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The Village Rector

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1899 · 552,152 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Village Rector

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: November 11, 2005 [eBook #1899]
                Most recently updated: November 24, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1899

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VILLAGE RECTOR ***




Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





THE VILLAGE RECTOR


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley




                             DEDICATION

  To Helene.

  The tiniest boat is not launched upon the sea without the
  protection of some living emblem or revered name, placed upon it
  by the mariners. In accordance with this time-honored custom,
  Madame, I pray you to be the protectress of this book now launched
  upon our literary ocean; and may the Imperial name which the
  Church has canonized and your devotion has doubly sanctified for
  me guard it from perils.

                                                       De Balzac.





THE VILLAGE RECTOR





I. THE SAUVIATS

In the lower town of Limoges, at the corner of the rue de la
Vieille-Poste and the rue de la Cite might have been seen, a generation
ago, one of those shops which were scarcely changed from the period of
the middle-ages. Large tiles seamed with a thousand cracks lay on the
soil itself, which was damp in places, and would have tripped up those
who failed to observe the hollows and ridges of this singular flooring.
The dusty walls exhibited a curious mosaic of wood and brick, stones and
iron, welded together with a solidity due to time, possibly to chance.
For more than a hundred years the ceiling, formed of colossal beams,
bent beneath the weight of the upper stories, though it had never given
way under them. Built _en colombage_, that is to say, with a wooden
frontage, the whole facade was covered with slates, so put on as to
form geometrical figures,--thus preserving a naive image of the burgher
habitations of the olden time.

None of the windows, cased in wood and formerly adorned with carvings,
now destroyed by the action of the weather, had continued plumb; some
bobbed forward, others tipped backward, while a few seemed disposed to
fall apart; all had a compost of earth, brought from heaven knows where,
in the nooks and crannies hollowed by the rain, in which the spring-tide
brought forth fragile flowers, timid creeping plants, and sparse
herbage. Moss carpeted the roof and draped its supports. The corner
pillar, with its composite masonry of stone blocks mingled with brick
and pebbles, was alarming to the eye by reason of its curvature; it
seemed on the point of giving way under the weight of the house, the
gable of which overhung it by at least half a foot. The municipal
authorities and the commissioner of highways did, eventually, pull the
old building down, after buying it, to enlarge the square.

The pillar we have mentioned, placed at the angle of two streets, was
a treasure to the seekers for Limousin antiquities, on account of its
lovely sculptured niche in which was a Virgin, mutilated during the
Revolution. All visitors with archaeological proclivities found traces
of the stone sockets used to hold the candelabra in which public piety
lighted tapers or placed its _ex-votos_ and flowers.

At the farther end of the shop, a worm-eaten wooden staircase led to the
two upper floors which were in turn surmounted by an attic. The house,
backing against two adjoining houses, had no depth and derived all its
light from the front and side windows. Each floor had two small chambers
only, lighted by single windows, one looking out on the rue de la Cite,
the other on the rue de la Vieille-Poste.

In the middle-ages no artisan was better lodged. The house had evidently
belonged in those times to makers of halberds and battle-axes, armorers
in short, artificers whose work was not injured by exposure to the
open air; for it was impossible to see clearly within, unless the iron
shutters were raised from each side of the building; where were also two
doors, one on either side of the corner pillar, as may be seen in many
shops at the corners of streets. From the sill of each door--of fine
stone worn by the tread of centuries--a low wall about three feet high
began; in this wall was a groove or slot, repeated above in the beam by
which the wall of each facade was supported. From time immemorial
the heavy shutters had been rolled along these grooves, held there by
enormous iron bars, while the doors were closed and secured in the same
manner; so that these merchants and artificers could bar themselves into
their houses as into a fortress.

Examining the interior, which, during the first twenty years of this
century, was encumbered with old iron and brass, tires of wheels,
springs, bells, anything in short which the destruction of buildings
afforded of old metals, persons interested in the relics of the old town
noticed signs of the flue of a forge, shown by a long trail of soot,--a
minor detail which confirmed the conjecture of archaeologists as to the
original use to which the building was put. On the first floor (above
the ground-floor) was one room and the kitchen; on the floor above that
were two bedrooms. The garret was used to put away articles more choice
and delicate than those that lay pell-mell about the shop.

This house, hired in the first instance, was subsequently bought by a
man named Sauviat, a hawker or peddler who, from 1786 to 1793, travelled
the country over a radius of a hundred and fifty miles around Auvergne,
exchanging crockery of a common kind, plates, dishes, glasses,--in
short, the necessary articles of the poorest households,--for old iron,
brass, and lead, or any metal under any shape it might lurk in. The
Auvergnat would give, for instance, a brown earthenware saucepan worth
two sous for a pound of lead, two pounds of iron, a broken spade or hoe
or a cracked kettle; and being invariably the judge of his own cause, he
did the weighing.

At the close of his third year Sauviat added the hawking of tin and
copper ware to that of his pottery. In 1793 he was able to buy a chateau
sold as part of the National domain, which he at once pulled to pieces.
The profits were such that he repeated the process at several points of
the sphere in which he operated; later, these first successful essays
gave him the idea of proposing something of a like nature on a larger
scale to one of his compatriots who lived in Paris. Thus it happened
that the “Bande Noire,” so celebrated for its devastations, had its
birth in the brain of old Sauviat, the peddler, whom all Limoges
afterward saw and knew for twenty-seven years in the rickety old shop
among his cracked bells and rusty bars, chains and scales, his twisted
leaden gutters, and metal rubbish of all kinds. We must do him the
justice to say that he knew nothing of the celebrity or the extent
of the association he originated; he profited by his own idea only
in proportion to the capital he entrusted to the since famous firm of
Bresac.

Tired of frequenting fairs and roaming the country, the Auvergnat
settled at Limoges, where he married, in 1797, the daughter of a
coppersmith, a widower, named Champagnac. When his father-in-law died he
bought the house in which he had been carrying on his trade of old-iron
dealer, after ceasing to roam the country as a peddler. Sauviat was
fifty years of age when he married old Champagnac’s daughter, who was
herself not less than thirty. Neither handsome nor pretty, she was
nevertheless born in Auvergne, and the _patois_ seemed to be the mutual
attraction; also she had the sturdy frame which enables women to bear
hard work. In the first three years of their married life Sauviat
continued to do some peddling, and his wife accompanied him, carrying
iron or lead on her back, and leading the miserable horse and cart
full of crockery with which her husband plied a disguised usury.
Dark-skinned, high-colored, enjoying robust health, and showing when
she laughed a brilliant set of teeth, white, long, and broad as
almonds, Madame Sauviat had the hips and bosom of a woman made by Nature
expressly for maternity.

If this strong girl were not earlier married, the fault must be
attributed to the Harpagon “no dowry” her father practised, though
he never read Moliere. Sauviat was not deterred by the lack of dowry;
besides, a man of fifty can’t make difficulties, not to speak of the
fact that such a wife would save him the cost of a servant. He added
nothing to the furniture of his bedroom where, from the day of his
wedding to the day he left the house, twenty years later, there was
never anything but a single four-post bed, with valance and curtains
of green serge, a chest, a bureau, four chairs, a table, and a
looking-glass, all collected from different localities. The chest
contained in its upper section pewter plates, dishes, etc., each article
dissimilar from the rest. The kitchen can be imagined from the bedroom.

Neither husband nor wife knew how to read,--a slight defect of education
which did not prevent them from ciphering admirably and doing a most
flourishing business. Sauviat never bought any article without the
certainty of being able to sell it for one hundred per cent profit.
To relieve himself of the necessity of keeping books and accounts, he
bought and sold for cash only. He had, moreover, such a perfect memory
that the cost of any article, were it only a farthing, remained in his
mind year after year, together with its accrued interest.

Except during the time required for her household duties, Madame Sauviat
was always seated in a rickety wooden chair placed against the corner
pillar of the building. There she knitted and looked at the passers,
watched over the old iron, sold and weighed it, and received payment
if Sauviat was away making purchases. When at home the husband could be
heard at daybreak pushing open his shutters; the household dog rushed
out into the street; and Madame Sauviat presently came out to help
her man in spreading upon the natural counter made by the low walls
on either side of the corner of the house on the two streets, the
multifarious collection of bells, springs, broken gunlocks, and the
other rubbish of their business, which gave a poverty-stricken look
to the establishment, though it usually contained as much as twenty
thousand francs’ worth of lead, steel, iron, and other metals.

Never were the former peddler and his wife known to speak of their
fortune; they concealed its amount as carefully as a criminal hides a
crime; and for years they were suspected of shaving both gold and
silver coins. When Champagnac died the Sauviats made no inventory of his
property; but they rummaged, with the intelligence of rats, into every
nook and corner of the old man’s house, left it as naked as a corpse,
and sold the wares it contained in their own shop.

Once a year, in December, Sauviat went to Paris in one of the public
conveyances. The gossips of the neighborhood concluded that in order to
conceal from others the amount of his fortune, he invested it himself on
these occasions. It was known later that, having been connected in his
youth with one of the most celebrated dealers in metal, an Auvergnat
like himself, who was living in Paris, Sauviat placed his funds with
the firm of Bresac, the mainspring and spine of that famous association
known by the name of the “Bande Noire,” which, as we have already said,
took its rise from a suggestion made by Sauviat himself.

Sauviat was a fat little man with a weary face, endowed by Nature with
a look of honesty which attracted customers and facilitated the sale of
goods. His straightforward assertions, and the perfect indifference of
his tone and manner, increased this impression. In person, his naturally
ruddy complexion was hardly perceptible under the black metallic dust
which powdered his curly black hair and the seams of a face pitted
with the small-pox. His forehead was not without dignity; in fact, it
resembled the well-known brow given by all painters to Saint Peter,
the man of the people, the roughest, but withal the shrewdest, of the
apostles. His hands were those of an indefatigable worker,--large,
thick, square, and wrinkled with deep furrows. His chest was of
seemingly indestructible muscularity. He never relinquished his
peddler’s costume,--thick, hobnailed shoes; blue stockings knit by his
wife and hidden by leather gaiters; bottle-green velveteen trousers; a
checked waistcoat, from which depended the brass key of his silver watch
by an iron chain which long usage had polished till it shone like steel;
a jacket with short tails, also of velveteen, like that of the trousers;
and around his neck a printed cotton cravat much frayed by the rubbing
of his beard.

On Sundays and fete-days Sauviat wore a frock-coat of maroon cloth, so
well taken care of that two new ones were all he bought in twenty years.
The living of galley-slaves would be thought sumptuous in comparison
with that of the Sauviats, who never ate meat except on the great
festivals of the Church. Before paying out the money absolutely needed
for their daily subsistence, Madame Sauviat would feel in the two
pockets hidden between her gown and petticoat, and bring forth a
single well-scraped coin,--a crown of six francs, or perhaps a piece
of fifty-five sous,--which she would gaze at for a long time before she
could bring herself to change it. As a general thing the Sauviats ate
herrings, dried peas, cheese, hard eggs in salad, vegetables seasoned in
the cheapest manner. Never did they lay in provisions, except perhaps
a bunch of garlic or onions, which could not spoil and cost but little.
The small amount of wood they burned in winter they bought of itinerant
sellers day by day. By seven in winter, by nine in summer, the household
was in bed, and the shop was closed and guarded by a huge dog, which got
its living from the kitchens in the neighborhood. Madame Sauviat used
about three francs’ worth of candles in the course of the year.

The sober, toilsome life of these persons was brightened by one joy, but
that was a natural joy, and for it they made their only known outlays.
In May, 1802, Madame Sauviat gave birth to a daughter. She was confined
all alone, and went about her household work five days later. She nursed
her child in the open air, seated as usual in her chair by the corner
pillar, continuing to sell old iron while the infant sucked. Her milk
cost nothing, and she let her little daughter feed on it for two years,
neither of them being the worse for the long nursing.

Veronique (that was the infant’s name) became the handsomest child in
the Lower town, and every one who saw her stopped to look at her. The
neighbors then noticed for the first time a trace of feeling in the old
Sauviats, of which they had supposed them devoid. While the wife cooked
the dinner the husband held the little one, or rocked it to the tune
of an Auvergnat song. The workmen as they passed sometimes saw him
motionless gazing at Veronique asleep on her mother’s knees. He softened
his harsh voice when he spoke to her, and wiped his hands on his
trousers before taking her up. When Veronique tried to walk, the father
bent his legs and stood at a little distance holding out his arms and
making little grimaces which contrasted funnily with the rigid furrows
of his stern, hard face. The man of iron, brass, and lead became a being
of flesh and blood and bones. If he happened to be standing with his
back against the corner pillar motionless, a cry from Veronique would
agitate him and send him flying over the mounds of iron fragments to
find her; for she spent her childhood playing with the wreck of ancient
castles heaped in the depths of that old shop. There were other days on
which she went to play in the street or with the neighboring children;
but even then her mother’s eye was always on her.

It is not unimportant to say here that the Sauviats were eminently
religious. At the very height of the Revolution they observed both
Sunday and fete-days. Twice Sauviat came near having his head cut off
for hearing mass from an unsworn priest. He was put in prison, being
justly accused of helping a bishop, whose life he saved, to fly the
country. Fortunately the old-iron dealer, who knew the ways of bolts
and bars, was able to escape; nevertheless he was condemned to death by
default, and as, by the bye, he never purged himself of that contempt,
he may be said to have died dead.

His wife shared his piety. The avariciousness of the household yielded
to the demands of religion. The old-iron dealers gave their alms
punctually at the sacrament and to all the collections in church. When
the vicar of Saint-Etienne called to ask help for his poor, Sauviat or
his wife fetched at once without reluctance or sour faces the sum they
thought their fair share of the parish duties. The mutilated Virgin on
their corner pillar never failed (after 1799) to be wreathed with holly
at Easter. In the summer season she was feted with bouquets kept fresh
in tumblers of blue glass; this was particularly the case after
the birth of Veronique. On the days of the processions the Sauviats
scrupulously hung their house with sheets covered with flowers, and
contributed money to the erection and adornment of the altar, which was
the pride and glory of the whole square.

Veronique Sauviat was, therefore, brought up in a Christian manner. From
the time she was seven years old she was taught by a Gray sister from
Auvergne to whom the Sauviats had done some kindness in former times.
Both husband and wife were obliging when the matter did not affect their
pockets or consume their time,--like all poor folk who are cordially
ready to be serviceable to others in their own way. The Gray sister
taught Veronique to read and write; she also taught her the history of
the people of God, the catechism, the Old and the New Testaments, and
a very little arithmetic. That was all; the worthy sister thought it
enough; it was in fact too much.

At nine years of age Veronique surprised the whole neighborhood with her
beauty. Every one admired her face, which promised much to the pencil of
artists who are always seeking a noble ideal. She was called “the Little
Virgin” and showed signs already of a fine figure and great delicacy of
complexion. Her Madonna-like face--for the popular voice had well named
her--was surrounded by a wealth of fair hair, which brought out the
purity of her features. Whoever has seen the sublime Virgin of Titian
in his great picture of the “Presentation” at Venice, will know that
Veronique was in her girlhood,--the same ingenuous candor, the same
seraphic astonishment in her eyes, the same simple yet noble attitude,
the same majesty of childhood in her demeanor.

At eleven years of age she had the small-pox, and owed her life to the
care of Soeur Marthe. During the two months that their child was in
danger the Sauviats betrayed to the whole community the depth of their
tenderness. Sauviat no longer went about the country to sales; he stayed
in the shop, going upstairs and down to his daughter’s room, sitting up
with her every night in company with his wife. His silent anguish seemed
so great that no one dared to speak to him; his neighbors looked at
him with compassion, but they only asked news of Veronique from Soeur
Marthe. During the days when the child’s danger reached a crisis, the
neighbors and passers saw, for the first and only time in Sauviat’s
life, tears in his eyes and rolling down his hollow cheeks; he did
not wipe them, but stood for hours as if stupefied, not daring to go
upstairs to his daughter’s room, gazing before him and seeing nothing,
so oblivious of all things that any one might have robbed him.

Veronique was saved, but her beauty perished. Her face, once exquisitely
colored with a tint in which brown and rose were harmoniously mingled,
came out from the disease with a myriad of pits which thickened the
skin, the flesh beneath it being deeply indented. Even her forehead did
not escape the ravages of the scourge; it turned brown and looked as
though it were hammered, like metal. Nothing can be more discordant
than brick tones of the skin surrounded by golden hair; they destroy all
harmony. These fissures in the tissues, capriciously hollowed, injured
the purity of the profile and the delicacy of the lines of the face,
especially that of the nose, the Grecian form of which was lost, and
that of the chin, once as exquisitely rounded as a piece of white
porcelain. The disease left nothing unharmed except the parts it was
unable to reach,--the eyes and the teeth. She did not, however, lose the
elegance and beauty of her shape,--neither the fulness of its lines nor
the grace and suppleness of her waist. At fifteen Veronique was still a
fine girl, and to the great consolation of her father and mother, a good
and pious girl, busy, industrious, and domestic.

After her convalescence and after she had made her first communion,
her parents gave her the two chambers on the second floor for her own
particular dwelling. Sauviat, so course in his way of living for himself
and his wife, now had certain perceptions of what comfort might be; a
vague idea came to him of consoling his child for her great loss, which,
as yet, she did not comprehend. The deprivation of that beauty which was
once the pride and joy of those two beings made Veronique the more dear
and precious to them. Sauviat came home one day, bearing a carpet he
had chanced upon in some of his rounds, which he nailed himself on
Veronique’s floor. For her he saved from the sale of an old chateau
the gorgeous bed of a fine lady, upholstered in red silk damask, with
curtains and chairs of the same rich stuff. He furnished her two
rooms with antique articles, of the true value of which he was wholly
ignorant. He bought mignonette and put the pots on the ledge outside
her window; and he returned from many of his trips with rose trees, or
pansies, or any kind of flower which gardeners or tavern-keepers would
give him.

If Veronique could have made comparisons and known the character, past
habits, and ignorance of her parents she would have seen how much there
was of affection in these little things; but as it was, she simply loved
them from her own sweet nature and without reflection.

The girl wore the finest linen her mother could find in the shops.
Madame Sauviat left her daughter at liberty to buy what materials she
liked for her gowns and other garments; and the father and mother
were proud of her choice, which was never extravagant. Veronique was
satisfied with a blue silk gown for Sundays and fete-days, and on
working-days she wore merino in winter and striped cotton dresses in
summer. On Sundays she went to church with her father and mother, and
took a walk after vespers along the banks of the Vienne or about the
environs. On other days she stayed at home, busy in filling worsted-work
patterns, the payment for which she gave to the poor,--a life of simple,
chaste, and exemplary principles and habits. She did some reading
together with her tapestry, but never in any books except those lent to
her by the vicar of Saint-Etienne, a priest whom Soeur Marthe had first
made known to her parents.

All the rules of the Sauviat’s domestic economy were suspended in favor
of Veronique. Her mother delighted in giving her dainty things to eat,
and cooked her food separately. The father and mother still ate their
nuts and dry bread, their herrings and parched peas fricasseed in salt
butter, while for Veronique nothing was thought too choice and good.

“Veronique must cost you a pretty penny,” said a hatmaker who lived
opposite to the Sauviats and had designs on their daughter for his son,
estimating the fortune of the old-iron dealer at a hundred thousand
francs.

“Yes, neighbor, yes,” Pere Sauviat would say; “if she asked me for ten
crowns I’d let her have them. She has all she wants; but she never asks
for anything; she is as gentle as a lamb.”

Veronique was, as a matter of fact, absolutely ignorant of the value of
things. She had never wanted for anything; she never saw a piece of gold
till the day of her marriage; she had no money of her own; her mother
bought and gave her everything she needed and wished for; so that even
when she wanted to give alms to a beggar, the girl felt in her mother’s
pocket for the coin.

“If that’s so,” remarked the hatmaker, “she can’t cost you much.”

“So you think, do you?” replied Sauviat. “You wouldn’t get off under
forty crowns a year, I can tell you that. Why, her room, she has at
least a hundred crowns’ worth of furniture in it! But when a man has but
one child, he doesn’t mind. The little we own will all go to her.”

“The little! Why, you must be rich, pere Sauviat! It is pretty nigh
forty years that you have been doing a business in which there are no
losses.”

“Ha! I sha’n’t go to the poorhouse for want of a thousand francs or so!”
 replied the old-iron dealer.

From the day when Veronique lost the soft beauty which made her girlish
face the admiration of all who saw it, Pere Sauviat redoubled in
activity. His business became so prosperous that he now went to Paris
several times a year. Every one felt that he wanted to compensate his
daughter by force of money for what he called her “loss of profit.”
 When Veronique was fifteen years old a change was made in the internal
manners and customs of the household. The father and mother went
upstairs in the evenings to their daughter’s apartment, where Veronique
would read to them, by the light of a lamp placed behind a glass globe
full of water, the “Vie des Saints,” the “Lettres Edifiantes,” and other
books lent by the vicar. Madame Sauviat knitted stockings, feeling that
she thus recouped herself for the cost of oil. The neighbors could see
through the window the old couple seated motionless in their armchairs,
like Chinese images, listening to their daughter, and admiring her with
all the powers of their contracted minds, obtuse to everything that was
not business or religious faith.




II. VERONIQUE

There are, no doubt, many young girls in the world as pure as Veronique,
but none purer or more modest. Her confessions might have surprised the
angels and rejoiced the Blessed Virgin.

At sixteen years of age she was fully developed, and appeared the woman
she was eventually to become. She was of medium height, neither her
father nor her mother being tall; but her figure was charming in its
graceful suppleness, and in the serpentine curves laboriously sought by
painters and sculptors,--curves which Nature herself draws so delicately
with her lissom outlines, revealed to the eye of artists in spite of
swathing linen and thick clothes, which mould themselves, inevitably,
upon the nude. Sincere, simple, and natural, Veronique set these
beauties of her form into relief by movements that were wholly free from
affectation. She brought out her “full and complete effect,” if we may
borrow that strong term from legal phraseology. She had the plump arms
of the Auvergnat women, the red and dimpled hand of a barmaid, and her
strong but well-shaped feet were in keeping with the rest of her figure.

At times there seemed to pass within her a marvellous and delightful
phenomenon which promised to Love a woman concealed thus far from every
eye. This phenomenon was perhaps one cause of the admiration her
father and mother felt for her beauty, which they often declared to
be divine,--to the great astonishment of their neighbors. The first to
remark it were the priests of the cathedral and the worshippers with
her at the same altar. When a strong emotion took possession of
Veronique,--and the religious exaltation to which she yielded herself on
receiving the communion must be counted among the strongest emotions of
so pure and candid a young creature,--an inward light seemed to efface
for the moment all traces of the small-pox. The pure and radiant face of
her childhood reappeared in its pristine beauty. Though slightly veiled
by the thickened surface disease had laid there, it shone with the
mysterious brilliancy of a flower blooming beneath the water of the sea
when the sun is penetrating it. Veronique was changed for a few
moments; the Little Virgin reappeared and then disappeared again, like a
celestial vision. The pupils of her eyes, gifted with the power of great
expansion, widened until they covered the whole surface of the blue iris
except for a tiny circle. Thus the metamorphose of the eye, which became
as keen and vivid as that of an eagle, completed the extraordinary
change in the face. Was it the storm of restrained passions; was it some
power coming from the depths of the soul, which enlarged the pupils
in full daylight as they sometimes in other eyes enlarge by night,
darkening the azure of those celestial orbs?

However that may be, it was impossible to look indifferently at
Veronique as she returned to her seat from the altar where she had
united herself with God,--a moment when she appeared to all the parish
in her primitive splendor. At such moments her beauty eclipsed that
of the most beautiful of women. What a charm was there for the man who
loved her, guarding jealously that veil of flesh which hid the woman’s
soul from every eye,--a veil which the hand of love might lift for an
instant and then let drop over conjugal delights! Veronique’s lips were
faultlessly curved and painted in the clear vermilion of her pure warm
blood. Her chin and the lower part of her face were a little heavy, in
the acceptation given by painters to that term,--a heaviness which is,
according to the relentless laws of physiognomy, the indication of an
almost morbid vehemence in passion. She had above her brow, which was
finely modelled and almost imperious, a magnificent diadem of hair,
voluminous, redundant, and now of a chestnut color.

From the age of sixteen to the day of her marriage Veronique’s bearing
was always thoughtful, and sometimes melancholy. Living in such deep
solitude, she was forced, like other solitary persons, to examine and
consider the spectacle of that which went on within her,--the progress
of her thought, the variety of the images in her mind, and the scope of
feelings warmed and nurtured in a life so pure.

Those who looked up from their lower level as they passed along the
rue de la Cite might have seen, on all fine days, the daughter of the
Sauviats sitting at her open window, sewing, embroidering, or pricking
the needle through the canvas of her worsted-work, with a look that
was often dreamy. Her head was vividly defined among the flowers which
poetized the brown and crumbling sills of her casement windows
with their leaded panes. Sometimes the reflection of the red damask
window-curtains added to the effect of that head, already so highly
colored; like a crimson flower she glowed in the aerial garden so
carefully trained upon her window-sill.

The quaint old house possessed therefore something more quaint than
itself,--the portrait of a young girl worthy of Mieris, or Van Ostade,
or Terburg, or Gerard Douw, framed in one of those old, defaced, half
ruined windows the brushes of the old Dutch painters loved so well. When
some stranger, surprised or interested by the building, stopped before
it and gazed at the second story, old Sauviat would poke his head beyond
the overhanging projection, certain that he should see his daughter at
her window. Then he would retreat into the shop rubbing his hands and
saying to his wife in the Auvergne vernacular:--

“Hey! old woman; they’re admiring your daughter!”

In 1820 an incident occurred in the simple uneventful life the girl was
leading, which might have had no importance in the life of any other
young woman, but which, in point of fact, did no doubt exercise over
Veronique’s future a terrible influence.

On one of the suppressed church fete-days, when many persons went about
their daily labor, though the Sauviats scrupulously closed their shop,
attended mass, and took a walk, Veronique passed, on their way to the
fields, a bookseller’s stall on which lay a copy of “Paul and Virginia.”
 She had a fancy to buy it for the sake of the engraving, and her father
paid a hundred sous for the fatal volume, which he put into the pocket
of his coat.

“Wouldn’t it be well to show that book to Monsieur le vicaire before
you read it?” said her mother, to whom all printed books were a sealed
mystery.

“I thought of it,” answered Veronique.

The girl passed the whole night reading the story,--one of the most
touching bits of writing in the French language. The picture of mutual
love, half Biblical and worthy of the earlier ages of the world, ravaged
her heart. A hand--was it divine or devilish?--raised the veil which,
till then, had hidden nature from her. The Little Virgin still existing
in the beautiful young girl thought on the morrow that her flowers had
never been so beautiful; she heard their symbolic language, she looked
into the depths of the azure sky with a fixedness that was almost
ecstasy, and tears without a cause rolled down her cheeks.

In the life of all women there comes a moment when they comprehend their
destiny,--when their hitherto mute organization speaks peremptorily.
It is not always a man, chosen by some furtive involuntary glance, who
awakens their slumbering sixth sense; oftener it is some unexpected
sight, the aspect of scenery, the _coup d’oeil_ of religious pomp, the
harmony of nature’s perfumes, a rosy dawn veiled in slight mists, the
winning notes of some divinest music, or indeed any unexpected motion
within the soul or within the body. To this lonely girl, buried in that
old house, brought up by simple, half rustic parents, who had never
heard an unfit word, whose pure unsullied mind had never known the
slightest evil thought,--to the angelic pupil of Soeur Marthe and the
vicar of Saint-Etienne the revelation of love, the life of womanhood,
came from the hand of genius through one sweet book. To any other
mind the book would have offered no danger; to her it was worse in its
effects than an obscene tale. Corruption is relative. There are chaste
and virgin natures which a single thought corrupts, doing all the more
harm because no thought of the duty of resistance has occurred.

The next day Veronique showed the book to the good priest, who approved
the purchase; for what could be more childlike and innocent and pure
than the history of Paul and Virginia? But the warmth of the tropics,
the beauty of the scenery, the almost puerile innocence of a love that
seemed so sacred had done their work on Veronique. She was led by the
sweet and noble achievement of its author to the worship of the Ideal,
that fatal human religion! She dreamed of a lover like Paul. Her
thoughts caressed the voluptuous image of that balmy isle. Childlike,
she named an island in the Vienne, below Limoges and nearly opposite to
the Faubourg Saint-Martial, the Ile de France. Her mind lived there in
the world of fancy all young girls construct,--a world they enrich with
their own perfections. She spent long hours at her window, looking
at the artisans or the mechanics who passed it, the only men whom the
modest position of her parents allowed her to think of. Accustomed, of
course, to the idea of eventually marrying a man of the people, she
now became aware of instincts within herself which revolved from all
coarseness.

In such a situation she naturally made many a romance such as young
girls are fond of weaving. She clasped the idea--perhaps with the
natural ardor of a noble and virgin imagination--of ennobling one of
those men, and of raising him to the height where her own dreams led
her. She may have made a Paul of some young man who caught her eye,
merely to fasten her wild ideas on an actual being, as the mists of a
damp atmosphere, touched by frost, crystallize on the branches of a tree
by the wayside. She must have flung herself deep into the abysses of
her dream, for though she often returned bearing on her brow, as if from
vast heights, some luminous reflections, oftener she seemed to carry in
her hand the flowers that grew beside a torrent she had followed down a
precipice.

On the warm summer evenings she would ask her father to take her on his
arm to the banks of the Vienne, where she went into ecstasies over the
beauties of the sky and fields, the glories of the setting sun, or
the infinite sweetness of the dewy evening. Her soul exhaled itself
thenceforth in a fragrance of natural poesy. Her hair, until then simply
wound about her head, she now curled and braided. Her dress showed
some research. The vine which was running wild and naturally among the
branches of the old elm, was transplanted, cut and trained over a green
and pretty trellis.

After the return of old Sauviat (then seventy years of age) from a trip
to Paris in December, 1822, the vicar came to see him one evening, and
after a few insignificant remarks he said suddenly:--

“You had better think of marrying your daughter, Sauviat. At your age
you ought not to put off the accomplishment of so important a duty.”

“But is Veronique willing to be married?” asked the old man, startled.

“As you please, father,” she said, lowering her eyes.

“Yes, we’ll marry her!” cried stout Madame Sauviat, smiling.

“Why didn’t you speak to me about it before I went to Paris, mother?”
 said Sauviat. “I shall have to go back there.”

Jerome-Baptiste Sauviat, a man in whose eyes money seemed to constitute
the whole of happiness, who knew nothing of love, and had never seen
in marriage anything but the means of transmitting property to another
self, had long sworn to marry Veronique to some rich bourgeois,--so
long, in fact, that the idea had assumed in his brain the
characteristics of a hobby. His neighbor, the hat-maker, who possessed
about two thousand francs a year, had already asked, on behalf of his
son, to whom he proposed to give up his hat-making establishment, the
hand of a girl so well known in the neighborhood for her exemplary
conduct and Christian principles. Sauviat had politely refused, without
saying anything to Veronique. The day after the vicar--a very important
personage in the eyes of the Sauviat household--had mentioned the
necessary of marrying Veronique, whose confessor he was, the old man
shaved and dressed himself as for a fete-day, and went out without
saying a word to his wife or daughter; both knew very well, however,
that the father was in search of a son-in-law. Old Sauviat went to
Monsieur Graslin.

Monsieur Graslin, a rich banker in Limoges, had, like Sauviat himself,
started from Auvergne without a penny; he came to Limoges to be a
porter, found a place as an office-boy in a financial house, and there,
like many other financiers, he made his way by dint of economy, and also
through fortunate circumstances. Cashier at twenty-five years of age,
partner ten years later, in the firm of Perret and Grossetete, he ended
by finding himself the head of the house, after buying out the senior
partners, both of whom retired into the country, leaving him their funds
to manage in the business at a low interest.

Pierre Graslin, then forty-seven years of age, was supposed to possess
about six hundred thousand francs. The estimate of his fortune had
lately increased throughout the department, in consequence of his outlay
in having built, in a new quarter of the town called the place d’Arbres
(thus assisting to give Limoges an improved aspect), a fine house, the
front of it being on a line with a public building with the facade of
which it corresponded. This house had now been finished six months, but
Pierre Graslin delayed furnishing it; it had cost him so much that he
shrank from the further expense of living in it. His vanity had led him
to transgress the wise laws by which he governed his life. He felt, with
the good sense of a business man, that the interior of the house
ought to correspond with the character of the outside. The furniture,
silver-ware, and other needful accessories to the life he would have to
lead in his new mansion would, he estimated, cost him nearly as much as
the original building. In spite, therefore, of the gossip of tongues and
the charitable suppositions of his neighbors, he continued to live on
in the damp, old, and dirty ground-floor apartment in the rue
Montantmanigne where his fortune had been made. The public carped,
but Graslin had the approval of his former partners, who praised a
resolution that was somewhat uncommon.

A fortune and a position like those of Pierre Graslin naturally excited
the greed of not a few in a small provincial city. During the last
ten years more than one proposition of marriage had been intimated to
Monsieur Graslin. But the bachelor state was so well suited to a man
who was busy from morning till night, overrun with work, eager in the
pursuit of money as a hunter for game, and always tired out with his
day’s labor, that Graslin fell into none of the traps laid for him
by ambitious mothers who coveted so brilliant a position for their
daughters.

Graslin, another Sauviat in an upper sphere, did not spend more than
forty sous a day, and clothed himself no better than his under-clerk.
Two clerks and an office-boy sufficed him to carry on his business,
which was immense through the multiplicity of its details. One clerk
attended to the correspondence; the other had charge of the accounts;
but Pierre Graslin was himself the soul, and body too, of the whole
concern. His clerks, chosen from his own relations, were safe men,
intelligent and as well-trained in the work as himself. As for the
office-boy, he led the life of a truck horse,--up at five in the morning
at all seasons, and never getting to bed before eleven at night.

Graslin employed a charwoman by the day, an old peasant from Auvergne,
who did his cooking. The brown earthenware off which he ate, and the
stout coarse linen which he used, were in keeping with the character of
his food. The old woman had strict orders never to spend more than three
francs daily for the total expenses of the household. The office-boy
was also man-of-all-work. The clerks took care of their own rooms. The
tables of blackened wood, the straw chairs half unseated, the wretched
beds, the counters and desks, in short, the whole furniture of house and
office was not worth more than a thousand francs, including a colossal
iron safe, built into the wall, before which slept the man-of-all-work
with two dogs at his feet.

Graslin did not often go into society, which, however, discussed
him constantly. Two or three times a year he dined with the
receiver-general, with whom his business brought him into occasional
intercourse. He also occasionally took a meal at the prefecture; for he
had been appointed, much to his regret, a member of the Council-general
of the department--“a waste of time,” he remarked. Sometimes his brother
bankers with whom he had dealings kept him to breakfast or dinner; and
he was forced also to visit his former partners, who spent their winters
in Limoges. He cared so little to keep up his relations to society that
in twenty-five years Graslin had not offered so much as a glass of water
to any one. When he passed along the street persons would nudge each
other and say: “That’s Monsieur Graslin”; meaning, “There’s a man
who came to Limoges without a penny and has now acquired an enormous
fortune.” The Auvergnat banker was a model which more than one father
pointed out to his son, and wives had been known to fling him in the
faces of their husbands.

We can now understand the reasons that led a man who had become the
pivot of the financial machine of Limoges to repulse the various
propositions of marriage which parents never ceased to make to him. The
daughters of his partners, Messrs. Perret and Grossetete, were married
before Graslin was in a position to take a wife; but as each of these
ladies had young daughters, the wiseheads of the community finally
concluded that old Perret or old Grossetete had made an arrangement with
Graslin to wait for one of his granddaughters, and thenceforth they left
him alone.

Sauviat had watched the ascending career of his compatriot more
attentively and seriously than any one else. He had known him from
the time he first came to Limoges; but their respective positions had
changed so much, at least apparently, that their friendship, now become
merely superficial, was seldom freshened. Still, in his relation as
compatriot, Graslin never disdained to talk with Sauviat when they
chanced to meet. Both continued to keep up their early _tutoiement_, but
only in their native dialect. When the receiver-general of Bourges, the
youngest of the brothers Grossetete, married his daughter in 1823 to the
youngest son of Comte Fontaine, Sauviat felt sure that the Grossetetes
would never allow Graslin to enter their family.

After his conference with the banker, Pere Sauviat returned home
joyously. He dined that night in his daughter’s room, and after dinner
he said to his womenkind:--

“Veronique will be Madame Graslin.”

“Madame Graslin!” exclaimed Mere Sauviat, astounded.

“Is it possible?” said Veronique, to whom Graslin was personally
unknown, and whose imagination regarded him very much as a Parisian
grisette would regard a Rothschild.

“Yes, it is settled,” said old Sauviat solemnly. “Graslin will furnish
his house magnificently; he is to give our daughter a fine Parisian
carriage and the best horses to be found in the Limousin; he will buy
an estate worth five hundred thousand francs, and settle that and his
town-house upon her. Veronique will be the first lady in Limoges,
the richest in the department, and she can do what she pleases with
Graslin.”

Veronique’s education, her religious ideas, and her boundless affection
for her parents, prevented her from making a single objection; it did
not even cross her mind to think that she had been disposed of without
reference to her own will. On the morrow Sauviat went to Paris, and was
absent for nearly a week.

Pierre Graslin was, as can readily be imagined, not much of a talker; he
went straight and rapidly to deeds. A thing decided on was a thing done.
In February, 1822, a strange piece of news burst like a thunderbolt on
the town of Limoges. The hotel Graslin was being handsomely furnished;
carriers’ carts came day after day from Paris, and their contents were
unpacked in the courtyard. Rumors flew about the town as to the beauty
and good taste of the modern or the antique furniture as it was seen
to arrive. The great firm of Odiot and Company sent down a magnificent
service of plate by the mail-coach. Three carriages, a caleche, a coupe,
and a cabriolet arrived, wrapped in straw with as much care as if they
were jewels.

“Monsieur Graslin is going to be married!”

These words were said by every pair of lips in Limoges in the course of
a single evening,--in the salons of the upper classes, in the kitchens,
in the shops, in the streets, in the suburbs, and before long throughout
the whole surrounding country. But to whom? No one could answer. Limoges
had a mystery.




III. MARRIAGE

On the return of old Sauviat Graslin paid his first evening visit at
half-past nine o’clock. Veronique was expecting him, dressed in her blue
silk gown and muslin guimpe, over which fell a collaret made of lawn
with a deep hem. Her hair was simply worn in two smooth bandeaus,
gathered into a Grecian knot at the back of her head. She was seated on
a tapestried chair beside her mother, who occupied a fine armchair with
a carved back, covered with red velvet (evidently the relic of some old
chateau), which stood beside the fireplace. A bright fire blazed on the
hearth. On the chimney-piece, at either side of an antique clock, the
value of which was wholly unknown to the Sauviats, six wax candles in
two brass sconces twisted like vine-shoots, lighted the dark room and
Veronique in all her budding prime. The old mother was wearing her best
gown.

From the silent street, at that tranquil hour, through the soft shadows
of the ancient stairway, Graslin appeared to the modest, artless
Veronique, her mind still dwelling on the sweet ideas which Bernadin de
Saint-Pierre had given her of love.

Graslin, who was short and thin, had thick black hair like the bristles
of a brush, which brought into vigorous relief a face as red as that
of a drunkard emeritus, and covered with suppurating pimples, either
bleeding or about to burst. Without being caused by eczema or scrofula,
these signs of a blood overheated by continual toil, anxiety, and the
lust of business, by wakeful nights, poor food, and a sober life,
seemed to partake of both these diseases. In spite of the advice of his
partners, his clerks, and his physician, the banker would never compel
himself to take the healthful precautions which might have prevented, or
would at least modify, this malady, which was slight at first, but had
greatly increased from year to year. He wanted to cure it, and would
sometimes take baths or drink some prescribed potion; but, hurried
along on the current of his business, he soon neglected the care of his
person. Sometimes he thought of suspending work for a time, travelling
about, and visiting the noted baths for such diseases; but where is the
hunter after millions who is willing to stop short?

In that blazing furnace shone two gray eyes rayed with green lines
starting from the pupils, and speckled with brown spots,--two implacable
eyes, full of resolution, rectitude, and shrewd calculation. Graslin’s
nose was short and turned up; he had a mouth with thick lips, a
prominent forehead, and high cheek-bones, coarse ears with large edges
discolored by the condition of his blood,--in short, he was an ancient
satyr in a black satin waistcoat, brown frock-coat, and white cravat.
His strong and vigorous shoulders, which began life by bearing heavy
burdens, were now rather bent; and beneath this torso, unduly developed,
came a pair of weak legs, rather badly affixed to the short thighs. His
thin and hairy hands had the crooked fingers of those whose business it
is to handle money. The habit of quick decision could be seen in the
way the eyebrows rose into a point over each arch of the eye. Though
the mouth was grave and pinched, its expression was that of inward
kindliness; it told of an excellent nature, sunk in business, smothered
possibly, though it might revive by contact with a woman.

At this apparition Veronique’s heart was violently agitated; blackness
came before her eyes; she thought she cried aloud; but she really sat
there mute, with fixed and staring gaze.

“Veronique, this is Monsieur Graslin,” said old Sauviat.

Veronique rose, curtsied, dropped back into her chair, and looked at her
mother, who was smiling at the millionaire, seeming, as her father
did, so happy,--so happy that the poor girl found strength to hide her
surprise and her violent repulsion. During the conversation which then
took place something was said of Graslin’s health. The banker looked
naively into the mirror, with bevelled edges in an ebony frame.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I am not good-looking.”

Thereupon he proceeded to explain the blotches on his face as the result
of his overworked life. He related how he had constantly disobeyed his
physician’s advice; and remarked that he hoped to change his appearance
altogether when he had a wife to rule his household, and take better
care of him than he took of himself.

“Is a man married for his face, compatriot?” said Sauviat, giving the
other a hearty slap on the thigh.

Graslin’s speech went straight to those natural feelings which, more or
less, fill the heart of every woman. The thought came into Veronique’s
mind that her face, too, had been destroyed by a horrible disease, and
her Christian modesty rebuked her first impression.

Hearing a whistle in the street, Graslin went downstairs, followed by
Sauviat. They speedily returned. The office-boy had brought the first
bouquet, which was a little late in coming. When the banker exhibited
this mound of exotic flowers, the fragrance of which completely filled
the room, and offered it to his future wife, Veronique felt a rush
of conflicting emotions; she was suddenly plunged into the ideal and
fantastic world of tropical nature. Never before had she seen white
camelias, never had she smelt the fragrance of the Alpine cistus, the
Cape jessamine, the cedronella, the volcameria, the moss-rose, or any of
the divine perfumes which woo to love, and sing to the heart their hymns
of fragrance. Graslin left Veronique that night in the grasp of such
emotions.

From this time forth, as soon as all Limoges was sleeping, the banker
would slip along the walls to the Sauviats’ house. There he would tap
gently on the window-shutter; the dog did not bark; old Sauviat came
down and let him in, and Graslin would then spend an hour or two with
Veronique in the brown room, where Madame Sauviat always served him a
true Auvergnat supper. Never did this singular lover arrive without
a bouquet made of the rarest flowers from the greenhouse of his old
partner, Monsieur Grossetete, the only person who as yet knew of the
approaching marriage. The man-of-all-work went every evening to fetch
the bunch, which Monsieur Grossetete made himself.

Graslin made about fifty such visits in two months; each time, besides
the flowers, he brought with him some rich present,--rings, a watch, a
gold chain, a work-box, etc. These inconceivable extravagances must
be explained, and a word suffices. Veronique’s dowry, promised by her
father, consisted of nearly the whole of old Sauviat’s property, namely,
seven hundred and fifty thousand francs. The old man retained an
income of eight thousand francs derived from the Funds, bought for him
originally for sixty thousand francs in assignats by his correspondent
Brezac, to whom, at the time of his imprisonment, he had confided that
sum, and who kept it for him safely. These sixty thousand francs in
assignats were the half of Sauviat’s fortune at the time he came so
near being guillotined. Brezac was also, at the same time, the faithful
repository of the rest, namely, seven hundred louis d’or (an enormous
sum at that time in gold), with which old Sauviat began his business
once more as soon as he recovered his liberty. In thirty years each of
those louis d’or had been transformed into a bank-note for a thousand
francs, by means of the income from the Funds, of Madame Sauviat’s
inheritance from her father, old Champagnac, and of the profits accruing
from the business and the accumulated interest thereon in the hands of
the Brezac firm. Brezac himself had a loyal and honest friendship for
Sauviat,--such as all Auvergnats are apt to feel for one another.

So, whenever Sauviat passed the front of the Graslin mansion he had said
to himself, “Veronique shall live in that fine palace.” He knew very
well that no girl in all the department would have seven hundred and
fifty thousand francs as a marriage portion, besides the expectation
of two hundred and fifty thousand more. Graslin, his chosen son-in-law,
would therefore infallibly marry Veronique; and so, as we have seen, it
came about.

Every evening Veronique had her fresh bunch of flowers, which on the
morrow decked her little salon and was carefully concealed from the
neighbors. She admired the beautiful jewels, the pearls and diamonds,
the bracelets, the rubies, gifts which assuredly gratify all the
daughters of Eve. She thought herself less plain when she wore them. She
saw her mother happy in the marriage, and she had no other point of view
from which to make comparisons. She was, moreover, totally ignorant of
the duties or the purpose of marriage. She heard the solemn voice of the
vicar of Saint-Etienne praising Graslin to her as a man of honor,
with whom she would lead an honorable life. Thus it was that Veronique
consented to receive Monsieur Graslin as her future husband.

When it happens that in a life so withdrawn from the world, so solitary
as that of Veronique, a single person enters it every day, that person
cannot long remain indifferent; either he is hated, and the aversion,
justified by a deepening knowledge of his character, renders him
intolerable, or the habit of seeing bodily defects dims the eye to
them. The mind looks about for compensations; his countenance awakens
curiosity; its features brighten; fleeting beauties appear in it. At
last the inner, hidden beneath the outer, shows itself. Then, when the
first impressions are fairly overcome, the attachment felt is all the
stronger, because the soul clings to it as its own creation. That is
love. And here lies the reason of those passions conceived by beautiful
things for other beings apparently ugly. The outward aspect, forgotten
by affection, is no longer seen in a creature whose soul is deeply
valued. Besides this, beauty, so necessary to a woman, takes many
strange aspects in man; and there is as much diversity of feeling among
women about the beauty of men as there is among men about the beauty
of women. So, after deep reflection and much debating with herself,
Veronique gave her consent to the publication of the banns.

From that moment all Limoges rang with this inexplicable
affair,--inexplicable because no one knew the secret of it, namely, the
immensity of the dowry. Had that dowry been known Veronique could have
chosen a husband where she pleased; but even so, she might have made a
mistake.

Graslin was thought to be much in love. Upholsterers came from Paris
to fit up the house. Nothing was talked of in Limoges but the profuse
expenditures of the banker. The value of the chandeliers was calculated;
the gilding of the walls, the figures on the clocks, all were discussed;
the jardinieres, the caloriferes, the objects of luxury and novelty,
nothing was left unnoticed. In the garden of the hotel Graslin, above
the icehouse, was an aviary, and all the inhabitants of the town were
presently surprised by the sight of rare birds,--Chinese pheasants,
mysterious breeds of ducks. Every one flocked to see them. Monsieur and
Madame Grossetete, an old couple who were highly respected in Limoges,
made several visits to the Sauviats, accompanied by Graslin. Madame
Grossetete, a most excellent woman, congratulated Veronique on her happy
marriage. Thus the Church, the family, society, and all material things
down to the most trivial, made themselves accomplices to bring about
this marriage.

In the month of April the formal invitations to the wedding were issued
to all Graslin’s friends and acquaintance. On a fine spring morning
a caleche and a coupe, drawn by Limousin horses chosen by Monsieur
Grossetete, drew up at eleven o’clock before the shop of the
iron-dealer, bringing, to the great excitement of the neighborhood,
the former partners of the bridegroom and the latter’s two clerks.
The street was lined with spectators, all anxious to see the Sauviats’
daughter, on whose beautiful hair the most renowned hairdresser in
Limoges had placed the bridal wreath and a costly veil of English
lace. Veronique wore a gown of simple white muslin. A rather imposing
assemblage of the most distinguished women in the society of the town
attended the wedding in the cathedral, where the bishop, knowing the
religious fervor of the Sauviats, deigned to marry Veronique himself.
The bride was very generally voted plain.

She entered her new house, and went from one surprise to another. A
grand dinner was to precede the ball, to which Graslin had invited
nearly all Limoges. The dinner, given to the bishop, the prefect, the
judge of the court, the attorney-general, the mayor, the general, and
Graslin’s former partners with their wives, was a triumph for the bride,
who, like all other persons who are simple and natural, showed charms
that were not expected in her. Neither of the bridal pair could dance;
Veronique continued therefore to do the honors to her guests, and to win
the esteem and good graces of nearly all the persons who were presented
to her, asking Grossetete, who took an honest liking to her, for
information about the company. She made no mistakes and committed no
blunders. It was during this evening that the two former partners of the
banker announced the amount of the dowry (immense for Limousin) given
by the Sauviats to their daughter. At nine o’clock the old iron-dealer
returned home and went to bed, leaving his wife to preside over the
bride’s retiring. It was said by everyone throughout the town that
Madame Graslin was very plain, though well made.

Old Sauviat now wound up his business and sold his house in town. He
bought a little country-place on the left bank of the Vienne between
Limoges and Cluzeau, ten minutes’ walk from the suburb of Saint-Martial,
where he intended to finish his days tranquilly with his wife. The old
couple had an apartment in the hotel Graslin and always dined once or
twice a week with their daughter, who, as often, made their house in the
country the object of her walks.

This enforced rest almost killed old Sauviat. Happily, Graslin found a
means of occupying his father-in-law. In 1823 the banker was forced to
take possession of a porcelain manufactory, to the proprietors of which
he had advanced large sums, which they found themselves unable to repay
except by the sale of their factory, which they made to him. By the help
of his business connections and by investing a large amount of property
in the concern, Graslin made it one of the finest manufactories of
Limoges ware in the town. Afterwards he resold it at a fine profit;
meantime he placed it under the superintendence of his father-in-law,
who, in spite of his seventy-two years, counted for much in the return
of prosperity to the establishment, who himself renewed his youth in the
employment. Graslin was then able to attend to his legitimate business
of banking without anxiety as to the manufactory.

Sauviat died in 1827 from an accident. While taking account of stock he
fell into a _charasse_,--a sort of crate with an open grating in which
the china was packed; his leg was slightly injured, so slightly that
he paid no attention to it; gangrene set in; he would not consent to
amputation, and therefore died. The widow gave up about two hundred and
fifty thousand francs which came to her from Sauviat’s estate, reserving
only a stipend of two hundred francs a month, which amply sufficed for
her wants. Graslin bound himself to pay her that sum duly. She kept her
little house in the country, and lived there alone without a servant and
against the remonstrances of her daughter, who could not induce her to
alter this determination, to which she clung with the obstinacy peculiar
to old persons. Madame Sauviat came nearly every day into Limoges to see
her daughter, and the latter still continued to make her mother’s house,
from which was a charming view of the river, the object of her walks.
From the road leading to it could be seen that island long loved by
Veronique and called by her the Ile de France.

In order not to complicate our history of the Graslin household with the
foregoing incidents, we have thought it best to end that of the Sauviats
by anticipating events, which are moreover useful as explaining the
private and hidden life which Madame Graslin now led. The old mother,
noticing that Graslin’s miserliness, which returned upon him, might
hamper her daughter, was for some time unwilling to resign the property
left to her by her husband. But Veronique, unable to imagine a case in
which a woman might desire the use of her own property, urged it upon
her mother with reasons of great generosity, and out of gratitude to
Graslin for restoring to her the liberty and freedom of a young girl.
But this is anticipating.

The unusual splendor which accompanied Graslin’s marriage had disturbed
all his habits and constantly annoyed him. The mind of the great
financier was a very small one. Veronique had had no means of judging
the man with whom she was to pass her life. During his fifty-five visits
he had let her see nothing but the business man, the indefatigable
worker, who conceived and sustained great enterprises, and analyzed
public affairs, bringing them always to the crucial test of the Bank.
Fascinated by the million offered to him by Sauviat, he showed himself
generous by calculation. Carried away by the interests of his marriage
and by what he called his “folly,” namely, the house which still goes
by the name of the hotel Graslin, he did things on a large scale. Having
bought horses, a caleche, and a coupe, he naturally used them to
return the wedding visits and go to those dinners and balls, called the
“retours de noces,” which the heads of the administration and the
rich families of Limoges gave to the newly married pair. Under this
impulsion, which carried him entirely out of his natural sphere, Graslin
sent to Paris for a man-cook and took a reception day. For a year
he kept the pace of a man who possesses a fortune of sixteen hundred
thousand francs, and he became of course the most noted personage in
Limoges. During this year he generously put into his wife’s purse every
month twenty-five gold pieces of twenty francs each.

Society concerned itself much about Veronique from the day of her
marriage, for she was a boon to its curiosity, which has little to feed
on in the provinces. Veronique was all the more studied because she
had appeared in the social world like a phenomenon; but once there, she
remained always simple and modest, in the attitude of a person who
is observing habits, customs, manners, things unknown to her, and
endeavoring to conform to them. Already voted ugly but well-shaped, she
was now declared kindly but stupid. She was learning so many things, she
had so much to hear and to see that her looks and speech did certainly
give some reason for this judgment. She showed a sort of torpor which
resembled lack of mind. Marriage, that hard calling, as she said, for
which the Church, the Code, and her mother exhorted her to resignation
and obedience, under pain of transgressing all human laws and causing
irreparable evil, threw her into a dazed and dizzy condition, which
amounted sometimes to a species of inward delirium.

Silent and self-contained, she listened as much to herself as she did to
others. Feeling within her the most violent “difficulty of existing,” to
use an expression of Fontenelle’s, which was constantly increasing, she
became terrified at herself. Nature resisted the commands of the mind,
the body denied the will. The poor creature, caught in the net, wept on
the breast of that great Mother of the poor and the afflicted,--she
went for comfort to the Church; her piety redoubled, she confided the
assaults of the demon to her confessor; she prayed to heaven for succor.
Never, at any period of her life, did she fulfil her religious duties
with such fervor. The despair of not loving her husband flung her
violently at the foot of the altar, where divine and consolatory
voices urged her to patience. She was patient, she was gentle, and she
continued to live on, hoping always for the happiness of maternity.

“Did you notice Madame Graslin this morning?” the women would say to
each other. “Marriage doesn’t agree with her; she is actually green.”

“Yes,” some of them would reply; “but would you give your daughter to a
man like Graslin? No woman could marry him with impunity.”

Now that Graslin was married, all the mothers who had courted him for
ten years past pursued him with sarcasms.

Veronique grew visibly thinner and really ugly; her eyes looked weary,
her features coarsened, her manner was shy and awkward; she acquired
that air of cold and melancholy rigidity for which the ultra-pious are
so often blamed. Her skin took on a grayish tone; she dragged herself
languidly about during this first year of married life, ordinarily so
brilliant for a young wife. She tried to divert her mind by reading,
profiting by the liberty of married women to read what they please. She
read the novels of Walter Scott, the poems of Lord Byron, the works
of Schiller and of Goethe, and much else of modern and also ancient
literature. She learned to ride a horse, and to dance and to draw. She
painted water-colors and made sepia sketches, turning ardently to
all those resources which women employ to bear the weariness of their
solitude. She gave herself that second education which most women derive
from a man, but which she derived from herself only.

The natural superiority of a free, sincere spirit, brought up, as it
were in a desert and strengthened by religion, had given her a sort of
untrammelled grandeur and certain needs, to which the provincial world
she lived in offered no sustenance. All books pictured Love to her, and
she sought for the evidence of its existence, but nowhere could she see
the passion of which she read. Love was in her heart, like seeds in the
earth, awaiting the action of the sun. Her deep melancholy, caused by
constant meditation on herself, brought her back by hidden by-ways to
the brilliant dreams of her girlish days. Many a time she must have
lived again that old romantic poem, making herself both the actor and
the subject of it. Again she saw that island bathed in light, flowery,
fragrant, caressing to her soul. Often her pallid eyes wandered around
a salon with piercing curiosity. The men were all like Graslin. She
studied them, and then she seemed to question their wives; but nothing
on the faces of those women revealed an inward anguish like to hers,
and she returned home sad and gloomy and distressed about herself. The
authors she had read in the morning answered to the feelings in her
soul; their thoughts pleased her; but at night she heard only empty
words, not even presented in a lively way,--dull, empty, foolish
conversations in petty local matters, or personalities of no interest to
her. She was often surprised at the heat displayed in discussions which
concerned no feeling or sentiment--to her the essence of existence, the
soul of life.

Often she was seen with fixed eyes, mentally absorbed, thinking no doubt
of the days of her youthful ignorance spent in that chamber full of
harmonies now forever passed away. She felt a horrible repugnance
against dropping into the gulf of pettiness in which the women among
whom she lived were floundering. This repugnance, stamped on her
forehead, on her lips, and ill-disguised, was taken for the insolence
of a parvenue. Madame Graslin began to observe on all faces a certain
coldness; she felt in all remarks an acrimony, the causes of which were
unknown to her, for she had no intimate friend to enlighten or advise
her. Injustice, which angers little minds, brings loftier souls to
question themselves, and communicates a species of humility to them.
Veronique condemned herself, endeavoring to see her own faults. She
tried to be affable; they called her false. She grew more gentle still;
they said she was a hypocrite, and her pious devotion helped on the
calumny. She spent money, gave dinners and balls, and they taxed her
with pride.

Unsuccessful in all these attempts, unjustly judged, rebuffed by the
petty and tormenting pride which characterizes provincial society,
where each individual is armed with pretensions and their attendant
uneasiness, Madame Graslin fell back into utter solitude. She returned
with eagerness to the arms of the Church. Her great soul, clothed with
so weak a flesh, showed her the multiplied commandments of Catholicism
as so many stones placed for protection along the precipices of life, so
many props brought by charitable hands to sustain human weakness on
its weary way; and she followed, with greater rigor than ever, even the
smallest religious practices.

On this the liberals of the town classed Madame Graslin among the
_devotes_, the ultras. To the different animosities Veronique had
innocently acquired, the virulence of party feeling now added its
periodical exasperation. But as this ostracism took nothing really from
her, she quietly left society and lived in books which offered her
such infinite resources. She meditated on what she read, she compared
systems, she widened immeasurably the horizons of her intellect and the
extent of her education; in this way she opened the gates of her soul to
curiosity.

During this period of resolute study, in which religion supported and
maintained her mind, she obtained the friendship of Monsieur Grossetete,
one of those old men whose mental superiority grows rusty in provincial
life, but who, when they come in contact with an eager mind, recover
something of their former brilliancy. The good man took an earnest
interest in Veronique, who, to reward him for the flattering warmth of
heart which old men show to those they like, displayed before him,
and for the first time in her life, the treasures of her soul and
the acquirements of her mind, cultivated so secretly, and now full of
blossom. An extract from a letter written by her about this time to
Monsieur Grossetete will show the condition of the mind of a woman who
was later to give signal proofs of a firm and lofty nature:--

  “The flowers you sent me for the ball were charming, but they
  suggested harsh reflections. Those pretty creatures gathered by
  you, and doomed to wilt upon my bosom to adorn a fete, made me
  think of others that live and die unseen in the depths of your
  woods, their fragrance never inhaled by any one. I asked myself
  why I was dancing there, why I was decked with flowers, just as I
  ask God why he has placed me to live in this world.

  “You see, my friend, all is a snare to the unhappy; the smallest
  matter brings the sick mind back to its woes; but the greatest
  evil of certain woes is the persistency which makes them a fixed
  idea pervading our lives. A constant sorrow ought rather to be a
  divine inspiration. You love flowers for themselves, whereas I
  love them as I love to listen to fine music. So, as I was saying,
  the secret of a mass of things escapes me. You, my old friend, you
  have a passion,--that of the horticulturist. When you return to
  town inspire me with that taste, so that I may rush to my
  greenhouse with eager feet, as you go to yours to watch the
  development of your plants, to bud and bloom with them, to admire
  what you create,--the new colors, the unexpected varieties, which
  expand and grow beneath your eyes by the virtue of your care.

  “My greenhouse, the one I watch, is filled with suffering souls.
  The miseries I try to lessen sadden my heart; and when I take them
  upon myself, when, after finding some young woman without clothing
  for her babe, some old man wanting bread, I have supplied their
  needs, the emotions their distress and its relief have caused me
  do not suffice my soul. Ah, friend, I feel within me untold powers
  --for evil, possibly,--which nothing can lower, which the sternest
  commands of our religion are unable to abase! Sometimes, when I go
  to see my mother, walking alone among the fields, I want to cry
  aloud, and I do so. It seems to me that my body is a prison in
  which some evil genius is holding a shuddering creature while
  awaiting the mysterious words which are to burst its obstructive
  form.

  “But that comparison is not a just one. In me it seems to be the
  body that seeks escape, if I may say so. Religion fills my soul,
  books and their riches occupy my mind. Why, then, do I desire some
  anguish which shall destroy the enervating peace of my existence?

  “Oh, if some sentiment, some mania that I could cultivate, does
  not come into my life, I feel I shall sink at last into the gulf
  where all ideas are dulled, where character deteriorates, motives
  slacken, virtues lose their backbone, and all the forces of the
  soul are scattered,--a gulf in which I shall no longer be the
  being Nature meant me to be!

  “This is what my bitter complainings mean. But do not let them
  hinder you from sending me those flowers. Your friendship is so
  soothing and so full of loving kindness that it has for the last
  few months almost reconciled me to myself. Yes, it makes me happy
  to have you cast a glance upon my soul, at once so barren and so
  full of bloom; and I am thankful for every gentle word you say to
  one who rides the phantom steed of dreams, and returns worn-out.”

At the end of the third year of his married life, Graslin, observing
that his wife no longer used her horses, and finding a good market for
them, sold them. He also sold the carriages, sent away the coachman, let
the bishop have his man-cook, and contented himself with a woman. He no
longer gave the monthly sum to his wife, telling her that he would pay
all bills. He thought himself the most fortunate of husbands in meeting
no opposition whatever to these proceedings from the woman who had
brought him a million of francs as a dowry. Madame Graslin, brought up
from childhood without ever seeing money, or being made to feel that it
was an indispensable element in life, deserved no praise whatever
for this apparent generosity. Graslin even noticed in a corner of the
secretary all the sums he had ever given her, less the money she had
bestowed in charity or spent upon her dress, the cost of which was much
lessened by the profusion of her wedding trousseau.

Graslin boasted of Veronique to all Limoges as being a model wife.
He next regretted the money spent on the house, and he ordered the
furniture to be all packed away or covered up. His wife’s bedroom,
dressing-room, and boudoir were alone spared from these protective
measures; which protect nothing, for furniture is injured just as much
by being covered up as by being left uncovered. Graslin himself lived
almost entirely on the ground-floor of the house, where he had his
office, and resumed his old business habits with avidity. He thought
himself an excellent husband because he went upstairs to breakfast and
dined with his wife; but his unpunctuality was so great that it was
not more than ten times a month that he began a meal with he; he had
exacted, out of courtesy, that she should never wait for him. Veronique
did, however, always remain in the room while her husband took his
meals, serving him herself, that she might at least perform voluntarily
some of the visible obligations of a wife.

The banker, to whom the things of marriage were very indifferent, and
who had seen nothing in his wife but seven hundred and fifty thousand
francs, had never once perceived Veronique’s repugnance to him. Little
by little he now abandoned Madame Graslin for his business. When
he wished to put a bed in the room adjoining his office on the
ground-floor, Veronique hastened to comply with the request. So that
three years after their marriage these two ill-assorted beings returned
to their original estate, each equally pleased and happy to do so. The
moneyed man, possessing eighteen hundred thousand francs, returned
with all the more eagerness to his old avaricious habits because he had
momentarily quitted them. His two clerks and the office-boy were better
lodged and rather better fed, and that was the only difference
between the present and the past. His wife had a cook and maid (two
indispensable servants); but except for the actual necessities of life,
not a penny left his coffers for his household.

Happy in the turn which things were now taking, Veronique saw in the
evident satisfaction of the banker the absolution for this separation
which she would never have asked for herself. She had no conception that
she was as disagreeable to Graslin as Graslin was repulsive to her. This
secret divorce made her both sad and joyful. She had always looked
to motherhood for an interest in life; but up to this time (1828) the
couple had had no prospect of a family.




IV. THE HISTORY OF MANY MARRIED WOMEN IN THE PROVINCES

So now, in her magnificent house and envied for her wealth by all the
town, Madame Graslin recovered the solitude of her early years in
her father’s house, less the glow of hope and the youthful joys
of ignorance. She lived among the ruins of her castles in the air,
enlightened by sad experience, sustained by religious faith, occupied
by the care of the poor, whom she loaded with benefits. She made clothes
for the babies, gave mattresses and sheets to those who slept on straw;
she went among the poor herself, followed by her maid, a girl from
Auvergne whom her mother procured for her, and who attached herself
body and soul to her mistress. Veronique made an honorable spy of her,
sending her to discover the places where suffering could be stilled,
poverty softened.

This active benevolence, carried on with strict attention to religious
duties, was hidden in the deepest secrecy and directed by the various
rectors in the town, with whom Veronique had a full understanding in
all her charitable deeds, so as not to suffer the money so needed for
unmerited misfortunes to fall into the hands of vice. It was during this
period of her life that she won a friendship quite as strong and quite
as precious as that of old Grossetete. She became the beloved lamb of a
distinguished priest, who was persecuted for his true merits, which were
wholly misunderstood, one of the two grand-vicars of the diocese, named
the Abbe Dutheil.

This priest belonged to the portion of the French clergy who incline
toward certain concessions, who would be glad to associate the Church
with the people’s interests, and so enable it to regain, through the
application of true evangelical doctrine, its former influence over the
masses, which it might then draw to closer relations with the monarchy.
Whether it was that the Abbe Dutheil recognized the impossibility of
enlightening the court of Rome and the higher clergy on this point,
or that he had consented to sacrifice his own opinions to those of
his superiors, it is certain that he remained within the limits of the
strictest orthodoxy, being very well aware that any manifestation of his
principles at the present time would deprive him of all chance of the
episcopate.

This eminent priest united in himself great Christian modesty and a
noble character. Without pride or ambition he remained at his post
and did his duty in the midst of perils. The liberals of the town were
ignorant of the motives of his conduct; they claimed him as being
of their opinions and considered him a patriot,--a word which meant
revolutionist in Catholic minds. Loved by his inferiors, who dared not,
however, proclaim his merits, feared by his equals who kept watch upon
him, he was a source of embarrassment to the bishop. His virtues and his
knowledge, envied, no doubt, prevented persecution; it was impossible to
complain of him, though he criticized frankly the political blunders by
which both the throne and the clergy mutually compromised themselves.
He often foretold results, but vainly,--like poor Cassandra, who was
equally cursed before and after the disaster she predicted. Short of a
revolution the Abbe Dutheil was likely to remain as he was, one of those
stones hidden in the foundation wall on which the edifice rests. His
utility was recognized and they left him in his place, like many other
solid minds whose rise to power is the terror of mediocrities. If, like
the Abbe de Lamennais, he had taken up his pen he would doubtless, like
him, have been blasted by the court of Rome.

The Abbe Dutheil was imposing in appearance. His exterior revealed the
underlying of a profound nature always calm and equable on the surface.
His tall figure and its thinness did not detract from the general
effect of his lines, which recalled those by which the genius of Spanish
painters delights to represent the great monastic meditators, and those
selected at a later period by Thorwaldsen for the Apostles. The long,
almost rigid folds of the face, in harmony with those of his vestment,
had the charm which the middle-ages bring into relief in the mystical
statues placed beside the portals of their churches. Gravity of thought,
word, and accent, harmonized in this man and became him well. Seeing
his dark eyes hollowed by austerities and surrounded by a brown circle;
seeing, too, his forehead, yellow as some old stone, his head and hands
almost fleshless, men desired to hear the voice and the instructions
which issued from his lips. This purely physical grandeur which accords
with moral grandeur, gave this priest a somewhat haughty and disdainful
air, which was instantly counteracted to an observer by his modesty and
by his speech, though it did not predispose others in his favor. In
some more elevated station these advantages would have obtained that
necessary ascendancy over the masses which the people willingly allow to
men who are thus endowed. But superiors will not forgive their inferiors
for possessing the externals of greatness, nor for displaying
that majesty so prized by the ancients but so often lacking to the
administrators of modern power.

By one of those strange freaks of circumstance which are never accounted
for, the other vicar-general, the Abbe de Grancour, a stout little man
with a rosy complexion and blue eyes, whose opinions were diametrically
opposed to those of the Abbe Dutheil, liked to be in the latter’s
company, although he never testified this liking enough to put himself
out of the good graces of the bishop, to whom he would have sacrificed
everything. The Abbe de Grancour believed in the merit of his colleague,
recognized his talents, secretly accepted his doctrines, and condemned
them openly; for the little priest was one of those men whom superiority
attracts and intimidates,--who dislike it and yet cultivate it. “He
would embrace me and condemn me,” the Abbe Dutheil said of him. The Abbe
de Grancour had neither friends nor enemies; he was therefore likely
to live and die a vicar-general. He said he was drawn to visit Madame
Graslin by the desire of counselling so religious and benevolent a
person; and the bishop approved of his doing so,--Monsieur de Grancour’s
real object being to spend a few evenings with the Abbe Dutheil in
Veronique’s salon.

The two priests now came pretty regularly to see Madame Graslin, and
make her a sort of report about her poor and discuss the best means
of succoring and improving them. But Monsieur Graslin had now begun to
tighten his purse-strings, having made the discovery, in spite of the
innocent deceptions of his wife and her maid, that the money he paid did
not go solely for household expenses and for dress. He was angry when
he found out how much money his wife’s charities cost him; he called the
cook to account, inquired into all the details of the housekeeping, and
showed what a grand administrator he was by practically proving that his
house could be splendidly kept for three thousand francs a year. Then he
put his wife on an allowance of a hundred francs a month, and boasted of
his liberality in so doing. The office-boy, who liked flowers, was made
to take care of the garden on Sundays. Having dismissed the gardener,
Graslin used the greenhouse to store articles conveyed to him as
security for loans. He let the birds in the aviary die for want of
care, to avoid the cost of their food and attendance. And he even took
advantage of a winter when there was no ice, to give up his icehouse and
save the expense of filling it.

By 1828 there was not a single article of luxury in the house which he
had not in some way got rid of. Parsimony reigned unchecked in the hotel
Graslin. The master’s face, greatly improved during the three years
spent with his wife (who induced him to follow his physician’s advice),
now became redder, more fiery, more blotched than before. Business
had taken such proportions that it was necessary to promote the
boy-of-all-work to the position of cashier, and to find some stout
Auvergnat for the rougher service of the hotel Graslin.

Thus, four years after her marriage, this very rich woman could not
dispose of a single penny by her own will. The avarice of her husband
succeeded the avarice of her parents. Madame Graslin had never
understood the necessity of money until the time came when her
benevolence was checked.

By the beginning of the year 1828 Veronique had entirely recovered the
blooming health which had given such beauty to the innocent young girl
sitting at her window in the old house in the rue de la Cite; but by
this time she had acquired a fine literary education, and was fully
able to think and to speak. An excellent judgment gave real depth to
her words. Accustomed now to the little things of life, she wore the
fashions of the period with infinite grace. When she chanced about this
time to visit a salon she found herself--not without a certain inward
surprise--received by all with respectful esteem. These changed
feelings and this welcome were due to the two vicars-general and to
old Grossetete. Informed by them of her noble hidden life, and the
good deeds so constantly done in their midst, the bishop and a few
influential persons spoke of Madame Graslin as a flower of true piety,
a violet fragrant with virtues; in consequence of which, one of those
strong reactions set in, unknown to Veronique, which are none the less
solid and durable because they are long in coming. This change in public
opinion gave additional influence to Veronique’s salon, which was
now visited by all the chief persons in the society of the town, in
consequence of certain circumstances we shall now relate.

Toward the close of this year the young Vicomte de Grandville was sent
as deputy solicitor to the courts of Limoges. He came preceded by a
reputation always given to Parisians in the provinces. A few days after
his arrival, during a soiree at the prefecture, he made answer to
a rather foolish question, that the most able, intelligent, and
distinguished woman he had met in the town was Madame Graslin.

“Perhaps you think her the handsomest also?” said the wife of the
receiver-general.

“I cannot think so in your presence, madame,” he replied, “and therefore
I am in doubt. Madame Graslin possesses a beauty which need inspire no
jealousy, for it seldom shows itself: she is only beautiful to those she
loves; you are beautiful to all the world. When Madame Graslin’s soul
is moved by true enthusiasm, it sheds an expression upon her face which
changes it completely. Her countenance is like a landscape,--dull in
winter, glorious in summer; but the world will always see it in winter.
When she talks with friends on some literary or philosophical topic, or
on certain religious questions which interest her, she is roused into
appearing suddenly an unknown woman of marvellous beauty.”

This declaration, which was caused by observing the phenomenon that
formerly made Veronique so beautiful on her return from the holy table,
made a great noise in Limoges, where for a time the young deputy, to
whom the place of the _procureur-general_ was said to be promised,
played a leading part. In all provincial towns a man who rises a trifle
above others becomes, for a period more or less protracted, the object
of a liking which resembles enthusiasm, and which usually deceives the
object of this ephemeral worship. It is to this social caprice that we
owe so many local geniuses, soon ignored and their false reputations
mortified. The men whom women make the fashion in this way are oftener
strangers than compatriots.

In this particular case the admirers of the Vicomte de Grandville were
not mistaken; he was in truth a superior man. Madame Graslin was the
only woman he found in Limoges with whom he could exchange ideas and
keep up a varied conversation. A few months after his arrival, attracted
by the increasing charm of Veronique’s manners and conversation, he
proposed to the Abbe Dutheil, and a few other of the remarkable men
in Limoges, to meet in the evenings at Madame Graslin’s house and play
whist. At this time Madame Graslin was at home five evenings in the week
to visitors, reserving two free days, as she said, for herself.

When Madame Graslin had thus gathered about her the distinguished men we
have mentioned, others were not sorry to give themselves the reputation
of cleverness by seeking to join the same society. Veronique also
received three or four of the distinguished officers of the garrison and
staff; but the freedom of mind displayed by her guests, and the tacit
discretion enjoined by the manners of the best society, made her
extremely cautious as to the admission of those who now vied with each
other to obtain her invitations.

The other women in this provincial society were not without jealousy in
seeing Madame Graslin surrounded by the most agreeable and distinguished
men in the town; but by this time Veronique’s social power was all the
stronger because it was exclusive; she accepted the intimacy of four or
five women only, and these were strangers in Limoges who had come from
Paris with their husbands, and who held in horror the petty gossip of
provincial life. If any one outside of this little clique of superior
persons came in to make a visit, the conversation immediately changed,
and the habitues of the house talked commonplace.

The hotel Graslin thus became an oasis where intelligent minds found
relaxation and relief from the dulness of provincial life; where
persons connected with the government could express themselves freely
on politics without fear of having their words taken down and repeated;
where all could satirize that which provoked satire, and where each
individual abandoned his professional trammels and yielded himself up to
his natural self.

So, after being the most obscure young girl in all Limoges, considered
ugly, dull, and vacant, Madame Graslin, at the beginning of the year
1828, was regarded as one of the leading personages in the town, and the
most noted woman in society. No one went to see her in the mornings, for
all knew her habits of benevolence and the regularity of her religious
observances. She always went to early mass so as not to delay her
husband’s breakfast, for which, however, there was no fixed hour, though
she never failed to be present and to serve it herself. Graslin had
trained his wife to this little ceremony. He continued to praise her on
all occasions; he thought her perfect; she never asked him for anything;
he could pile up louis upon louis, and spread his investments over a
wide field of enterprise through his relations with the Brezacs;
he sailed with a fair wind and well freighted over the ocean of
commerce,--his intense business interest keeping him in the still,
though half-intoxicated, frenzy of gamblers watching events on the green
table of speculation.

During this happy period, and until the beginning of the year 1829,
Madame Graslin attained, in the eyes of her friends, to a degree of
beauty that was really extraordinary, the reasons of which they
were unable to explain. The blue of the iris expanded like a flower,
diminishing the dark circle of the pupil, and seeming to float in
a liquid and languishing light that was full of love. Her forehead,
illumined by thoughts and memories of happiness, was seen to whiten like
the zenith before the dawn, and its lines were purified by an inward
fire. Her face lost those heated brown tones which betoken a disturbance
of the liver,--that malady of vigorous constitutions, or of persons
whose soul is distressed and whose affections are thwarted. Her temples
became adorably fresh and pure; gleams of the celestial face of a
Raffaelle showed themselves now and then in hers,--a face hitherto
obscured by the malady of grief, as the canvas of the great master is
encrusted by time. Her hands seemed whiter; her shoulders took on an
exquisite fulness; her graceful, animated movements gave to her supple
figure its utmost charm.

The Limoges women accused her of being in love with Monsieur de
Grandville, who certainly paid her assiduous attention, to which
Veronique opposed all the barriers of a conscientious resistance. The
viscount professed for her one of those respectful attachments which
did not blind the habitual visitors of her salon. The priests and men of
sense saw plainly that this affection, which was love on the part of
the young man, did not go beyond the permissible line in Madame Graslin.
Weary at last of a resistance based on religious principle, the Vicomte
de Grandville consoled himself (to the knowledge of his intimates)
with other and easier friendships; which did not, however, lessen his
constant admiration and worship of the beautiful Madame Graslin,--such
was the term by which she was designated in 1829.

The most clear-sighted among those who surrounded her attributed the
change which rendered Veronique increasingly charming to her friends to
the secret delight which all women, even the most religious, feel when
they see themselves courted; and to the satisfaction of living at last
in a circle congenial to her mind, where the pleasure of exchanging
ideas and the happiness of being surrounded by intelligent and
well-informed men and true friends, whose attachment deepened day by
day, had dispersed forever the weary dulness of her life.

Perhaps, however, closer, more perceptive or sceptical observers were
needed than those who frequented the hotel Graslin, to detect
the barbaric grandeur, the plebeian force of the People which lay
deep-hidden in her soul. If sometimes her friends surprised her in a
torpor of meditation either gloomy or merely pensive, they knew she bore
upon her heart the miseries of others, and had doubtless that morning
been initiated in some fresh sorrow, or had penetrated to some haunt
where vices terrify the soul with their candor.

The viscount, now promoted to be _procureur-general_, would occasionally
blame her for certain unintelligent acts of charity by which, as he knew
from his secret police-reports, she had given encouragement to criminal
schemes.

“If you ever want money for any of your paupers, let me be a sharer in
your good deeds,” said old Grossetete, taking Veronique’s hand.

“Ah!” she replied with a sigh, “it is impossible to make everybody
rich.”

At the beginning of this year an event occurred which was destined
to change the whole interior life of this woman and to transform
the splendid expression of her countenance into something far more
interesting in the eyes of painters.

Becoming uneasy about his health, Graslin, to his wife’s despair, no
longer desired to live on the ground-floor. He returned to the
conjugal chamber and allowed himself to be nursed. The news soon spread
throughout Limoges that Madame Graslin was pregnant. Her sadness,
mingled with joy, struck the minds of her friends, who then for the
first time perceived that in spite of her virtues she had been happy in
the fact of living separate from her husband. Perhaps she had hoped
for some better fate ever since the time when, as it was known, the
attorney-general had declined to marry the richest heiress in the place,
in order to keep his loyalty to her.

From this suggestion there grew up in the minds of the profound
politicians who played their whist at the hotel Graslin a belief
that the viscount and the young wife had based certain hopes on the
ill-health of the banker which were now frustrated. The great agitations
which marked this period of Veronique’s life, the anxieties which a
first childbirth causes in every woman, and which, it is said, threatens
special danger when she is past her first youth, made her friends more
attentive than ever to her; they vied with each other in showing her
those little kindnesses which proved how warm and solid their affection
really was.




V. TASCHERON

It was in this year that Limoges witnessed a terrible event and the
singular drama of the Tascheron trial, in which the young Vicomte
de Grandville displayed the talents which afterwards made him
_procureur-general_.

An old man living in a lonely house in the suburb of Saint-Etienne was
murdered. A large fruit-garden lay between the road and the house, which
was also separated from the adjoining fields by a pleasure-garden, at
the farther end of which were several old and disused greenhouses. In
front of the house a rapid slope to the river bank gave a view of the
Vienne. The courtyard, which also sloped downward, ended at a little
wall, from which small columns rose at equal distances united by a
railing, more, however, for ornament than protection, for the bars of
the railing were of painted wood.

The old man, named Pingret, noted for his avarice, lived with a single
woman-servant, a country-girl who did all the work of the house. He
himself took care of his espaliers, trimmed his trees, gathered his
fruit, and sent it to Limoges for sale, together with early vegetables,
in the raising of which he excelled.

The niece of this old man, and his sole heiress, married to a gentleman
of small means living in Limoges, a Madame des Vanneaulx, had again and
again urged her uncle to hire a man to protect the house, pointing out
to him that he would thus obtain the profits of certain uncultivated
ground where he now grew nothing but clover. But the old man steadily
refused. More than once a discussion on the subject had cut into the
whist-playing of Limoges. A few shrewd heads declared that the old miser
buried his gold in that clover-field.

“If I were Madame des Vanneaulx,” said a wit, “I shouldn’t torment my
uncle about it; if somebody murders him, why, let him be murdered! I
should inherit the money.”

Madame des Vanneaulx, however, wanted to keep her uncle, after the
manner of the managers of the Italian Opera, who entreat their popular
tenor to wrap up his throat, and give him their cloak if he happens to
have forgotten his own. She had sent old Pingret a fine English mastiff,
which Jeanne Malassis, the servant-woman brought back the next day
saying:--

“Your uncle doesn’t want another mouth to feed.”

The result proved how well-founded were the niece’s fears. Pingret was
murdered on a dark night, in the middle of his clover-field, where
he may have been adding a few coins to a buried pot of gold. The
servant-woman, awakened by the struggle, had the courage to go to the
assistance of the old miser, and the murderer was under the necessity of
killing her to suppress her testimony. This necessity, which frequently
causes murderers to increase the number of their victims, is an evil
produced by the fear of the death penalty.

This double murder was attended by curious circumstances which told as
much for the prosecution as for the defence. After the neighbors had
missed seeing the little old Pingret and his maid for a whole morning
and had gazed at his house through the wooden railings as they passed
it, and seen that, contrary to custom, the doors and windows were
still closed, an excitement began in the Faubourg Saint-Etienne which
presently reached the rue de la Cloche, where Madame des Vanneaulx
resided.

The niece was always in expectation of some such catastrophe, and she at
once notified the officers of the law, who went to the house and broke
in the gate. They soon discovered in a clover patch four holes, and
near two of these holes lay the fragments of earthenware pots, which had
doubtless been full of gold the night before. In the other two holes,
scarcely covered up, were the bodies of old Pingret and Jeanne Malassis,
who had been buried with their clothes on. The poor girl had run to her
master’s assistance in her night-gown, with bare feet.

While the _procureur-du-roi_, the commissary of police, and the
examining magistrate were gathering all particulars for the basis of
their action, the luckless des Vanneaulx picked up the broken pots and
calculated from their capacity the sum lost. The magistrates admitted
the correctness of their calculations and entered the sum stolen on
their records as, in all probability, a thousand gold coins to each pot.
But were these coins forty-eight or forty, twenty-four or twenty francs
in value? All expectant heirs in Limoges sympathized with the des
Vanneaulx. The Limousin imagination was greatly stirred by the spectacle
of the broken pots. As for old Pingret, who often sold vegetables
himself in the market, lived on bread and onions, never spent more than
three hundred francs a year, obliged and disobliged no one, and had
never done one atom of good in the suburb of Saint-Etienne where he
lived, his death did not excite the slightest regret. Poor Jeanne
Malassis’ heroism, which the old miser, had she saved him, would
certainly not have rewarded, was thought rash; the number of souls who
admired it was small in comparison with those who said: “For my part, I
should have stayed in my bed.”

The police found neither pen nor ink wherewith to write their report in
the bare, dilapidated, cold, and dismal house. Observing persons and the
heir might then have noticed a curious inconsistency which may be seen
in certain misers. The dread the little old man had of the slightest
outlay showed itself in the non-repaired roof which opened its sides
to the light and the rain and snow; in the cracks of the walls; in the
rotten doors ready to fall at the slightest shock; in the windows, where
the broken glass was replaced by paper not even oiled. All the windows
were without curtains, the fireplaces without mirrors or andirons; the
hearth was garnished with one log of wood and a few little sticks almost
caked with the soot which had fallen down the chimney. There were two
rickety chairs, two thin couches, a few cracked pots and mended plates,
a one-armed armchair, a dilapidated bed, the curtains of which time had
embroidered with a bold hand, a worm-eaten secretary where the miser
kept his seeds, a pile of linen thickened by many darns, and a heap
of ragged garments, which existed only by the will of their master; he
being dead they dropped into shreds, powder, chemical dissolution, in
fact I know not into what form of utter ruin, as soon as the heir or the
officers of the law laid rough hands upon them; they disappeared as if
afraid of being publicly sold.

The population at Limoges was much concerned for these worthy des
Vanneaulx, who had two children; and yet, no sooner did the law lay
hands upon the reputed doer of the crime than the guilty personage
absorbed attention, became a hero, and the des Vanneaulx were relegated
into a corner of the picture.

Toward the end of March Madame Graslin began to feel some of those pains
which precede a first confinement and cannot be concealed. The inquiry
as to the murder was then going on, but the murderer had not as yet been
arrested.

Veronique now received her friends in her bedroom, where they played
whist. For several days past Madame Graslin had not left the house, and
she seemed to be tormented by several of those caprices attributed to
women in her condition. Her mother came to see her almost every day, and
the two women remained for hours in consultation.

It was nine o’clock, and the card tables were still without players, for
every one was talking of the murder. Monsieur de Grandville entered the
room.

“We have arrested the murderer of old Pingret,” he said, joyfully.

“Who is it?” was asked on all sides.

“A porcelain workman; a man whose character has always been excellent,
and who was in a fair way to make his fortune. He worked in your
husband’s old factory,” added Monsieur de Grandville, turning to Madame
Graslin.

“What is his name?” asked Veronique, in a weak voice.

“Jean-Francois Tascheron.”

“Unhappy man!” she answered. “Yes, I have often seen him; my poor father
recommended him to my care as some one to be looked after.”

“He left the factory before Sauviat’s death,” said her mother, “and went
to that of Messrs. Philippart, who offered him higher wages-- But my
daughter is scarcely well enough for this exciting conversation,” she
added, calling attention to Madame Graslin, whose face was as white as
her sheets.

After that evening Mere Sauviat gave up her own home, and came, in spite
of her sixty-six years, to stay with her daughter and nurse her through
her confinement. She never left the room; Madame Graslin’s friends
found the old woman always at the bed’s head busy with her eternal
knitting,--brooding over Veronique as she did when the girl had the
small-pox, answering questions for her and often refusing to admit
visitors. The maternal and filial love of mother and daughter was so
well known in Limoges that these actions of Madame Sauviat caused no
comment.

A few days later, when the viscount, thinking to amuse the invalid,
began to relate details which the whole town were eagerly demanding
about Jean-Francois Tascheron, Madame Sauviat again stopped him hastily,
declaring that he would give her daughter bad dreams. Veronique,
however, looking fixedly at Monsieur de Grandville, asked him to finish
what he was saying. Thus her friends, and she herself, were the first
to know the results of the preliminary inquiry, which would soon be
made public. The following is a brief epitome of the facts on which the
indictment found against the prisoner was based.

Jean-Francois Tascheron was the son of a small farmer burdened with a
family, who lived in the village of Montegnac.

Twenty years before this crime, which was famous throughout the
Limousin, the canton of Montegnac was known for its evil ways. The
saying was proverbial in Limoges that out of one hundred criminals in
the department fifty belonged to the arrondissement of Montegnac. Since
1816, however, two years after a priest named Bonnet was sent there as
rector, it had lost its bad reputation, and the inhabitants no longer
sent their heavy contingent to the assizes. This change was widely
attributed to the influence acquired by the rector, Monsieur Bonnet,
over a community which had lately been a hotbed for evil-minded persons
whose actions dishonored the whole region. The crime of Jean-Francois
Tascheron brought back upon Montegnac its former ill-savor.

By a curious trick of chance, the Tascherons were almost the only family
in this village community who had retained through its evil period the
old rigid morals and religious habits which are noticed by the observers
of to-day to be rapidly disappearing throughout the country districts.
This family had therefore formed a point of reliance to the rector, who
naturally bore it on his heart. The Tascherons, remarkable for their
uprightness, their union, their love of work, had never given other than
good examples to Jean-Francois. Induced by the praiseworthy ambition of
earning his living by a trade, the lad had left his native village, to
the regret of his parents and friends, who greatly loved him, and had
come to Limoges. During his two years’ apprenticeship in a porcelain
factory, his conduct was worthy of all praise; no apparent ill-conduct
had led up to the horrible crime which was now to end his life. On the
contrary, Jean-Francois Tascheron had given the time which other workmen
were in the habit of spending in wine-shops and debauchery to study and
self-improvement.

The most searching and minute inquiry on the part of the provincial
authorities (who have plenty of time on their hands) failed to throw any
light on the secrets of the young man’s life. When the mistress of the
humble lodging-house in which he lived was questioned she said she
had never had a lodger whose moral conduct was as blameless. He was
naturally amiable and gentle, and sometimes gay. About a year before
the commission of the crime, his habits changed: he slept away from home
several times a month and often for consecutive nights; but where she
did not know, though she thought, from the state of his shoes when he
returned, that he must have been into the country. She noticed that
although he appeared to have left the town, he never wore his heavy
boots, but always a pair of light shoes. He shaved before starting, and
put on clean linen. Hearing this, the police turned their attention to
houses of ill-fame and questionable resorts; but Jean-Francois Tascheron
was found to be wholly unknown among them. The authorities then made a
search through the working-girl and _grisette_ class; but none of these
women had had relations with the accused.

A crime without a motive is unheard of, especially in a young man whose
desire for education and whose laudable ambition gave him higher ideas
and a superior judgment to that of other workmen. The police and the
examining justice, finding themselves balked in the above directions,
attributed the murder to a passion for gambling; but after the most
searching inquiries it was proved that Tascheron never played cards.

At first Jean-Francois entrenched himself in a system of flat denials,
which, of course, in presence of a jury, would fall before proof; they
seemed to show the collusion of some person either well versed in law or
gifted with an intelligent mind. The following are the chief proofs the
prosecution were prepared to present, and they are, as is frequently the
case in trials for murder, both important and trifling; to wit:--

The absence of Tascheron during the night of the crime, and his refusal
to say where he was, for the accused did not offer to set up an alibi;
a fragment of his blouse, torn off by the servant-woman in the struggle,
found close by on a tree to which the wind had carried it; his presence
that evening near Pingret’s house, which was noticed by passers and
by persons living in the neighborhood, though it might not have been
remembered unless for the crime; a false key made by Tascheron which
fitted the door opening to the fields; this key was found carefully
buried two feet below one of the miser’s holes, where Monsieur des
Vanneaulx, digging deep to make sure there was not another layer of
treasure-pots, chanced to find it; the police, after many researches,
found the different persons who had furnished Tascheron with the iron,
loaned him the vice, and given him the file, with which the key was
presumably made.

The key was the first real clue. It put the police on the track of
Tascheron, whom they arrested on the frontiers of the department, in a
wood where he was awaiting the passage of a diligence. An hour later he
would have started for America.

Besides all this, and in spite of the care with which certain footmarks
in the ploughed field and on the mud of the road had been effaced and
covered up, the searchers had found in several places the imprint of
shoes, which they carefully measured and described, and which were
afterwards found to correspond with the soles of Tascheron’s shoes
taken from his lodgings. This fatal proof confirmed the statement of
the landlady. The authorities now attributed the crime to some foreign
influence, and not to the man’s personal intention; they believed he had
accomplices, basing this idea on the impossibility of one man carrying
away the buried money; for however strong he might be, no man could
carry twenty-five thousand francs in gold to any distance. If each pot
contained, as it was supposed to have done, about that sum, this would
have required four trips to and from the clover-patch. Now, a singular
circumstance went far to prove the hour at which the crime was
committed. In the terror Jeanne Malassis must have felt on hearing her
master’s cries, she knocked over, as she rose, the table at her bedside,
on which lay her watch, the only present the miser had given her in five
years. The mainspring was broken by the shock, and the hands had stopped
at two in the morning. By the middle of March (the date of the murder)
daylight dawns between five and six o’clock. To whatever distance the
gold had been carried, Tascheron could not possibly, under any apparent
hypothesis, have transported it alone.

The care with which some of the footsteps were effaced, while others,
to which Tascheron’s shoes fitted, remained, certainly pointed to some
mysterious assistant. Forced into hypotheses, the authorities once more
attributed the crime to a desperate passion; not finding any trace of
the object of such a passion in the lower classes, they began to look
higher. Perhaps some bourgeoise, sure of the discretion of a man who
had the face and bearing of a hero, had been drawn into a romance the
outcome of which was crime.

This supposition was to some extent justified by the facts of the
murder. The old man had been killed by blows with a spade; evidently,
therefore, the murder was sudden, unpremeditated, fortuitous. The lovers
might have planned the robbery, but not the murder. The lover and the
miser, Tascheron and Pingret, each under the influence of his master
passion, must have met by the buried hoards, both drawn thither by the
gleaming of gold on the utter darkness of that fatal night.

In order to obtain, if possible, some light on this latter supposition,
the authorities arrested and kept in solitary confinement a sister of
Jean-Francois, to whom he was much attached, hoping to obtain through
her some clue to the mystery of her brother’s private life. Denise
Tascheron took refuge in total denial of any knowledge whatever, which
gave rise to a suspicion that she did know something of the causes of
the crime, although in fact she knew nothing.

The accused himself showed points of character that were rare amongst
the peasantry. He baffled the cleverest police-spies employed against
him, without knowing their real character. To the leading minds of the
magistracy his guilt seemed caused by the influence of passion, and not
by necessity or greed, as in the case of ordinary murderers, who usually
pass through stages of crime and punishment before they commit the
supreme deed. Active and careful search was made in following up this
idea; but the uniform discretion of the prisoner gave no clue whatever
to his prosecutors. The plausible theory of his attachment to a woman of
the upper classes having once been admitted, Jean-Francois was subjected
to the most insidious examination upon it; but his caution triumphed
over all the moral tortures the examining judge applied to him. When,
making a final effort, that official told him that the person for whom
he had committed the crime was discovered and arrested, his face did not
change, and he replied ironically:--

“I should very much like to see him.”

When the public were informed of these circumstances, many persons
adopted the suspicions of the magistrates, which seemed to be confirmed
by Tascheron’s savage obstinacy in giving no account of himself.
Increased interest was felt in a young man who was now a problem. It is
easy to see how these elements kept public curiosity on the _qui vive_,
and with what eager interest the trial would be followed. But in spite
of every effort on the part of the police, the prosecution stopped short
on the threshold of hypothesis; it did not venture to go farther into
the mystery where all was obscurity and danger. In certain judicial
cases half-certainties are not sufficient for the judges to proceed
upon. Nevertheless the case was ordered for trial, in hopes that the
truth would come to the surface when the case was brought into court, an
ordeal under which many criminals contradict themselves.

Monsieur Graslin was one of the jury; so that either through her husband
or through Monsieur de Grandville, the public prosecutor, Veronique knew
all the details of the criminal trial which, for a fortnight, kept the
department, and we may say all France, in a state of excitement. The
attitude maintained by the accused seemed to justify the theory of the
prosecution. More than once when the court opened, his eyes turned upon
the brilliant assemblage of women who came to find emotions in a real
drama, as though he sought for some one. Each time that the man’s
glance, clear, but impenetrable, swept along those elegant ranks, a
movement was perceptible, a sort of shock, as though each woman feared
she might appear his accomplice under the inquisitorial eyes of judge
and prosecutor.

The hitherto useless efforts of the prosecution were now made public,
also the precautions taken by the criminal to ensure the success of his
crime. It was shown that Jean-Francois Tascheron had obtained a passport
for North America some months before the crime was committed. Thus the
plan of leaving France was fully formed; the object of his passion must
therefore be a married woman; for he would have no reason to flee the
country with a young girl. Possibly the crime had this one object in
view, namely, to obtain sufficient means to support this unknown woman
in comfort.

The prosecution had found no passport issued to a woman for North
America. In case she had obtained one in Paris, the registers of that
city were searched, also those of the towns contingent to Limoges, but
without result. All the shrewdest minds in the community followed
the case with deep attention. While the more virtuous dames of
the department attributed the wearing of pumps on a muddy road (an
inexplicable circumstance in the ordinary lives of such shoes) to the
necessity of noiselessly watching old Pingret, the men pointed out that
pumps were very useful in silently passing through a house--up stairways
and along corridors--without discovery.

So Jean-Francois Tascheron and his mistress (by this time she was young,
beautiful, romantic, for every one made a portrait of her) had evidently
intended to escape with only one passport, to which they would forge the
additional words, “and wife.” The card tables were deserted at night in
the various social salons, and malicious tongues discussed what women
were known in March, 1829, to have gone to Paris, and what others could
be making, openly or secretly, preparations for a journey. Limoges might
be said to be enjoying its Fualdes trial, with an unknown and mysterious
Madame Manson for an additional excitement. Never was any provincial
town so stirred to its depths as Limoges after each day’s session.
Nothing was talked of but the trial, all the incidents of which
increased the interest felt for the accused, whose able answers,
learnedly taken up, turned and twisted and commented upon, gave rise
to ample discussions. When one of the jurors asked Tascheron why he had
taken a passport for America, the man replied that he had intended
to establish a porcelain manufactory in that country. Thus, without
committing himself to any line of defence, he covered his accomplice,
leaving it to be supposed that the crime was committed, if at all, to
obtain funds for this business venture.

In the midst of such excitement it was impossible for Veronique’s
friends to refrain from discussing in her presence the progress of the
case and the reticence of the criminal. Her health was extremely feeble;
but the doctor having advised her going out into the fresh air, she
had on one occasion taken her mother’s arm and walked as far as Madame
Sauviat’s house in the country, where she rested. On her return she
endeavored to keep about until her husband came to his dinner, which she
always served him herself. On this occasion Graslin, being detained in
the court-room, did not come in till eight o’clock. She went into the
dining-room as usual, and was present at a discussion which took place
among a number of her friends who had assembled there.

“If my poor father were still living,” she remarked to them, “we should
know more about the matter; possibly this man might never have become a
criminal. I think you have all taken a singular idea about the matter.
You insist that love is at the bottom of the crime, and I agree with you
there; but why do you think this unknown person is a married woman? He
may have loved some young girl whose father and mother would not let her
marry him.”

“A young girl could, sooner or later, have married him legitimately,”
 replied Monsieur de Grandville. “Tascheron has no lack of patience; he
had time to make sufficient means to support her while awaiting the
time when all girls are at liberty to marry against the wishes of their
parents; he need not have committed a crime to obtain her.”

“I did not know that a girl could marry in that way,” said Madame
Graslin; “but how is it that in a town like this, where all things are
known, and where everybody sees everything that happens to his neighbor,
not the slightest clue to this woman has been obtained? In order to
love, persons must see each other and consequently be seen. What do you
really think, you magistrates?” she added, plunging a fixed look into
the eyes of the _procureur-general_.

“We think that the woman belongs to the bourgeois or the commercial
class.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said Madame Graslin. “A woman of that class
does not have elevated sentiments.”

This reply drew all eyes on Veronique, and the whole company waited for
an explanation of so paradoxical a speech.

“During the hours I lie awake at night I have not been able to keep my
mind from dwelling on this mysterious affair,” she said slowly, “and I
think I have fathomed Tascheron’s motive. I believe the person he loves
is a young girl, because a married woman has interests, if not feelings,
which partly fill her heart and prevent her from yielding so completely
to a great passion as to leave her home. There is such a thing as a love
proceeding from passion which is half maternal, and to me it is evident
that this man was loved by a woman who wished to be his prop, his
Providence. She must have put into her passion something of the genius
that inspires the work of artists and poets, the creative force which
exists in woman under another form; for it is her mission to create men,
not things. Our works are our children; our children are the pictures,
books, and statues of our lives. Are we not artists in their earliest
education? I say that this unknown woman, if she is not a young girl,
has never been a mother but is filled with the maternal instinct; she
has loved this man to form him, to develop him. It needs a feminine
element in you men of law to detect these shades of motive, which too
often escape you. If I had been your deputy,” she said, looking straight
at the _procureur-general_, “I should have found the guilty woman, if
indeed there is any guilt about it. I agree with the Abbe Dutheil that
these lovers meant to fly to America with the money of old Pingret. The
theft led to the murder by the fatal logic which the punishment of
death inspires. And so,” she added with an appealing look at Monsieur de
Grandville, “I think it would be merciful in you to abandon the theory
of premeditation, for in so doing you would save the man’s life. He is
evidently a fine man in spite of his crime; he might, perhaps, repair
that crime by a great repentance if you gave him time. The works of
repentance ought to count for something in the judgment of the law. In
these days is there nothing better for a human being to do than to give
his life, or build, as in former times, a cathedral of Milan, to expiate
his crimes?”

“Your ideas are noble, madame,” said Monsieur de Grandville, “but,
premeditation apart, Tascheron would still be liable to the penalty of
death on account of the other serious and proved circumstances attending
the crime,--such as forcible entrance and burglary at night.”

“Then you think that he will certainly be found guilty?” she said,
lowering her eyelids.

“I am certain of it,” he said; “the prosecution has a strong case.”

A slight tremor rustled Madame Graslin’s dress.

“I feel cold,” she said. Taking her mother’s arm she went to bed.

“She seemed quite herself this evening,” said her friends.

The next day Veronique was much worse and kept her bed. When her
physician expressed surprise at her condition she said, smiling:--

“I told you that that walk would do me no good.”

Ever since the opening of the trial Tascheron’s demeanor had been
equally devoid of hypocrisy or bravado. Veronique’s physician, intending
to divert his patient’s mind, tried to explain this demeanor, which the
man’s defenders were making the most of. The prisoner was misled, said
the doctor, by the talents of his lawyer, and was sure of acquittal;
at times his face expressed a hope that was greater than that of merely
escaping death. The antecedents of the man (who was only twenty-three
years old) were so at variance with the crime now charged to him
that his legal defenders claimed his present bearing to be a proof of
innocence; besides, the overwhelming circumstantial proofs of the theory
of the prosecution were made to appear so weak by his advocate that the
man was buoyed up by the lawyer’s arguments. To save his client’s
life the lawyer made the most of the evident want of premeditation;
hypothetically he admitted the premeditation of the robbery but not of
the murders, which were evidently (no matter who was the guilty party)
the result of two unexpected struggles. Success, the doctor said, was
really as doubtful for one side as for the other.

After this visit of her physician Veronique received that of the
_procureur-general_, who was in the habit of coming in every morning on
his way to the court-room.

“I have read the arguments of yesterday,” she said to him, “and to-day,
as I suppose, the evidence for the defence begins. I am so interested in
that man that I should like to have him saved. Couldn’t you for once
in your life forego a triumph? Let his lawyer beat you. Come, make me a
present of the man’s life, and perhaps you shall have mine some day. The
able presentation of the defence by Tascheron’s lawyer really raises a
strong doubt, and--”

“Why, you are quite agitated,” said the viscount somewhat surprised.

“Do you know why?” she answered. “My husband has just remarked a most
horrible coincidence, which is really enough in the present state of my
nerves, to cause my death. If you condemn this man to death it will be
on the very day when I shall give birth to my child.”

“But I can’t change the laws,” said the lawyer.

“Ah! you don’t know how to love,” she retorted, closing her eyes; then
she turned her head on the pillow and made him an imperative sign to
leave the room.

Monsieur Graslin pleaded strongly but in vain with his fellow-jurymen
for acquittal, giving a reason which some of them adopted; a reason
suggested by his wife:--

“If we do not condemn this man to death, but allow him to live, the des
Vanneaulx will in the end recover their property.”

This weighty argument made a division of the jury, into five for
condemnation against seven for acquittal, which necessitated an appeal
to the court; but the judge sided with the minority. According to the
legal system of that day this action led to a verdict of guilty. When
sentence was passed upon him Tascheron flew into a fury which was
natural enough in a man full of life and strength, but which the court
and jury and lawyers and spectators had rarely witnessed in persons who
were thought to be unjustly condemned.




VI. DISCUSSIONS AND CHRISTIAN SOLICITUDES

In spite of the verdict, the drama of this crime did not seem over so
far as the community was concerned. So complicated a case gave rise, as
usually happens under such circumstances, to two sets of diametrically
opposite opinions as to the guilt of the hero, whom some declared to be
an innocent and ill-used victim, and others the worst of criminals.

The liberals held for Tascheron’s innocence, less from conviction than
for the satisfaction of opposing the government.

“What an outrage,” they said, “to condemn a man because his footprint
is the size of another man’s footprint; or because he will not tell you
where he spent the night, as if all young men would not rather die than
compromise a woman. They prove he borrowed tools and bought iron, but
have they proved he made that key? They find a bit of blue linen hanging
to the branch of a tree, possibly put there by old Pingret himself
to scare the crows, though it happens to match a tear in Tascheron’s
blouse. Is a man’s life to depend on such things as these? Jean-Francois
denies everything, and the prosecution has not produced a single witness
who saw the crime or anything relating to it.”

They talked over, enlarged upon, and paraphrased the arguments of the
defence. “Old Pingret! what was he?--a cracked money box!” said the
strong-minded. A few of the more determined progressists, denying
the sacred laws of property, which the Saint-Simonians were already
attacking under their abstract theories of political economy, went
further.

“Pere Pingret,” they said, “was the real author of the crime. By
hoarding his gold that man robbed the nation. What enterprises might
have been made fruitful by his useless money! He had barred the way of
industry, and was justly punished.”

They pitied the poor murdered servant-woman, but Denise, Tascheron’s
sister, who resisted the wiles of lawyers and did not give a single
answer at the trial without long consideration of what she ought to say,
excited the deepest interest. She became in their minds a figure to
be compared (though in another sense) with Jeannie Deans, whose piety,
grace, modesty and beauty she possessed.

Francois Tascheron continued, therefore, to excite the curiosity of
not only all the town but all the department, and a few romantic women
openly testified their admiration for him.

“If there is really in all this a love for some woman high above him,”
 they said, “then he is surely no ordinary man, and you will see that he
will die well.”

The question, “Will he speak out,--will he not speak?” gave rise to many
a bet.

Since the burst of rage with which Tascheron received his sentence, and
which was so violent that it might have been fatal to persons about him
in the court-room if the gendarmes had not been there to master him, the
condemned man threatened all who came near him with the fury of a
wild beast; so that the jailers were obliged to put him into a
straight-jacket, as much to protect his life as their own from the
effects of his anger. Prevented by that controlling power from doing
violence, Tascheron gave vent to his despair by convulsive jerks which
horrified his guardians, and by words and looks which the middle-ages
would have attributed to demoniacal possession. He was so young that
many women thought pitifully of a life so full of passion about to be
cut off forever. “The Last Day of a Condemned Man,” that mournful
elegy, that useless plea against the penalty of death (the mainstay of
society!), which had lately been published, as if expressly to meet this
case, was the topic of all conversations.

But, above all, in the mind of every one, stood that invisible unknown
woman, her feet in blood, raised aloft by the trial as it were on a
pedestal,--torn, no doubt, by horrible inward anguish and condemned to
absolute silence within her home. Who was this Medea whom the public
well-nigh admired,--the woman with that impenetrable brow, that white
breast covering a heart of steel? Perhaps she was the sister or the
cousin or the daughter or the wife of this one or of that one among
them! Alarm seemed to creep into the bosom of families. As Napoleon
finely said, it is especially in the domain of the imagination that the
power of the Unknown is immeasurable.

As for the hundred thousand francs stolen from Monsieur and Madame des
Vanneaulx no efforts of the police could find them; and the obstinate
silence of the criminal gave no clue. Monsieur de Grandville tried the
common means of holding out hopes of commutation of the sentence in case
of confession; but when he went to see the prisoner and suggest it the
latter received him with such furious cries and epileptic contortions,
such rage at being powerless to take him by the throat, that he could do
nothing.

The law could only look to the influence of the Church at the last
moment. The des Vanneaulx had frequently consulted with the Abbe Pascal,
chaplain of the prison. This priest was not without the faculty of
making prisoners listen to him, and he religiously braved Tascheron’s
violence, trying to get in a few words amid the storms of that powerful
nature in convulsion. But this struggle of spiritual fatherhood against
the hurricane of unchained passions, overcame the poor abbe completely.

“The man has had his paradise here below,” said the old man, in his
gentle voice.

Little Madame des Vanneaulx consulted her friends as to whether she
ought to try a visit herself to the criminal. Monsieur des Vanneaulx
talked of offering terms. In his anxiety to recover the money he
actually went to Monsieur de Grandville and asked for the pardon of his
uncle’s murderer if the latter would make restitution of the hundred
thousand francs. The _procureur-general_ replied that the majesty of the
crown did not stoop to such compromises.

The des Vanneaulx then had recourse to the lawyer who had defended
Tascheron, and to him they offered ten per cent of whatever sum he could
recover. This lawyer was the only person before whom Tascheron was not
violent. The heirs authorized him to offer the prisoner an additional
ten per cent to be paid to his family. In spite of all these inducements
and his own eloquence, the lawyer could obtain nothing whatever from his
client. The des Vanneaulx were furious; they anathematized the unhappy
man.

“He is not only a murderer, but he has no sense of decency,” cried
Madame des Vanneaulx (ignorant of Fualdes’ famous complaint), when she
received word of the failure of the Abbe Pascal’s efforts, and was told
there was no hope of a reversal of the sentence by the court of appeals.

“What good will our money do him in the place he is going to?” said
her husband. “Murder can be conceived of, but useless theft is
inconceivable. What days we live in, to be sure! To think that people in
good society actually take an interest in such a wretch!”

“He has no honor,” said Madame des Vanneaulx.

“But perhaps the restitution would compromise the woman he loves,” said
an old maid.

“We would keep his secret,” returned Monsieur des Vanneaulx.

“Then you would be compounding a felony,” remarked a lawyer.

“Oh, the villain!” was Monsieur des Vanneaulx’s usual conclusion.

One of Madame Graslin’s female friends related to her with much
amusement these discussions of the des Vanneaulx. This lady, who was
very intelligent, and one of those persons who form ideals and desire
that all things should attain perfection, regretted the violence and
savage temper of the condemned; she would rather he had been cold and
calm and dignified, she said.

“Do you not see,” replied Veronique, “that he is thus avoiding their
temptations and foiling their efforts? He is making himself a wild beast
for a purpose.”

“At any rate,” said the lady, “he is not a well-bred man; he is only a
workman.”

“If he had been a well-bred man,” said Madame Graslin, “he would soon
have sacrificed that unknown woman.”

These events, discussed and turned and twisted in every salon, every
household, commented on in a score of ways, stripped bare by the
cleverest tongues in the community, gave, of course, a cruel interest
to the execution of the criminal, whose appeal was rejected after two
months’ delay by the upper court. What would probably be his demeanor in
his last moments? Would he speak out? Would he contradict himself? How
would the bets be decided? Who would go to see him executed, and who
would not go, and how could it be done? The position of the localities,
which in Limoges spares a criminal the anguish of a long distance to the
scaffold, lessens the number of spectators. The law courts which adjoin
the prison stand at the corner of the rue du Palais and the rue du
Pont-Herisson. The rue du Palais is continued in a straight line by the
short rue de Monte-a-Regret, which leads to the place des Arenes, where
the executions take place, and which probably owes its name to that
circumstances. There is therefore but little distance to go, few houses
to pass, and few windows to look from. No person in good society would
be willing to mingle in the crowd which would fill the streets.

But the expected execution was, to the great astonishment of the whole
town, put off from day to day for the following reason:--

The repentance and resignation of great criminals on their way to death
is one of the triumphs which the Church reserves for itself,--a triumph
which seldom misses its effect on the popular mind. Repentance is so
strong a proof of the power of religious ideas--taken apart from all
Christian interest, though that, of course, is the chief object of
the Church--that the clergy are always distressed by a failure on such
occasions. In July, 1829, such a failure was aggravated by the spirit of
party which envenomed every detail in the life of the body politic. The
liberal party rejoiced in the expectation that the priest-party (a term
invented by Montlosier, a royalist who went over to the constitutionals,
and was dragged by them far beyond his wishes),--that the priests would
fail on so public an occasion before the eyes of the people. Parties _en
masse_ commit infamous actions which would cover a single man with shame
and opprobrium; therefore when one man alone stands in his guilt
before the eyes of the masses, he becomes a Robespierre, a Jeffries, a
Laubardemont, a species of expiatory altar on which all secret guilts
hang their _ex-votos_.

The authorities, sympathizing with the Church, delayed the execution,
partly in the hope of gaining some conclusive information for
themselves, and partly to allow religion an opportunity to prevail.

Nevertheless, their power was not unlimited, and the sentence must
sooner or later be carried out. The same liberals who, out of mere
opposition, had declared Tascheron innocent, and who had done their best
to break down the verdict, now clamored because the sentence was not
executed. When the opposition is consistent it invariably falls into
such unreasonableness, because its object is not to have right on its
own side, but to harass the authorities and put them in the wrong.

Accordingly, about the beginning of August, the government officials
felt their hand forced by that clamor, so often stupid, called “public
opinion.” The day for the execution was named. In this extremity the
Abbe Dutheil took upon himself to propose to the bishop a last resource,
the adoption of which caused the introduction into this judicial drama
of a remarkable personage, who serves as a bond between all the figures
brought upon the scene of it, and who, by ways familiar to Providence,
was destined to lead Madame Graslin along a path where her virtues were
to shine with greater brilliancy as a noble benefactress and an angelic
Christian woman.

The episcopal palace at Limoges stands on a hill which slopes to the
banks of the Vienne; and its gardens, supported by strong walls topped
with a balustrade, descend to the river by terrace after terrace,
according to the natural lay of the land. The rise of this hill is such
that the suburb of Saint-Etienne on the opposite bank seems to lie at
the foot of the lower terrace. From there, according to the direction in
which a person walks, the Vienne can be seen either in a long stretch
or directly across it, in the midst of a fertile panorama. On the west,
after the river leaves the embankment of the episcopal gardens, it turns
toward the town in a graceful curve which winds around the suburb
of Saint-Martial. At a short distance beyond that suburb is a pretty
country house called Le Cluseau, the walls of which can be seen from
the lower terrace of the bishop’s palace, appearing, by an effect of
distance, to blend with the steeples of the suburb. Opposite to Le
Cluseau is the sloping island, covered with poplar and other trees,
which Veronique in her girlish youth had named the Ile de France. To the
east the distance is closed by an ampitheatre of hills.

The magic charm of the site and the rich simplicity of the building
make this episcopal palace one of the most interesting objects in a town
where the other edifices do not shine, either through choice of material
or architecture.

Long familiarized with the aspects which commend these gardens to all
lovers of the picturesque, the Abbe Dutheil, who had induced the Abbe de
Grancour to accompany him, descended from terrace to terrace, paying no
attention to the ruddy colors, the orange tones, the violet tints, which
the setting sun was casting on the old walls and balustrades of the
gardens, on the river beneath them, and, in the distance, on the houses
of the town. He was in search of the bishop, who was sitting on the
lower terrace under a grape-vine arbor, where he often came to take his
dessert and enjoy the charm of a tranquil evening. The poplars on the
island seemed at this moment to divide the waters with the lengthening
shadow of their yellowing heads, to which the sun was lending the
appearance of a golden foliage. The setting rays, diversely reflected on
masses of different greens, produced a magnificent harmony of melancholy
tones. At the farther end of the valley a sheet of sparkling water
ruffled by the breeze brought out the brown stretch of roofs in the
suburb of Saint-Etienne. The steeples and roofs of Saint-Martial, bathed
in light, showed through the tracery of the grape-vine arbor. The soft
murmur of the provincial town, half hidden by the bend of the river, the
sweetness of the balmy air, all contributed to plunge the prelate into
the condition of quietude prescribed by medical writers on digestion;
seemingly his eyes were resting mechanically on the right bank of the
river, just where the long shadows of the island poplars touched it on
the side toward Saint-Etienne, near the field where the twofold
murder of old Pingret and his servant had been committed. But when
his momentary felicity was interrupted by the arrival of the two grand
vicars, and the difficulties they brought to him to solve, it was
seen his eyes were filled with impenetrable thoughts. The two priests
attributed this abstraction to the fact of being bored, whereas, on the
contrary, the prelate was absorbed in seeing in the sands of the Vienne
the solution of the enigma then so anxiously sought for by the officers
of justice, the des Vanneaulx, and the community at large.

“Monsieur,” said the Abbe de Grancour, approaching the bishop, “it is
all useless; we shall certainly have the distress of seeing that
unhappy Tascheron die an unbeliever. He vociferates the most horrible
imprecations against religion; he insults that poor Abbe Pascal; he
spits upon the crucifix; and means to die denying all, even hell.”

“He will shock the populace on the scaffold,” said the Abbe Dutheil.
“The great scandal and horror his conduct will excite may hide our
defeat and powerlessness. In fact, as I have just been saying to
Monsieur de Grancour, this very spectacle may drive other sinners into
the arms of the Church.”

Troubled by these words, the bishop laid down upon a rustic wooden table
the bunch of grapes at which he was picking, and wiped his fingers as he
made a sign to the two grand vicars to be seated.

“The Abbe Pascal did not take a wise course,” he said.

“He is actually ill in his bed from the effects of his last scene with
the man,” said the Abbe de Grancour. “If it were not for that we might
get him to explain more clearly the difficulties that have defeated all
the various efforts monseigneur ordered him to make.”

“The condemned man sings obscene songs at the highest pitch of his voice
as soon as he sees any one of us, so as to drown out every word we try
to say to him,” said a young priest who was sitting beside the bishop.

This young man, who was gifted with a charming personality, had his
right arm resting on the table, while his white hand dropped negligently
on the bunches of grapes, seeking the ripest, with the ease and
assurance of an habitual guest or favorite. He was both to the prelate,
being the younger brother of Baron Eugene de Rastignac, to whom ties of
family and also of affection had long bound the Bishop of Limoges. Aware
of the want of fortune which devoted this young man to the Church, the
bishop took him as his private secretary to give him time to wait for
eventual preferment. The Abbe Gabriel bore a name which would lead him
sooner or later to the highest dignities of the Church.

“Did you go to see him, my son?” asked the bishop.

“Yes, Monseigneur. As soon as I entered his cell the wretched man hurled
the most disgusting epithets at you and at me. He behaved in such a
manner that it was impossible for any priest to remain in his presence.
Might I give Monseigneur a word of advice?”

“Let us listen to the words of wisdom which God Almighty sometimes puts
into the mouths of children,” said the bishop, smiling.

“Well, you know he made Balaam’s ass speak out,” said the young abbe
quickly.

“But according to some commentators she did not know what she was
saying,” replied the bishop, laughing.

The two grand vicars smiled. In the first place, the joke came from
Monseigneur; next, it bore gently on the young abbe, of whom the
dignitaries and other ambitious priests grouped around the bishop were
somewhat jealous.

“My advice would be,” resumed the young man, “to ask Monsieur de
Grandville to reprieve the man for the present. When Tascheron knows
that he owes an extension of his life to our intercession, he may
pretend to listen to us, and if he listens--”

“He will persist in his present conduct, finding that it has won
him that advantage,” said the bishop, interrupting his favorite.
“Messieurs,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “does the whole town
know of these details?”

“There is not a household in which they are not talked over,” said the
Abbe de Grancour. “The state in which our good Abbe Pascal was put by
his last efforts is the present topic of conversation throughout the
town.”

“When is Tascheron to be executed?” asked the bishop.

“To-morrow, which is market-day;” replied Monsieur de Grancour.

“Messieurs,” exclaimed the bishop, “religion must not be overset in this
way. The more public attention is attracted to the matter, the more I am
determined to obtain a notable triumph. The Church is now in presence
of a great difficulty. We are called upon to do miracles in this
manufacturing town, where the spirit of sedition against religious and
monarchical principles has such deep root, where the system of inquiry
born of protestantism (which in these days calls itself liberalism,
prepared at any moment to take another name) extends into everything. Go
at once to Monsieur de Grandville; he is wholly on our side, and say to
him from me that we beg for a few days’ reprieve. I will go myself and
see that unhappy man.”

“You, Monseigneur!” said the Abbe de Rastignac. “If you should fail,
wouldn’t that complicate matters? You ought not to go unless you are
certain of success.”

“If Monseigneur will permit me to express my opinion,” said the Abbe
Dutheil, “I think I can suggest a means which may bring victory to
religion in this sad case.”

The prelate answered with a sign of assent, so coldly given as to show
how little credit he gave to his vicar-general.

“If any one can influence that rebellious soul and bring it back to
God,” continued the Abbe Dutheil, “it is the rector of the village in
which he was born, Monsieur Bonnet.”

“One of your proteges,” remarked the bishop.

“Monseigneur, Monsieur Bonnet is one of those men who protect
themselves, both by their active virtues and their gospel work.”

This simple and modest reply was received in a silence which would have
embarrassed any other man than the Abbe Dutheil. The three priests chose
to see in it one of those hidden and unanswerable sarcasms which are
characteristic of ecclesiastics, who contrive to express what they want
to say while observing the strictest decorum. In this case there was
nothing of the kind. The Abbe Dutheil never thought of himself and had
no double meaning.

“I have heard of Saint Aristides for some time,” said the bishop,
smiling. “If I have left his light under a bushel I may have been unjust
or prejudiced. Your liberals are always crying up Monsieur Bonnet as
though he belonged to their party. I should like to judge for myself of
this rural apostle. Go at once, messieurs, to Monsieur de Grandville,
and ask for the reprieve; I will await his answer before sending our
dear Abbe Gabriel to Montegnac to fetch the saintly man. We will give
his Blessedness a chance to do miracles.”

As he listened to these words of the prelate the Abbe Dutheil reddened;
but he would not allow himself to take notice of the incivilities of the
speech. The two grand vicars bowed in silence and withdrew, leaving the
prelate alone with his secretary.

“The secrets of the confession we are so anxious to obtain from the
unhappy man himself are no doubt buried there,” said the bishop to his
young abbe, pointing to the shadow of the poplars where it fell on a
lonely house between the island and Saint-Etienne.

“I have always thought so,” replied Gabriel. “I am not a judge and I
will not be an informer; but if I were a magistrate I should have known
the name of that woman who trembles at every sound, at every word, while
forced to keep her features calm and serene under pain of going to the
scaffold with her lover. She has nothing to fear, however. I have seen
the man; he will carry the secret of that passionate love to the grave
with him.”

“Ah! you sly fellow!” said the bishop, twisting the ear of his secretary
as he motioned to the space between the island and the suburb
of Saint-Etienne which the last gleams of the setting sun were
illuminating, and on which the young abbe’s eyes were fixed. “That is
the place where justice should have searched; don’t you think so?”

“I went to see the criminal to try the effect of my suspicions upon
him,” replied the young man. “I could not speak them out, for fear of
compromising the woman for whose sake he dies.”

“Yes,” said the bishop, “we will hold our tongues; we are not the
servants of human justice. One head is enough. Besides, sooner or later,
the secret will be given to the Church.”

The perspicacity which the habit of meditation gives to priests is far
superior to that of lawyers or the police. By dint of contemplating from
those terraces the scene of the crime, the prelate and his secretary had
ended by perceiving circumstances unseen by others, in spite of all the
investigations before and during the trial of the case.

Monsieur de Grandville was playing whist at Madame Graslin’s house; it
was necessary to await his return; the bishop did not therefore receive
his answer till nearly midnight. The Abbe Gabriel, to whom the prelate
lent his carriage, started at two in the morning for Montegnac. This
region, which begins about twenty-five miles from the town, is situated
in that part of the Limousin which lies at the base of the mountains
of the Correze and follows the line of the Creuze. The young abbe left
Limoges all heaving with expectation of the spectacle on the morrow, and
still unaware that it would not take place.




VII. MONTEGNAC

Priests and religious devotees have a tendency in the matter of payments
to keep strictly to the letter of the law. Is this from poverty, or from
the selfishness to which their isolation condemns them, thus encouraging
the natural inclination of all men to avarice; or is it from a
conscientious parsimony which saves all it can for deeds of charity?
Each nature will give a different answer to this question. The
difficulty of putting the hand into the pocket, sometimes concealed by
a gracious kindliness, oftener unreservedly exhibited, is more
particularly noticeable in travelling. Gabriel de Rastignac, the
prettiest youth who had served before the altar for many a long day,
gave only a thirty-sous _pour-boire_ to the postilion. Consequently he
travelled slowly. Postilions drive bishops and other clergy with the
utmost care when they merely double the legal wage, and they run no risk
of damaging the episcopal carriage for any such sum, fearing, they
might say, to get themselves into trouble. The Abbe Gabriel, who was
travelling alone for the first time, said, at each relay, in his dulcet
voice:--

“Pray go faster, postilion.”

“We ply the whip,” replied an old postilion, “according to how the
traveller plies his finger and thumb.”

The young abbe flung himself back into a corner of the carriage unable
to comprehend that answer. To occupy the time he began to study the
country through which he was passing, making several mental excursions
on foot among the hills through which the road winds between Bordeaux
and Lyon.

About fifteen miles from Limoges the landscape, losing the graceful flow
of the Vienne through the undulating meadows of the Limousin, which
in certain places remind one of Switzerland, especially about
Saint-Leonard, takes on a harsh and melancholy aspect. Here we come upon
vast tracts of uncultivated land, sandy plains without herbage, hemmed
in on the horizon by the summits of the Correze. These mountains have
neither the abrupt rise of the Alpine ranges nor their splendid ridges;
neither the warm gorges and desolate peaks of the Appenines, nor the
picturesque grandeur of the Pyrenees. Their undulating slopes, due
to the action of water, prove the subsidence of some great natural
catastrophe in which the floods retired slowly. This characteristic,
common to most of the earth convulsions in France, has perhaps
contributed, together with the climate, to the epitaph of _douce_
bestowed by all Europe on our sunny France.

Though this abrupt transition from the smiling landscapes of the
Limousin to the sterner aspects of La Marche and Auvergne may offer to
the thinker and the poet, as he passes them on his way, an image of the
Infinite, that terror of certain minds; though it incites to revelry
the woman of the world, bored as she travels luxuriously in her
carriage,--to the inhabitants of this region Nature is cruel, savage,
and without resources. The soil of these great gray plains is thankless.
The vicinity of a capital town could alone reproduce the miracle worked
in Brie during the last two centuries. Here, however, not only is a
town lacking, but also the great residences which sometimes give life
to these hopeless deserts, where civilization languishes, where the
agriculturist sees only barrenness, and the traveller finds not a single
inn, nor that which, perchance, he is there to seek,--the picturesque.

Great minds, however, do not dislike these barren wastes, necessary
shadows in Nature’s vast picture. Quite recently Fenimore Cooper has
magnificently developed with his melancholy genius the poesy of such
solitudes, in his “Prairie.” These regions, unknown to botanists,
covered by mineral refuse, round pebbles, and a sterile soil, cast
defiance to civilization. France should adopt the only solution to
these difficulties, as the British have done in Scotland, where patient,
heroic agriculture has changed the arid wastes into fertile farms.
Left in their savage and primitive state these uncultivated social
and natural wastes give birth to discouragement, laziness, weakness
resulting from poor food, and crime when needs become importunate.

These few words present the past history of Montegnac. What could be
done in that great tract of barren land, neglected by the government,
abandoned by the nobility, useless to industry,--what but war against
society which disregarded its duty? Consequently, the inhabitants of
Montegnac lived to a recent period, as the Highlands of Scotland lived
in former times, by murder and rapine. From the mere aspect of this
region a thinking man would understand how, twenty years earlier, the
inhabitants were at war with society. The great upland plain, flanked
on one side by the valley of the Vienne, on the other by the charming
valleys of La Marche, then by Auvergne, and bounded by the mountains of
the Correze, is like (agriculture apart) the plateau of La Beauce, which
separates the basin of the Loire from that of the Seine, also like those
of Touraine and Berry, and many other of the great upland plains which
are cut like facets on the surface of France and are numerous enough
to claim the attention of the wisest administrators. It is amazing
that while complaint is made of the influx of population to the social
centres, the government does not employ the natural remedy of redeeming
a region where, as statistics show, there are many million acres of
waste land, certain parts of which, especially in Berry, have a soil
from seven to eight feet deep.

Many of these plains which might be covered by villages and made
splendidly productive belong to obstinate communes, the authorities of
which refuse to sell to those who would develop them, merely to keep
the right to pasture cows upon them! On all these useless, unproductive
lands is written the word “Incapacity.” All soils have some special
fertility of their own. Arms and wills are ready; the thing lacking is
a sense of duty combined with talent on the part of the government. In
France, up to the present time, these upland plains have been sacrificed
to the valleys; the government has chosen to give all its help to those
regions of country which can take care of themselves.

Most of these luckless uplands are without water, the first essential
for production. The mists which ought to fertilize the gray, dead soil
by discharging oxygen upon it, sweep across it rapidly, driven by the
wind, for want of trees which might arrest them and so obtain their
nourishment. Merely to plant trees in such a region would be carrying a
gospel to it. Separated from the nearest town or city by a distance as
insurmountable to poor folk as though a desert lay between them, with
no means of reaching a market for their products (if they produced
anything), close to an unexplored forest which supplied them with wood
and the uncertain livelihood of poaching, the inhabitants often suffered
from hunger during the winters. The soil not being suitable for wheat,
and the unfortunate peasantry having neither cattle of any kind nor
farming implements, they lived for the most part on chestnuts.

Any one who has studied zoological productions in a museum, or become
personally aware of the indescribable depression caused by the brown
tones of all European products, will understand how the constant sight
of these gray, arid plains must have affected the moral nature of the
inhabitants, through the desolate sense of utter barrenness which they
present to the eye. There, in those dismal regions, is neither coolness
nor brightness, nor shade nor contrast,--none of all those ideas and
spectacles of Nature which awaken and rejoice the heart; even a stunted
apple-tree would be hailed as a friend.

A country road, recently made, runs through the centre of this great
plain, and meets the high-road. Upon it, at a distance of some fifteen
miles from the high-road, stands Montegnac, at the foot of a hill,
as its name designates, the chief town of a canton or district in
the Haute-Vienne. The hill is part of Montegnac, which thus unites
a mountainous scenery with that of the plains. This district is a
miniature Scotland, with its lowlands and highlands. Behind the hill, at
the foot of which lies the village, rises, at a distance of about three
miles, the first peak of the Correze mountains. The space between
is covered by the great forest of Montegnac, which clothes the hill,
extends over the valley, and along the slopes of the mountain (though
these are bare in some places), continuing as far as the highway to
Aubusson, where it diminishes to a point near a steep embankment on
that road. This embankment commands a ravine through which the post-road
between Bordeaux and Lyon passes. Travellers, either afoot or in
carriages, were often stopped in the depths of this dangerous gorge
by highwaymen, whose deeds of violence went unpunished, for the site
favored them; they could instantly disappear, by ways known to them
alone, into the inaccessible parts of the forest.

Such a region was naturally out of reach of law. No one now travelled
through it. Without circulation, neither commerce, industry, exchange of
ideas, nor any of the means to wealth, can exist; the material triumphs
of civilization are always the result of the application of primitive
ideas. Thought is invariably the point of departure and the goal of all
social existence. The history of Montegnac is a proof of that axiom
of social science. When at last the administration was able to concern
itself with the needs and the material prosperity of this region of
country, it cut down this strip of forest, and stationed a detachment of
gendarmerie near the ravine, which escorted the mail-coaches between the
two relays; but, to the shame of the gendarmerie be it said, it was the
gospel, and not the sword, the rector Monsieur Bonnet, and not Corporal
Chervin, who won a civil victory by changing the morals of a population.
This priest, filled with Christian tenderness for the poor, hapless
region, attempted to regenerate it, and succeeded in the attempt.

After travelling for about an hour over these plains, alternately stony
and dusty, where the partridges flocked in tranquil coveys, their wings
whirring with a dull, heavy sound as the carriage came toward them,
the Abbe Gabriel, like all other travellers on the same road, saw with
satisfaction the roofs of Montegnac in the distance. At the entrance of
the village was one of those curious post-relays which are seen only
in the remote parts of France. Its sign was an oak board on which
some pretentious postilion had carved the words, _Pauste o chevos_,
blackening the letters with ink, and then nailing the board by its
four corners above the door of a wretched stable in which there were no
horses. The door, which was nearly always open, had a plank laid on the
soil for its threshold, to protect the stable floor, which was lower
than the road, from inundation when it rained. The discouraged traveller
could see within worn-out, mildewed, and mended harnesses, certain to
break at a plunge of the horses. The horses themselves were hard at
work in the fields, or anywhere but in the stable. If by any chance they
happen to be in their stalls, they are eating; if they have finished
eating, the postilion has gone to see his aunt or his cousin, or is
getting in the hay, or else he is asleep; no one can say where he is;
the traveller has to wait till he is found, and he never comes till he
has finished what he is about. When he does come he loses an immense
amount of time looking for his jacket and his whip, or putting the
collars on his horses. Near by, at the door of the post-house, a worthy
woman is fuming even more than the traveller, in order to prevent the
latter from complaining loudly. This is sure to be the wife of the
post-master, whose husband is away in the fields.

The bishop’s secretary left his carriage before a post-house of this
kind, the walls of which resembled a geographical map, while the
thatched roof, blooming like a flower-garden, seemed to be giving way
beneath the weight of stone-crop. After begging the post-mistress to
have everything in readiness for his departure in an hour’s time, the
abbe asked the way to the parsonage. The good woman showed him a lane
which led to the church, telling him the rectory was close beside it.

While the young abbe followed this lane, which was full of stones
and closed on either side by hedges, the post-mistress questioned the
postilion. Since starting from Limoges each postilion had informed his
successor of the conjectures of the Limoges postilion as to the mission
of the bishop’s messenger. While the inhabitants of the town were
getting out of bed and talking of the coming execution, a rumor spread
among the country people that the bishop had obtained the pardon of
the innocent man; and much was said about the mistakes to which human
justice was liable. If Jean-Francois was executed later, it was certain
that he was regarded in the country regions as a martyr.

After taking a few steps along the lane, reddened by the autumn leaves,
and black with mulberries and damsons, the Abbe Gabriel turned round
with the instinctive impulse which leads us all to make acquaintance
with a region which we see for the first time,--a sort of instinctive
physical curiosity shared by dogs and horses.

The position of Montegnac was explained to him as his eyes rested on
various little streams flowing down the hillsides and on a little river,
along the bank of which runs the country road which connects the chief
town of the arrondissement with the prefecture. Like all the villages
of this upland plain, Montegnac is built of earth baked in the sun and
moulded into square blocks. After a fire a house looks as if it had been
built of brick. The roofs are of thatch. Poverty is everywhere visible.

Before the village lay several fields of potatoes, radishes, and rye,
redeemed from the barren plain. On the slope of the hill were irrigated
meadows where the inhabitants raised horses, the famous Limousin breed,
which is said to be a legacy of the Arabs when they descended by the
Pyrenees into France and were cut to pieces by the battle-axes of the
Franks under Charles Martel. The heights are barren. A hot, baked,
reddish soil shows a region where chestnuts flourish. The springs,
carefully applied to irrigation, water the meadows only, nourishing
the sweet, crisp grass, so fine and choice, which produces this race of
delicate and high-strung horses,--not over-strong to bear fatigue,
but showy, excellent for the country of their birth, though subject to
changes if transplanted. A few mulberry trees lately imported showed an
intention of cultivating silk-worms.

Like most of the villages in this world Montegnac had but one street,
through which the high road passed. Nevertheless there was an upper and
a lower Montegnac, reached by lanes going up or going down from the main
street. A line of houses standing along the brow of the hill presented
the cheerful sight of terraced gardens, which were entered by flights
of steps from the main street. Some had their steps of earth, others
of pebbles; here and there old women were sitting on them, knitting or
watching children, and keeping up a conversation from the upper to the
lower town across the usually peaceful street of the little village;
thus rumors spread easily and rapidly in Montegnac. All the gardens,
which were full of fruit-trees, cabbages, onions, and other vegetables,
had bee-hives along their terraces.

Another line of houses, running down from the main street to the river,
the course of which was outlined by thriving little fields of hemp and
the sorts of fruit trees which like moisture, lay parallel with the
upper town; some of the houses, that of the post-house, for instance,
were in a hollow, and were well-situated for certain kinds of work, such
as weaving. Nearly all of them were shared by walnut-trees, the tree
_par excellence_ of strong soils.

On this side of the main street at the end farthest from the great plain
was a dwelling-house, very much larger and better cared for than those
in other parts of the village; around it were other houses equally well
kept. This little hamlet, separated from the village by its gardens, was
already called Les Tascherons, a name it keeps to the present day.

The village itself mounted to very little, but thirty or more outlying
farms belonged to it. In the valley, leading down to the river,
irrigating channels like those of La Marche and Berry indicated the flow
of water around the village by the green fringe of verdure about them;
Montegnac seemed tossed in their midst like a vessel at sea. When
a house, an estate, a village, a region, passes from the wretched
condition to a prosperous one, without becoming either rich or splendid,
life seems so easy, so natural to living beings, that the spectator may
not at once suspect the enormous labor, infinite in petty detail, grand
in persistency like the toil buried in a foundation wall, in short, the
forgotten labor on which the whole structure rests.

Consequently the scene that lay before him told nothing extraordinary
to the young Abbe Gabriel as his eye took in the charming landscape.
He knew nothing of the state of the region before the arrival of the
rector, Monsieur Bonnet. The young man now went on a few steps and again
saw, several hundred feet above the gardens of the upper village, the
church and the parsonage, which he had already seen from a distance
confusedly mingled with the imposing ruins clothed with creepers of the
old castle of Montegnac, one of the residences of the Navarreins family
in the twelfth century.

The parsonage, a house originally built no doubt for the bailiff or
game-keeper, was noticeable for a long raised terrace planted with
lindens from which a fine view extended over the country. The steps
leading to this terrace and the walls which supported it showed their
great age by the ravages of time. The flat moss which clings to stones
had laid its dragon-green carpet on each surface. The numerous families
of the pellitories, the chamomiles, the mesembryanthemums, pushed their
varied and abundant tufts through the loop-holes in the walls, cracked
and fissured in spite of their thickness. Botany had lavished there
its most elegant drapery of ferns of all kinds, snap-dragons with their
violet mouths and golden pistils, the blue anchusa, the brown lichens,
so that the old worn stones seemed mere accessories peeping out at
intervals from this fresh growth. Along the terrace a box hedge, cut
into geometric figures, enclosed a pleasure garden surrounding the
parsonage, above which the rock rose like a white wall surmounted by
slender trees that drooped and swayed above it like plumes.

The ruins of the castle looked down upon the house and church. The
house, built of pebbles and mortar, had but one story surmounted by an
enormous sloping roof with gable ends, in which were attics, no doubt
empty, considering the dilapidation of their windows. The ground-floor
had two rooms parted by a corridor, at the farther end of which was a
wooden staircase leading to the second floor, which also had two rooms.
A little kitchen was at the back of the building in a yard, where were
the stable and coach-house, both unused, deserted, and worthless. The
kitchen garden lay between the church and the house; a ruined gallery
led from the parsonage to the sacristy.

When the young abbe saw the four windows with their leaded panes, the
brown and mossy walls, the door in common pine slit like a bundle of
matches, far from being attracted by the adorable naivete of these
details, the grace of the vegetations which draped the roof and the
dilapidated wooden frames of the windows, the wealth of the clambering
plants escaping from every cranny, and the clasping tendrils of the
grape-vine which looked into every window as if to bring smiling ideas
to those within, he congratulated himself heartily on being a bishop in
perspective instead of a village rector.

This house, apparently always open, seemed to belong to everybody. The
Abbe Gabriel entered a room communicating with the kitchen, which was
poorly furnished with an oak table on four stout legs, a tapestried
armchair, a number of chairs all of wood, and an old chest by way
of buffet. No one was in the kitchen except a cat which revealed the
presence of a woman about the house. The other room served as a salon.
Casting a glance about it the young priest noticed armchairs in natural
wood covered with tapestry; the woodwork and the rafters of the ceiling
were of chestnut which had turned as black as ebony. A tall clock in
a green case painted with flowers, a table with a faded green cloth,
several chairs, two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, between which was
an Infant Jesus in wax under a glass case, completed the furniture of
the room. The chimney-piece of wood with common mouldings was filled by
a fire-board covered by a painting representing the Good Shepherd with
a lamb over his shoulder, which was probably the gift of some young
girl,--the mayor’s daughter, or the judge’s daughter,--in return for the
pastor’s care of her education.

The forlorn condition of the house was distressing to behold; the walls,
once whitewashed, were now discolored, and stained to a man’s height
by constant friction. The staircase with its heavy baluster and wooden
steps, though very clean, looked as if it might easily give way under
the feet. On the other side of the house, opposite to the entrance
door, another door opening upon the kitchen garden enabled the Abbe de
Rastignac to judge of the narrowness of that garden, which was closed
at the back by a wall cut in the white and friable stone side of
the mountain, against which espaliers were fastened, covered with
grape-vines and fruit-trees so ill taken care of that their leaves were
discolored with blight.

The abbe returned upon his steps and walked along the paths of the first
garden, from which he could see, in the distance beyond the village,
the magnificent stretch of valley, a true oasis at the edge of the vast
plains, which now, veiled by the light mists of morning, lay along the
horizon like a tranquil ocean. Behind him could be seen, on one side,
for a foil, the dark masses of the bronze-green forest; on the other,
the church and the ruins of the castle perched on the rock and vividly
detached upon the blue of the ether. The Abbe Gabriel, his feet creaking
on the gravelly paths cut in stars and rounds and lozenges, looked down
upon the village, where some of the inhabitants were already gazing up
at him, and then at the fresh, cool valley, with its tangled paths, its
river bordered with willows in delightful contrast to the endless plain,
and he was suddenly seized with sensations which changed the nature of
his thoughts; he admired the sweet tranquillity of the place; he felt
the influence of that pure air; he was conscious of the peace inspired
by the revelation of a life brought back to Biblical simplicity; he saw,
confusedly, the beauties of this old parsonage, which he now re-entered
to examine its details with greater interest.

A little girl, employed, no doubt, to watch the house, though she was
picking and eating fruit in the garden, heard the steps of a man with
creaking shoes on the great square flags of the ground-floor rooms. She
ran in to see who it was. Confused at being caught by a priest with a
fruit in one hand and another in her mouth, she made no answer to the
questions of the handsome young abbe. She had never imagined such an
abbe,--dapper and spruce as hands could make him, in dazzling linen and
fine black cloth without spot or wrinkle.

“Monsieur Bonnet?” she said at last. “Monsieur Bonnet is saying mass,
and Mademoiselle Ursule is at church.”

The Abbe Gabriel did not notice a covered way from the house to the
church; he went back to the road which led to the front portal, a
species of porch with a sloping roof that faced the village. It was
reached by a series of disjointed stone steps, at the side of which lay
a ravine washed out by the mountain torrents and covered with noble
elms planted by Sully the Protestant. This church, one of the poorest
in France where there are so many poor churches, was like one of those
enormous barns with projecting doors covered by roofs supported on
brick or wooden pillars. Built, like the parsonage, of cobblestones and
mortar, flanked by a face of solid rock, and roofed by the commonest
round tiles, this church was decorated on the outside with the richest
creations of sculpture, rich in light and shade and lavishly massed
and colored by Nature, who understands such art as well as any Michael
Angelo. Ivy clasped the walls with its nervous tendrils, showing stems
amid its foliage like the veins in a lay figure. This mantle, flung by
Time to cover the wounds he made, was starred by autumn flowers drooping
from the crevices, which also gave shelter to numerous singing birds.
The rose-window above the projecting porch was adorned with blue
campanula, like the first page of an illuminated missal. The side
which communicated with the parsonage, toward the north, was not less
decorated; the wall was gray and red with moss and lichen; but the other
side and the apse, around which lay the cemetery, was covered with a
wealth of varied blooms. A few trees, among others an almond-tree--one
of the emblems of hope--had taken root in the broken wall; two enormous
pines standing close against the apsis served as lightning-rods. The
cemetery, enclosed by a low, half-ruined wall, had for ornament an iron
cross, mounted on a pedestal and hung with box, blessed at Easter,--one
of those affecting Christian thoughts forgotten in cities. The village
rector is the only priest who, in these days, thinks to go among his
dead and say to them each Easter morn, “Thou shalt live again!” Here and
there a few rotten wooden crosses stood up from the grassy mounds.

The interior of the church harmonized perfectly with the poetic tangle
of the humble exterior, the luxury and art of which was bestowed by
Time, for once in a way charitable. Within, the eye first went to the
roof, lined with chestnut, to which age had given the richest tints of
the oldest woods of Europe. This roof was supported at equal distances
by strong shafts resting on transversal beams. The four white-washed
walls had no ornament whatever. Poverty had made the parish
iconoclastic, whether it would or not. The church, paved and furnished
with benches, was lighted by four arched windows with leaded panes. The
altar, shaped like a tomb, was adorned by a large crucifix placed
above a tabernacle in walnut with a few gilt mouldings, kept clean and
shining, eight candlesticks economically made of wood painted white, and
two china vases filled with artificial flowers such as the drudge of a
money-changer would have despised, but with which God was satisfied.

The sanctuary lamp was a night-wick placed in an old holy-water basin
of plated copper hanging by silken cords, the spoil of some demolished
chateau. The baptismal fonts were of wood; so were the pulpit and a sort
of cage provided for the church-wardens, the patricians of the village.
An altar to the Virgin presented to public admiration two colored
lithographs in small gilt frames. The altar was painted white, adorned
with artificial flowers in gilded wooden vases, and covered by a cloth
edged with shabby and discolored lace.

At the farther end of the church a long window entirely covered by a
red calico curtain produced a magical effect. This crimson mantle cast
a rosy tint upon the whitewashed walls; a thought divine seemed to glow
upon the altar and clasp the poor nave as if to warm it. The passage
which led to the sacristy exhibited on one of its walls the patron saint
of the village, a large Saint John the Baptist with his sheep, carved in
wood and horribly painted.

But in spite of all this poverty the church was not without some tender
harmonies delightful to choice souls, and set in charming relief by
their own colors. The rich dark tones of the wood relieved the white of
the walls and blended with the triumphal crimson cast on the chancel.
This trinity of color was a reminder of the grand Catholic doctrine.

If surprise was the first emotion roused by this pitiful house of the
Lord, surprise was followed speedily by admiration mingled with pity.
Did it not truly express the poverty of that poor region? Was it not
in harmony with the naive simplicity of the parsonage? The building was
perfectly clean and well-kept. The fragrance of country virtues exhaled
within it; nothing showed neglect or abandonment. Though rustic and
poor and simple, prayer dwelt there; those precincts had a soul,--a soul
which was felt, though we might not fully explain to our own souls how
we felt it.




VIII. THE RECTOR OF MONTEGNAC

The Abbe Gabriel glided softly through the church so as not to disturb
the devotions of two groups of persons on the benches near the high
altar, which was separated from the nave at the place where the lamp was
hung by a rather common balustrade, also of chestnut wood, and covered
with a cloth intended for the communion. On either side of the nave a
score of peasants, men and women, absorbed in fervent prayer, paid no
attention to the stranger when he passed up the narrow passage between
the two rows of seats.

When the young abbe stood beneath the lamp, whence he could see the two
little transepts which formed a cross, one of which led to the sacristy,
the other to the cemetery, he noticed on the cemetery side a family
clothed in black kneeling on the pavement, the transepts having no
benches. The young priest knelt down on the step of the balustrade which
separated the choir from the nave and began to pray, casting oblique
glances at a scene which was soon explained to him. The gospel had been
read. The rector, having removed his chasuble, came down from the altar
and stood before the railing; the young abbe, who foresaw this movement,
leaned back against the wall, so that Monsieur Bonnet did not see him.
Ten o’clock was striking.

“Brethren,” said the rector, in a voice of emotion, “at this very moment
a child of this parish is paying his debt to human justice by enduring
its last penalty, while we are offering the sacrifice of the mass for
the peace of his soul. Let us unite in prayer to God, imploring Him not
to turn His face from that child in these his last moments, and to
grant to his repentance the pardon in heaven which is denied to him here
below. The sin of this unhappy man, one of those on whom we most relied
for good examples, can only be explained by his disregard of religious
principles.”

Here the rector was interrupted by sobs from the kneeling group in
mourning garments, whom the Abbe Gabriel recognized, by this show of
affection, as the Tascheron family, although he did not know them. First
among them was an old couple (septuagenarians) standing by the wall,
their faces seamed with deep-cut, rigid wrinkles, and bronzed like a
Florentine medal. These persons, stoically erect like statues, in their
old darned clothes, were doubtless the grandfather and the grandmother
of the criminal. Their glazed and reddened eyes seemed to weep blood,
their arms trembled so that the sticks on which they leaned tapped
lightly on the pavement. Next, the father and the mother, their faces in
their handkerchiefs, sobbed aloud. Around these four heads of the family
knelt the two married sisters accompanied by their husbands, and three
sons, stupefied with grief. Five little children on their knees, the
oldest not seven years old, unable, no doubt, to understand what
was happening, gazed and listened with the torpid curiosity that
characterizes the peasantry, and is really the observation of physical
things pushed to its highest limit. Lastly, the poor unmarried sister,
imprisoned in the interests of justice, now released, a martyr to
fraternal affection, Denise Tascheron, was listening to the priest’s
words with a look that was partly bewildered and partly incredulous.
For her, her brother could not die. She well represented that one of the
Three Marys who did not believe in the death of Christ, though she was
present at the last agony. Pale, with dry eyes, like all those who have
gone without sleep, her fresh complexion was already faded, less by
toil and field labor than by grief; nevertheless, she had many of the
beauties of a country maiden,--a plump, full figure, finely shaped
arms, rounded cheeks, and clear, pure eyes, lighted at this instant with
flashes of despair. Below the throat, a firm, fair skin, not tanned by
the sun, betrayed the presence of a white and rosy flesh where the form
was hidden.

The married daughters wept; their husbands, patient farmers, were grave
and serious. The three brothers, profoundly sad, did not raise their
eyes from the ground. In the midst of this dreadful picture of dumb
despair and desolation, Denise and her mother alone showed symptoms of
revolt.

The other inhabitants of the village united in the affliction of this
respectable family with a sincere and Christian pity which gave the same
expression to the faces of all,--an expression amounting to horror when
the rector’s words announced that the knife was then falling on the neck
of a young man whom they all knew well from his very birth, and whom
they had doubtless thought incapable of crime.

The sobs which interrupted the short and simple allocution which the
pastor made to his flock overcame him so much that he stopped and said
no more, except to invite all present to fervent prayer.

Though this scene was not of a nature to surprise a priest, Gabriel de
Rastignac was too young not to be profoundly touched by it. As yet he
had never exercised the priestly virtues; he knew himself called to
other functions; he was not forced to enter the social breaches where
the heart bleeds at the sight of woes: his mission was that of the
higher clergy, who maintain the spirit of devotion, represent the
highest intellect of the Church, and on eminent occasions display the
priestly virtues on a larger stage,--like the illustrious bishops of
Marseille and Meaux, and the archbishops of Arles and Cambrai.

This little assemblage of country people weeping and praying for him
who, as they supposed, was then being executed on a public square, among
a crowd of persons come from all parts to swell the shame of such a
death,--this feeble counterpoise of prayer and pity, opposed to the
ferocious curiosity and just maledictions of a multitude, was enough
to move any soul, especially when seen in that poor church. The Abbe
Gabriel was tempted to go up to the Tascherons and say,--

“Your son and brother is reprieved.”

But he did not like to disturb the mass; and, moreover, he knew that
a reprieve was only a delay of execution. Instead of following the
service, he was irresistibly drawn to a study of the pastor from whom
the clergy in Limoges expected the conversion of the criminal.

Judging by the parsonage, Gabriel de Rastignac had made himself a
portrait of Monsieur Bonnet as a stout, short man with a strong and red
face, framed for toil, half a peasant, and tanned by the sun. So
far from that, the young abbe met his equal. Slight and delicate in
appearance, Monsieur Bonnet’s face struck the eyes at once as the
typical face of passion given to the Apostles. It was almost triangular,
beginning with a broad brow furrowed by wrinkles, and carried down from
the temples to the chin in two sharp lines which defined his hollow
cheeks. In this face, sallowed by tones as yellow as those of a church
taper, shone two blue eyes that were luminous with faith, burning with
eager hope. It was divided into two equal parts by a long nose, thin and
straight, with well-cut nostrils, beneath which spoke, even when closed
and voiceless, a large mouth, with strongly marked lips, from which
issued, whenever he spoke aloud, one of those voices which go straight
to the heart. The chestnut hair, which was thin and fine, and lay flat
upon the head, showed a poor constitution maintained by a frugal diet.
WILL made the power of this man.

Such were his personal distinctions. His short hands might have
indicated in another man a tendency to coarse pleasures, and perhaps
he had, like Socrates, conquered his temptations. His thinness was
ungraceful, his shoulders were too prominent, his knees knocked
together. The body, too much developed for the extremities, gave him the
look of a hump-backed man without a hump. In short, his appearance was
not pleasing. None but those to whom the miracles of thought, faith, art
are known could adore that flaming gaze of the martyr, that pallor of
constancy, that voice of love,--distinctive characteristics of this
village rector.

This man, worthy of the primitive Church, which exists no longer
except in the pictures of the sixteenth century and in the pages of
Martyrology, was stamped with the die of the human greatness which
most nearly approaches the divine greatness through Conviction,--that
indefinable something which embellishes the commonest form, gilds with
glowing tints the faces of men vowed to any worship, no matter what,
and brings into the face of a woman glorified by a noble love a sort of
light. CONVICTION is human will attaining to its highest reach. At once
both cause and effect, it impresses the coldest natures; it is a species
of mute eloquence which holds the masses.

Coming down from the altar the rector caught the eye of the Abbe Gabriel
and recognized him; so that when the bishop’s secretary reached the
sacristy Ursule, to whom her master had already given orders, was
waiting for him with a request that he would follow her.

“Monsieur,” said Ursule, a woman of canonical age, conducting the Abbe
de Rastignac by the gallery through the garden, “Monsieur Bonnet told me
to ask if you had breakfasted. You must have left Limoges very early
to get here by ten o’clock. I will soon have breakfast ready for you.
Monsieur l’abbe will not find a table like that of Monseigneur the
bishop in this poor village, but we will do the best we can. Monsieur
Bonnet will soon be in; he has gone to comfort those poor people, the
Tascherons. Their son has met with a terrible end to-day.”

“But,” said the Abbe Gabriel, when he could get in a word, “where is the
house of those worthy persons? I must take Monsieur Bonnet at once
to Limoges by order of the bishop. That unfortunate man will not be
executed to-day; Monseigneur has obtained a reprieve for him.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Ursule, whose tongue itched to spread the news about the
village, “monsieur has plenty of time to carry them that comfort while I
get breakfast ready. The Tascherons’ house is beyond the village; follow
the path below that terrace and it will take you there.”

As soon as Ursule lost sight of the abbe she went down into the village
to disseminate the news, and also to buy the things needed for the
breakfast.

The rector had been informed, while in church, of a desperate resolution
taken by the Tascherons as soon as they heard that Jean-Francois’s
appeal was rejected and that he had to die. These worthy souls intended
to leave the country, and their worldly goods were to be sold that
very morning. Delays and formalities unexpected by them had hitherto
postponed the sale. They had been forced to remain in their home until
the execution, and drink each day the cup of shame. This determination
had not been made public until the evening before the day appointed for
the execution. The Tascherons had expected to leave before that fatal
day; but the proposed purchaser of their property was a stranger in
those parts, and was prevented from clinching the bargain by a delay in
obtaining the money. Thus the hapless family were forced to bear their
trouble to its end. The feeling which prompted this expatriation was
so violent in these simple souls, little accustomed to compromise with
their consciences, that the grandfather and grandmother, the father and
the mother, the daughters and their husbands and the sons, in short, all
who bore and had borne the name of Tascheron or were closely allied to
it made ready to leave the country.

This emigration grieved the whole community. The mayor entreated the
rector to do his best to retain these worthy people. According to the
new Code the father was not responsible for the son, and the crime
of the father was no disgrace to the children. Together with other
emancipations which have weakened paternal power, this system has led
to the triumph of individualism, which is now permeating the whole
of modern society. He who thinks on the things of the future sees
the spirit of family destroyed, where the makers of the new Code have
introduced freedom of will and equality. The Family must always be the
basis of society. Necessarily temporary, incessantly divided, recomposed
to dissolve again, without ties between the future and the past, it
cannot fulfil that mission; the Family of the olden time no longer
exists in France. Those who have proceeded to demolish the ancient
edifice have been logical in dividing equally the family property,
in diminishing the authority of the father, in suppressing great
responsibilities; but is the reconstructed social state as solid, with
its young laws still untried, as it was under a monarchy, in spite of
the old abuses? In losing the solidarity of families, society has lost
that fundamental force which Montesquieu discovered and named HONOR. It
has isolated interests in order to subjugate them; it has sundered
all to enfeeble all. Society reigns over units, over single figures
agglomerated like grains of corn in a heap. Can the general interests of
all take the place of Family? Time alone can answer that question.

Nevertheless, the old law still exists; its roots have struck so deep
that you will find it still living, as we find perennials in polar
regions. Remote places are still to be found in the provinces where what
are now called prejudices exist, where the family suffers in the crime
of a child or a father.

This sentiment made the place uninhabitable any longer to the
Tascherons. Their deep religious feeling took them to church that
morning; for how could they let the mass be offered to God asking Him to
inspire their son with repentance that alone could restore to him life
eternal, and not share in it? Besides, they wished to bid farewell to
the village altar. But their minds were made up and their plans already
carried out. When the rector who followed them from church reached the
principal house he found their bags and bundles ready for the journey.
The purchaser of the property was there with the money. The notary had
drawn up the papers. In the yard behind the house was a carriole ready
harnessed to carry away the older couple with the money, and the mother
of Jean-Francois. The remainder of the family were to go on foot by
night.

At the moment when the young abbe entered the low room in which the
family were assembled the rector of Montegnac had exhausted all the
resources of his eloquence. The old pair, now insensible to the violence
of grief, were crouching in a corner on their bags and looking round
on their old hereditary home, its furniture, and the new purchaser, and
then upon each other as if to say:--

“Did we ever think this thing could happen?”

These old people, who had long resigned their authority to their son,
the father of the criminal, were, like kings on their abdication,
reduced to the passive role of subjects and children. Tascheron, the
father, was standing up; he listened to the pastor, and replied to him
in a low voice and by monosyllables. This man, who was about forty-eight
years of age, had the noble face which Titian has given to so many of
his Apostles,--a countenance full of faith, of grave and reflective
integrity, a stern profile, a nose cut in a straight and projecting
line, blue eyes, a noble brow, regular features, black, crisp, wiry
hair, planted on his head wit

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