperate as you suppose. My Aliette is one of those young enthusiasts through whom Heaven sometimes works miracles." And Bernard refusing any encouragement of that hope (the "very roots of faith are dead" in him for ever) "since you think that," the bishop answers, "it is honest to say so. But G.o.d has His ways!"

Soon after, the journal comes to an end with that peculiar crisis in Bernard's life which had suggested the writing of it. Aliette, with the approval of her family, has given him her hand. Bernard accepts it with the full purpose of doing all he can to make his wife as happy as she is charming and beloved. The virginal first period of their married life in their dainty house in Paris--the pure and beautiful picture of the mother, the father, and at last the child, a little [230] girl, Jeanne--is presented with M. Feuillet's usual grace.

Certain embarra.s.sments succeed; the development of what was ill-matched in their union; but still with mutual loyalty. A far-reaching acquaintance with, and reflection upon, the world and its ways, especially the Parisian world, has gone into the apparently slight texture of these pages. The accomplished playwright may be recognised in the skilful touches with which M. Feuillet, unrivalled, as his regular readers know, in his power of breathing higher notes into the frivolous prattle of fashionable French life, develops the tragic germ in the elegant, youthful household. Amid the distractions of a society, frivolous, perhaps vulgar, Aliette's mind is still set on greater things; and, in spite of a thousand rude discouragements, she maintains her generous hope for Bernard's restoration to faith. One day, a little roughly, he bids her relinquish that dream finally. She looks at him with the moist, suppliant eyes of some weak animal at bay.

Then his native goodness returns. In a softened tone he owns himself wrong.

"As to conversions;--no one must be despaired of. Do you remember M.

de Rance? He lived in your favourite age;--M. de Rance. Well! before he became the reformer of La Trappe he had been a worldling like me, and a great sceptic--what people called a libertine. Still he became a saint! It is true he had a terrible reason for it. Do you know what it was converted him?"

Aliette gave a sign that she did not know.

"Well! he returned to Paris after a few days' absence. He [231] ran straight to the lady he loved; Madame Montbazon, I think: he went up a little staircase of which he had the key, and the first thing he saw on the table in the middle of the room was the head of his mistress, of which the doctors were about to make a post-mortem examination."

"If I were sure," said Aliette, "that my head could have such power, I would love to die."

She said it in a low voice, but with such an accent of loving sincerity that her husband had a sensation of a sort of painful disquiet. He smiled, however, and tapping her cheek softly, "Folly!" he said. "A head, charming as yours, has no need to be dead that it may work miracles!"

Certainly M. Feuillet has some weighty charges to bring against the Parisian society of our day. When Aliette revolts from a world of gossip, which reduces all minds alike to the same level of vulgar mediocrity, Bernard, on his side, can perceive there a deterioration of moral tone which shocks his sense of honour. As a man of honour, he can hardly trust his wife to the gaieties of a society which welcomes all the world "to amuse itself in undress."

It happened that at this perplexed period in the youthful household, one and the same person became the recipient both of the tearful confidences of Madame de Vaudricourt and those of her husband. It was the d.u.c.h.ess of Castel-Moret [she is another of M. Feuillet's admirable minor sketches] an old friend of the Vaudricourt family, and the only woman with whom Aliette since her arrival in Paris had formed a kind of intimacy. The d.u.c.h.ess was far from sharing, on points of morality, and above all of religion, the severe and impa.s.sioned orthodoxy of her young friend. She had lived, it is true, an irreproachable life, but less in consequence of defined principles than by instinct and natural taste. She admitted to herself that she was an honest woman as a result of her birth, and had no further merit in the matter. She was old, very careful of [232] herself, and a pleasant aroma floated about her, below her silvery hair. People loved her for her grace--the grace of another time than ours--for her wit, and her worldly wisdom, which she placed freely at the disposal of the public. Now and then she made a match: but her special gift lay rather in the way in which she came to the rescue when a marriage turned out ill. And she had no sinecure: the result was that she pa.s.sed the best part of her time in repairing family rents. That might "last its time," she would say. "And then we know that what has been well mended sometimes lasts better than what is new."

A little later, Bernard, in the interest of Aliette, has chivalrously determined to quit Paris. At Valmoutiers, a fine old place in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, they established themselves for a country life. Here Aliette tastes the happiest days since her marriage. Bernard, of course, after a little time is greatly bored.

But so far they have never seriously doubted of their great love for each other. It is here that M. Feuillet brings on the scene a kind of character new in his books; perhaps hardly worthy of the other company there; a sort of female Monsieur de Camors, but without his grace and tenderness, and who actually commits a crime. How would the morbid charms of M. de Camors have vanished, if, as his wife once suspected of him, he had ever contemplated crime! And surely, the showy insolent charms of Sabine de Tallevaut, beautiful, intellectually gifted, supremely Amazonian, yet withal not drawn with M. Feuillet's usual fineness, scarcely hold out for the reader, any more than for [233]

Bernard himself, in the long run, against the vulgarising touch of her cold wickedness. Living in the neighbourhood of Valmoutiers, in a somewhat melancholy abode (the mystery of which in the eyes of Bernard adds to her poetic charm) with her guardian, an old, rich, freethinking doctor, devoted to research, she comes to Valmoutiers one night in his company on the occasion of the alarming illness of the only child.

They arrive escorted by Bernard himself. The little Jeanne, wrapped in her coverlet, was placed upon the table of her play-room, which was illuminated as if for a party. The illness, the operation (skilfully performed by the old doctor) which restores her to life, are described with that seemingly simple pathos in which M. Feuillet's consummate art hides itself. Sabine remains to watch the child's recovery, and becomes an intimate. In vain Bernard struggles against the first real pa.s.sion of his life;--does everything but send its object out of his sight. Aliette has divined their secret. In the fatal illness which follows soon after, Bernard watches over her with tender solicitude; hoping against hope that the disease may take a favourable turn.