In the Days of My Youth Part 61

"But it is a position of which I have the command, and which no one understands so well as myself. To attempt to help me, would be to add to my embarra.s.sments. For this reason it is well that Captain Dalrymple is not here. His presence just now in Paris could do no good--on the contrary, would be certain to do harm. Do you follow my meaning, Monsieur Arbuthnot?"

"I understand what you say, Madame; but...."

"But you do not quite understand why I say it? _Eh bien_, Monsieur, when you write to Captain Dalrymple.... for you write sometimes, do you not?"

"Often, Madame."

"Then, when you write, say nothing that may add to his anxieties. If you have reason at any time to suppose that I am importuned to do this or that; that I am annoyed; that I have my own battle to fight--still, for his sake as well as for mine, be silent. It _is_ my own battle, and I know how to fight it."

"Alas! Madame...."

She smiled sadly.

"Nay," she said, "I have more courage than you would suppose; more courage and more will. I am fully capable of bearing my own burdens; and Captain Dalrymple has already enough of his own. Now tell me something of yourself. You are here, I think, to study medicine. Are you greatly devoted to your work? Have you many friends?"

"I study, Madame--not always very regularly; and I have one friend."

"An Englishman?"

"No, Madame--a German."

"A fellow-student, I presume."

"No, Madame--an artist."

"And you are very happy here?"

"I have occupations and amus.e.m.e.nts; therefore, if to be neither idle nor dull is to be happy. I suppose I am happy."

"Nay," she said quickly, "be sure of it. Do not doubt it. Who asks more from Fate courts his own destruction."

"But it would be difficult, Madame, to go through life without desiring something better, something higher--without ambition, for instance--without love."

"Ambition and love!" she repeated, smiling sadly. "There speaks the man.

Ambition first--the aim and end of life; love next--the pleasant adjunct to success! Ah, beware of both."

"But without either, life would be a desert."

"Life _is_ a desert," she replied, bitterly. "Ambition is its mirage, ever beckoning, ever receding--love its Dead Sea fruit, fair without and dust within. You look surprised. You did not expect such gloomy theories from me--yet I am no cynic. I have lived; I have suffered; I am a woman--_voila tout_. When you are a few years older, and have trodden some of the flinty ways of life, you will see the world as I see it."

"It may be so, Madame; but if life is indeed a desert, it is, at all events, some satisfaction to know that the dwellers in tents become enamored of their lot, and, content with what the desert has to give, desire no other. It is only the neophyte who rides after the mirage and thirsts for the Dead Sea apple."

She smiled again.

"Ah!" she said, "the gifts of the desert are two-fold, and what one gets depends on what one seeks. For some the wilderness has gifts of resignation, meditation, peace; for others it has the horse, the tent, the pipe, the gun, the chase of the panther and antelope. But to go back to yourself. Life, you say, would be barren without ambition and love.

What is your ambition?"

"Nay, Madame, that is more than I can tell you--more than I know myself."

"Your profession...."

"If ever I dream dreams, Madame," I interrupted quickly, "my profession has no share in them. It is a profession I do not love, and which I hope some day to abandon."

"Your dreams, then?"

I shook my head.

"Vague--unsubstantial--illusory--forgotten as soon as dreamt! How can I a.n.a.lyze them? How can I describe them? In childhood one says--'I should like to be a soldier, and conquer the world;' or 'I should like to be a sailor, and discover new Continents;' or 'I should like to be a poet, and wear a laurel wreath, like Petrarch and Dante;' but as one gets older and wiser (conscious, perhaps, of certain latent energies, and weary of certain present difficulties and restraints), one can only wait, as best one may, and watch for the rising of that tide whose flood leads on to fortune."

With this I rose to take my leave. Madame de Courcelles smiled and put out her hand.

"Come often," she said; "and come at the hours when I am at home. I shall always be glad to see you. Above all, remember my caution--not a word to Captain Dalrymple, either now or at any other time."

"Madame, you may rely upon me. One thing I ask, however, as the reward of my discretion."

"And that one thing?"

"Permission, Madame, to serve you in any capacity, however humble--in any strait where a brother might interfere, or a faithful retainer lay down his life in your service."

With a sweet earnestness that made my heart beat and my cheeks glow, she thanked and promised me.

"I shall look upon you henceforth," she said, "as my knight _sans peur et sans reproche_."

Heaven knows that not all the lessons of all the moralists that ever wrote or preached since the world began, could just then have done me half such good service as did those simple words. They came at the moment when I most needed them--when I had almost lost my taste for society, and was sliding day by day into habits of more confirmed idleness and Bohemianism. They roused me. They made a man of me. They recalled me to higher aims, "purer manners, n.o.bler laws." They clothed me, so to speak, in the _toga virilis_ of a generous devotion. They made me long to prove myself "_sans peur_," to merit the "_sans reproche."_ They marked an era in my life never to be forgotten or effaced.

Let it not be thought for one moment that I loved her--or fancied I loved her. No, not so far as one heart-beat would carry me; but I was proud to possess her confidence and her friendship. Was she not Dalrymple's wife, and had not he asked me to watch over and protect her?

Nay, had she not called me her knight and accepted my fealty?

Nothing perhaps, is so invaluable to a young man on entering life as the friendship of a pure-minded and highly-cultivated woman who, removed too far above him to be regarded with pa.s.sion, is yet beautiful enough to engage his admiration; whose good opinion becomes the measure of his own self-respect; and whose confidence is a sacred trust only to be parted from with loss of life or honor.

Such an influence upon myself at this time was the friendship of Madame de Courcelles. I went out from her presence that morning morally stronger than before, and at each repet.i.tion of my visit I found her influence strengthen and increase. Sometimes I met Monsieur de Caylus, on which occasions my stay was ever of the briefest; but I most frequently found her alone, and then our talk was of books, of art, of culture, of all those high and stirring things that alike move the sympathies of the educated woman and rouse the enthusiasm of the young man. She became interested in me; at first for Dalrymple's sake, and by-and-by, however little I deserved it, for my own--and she showed that interest in many ways inexpressibly valuable to me then and thenceforth. She took pains to educate my taste; opened to me hitherto unknown avenues of study; led me to explore "fresh fields and pastures new," to which, but for her help, I might not have found my way for many a year to come. My reading, till now, had been almost wholly English or cla.s.sical; she sent me to the old French literature--to the _Chansons de Geste_; to the metrical romances of the Trouveres; to the Chronicles of Froissart, Monstrelet, and Philip de Comines, and to the poets and dramatists that immediately succeeded them.

These books opened a new world to me; and, having daily access to two fine public libraries, I plunged at once into a course of new and delightful reading, ranging over all that fertile tract of song and history that begins far away in the morning land of mediaeval romance, and leads on, century after century, to the new era that began with the Revolution.

With what avidity I devoured those picturesque old chronicles--those autobiographies--those poems, and satires, and plays that I now read for the first time! What evenings I spent with St. Simon, and De Thou, and Charlotte de Baviere! How I relished Voltaire! How I laughed over Moliere! How I revelled in Montaigne! Most of all, however, I loved the quaint lore of the earlier literature:--

"Old legends of the monkish page, Traditions of the saint and sage, Tales that have the rime of age, And Chronicles of Eld."

Nor was this all. I had hitherto loved art as a child or a savage might love it, ignorantly, half-blindly, without any knowledge of its principles, its purposes, or its history. But Madame de Courcelles put into my hands certain books that opened my eyes to a thousand wonders unseen before. The works of Vasari, Nibby, Winkelman and Lessing, the aesthetic writings of Goethe and the Schlegels, awakened in me, one after the other, fresher and deeper revelations of beauty.

I wandered through the galleries of the Louvre like one newly gifted with sight. I haunted the Venus of Milo and the Diane Cha.s.seresse like another Pygmalion. The more I admired, the more I found to admire. The more I comprehended, the more I found there remained for me to comprehend. I recognised in art the Sphinx whose enigma is never solved.

I learned, for the first time, that poetry may be committed to imperishable marble, and steeped in unfading colors. By degrees, as I followed in the footsteps of great thinkers, my insight became keener and my perceptions more refined. The symbolism of art evolved itself, as it were, from below the surface; and instead of beholding in paintings and statues mere studies of outward beauty, I came to know them as exponents of thought--as efforts after ideal truth--as aspirations which, because of their divineness, can never be wholly expressed; but whose suggestiveness is more eloquent than all the eloquence of words.

Thus a great change came upon my life--imperceptibly at first, and by gradual degrees; but deeply and surely. To apply myself to the study of medicine became daily more difficult and more distasteful to me. The boisterous pleasures of the Quartier Latin lost their charm for me. Day by day I gave myself up more and more pa.s.sionately to the cultivation of my taste for poetry and art. I filled my little sitting-room with casts after the antique. I bought some good engravings for my walls, and hung up a copy of the Madonna di San Sisto above the table at which I wrote and read. All day long, wherever I might be--at the hospital, in the lecture-room, in the laboratory--I kept looking longingly forward to the quiet evening by-and-by when, with shaded lamp and curtained window, I should again take up the studies of the night before.

Thus new aims opened out before me, and my thoughts flowed into channels ever wider and deeper. Already the first effervescence of youth seemed to have died off the surface of my life, as the "beaded bubbles" die off the surface of champagne. I had tried society, and wearied of it. I had tried Bohemia, and found it almost as empty as the Chaussee d'Autin.

And now that life which from boyhood I had ever looked upon as the happiest on earth, the life of the student, was mine. Could I have devoted it wholly and undividedly to those pursuits which were fast becoming to me as the life of my life, I would not have exchanged my lot for all the wealth of the Rothschilds. Somewhat indolent, perhaps, by nature, indifferent to achieve, ambitious only to acquire, I asked nothing better than a life given up to the worship of all that is beautiful in art, to the acquisition of knowledge, and to the development of taste. Would the time ever come when I might realize my dream? Ah! who could tell? In the meanwhile ... well, in the meanwhile, here was Paris--here were books, museums, galleries, schools, golden opportunities which, once past, might never come again. So I reasoned; so time went on; so I lived, plodding on by day in the ecole de Medecine, but, when evening came, resuming my studies at the leaf turned down the night before, and, like the visionary in "The Pilgrims of the Rhine," taking up my dream-life at the point where I had been last awakened.