Paul Bourget

“ I am a grand seigneur, you say. Say rather a pariah, before whom so many avenues were closed, when he was twenty years old, because he is called by that great name; and the woman he loves won't have him because of it! Ah! how truly I shall have known and lived the tragedy of the noble,—since my evil fate decrees that I am a noble,—that paralysis of the youthful being, quivering with life, hungry for action, because of a past which was not his own, suffocation by prejudices which he does not even share.—Valentine, say that you do not love me. ”

“ To have conceived that ghastly suspicion, that certainty, alas! concerning Madame de Claviers and his own birth, was such a disgrace to begin with! To put that idea in words, even to Valentine, especially to Valentine, would be a crime! The affection of a son for his mother bears so sacred a character, all the loving energies of our being combine so powerfully to make her a creature apart from all others, purer, more irreproachable, more venerable! Was Landri to overstep the bounds of that respect which he alone could never cease to feel for Madame de Claviers, whatever she might have done? ”

“ Handsome, intellectual, generous, affectionate, entertaining, so kindly-natured and so perfect a type of the grand seigneur, the "Émigré" had prestige, he had charm, and he had been subjected to the atrocious outrage! That infamous deed provoked an outburst of revolt from the son of the culprit.
"How could any one betray such a man? And prefer to him—whom? O mother! mother!"
Landri was alone now. He could give free vent to the emotion that was suffocating him. Lying prone on the cushions of the carriage, he wept at last, and for a long, long while. ”

“ This sentiment alone would have deterred Landri from questioning his sweetheart, even if he had not felt a sort of spasm of horror at the thought of accusing his mother to her. Silence is the pious charity of the son to whom reverence is forbidden. And then, too, even if he had essayed to speak, the young woman would have arrested the blasphemous words on his lips.
He had no sooner crossed the threshold of the little salon on Rue Monsieur, where she awaited him, than from the glance with which she greeted him he became aware that she too dreaded a painful explanation. ”

“ The Claviers-Grandchamps will die with me, and it is better so. They will die as all the great families of France are dying, one after another. We are passing away, like the old monarchy that made us and that we made. But there will be no stain on the shield. I shall know how to make a fitting end.—And now," he added after a pause, in the tone of one who has made up his mind, manfully, and will lament no more, "let us part. At what time does your boat sail?"
"At half-past four," said Landri.
"It is nearly four," exclaimed the marquis. "You must go aboard. Adieu!" ”

“ He escaped at last, while Landri said to the horrified Pierre, who no longer needed to have any one tell him the truth about his father:—
"Follow him. Do not leave him alone."
"You're afraid that he'll kill himself," said M. de Claviers, when the door had closed on the two men. "I suppose that he played that comedy for you," he continued with a bitter smile. "It is not he, but his son, who should not be left alone. Cowards live. It's the men of courage who think of suicide in the presence of disgrace. And when one does not believe in God! ”

“ Her union with a man older than herself, arranged by her family, had not caused her to know that total revolution of her existence, after which a woman is truly woman. With her, affection had never been anything more than imaginary. In the chaste and artless delights of this intimacy, without caresses or definite words, with a young man by whom nevertheless she knew that she was loved, and whom she loved, she had found the only pleasure which her sensibility, still altogether mental, could conceive. ”

“ At all events, that was the ghastly fact that Chaffin had grasped amid the sick man's divagations, as Landri himself had done; and, at this additional evidence, he felt an icy chill run through his whole body.
When a man is suddenly brought face to face with a fact of supremely tragic importance to him, which he cannot honestly doubt, and of which he had no previous suspicion, an interval of semi-stupefaction succeeds, of brief duration, during which he could not himself say what his sensations are. It is not grief, for the man does not comprehend what he has just learned. ”

“ Between those children who found at their humble fireside no reason for aught save respect,—and another child? Why had not his own mother understood the man whose name she bore? Why had she betrayed him? Why was a son born of that treachery? And why was not that son, who knew nothing of that horror for so many years, left in ignorance forever? Upon what trivial chances our destinies depend! Suppose that the train from Clermont had reached Paris an hour late yesterday? Doubtless Landri would have found the invalid of Rue de Solferino unconscious. The physician would not have let him in. ”

“ But once more Valentine had the miraculous double sight of love. She had appealed to the only sentiment in that suffering heart which could assist him to live through the far too trying period that was to precede the ostensible rupture with the marquis. He could find the requisite strength only in his passionate craving to prove to him the depth of an affection which had never been more intensely alive. ”

“ I am not a Claviers-Grandchamp, I am not a noble. The things that are valuable to them have no value to the son of a Jaubourg! He talked to me about honor! Honor! To me! But what I ought most of all to long for, is to be mixed up in one of these affairs, to have to execute an order contrary to all his ideas, and to act as I had made up my mind to act—before. He will curse me? ”

“ Again, as in the ride at the head of his dragoons to Hugueville-en-Plaine, he seemed to see him and only him—only him on the railway platform, where very few of his friends had the courage to come to bid him adieu; only him in the carriage, where, lulled by the monotonous rumbling of the train, he tried to imagine the words he was about to hear and those that he would say in reply, endlessly and anxiously; only him, finally, in Paris, where, as he stood in Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, before the door of their house, his suffering acquired fresh intensity. ”

“ She is the one, do you hear, she is the one who will not allow it. I know you, my Landri," continued the father, in an affectionate tone in striking contrast to the evident inflexibility of his decision. "For you to love this woman so dearly, she must be very pure and of a very delicate sense of honor. It was she who insisted that you should speak to me before she gave you her answer, was it not? Such a woman will never consent to marry you against your father's declared wish. If she were not magnanimous and high-minded to that degree, you would not love her." ”

“ A phrase so simple, yet of such deep meaning, which sums up in itself the whole miracle of love, because it is love! To cease to be one's self, to transform one's self into the ideas, the wishes of another, to become whatsoever he wills, contrary to self-interest, to prudence, sometimes to honor—so that he may be happy! And the man whom Valentine loved wanted nothing from her which she had not the right to give him without remorse. ”

“ The world, having known nothing of what has happened, would not know of the secret compact between us. People would say: 'Claviers is crazy. It wasn't worth while to make such an outcry, only to give way finally.'—What do I care? I should have you. You would close my eyes."
"No," the young man replied with extraordinary decision, "it is impossible. One adopts a stranger, a kinsman, but not one like me." Lowering his eyes, the child of sin repeated: "Not one like me! At this moment it is your affection that is stirring and that speaks, not your mind. ”

“ In consenting, as he had done, to entrust Landri's education to a chance tutor, M. de Claviers had conformed once more to the classic type of the Grand Seigneur. One is amazed at the extraordinary facility with which, in all times, people who bear the greatest names abandon their children to uncertain influences. Even princes are no more painstaking in this respect. A youth upon whom the future of an empire depends will sometimes have been educated by a withered fruit of the University, comparable for refinement to the Regent's Dubois! ”

“ If she loves you for yourself, she ought not to think of it, either. In the first place, Claviers will never consent. And secondly you must be rich. I want you to be rich—I want it.—You don't understand. You must not understand.—Ah! I have always loved you so dearly, you know, Landri, and I have never been able to show it. It was my duty not to. It's my duty now.—My head is getting confused again, like yesterday.—But I don't want—I don't want—No. No. No. I won't say anything.—Go away, Joseph. Go away, Chaffin. They're looking at me. They shall not know. They shall not know.—My Landri! ”

“ He realized that, before they disappear, the social species like the animal species spend their last vigor in producing most perfect types in which all the excellences of all that have gone before are consummated. Once more Landri had a realizing sense of the superiority of that man who, for lack of a suitable environment, had spent his long life in attitudinizing, and for motives so profound, so blended with the most generous idealism! He was too intelligent not to understand the bearing of the lofty philosophy amassed by M. de Claviers in his solemn harangue. ”

“ In the eyes of a man in love, the profile of his mistress, espied in the cage of an elevator, would bedeck with poesy and fascination the staircase of one of those monstrosities in brick and steel which the Americans brutally call "sky-scrapers." All the same, there is a more intimate, a more penetrating sweetness in a perfect accord between the setting in which a woman lives and the passion that she inspires. This sweetness Landri de Claviers had ecstatically intoxicated himself with in all his visits to that hermitage on Rue Monsieur. ”

“ Whom are you referring to?"
"To that Madame Olier," said Jaubourg. "Oh! Landri, not those eyes, not that voice! I can't stand that!—Look you,—I say nothing against her. I know that no one ever spoke ill of her. But at Saint-Mihiel you saw her constantly—I know that. She is a widow. I know that too, and where she lives. I should have found a way to know her, if it had been necessary. I know everything that concerns you, you see. I have always found a way to know it, day by day, ever since you were born. You mustn't think of marrying her. ”

“ If he lasts two or three days, the skies will fall! He was very particular to tell me not to show myself, so that Monsieur le Marquis should not know of my coming. He was afraid of disturbing him too much. However, here I am."
"Tell Monsieur Jaubourg I will come to-morrow at eleven o'clock," replied Landri. The care taken by a dying man to spare his old friend a pang touched him. He felt the delicacy of it all the more keenly because his heart was frozen, as it were, by the deferential brutality of formal respect, so cruel in reality, of his former tutor. ”

“ Love is the engrossing occupation of such coteries of luxury and pomp and pleasure. Madame de Claviers was very pretty. She was romantic, too. The stern and manly poesy of the marquis's nature did not satisfy a sentimentalism to which a nature more complex, more subtle, more corrupt perhaps, had appealed more strongly. And Landri was born of that sin, inevitable and deplorable. But what a crying shame that a man of so noble and rare a soul should have been made a mock of at his own fireside! ”

“ Landri de Claviers' conduct has nothing to do with it. The change in you that I have noticed these last weeks has given them to me, nothing else. Since you left Grandchamp you are not the same man. I see it with my eyes. I see that you are suffering. You are growing thin. You don't eat. You don't sleep. You have some persistent trouble that you cannot hide, and I too am beginning to have one, I feel it growing and taking possession of me—it is suspicion. I do not want it. We must not both play at madness. Let us have more pride. A father and son should not exchange such words as these twice. ”

“ The lover's son recognized therein everything—the heedless, but lofty-minded security of the nobleman; the loyalty which, having placed his honor in the hands of his wife and his friend, had distrusted neither; the wiles of the wife, and the seductive charm of the friend; and, too, the explanation, if not the excuse of their sin. That life of parade and magnificence, in which the "Émigré" had swallowed up his fortune that the glory of the name of Claviers-Grandchamp might not fade, he had not been able to lead without an accompaniment of idle associates. ”

“ If we are fated never to be wanted again, let us at least make a noble end. Decenter mori. An aristocrat should either remain an aristocrat or die. I have remained one. The misfortunes of the time have not allowed me to add a page to the history of the Claviers-Grandchamps, but I have written that history, and I have maintained our house in its place. I have sounded the splendor of the name, as our ancestors said. What more can I say, Landri? ”

“ M. de Claviers had aged, within the last few weeks, as much as his ex-secretary. But it was the aging of a man consumed by grief without remorse,—the despair, with undimmed eyes, of him who has naught to blame himself for in the suffering that is killing him; whereas Chaffin had exhibited to his son the mask of the unhappy wretch with sombre, veiled glance, the conscious architect of his own misery. This comparison shaped itself involuntarily in the physician's mind, as he was saying:—
"You will excuse me for disturbing you. Monsieur le Marquis, and at such an early hour. ”

“ I appeal to you yourself, to the head of the family, whom I have always known as so unyielding, so irreconcilable, so hostile to any compromise."
"You are right," said M. de Claviers in a broken voice. "The Spirit is strong and the Heart is weak! Let us say adieu then, Landri. If I miss you too much, and if I live, nothing will prevent my joining you, wherever you may be. And if I do not live!" ”

“ The same impression of Necessity, of a network of events woven by a will stronger than his own, haunted Landri throughout that evening, which he was able to pass alone, by good luck, M. de Claviers having gone to Grandchamp. He found it on his pillow when he awoke, still pursued by the image of that young man with whom he had played as a child, and whom he saw as he had left him, pale and motionless in the grasp of that horrible thought: "My father is a thief." As he said to himself at Saint-Mihiel, "If the Clermont train had only been late!" ”

“ They said no more, listening intently to the faintest sounds on the staircase, echoing with the hurried footsteps of the guests of the hotel, where people live after the fashion of a railway station—between the swift ocean steamers like the Cambria, and the boat-trains—"specials" as they are called in England—that run constantly from Liverpool to London and from London to Liverpool. At every such sound Landri had a convulsive shudder which Valentine soothed with a warmer pressure. ”

“ Not for nothing do you call him the 'Émigré.' So many times you have exerted yourself to prove to me that he is not a man of our time; that he has the pride, the religious veneration of his race and of old France. And such a man would consent that his heir, the only survivor of his four sons, should take for his wife the widow of an officer who was the son of a physician, herself the daughter of a provincial notary, who, before she became Madame Olier, bore the name of Mademoiselle Barral? ”

“ I have no pride, either. I withdraw that also. As you will pass through Paris again to-morrow, returning to Saint-Mihiel, come again to see me. I shall have reflected meanwhile. I shall be in a condition to answer otherwise than under the impulse of an emotion which discomposes me. Oh! why, in all the talks we have had together in these last three years, have you never told me so much about all these intimate details of your life? I would have helped you—I would have tried, at all events."
"That is another of the misfortunes of the noble," Landri replied. ”

“ The other, clever Marie de Charlus, carried her jovial humor to ever greater lengths as the dinner proceeded. She realized that she did not exist, so far as Landri was concerned, and she yielded to the instinct that has ruined the happiness of so many love-lorn women: to make an impression at any cost on the man they love, and to disgust him rather than not be noticed at all by him. Ascribing her conduct to the atmosphere, she began to run through a long list of satirical sobriquets, such as it was the fashion in Paris, last winter, to distribute at random. ”

“ I say nothing of the bond that binds together the members of the same family, in order not to return to that question of the name, although bourgeois and nobles are equal when the common honor is involved. You owe it to him from respect for his noble heart. He loves you. A determination so opposed to his wishes is likely to cause him very deep sorrow. He must not learn it first from another than you, so that he may not misconstrue your motives. ”

“ If you could have heard the remarks that were made about you when you came to Saint-Mihiel, you would appreciate more justly the value of that name which you all but blasphemed just now—and for what reason? I heard those remarks, and I am still proud for you. 'He's the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, and he works! He'll have three hundred thousand francs a year and he passed his examinations brilliantly! He's a good fellow. He treats people well. He has all the qualities of a leader of men.'—You call nobles pariahs, because they arouse much envy. ”

“ I suppose?"
"I shall have to," replied Landri, "if you do not give your consent."
He realized that he was lost if he yielded to the emotion with which that plaint, so affectionate in its manly simplicity, had filled his heart anew. This constant laying bare to the quick of his sensitive nature by that man's mere presence proved to him once more how necessary it was that he should muster energy to complete the rupture. He loved him, he revered him too deeply to be able to live in falsehood with him.
"My consent?" echoed the marquis, and his anger flared up once more. "Never! No, never! ”