The Human Comedy (43 page)

In the light he saw a woman standing there whose face was hidden by the length of pleated veil on her head. Following the rule of the order, she was clothed in
a robe whose color has become proverbial
. The general could not see the nun’s naked feet, which would have borne witness to her alarming thinness; however, despite the numerous folds of the coarse robe so entirely covering her body, he could see that tears, prayer, passion, and her solitary life had already wasted her.

A woman’s icy hand, no doubt the mother superior’s, held back the curtain. The general examined the necessary witness to this interview, met the dark and penetrating look of an aged nun, almost a hundred years old. But hers was a clear, youthful look that belied the numerous wrinkles by which the pale face of this woman was furrowed.

“Madame la duchesse,” he ventured, his voice full of emotion, to the nun who stood with bowed head. “Does your companion understand French?”

“There is no duchess here,” answered the nun. “You are in the presence of Sister Theresa. The woman you call my companion is my mother in God, my superior here below.”

These words—so humbly spoken by the voice that had once been in harmony with the luxury and elegance of her surroundings, the queen of fashionable Paris whose lips had once pronounced the language so lightly, so mockingly—struck the general like a bolt of lightning.

“My holy mother speaks only Latin and Spanish,” she added.

“I know neither one. My dear Antoinette, make my apologies to her.”

Hearing her name gently spoken by a man who had been so hard on her in the past, the nun felt a vivid inner emotion betrayed by the slight quivering of her veil, on which the daylight fell directly.

“My brother,” she said, bringing her sleeve up under her veil, perhaps to wipe her eyes, “my name is Sister Theresa . . .” Then she turned toward the mother superior and spoke in Spanish words that the general perfectly understood, for he knew enough to understand and perhaps also to speak. “My dear mother, this gentleman presents his respects and begs you to excuse him if he cannot pay them himself, but he knows neither of the two languages you speak . . .”

The old woman bowed her head slowly, an expression of angelic sweetness, enhanced by the consciousness of her power and dignity.

“Do you know this gentleman?” the mother asked her with a penetrating look.

“Yes, my mother.”

“Go back to your cell, my daughter!” said the mother superior in an imperious tone.

The general slipped quickly behind the curtain to prevent the terrible emotions that shook him from showing on his face, and in the shadows, he thought he could still see the mother superior’s piercing eyes. He was afraid of this woman, mistress of the fragile and fleeting happiness that had cost him such efforts, and he was trembling, this man whom a triple row of cannon had never frightened. The duchess was walking toward the door, but she turned back. “My mother,” she said, in a stunningly calm tone of voice, “this Frenchman is one of my brothers.”

“Stay then, my daughter!” said the old woman after a pause.

This admirable sophistry revealed such love and regret that a man less stalwart than the general might have felt faint at such keen pleasure in the midst of great peril—and for him this was something entirely new. How precious, then, were words, looks, and gestures when love must baffle the eyes of the lynx, the claws of the tiger! Sister Theresa came back.

“You see, my brother, what I have dared to do only to speak with you for a moment of your salvation, of the prayers my soul addresses each day to heaven on your behalf. I am committing a mortal sin. I have lied. How many days of penance it will take to expiate this lie! But I will suffer for you. You do not know, my brother, what happiness it is to love in heaven, to confess your feelings when religion has purified them, transported them into the highest spheres so that we are permitted to look only at the soul. If the doctrine and spirit of the saint to whom we owe this asylum had not borne me far above earthly anguish and set me, although far below the sphere where she dwells but surely above this world, I would not have seen you again. But I can see you and hear your voice and stay calm—”

“Ah, Antoinette,” cried the general interrupting these words. “Let me see you. I love you now as passionately, as madly, as you wanted me to love you.”

“Do not call me Antoinette, I beg you. Memories of the past hurt me. You must see here only Sister Theresa, a creature trusting in divine mercy . . .” And she added after a pause: “Control yourself, my brother. Our mother would separate us pitilessly if your face betrayed earthly passions or if you allowed tears to fall from your eyes.”

The general bowed his head as if to gather himself. When he raised his eyes to the grille, he saw between two bars the emaciated, pale, but still ardent face of the nun. Her complexion, formerly blooming with all the enchantment of youth, in which the happy contrast of matte white played with the colors of a Bengal rose, had taken on the warm tone of an earthenware bowl lit by a weak light from within. The beautiful head of hair, once this woman’s pride, had been shorn. A bandeau cinched her forehead and enveloped her face. The austerities of this life had left dark, bruised circles around her eyes, which at moments still sent out feverish rays, their usual calm merely a veil. In brief, all that remained of this woman was her soul.

“Ah! You shall leave this tomb, you have become my very life! You belong to me and were not free to give yourself, even to God. Did you not promise me to sacrifice everything at my slightest demand? Perhaps now you will find me worthy of this promise when you learn what I have done for you. I have sought you across the world. For five years, you have been in my thoughts every moment, my sole occupation. My friends, very powerful friends, as you know, have helped me with all their might to search through every convent in France, Italy, Spain, Sicily, and America. My love burned brighter with every vain search; I often made long journeys on a false hope; I have spent my life and the strongest throbbing of my heart beneath the dark walls of many cloisters. I am not speaking to you about unlimited fidelity—what is that? Nothing compared to the infinite longings of my love. If your remorse has been sincere, you must not hesitate to follow me today.”

“You forget that I am not free.”

“The duke is dead,” he answered quickly.

Sister Theresa blushed.

“May heaven be open to him,” she said with vivid feeling. “He was generous to me. But I was not speaking of such ties. One of my sins was wanting to break them all, without scruple, for you.”

“You are speaking of your vows,” cried the general, frowning. “I did not think that anything weighed in your heart but your love. Yet have no doubts, Antoinette, I will obtain a writ from the Holy Father to absolve your vows. I will go to Rome, certainly, to beg all the powers on earth. And if God could come down from heaven, I—”

“Do not commit blasphemy.”

“Do not worry about God! Oh, I would love you even more if you would breach these walls for me, if this very evening you would hurl yourself into a boat below the rocks. We would go and be happy together, somewhere at the end of the world! And with me at your side, you would come back to life and health, under the wings of love.”

“You must not talk like that,” Sister Theresa went on. “You do not know what you have become for me. I love you much more than I ever did. I pray to God every day for you, and I no longer see you with the body’s eyes. If you knew, Armand, the happiness of being able to surrender without shame to a pure friendship watched over by God! You do not know how happy I am to pray for heaven’s blessings on you. I never pray for myself: God will treat me according to His will. But even at the cost of my eternal life I would like to be sure that you are happy in this world, and that you will be happy in the next for all the centuries to come. My eternal life is all that wretchedness has left me to offer you. Now I am aged by tears, I am neither young nor beautiful; besides, you would have contempt for a nun who became a wife, whom no feeling, not even maternal love, would absolve . . . What can you say to outweigh the innumerable reflections accumulated in my heart for five years, thoughts that have changed it, hollowed it, withered it? I should have made a less sorrowful gift to God!”

“What can I say, my dear Antoinette! I can say that I love you, that the affection, the love, a true love, the joy of living in a heart wholly ours, entirely ours, without reservation, is so rare a thing and so difficult that I doubted you, that I made you endure the harshest trials. But today I love you with all my soul’s strength . . . If you follow me away from here, I will hear no voice but yours, I will see no other face—”

“Silence, Armand! You are cutting short the only moment we will be allowed in each other’s presence here below.”

“Antoinette, will you follow me?”

“But I am not leaving you. I live in your heart, not through an interest in worldly pleasures, vanity, selfish joy; I live here for you, pale and withered, in the bosom of God! If He is just, you will be happy—”

“All that is nothing but words! Pale and withered? And what if I want you and can be happy only by having you? Will you always know your duties, then, in your lover’s presence? Does he not come first in your heart? Earlier you preferred society, yourself, who knows what else; now, it is God, it is my salvation. In Sister Theresa I can still see the duchess, ignorant of the pleasures of love and still insensitive under the guise of feeling. You do not love me, you have never loved—”

“Ah, my brother—”

“You do not want to leave this tomb, you love my soul, you say? Ah well, you will lose it forever, this soul, I shall kill myself—”

“My mother,” cried Sister Theresa in Spanish, “I lied to you, this man is my lover!”

The curtain fell instantly. The general, stupefied, scarcely heard the interior doors slam shut.

“Ah! She still loves me!” he cried to himself, understanding the sublimity in the nun’s cry. “She must be carried away from here . . .”

The general left the island, returned to headquarters, asked for leave—citing reasons of poor health—and returned promptly to France.

Here now is the adventure that lay behind the situation of the two persons in this scene.

2.
LOVE IN A FASHIONABLE PARISH

What is called in France the Faubourg Saint-Germain is neither a quarter of Paris nor a sect nor an institution, nor anything that can be precisely defined. There are great houses in the Place Royale, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the Chaussée d’Antin where people breathe the same air as in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. So the Faubourg is not entirely within the Faubourg. People born far from its influence can feel it and are attracted to this world, while certain others who are born there can be forever banished from it. For approximately forty years now, the manners, speech, in brief the tradition of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris has played the role formerly taken by the court; the Hôtel Saint Paul did the same in the fourteenth century, the Louvre in the fifteenth, the Palace, the Hôtel Rambouillet, the Place Royale in the sixteenth, then Versailles in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.

In every period of history, the Paris of the upper class and the nobility has had its center, just as the people’s Paris always has its own. This periodic phenomenon offers ample reflection to those who would observe or depict the various social zones, and perhaps any inquiry into the causes of this centralization not only justifies the character of this episode but also serves serious interests, more pressing in the future than in the present, unless experience is as meaningless for the political parties as it is for the young.

In every era, the great lords, and rich people who will always ape the great lords, have kept their houses far from the more crowded parts of town. When the Duc d’Uzès, under the reign of Louis XIV, built his beautiful residence and put a fountain at the door on rue Montmartre—an act of benevolence that made him, in addition to his virtues, the object of such popular veneration that the entire quarter followed his funeral cortege en masse—this corner of Paris was deserted. But as soon as the fortifications came down and the marshes beyond the boulevards were filled with houses, the d’Uzès family left this fine residence, which is occupied in our day by a banker. Then the nobility, out of their element in the midst of shops, abandoned the Place Royale and the center of Paris, and crossed the river in order to breathe at their ease in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where palaces had already risen around the private residence built by Louis XIV for the Duc du Maine, this favorite among the bastards whom he legitimated. For people accustomed to the splendors of life, is there indeed anything more unseemly than the tumult, the mud, the shouting, the bad smells and narrow streets of the populous quarters? The habits of a trade or manufacturing district are completely at odds with the customs of the great. Commerce and Labor retire to bed just as the aristocracy is about to dine; the shopkeepers and artisans come noisily to life when the nobility and the wealthy have gone to sleep. Their calculations never coincide—the lower classes count their receipts, the nobility spare no expense. As a result, customs and manners are diametrically opposed.

No contempt is implied by this observation. An aristocracy is in a way the intellect of a society, just as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are its organism and action. It follows that these forces are differently situated, and from their antagonism comes a seeming antipathy produced by the performance of different functions—all, however, for the common good. This social discord is so logically the outcome of every constitutional charter that any liberal inclined to complain about it as an attack against the sublime ideas under which ambitious members of the inferior classes conceal their designs, would find it highly ridiculous for Monsieur le Prince de Montmorency to live on rue Saint-Martin, at the corner of the street that bears his name, or for Monsieur le Duc de Fitz James, descendant of the royal Scots race, to have his private mansion on rue Marie Stuart, at the corner of rue Montorgueil.
Sint ut sunt, aut non sint—
“Let them be what they are, or let them not be”
—
these fine pontifical words can serve as a motto for the great of every country.