The Lily of the Valley

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This slight sketch of my boyhood, in which you, Natalie, can readily
perceive innumerable songs of woe, was needful to explain to you its
influence on my future life. At twenty years of age, and affected by
many morbid elements, I was still small and thin and pale. My soul,
filled with the will to do, struggled with a body that seemed weakly,
but which, in the words of an old physician at Tours, was undergoing
its final fusion into a temperament of iron. Child in body and old in
mind, I had read and thought so much that I knew life metaphysically
at its highest reaches at the moment when I was about to enter the
tortuous difficulties of its defiles and the sandy roads of its
plains. A strange chance had held me long in that delightful period
when the soul awakes to its first tumults, to its desires for joy, and
the savor of life is fresh. I stood in the period between puberty and
manhood,--the one prolonged by my excessive study, the other tardily
developing its living shoots. No young man was ever more thoroughly
prepared to feel and to love. To understand my history, let your mind
dwell on that pure time of youth when the mouth is innocent of
falsehood; when the glance of the eye is honest, though veiled by lids
which droop from timidity contradicting desire; when the soul bends
not to worldly Jesuitism, and the heart throbs as violently from
trepidation as from the generous impulses of young emotion.

I need say nothing of the journey I made with my mother from Paris to
Tours. The coldness of her behavior repressed me. At each relay I
tried to speak; but a look, a word from her frightened away the
speeches I had been meditating. At Orleans, where we had passed the
night, my mother complained of my silence. I threw myself at her feet
and clasped her knees; with tears I opened my heart. I tried to touch
hers by the eloquence of my hungry love in accents that might have
moved a stepmother. She replied that I was playing comedy. I
complained that she had abandoned me. She called me an unnatural
child. My whole nature was so wrung that at Blois I went upon the
bridge to drown myself in the Loire. The height of the parapet
prevented my suicide.

When I reached home, my two sisters, who did not know me, showed more
surprise than tenderness. Afterwards, however, they seemed, by
comparison, to be full of kindness towards me. I was given a room on
the third story. You will understand the extent of my hardships when I
tell you that my mother left me, a young man of twenty, without other
linen than my miserable school outfit, or any other outside clothes
than those I had long worn in Paris. If I ran from one end of the room
to the other to pick up her handkerchief, she took it with the cold
thanks a lady gives to her footman. Driven to watch her to find if
there were any soft spot where I could fasten the rootlets of
affection, I came to see her as she was,--a tall, spare woman, given
to cards, egotistical and insolent, like all the Listomeres, who count
insolence as part of their dowry. She saw nothing in life except
duties to be fulfilled. All cold women whom I have known made, as she
did, a religion of duty; she received our homage as a priest receives
the incense of the mass. My elder brother appeared to absorb the
trifling sentiment of maternity which was in her nature. She stabbed
us constantly with her sharp irony,--the weapon of those who have no
heart,--and which she used against us, who could make her no reply.

Notwithstanding these thorny hindrances, the instinctive sentiments
have so many roots, the religious fear inspired by a mother whom it is
dangerous to displease holds by so many threads, that the sublime
mistake--if I may so call it--of our love for our mother lasted until
the day, much later in our lives, when we judged her finally. This
terrible despotism drove from my mind all thoughts of the voluptuous
enjoyments I had dreamed of finding at Tours. In despair I took refuge
in my father's library, where I set myself to read every book I did
not know. These long periods of hard study saved me from contact with
my mother; but they aggravated the dangers of my moral condition.
Sometimes my eldest sister--she who afterwards married our cousin, the
Marquis de Listomere--tried to comfort me, without, however, being
able to calm the irritation to which I was a victim. I desired to die.

Great events, of which I knew nothing, were then in preparation. The
Duc d'Angouleme, who had left Bordeaux to join Louis XVIII. in Paris,
was received in every town through which he passed with ovations
inspired by the enthusiasm felt throughout old France at the return of
the Bourbons. Touraine was aroused for its legitimate princes; the
town itself was in a flutter, every window decorated, the inhabitants
in their Sunday clothes, a festival in preparation, and that nameless
excitement in the air which intoxicates, and which gave me a strong
desire to be present at the ball given by the duke. When I summoned
courage to make this request of my mother, who was too ill to go
herself, she became extremely angry. "Had I come from Congo?" she
inquired. "How could I suppose that our family would not be
represented at the ball? In the absence of my father and brother, of
course it was my duty to be present. Had I no mother? Was she not
always thinking of the welfare of her children?"

In a moment the semi-disinherited son had become a personage! I was
more dumfounded by my importance than by the deluge of ironical
reasoning with which my mother received my request. I questioned my
sisters, and then discovered that my mother, who liked such theatrical
plots, was already attending to my clothes. The tailors in Tours were
fully occupied by the sudden demands of their regular customers, and
my mother was forced to employ her usual seamstress, who--according to
provincial custom--could do all kinds of sewing. A bottle-blue coat
had been secretly made for me, after a fashion, and silk stockings and
pumps provided; waistcoats were then worn short, so that I could wear
one of my father's; and for the first time in my life I had a shirt
with a frill, the pleatings of which puffed out my chest and were
gathered in to the knot of my cravat. When dressed in this apparel I
looked so little like myself that my sister's compliments nerved me to
face all Touraine at the ball. But it was a bold enterprise. Thanks to
my slimness I slipped into a tent set up in the gardens of the Papion
house, and found a place close to the armchair in which the duke was
seated. Instantly I was suffocated by the heat, and dazzled by the
lights, the scarlet draperies, the gilded ornaments, the dresses, and
the diamonds of the first public ball I had ever witnessed. I was
pushed hither and thither by a mass of men and women, who hustled each
other in a cloud of dust. The brazen clash of military music was
drowned in the hurrahs and acclamations of "Long live the Duc
d'Angouleme! Long live the King! Long live the Bourbons!" The ball was
an outburst of pent-up enthusiasm, where each man endeavored to outdo
the rest in his fierce haste to worship the rising sun,--an exhibition
of partisan greed which left me unmoved, or rather, it disgusted me
and drove me back within myself.

Swept onward like a straw in the whirlwind, I was seized with a
childish desire to be the Duc d'Angouleme himself, to be one of these
princes parading before an awed assemblage. This silly fancy of a
Tourangean lad roused an ambition to which my nature and the
surrounding circumstances lent dignity. Who would not envy such
worship?--a magnificent repetition of which I saw a few months later,
when all Paris rushed to the feet of the Emperor on his return from
Elba. The sense of this dominion exercised over the masses, whose
feelings and whose very life are thus merged into one soul, dedicated
me then and thenceforth to glory, that priestess who slaughters the
Frenchmen of to-day as the Druidess once sacrificed the Gauls.

Suddenly I met the woman who was destined to spur these ambitious
desires and to crown them by sending me into the heart of royalty. Too
timid to ask any one to dance,--fearing, moreover, to confuse the
figures,--I naturally became very awkward, and did not know what to do
with my arms and legs. Just as I was suffering severely from the
pressure of the crowd an officer stepped on my feet, swollen by the
new leather of my shoes as well as by the heat. This disgusted me with
the whole affair. It was impossible to get away; but I took refuge in
a corner of a room at the end of an empty bench, where I sat with
fixed eyes, motionless and sullen. Misled by my puny appearance, a
woman--taking me for a sleepy child--slid softly into the place beside
me, with the motion of a bird as she drops upon her nest. Instantly I
breathed the woman-atmosphere, which irradiated my soul as, in after
days, oriental poesy has shone there. I looked at my neighbor, and was
more dazzled by that vision than I had been by the scene of the fete.

If you have understood this history of my early life you will guess
the feelings which now welled up within me. My eyes rested suddenly
on white, rounded shoulders where I would fain have laid my head,
--shoulders faintly rosy, which seemed to blush as if uncovered for
the first time; modest shoulders, that possessed a soul, and reflected
light from their satin surface as from a silken texture. These
shoulders were parted by a line along which my eyes wandered. I raised
myself to see the bust and was spell-bound by the beauty of the bosom,
chastely covered with gauze, where blue-veined globes of perfect
outline were softly hidden in waves of lace. The slightest details of
the head were each and all enchantments which awakened infinite
delights within me; the brilliancy of the hair laid smoothly above a
neck as soft and velvety as a child's, the white lines drawn by the
comb where my imagination ran as along a dewy path,--all these things
put me, as it were, beside myself. Glancing round to be sure that no
one saw me, I threw myself upon those shoulders as a child upon the
breast of its mother, kissing them as I laid my head there. The woman
uttered a piercing cry, which the noise of the music drowned; she
turned, saw me, and exclaimed, "Monsieur!" Ah! had she said, "My
little lad, what possesses you?" I might have killed her; but at the
word "Monsieur!" hot tears fell from my eyes. I was petrified by a
glance of saintly anger, by a noble face crowned with a diadem of
golden hair in harmony with the shoulders I adored. The crimson of
offended modesty glowed on her cheeks, though already it was appeased
by the pardoning instinct of a woman who comprehends a frenzy which
she inspires, and divines the infinite adoration of those repentant
tears. She moved away with the step and carriage of a queen.

I then felt the ridicule of my position; for the first time I realized
that I was dressed like the monkey of a barrel organ. I was ashamed.
There I stood, stupefied,--tasting the fruit that I had stolen,
conscious of the warmth upon my lips, repenting not, and following
with my eyes the woman who had come down to me from heaven. Sick with
the first fever of the heart I wandered through the rooms, unable to
find mine Unknown, until at last I went home to bed, another man.

A new soul, a soul with rainbow wings, had burst its chrysalis.
Descending from the azure wastes where I had long admired her, my star
had come to me a woman, with undiminished lustre and purity. I loved,
knowing naught of love. How strange a thing, this first irruption of
the keenest human emotion in the heart of a man! I had seen pretty
women in other places, but none had made the slightest impression upon
me. Can there be an appointed hour, a conjunction of stars, a union of
circumstances, a certain woman among all others to awaken an exclusive
passion at the period of life when love includes the whole sex?

The thought that my Elect lived in Touraine made the air I breathed
delicious; the blue of the sky seemed bluer than I had ever yet seen
it. I raved internally, but externally I was seriously ill, and my
mother had fears, not unmingled with remorse. Like animals who know
when danger is near, I hid myself away in the garden to think of the
kiss that I had stolen. A few days after this memorable ball my mother
attributed my neglect of study, my indifference to her tyrannical
looks and sarcasms, and my gloomy behavior to the condition of my
health. The country, that perpetual remedy for ills that doctors
cannot cure, seemed to her the best means of bringing me out of my
apathy. She decided that I should spend a few weeks at Frapesle, a
chateau on the Indre midway between Montbazon and Azay-le-Rideau,
which belonged to a friend of hers, to whom, no doubt, she gave
private instructions.

By the day when I thus for the first time gained my liberty I had swum
so vigorously in Love's ocean that I had well-nigh crossed it. I knew
nothing of mine unknown lady, neither her name, nor where to find her;
to whom, indeed, could I speak of her? My sensitive nature so
exaggerated the inexplicable fears which beset all youthful hearts at
the first approach of love that I began with the melancholy which
often ends a hopeless passion. I asked nothing better than to roam
about the country, to come and go and live in the fields. With the
courage of a child that fears no failure, in which there is something
really chivalrous, I determined to search every chateau in Touraine,
travelling on foot, and saying to myself as each old tower came in
sight, "She is there!"

Accordingly, of a Thursday morning I left Tours by the barrier of
Saint-Eloy, crossed the bridges of Saint-Sauveur, reached Poncher
whose every house I examined, and took the road to Chinon. For the
first time in my life I could sit down under a tree or walk fast or
slow as I pleased without being dictated to by any one. To a poor lad
crushed under all sorts of despotism (which more or less does weigh
upon all youth) the first employment of freedom, even though it be
expended upon nothing, lifts the soul with irrepressible buoyancy.
Several reasons combined to make that day one of enchantment. During
my school years I had never been taken to walk more than two or three
miles from a city; yet there remained in my mind among the earliest
recollections of my childhood that feeling for the beautiful which the
scenery about Tours inspires. Though quite untaught as to the poetry
of such a landscape, I was, unknown to myself, critical upon it, like
those who imagine the ideal of art without knowing anything of its
practice.

To reach the chateau of Frapesle, foot-passengers, or those on
horseback, shorten the way by crossing the Charlemagne moors,
--uncultivated tracts of land lying on the summit of the plateau which
separates the valley of the Cher from that of the Indre, and over
which there is a cross-road leading to Champy. These moors are flat
and sandy, and for more than three miles are dreary enough until you
reach, through a clump of woods, the road to Sache, the name of the
township in which Frapesle stands. This road, which joins that of
Chinon beyond Ballan, skirts an undulating plain to the little hamlet
of Artanne. Here we come upon a valley, which begins at Montbazon,
ends at the Loire, and seems to rise and fall,--to bound, as it were,
--beneath the chateaus placed on its double hillsides,--a splendid
emerald cup, in the depths of which flow the serpentine lines of the
river Indre. I gazed at this scene with ineffable delight, for which
the gloomy moor-land and the fatigue of the sandy walk had prepared
me.

"If that woman, the flower of her sex, does indeed inhabit this earth,
she is here, on this spot."

Thus musing, I leaned against a walnut-tree, beneath which I have
rested from that day to this whenever I return to my dear valley.
Beneath that tree, the confidant of my thoughts, I ask myself what
changes there are in me since last I stood there.

My heart deceived me not--she lived there; the first castle that I saw
on the slope of a hill was the dwelling that held her. As I sat
beneath my nut-tree, the mid-day sun was sparkling on the slates of
her roof and the panes of her windows. Her cambric dress made the
white line which I saw among the vines of an arbor. She was, as you
know already without as yet knowing anything, the Lily of this valley,
where she grew for heaven, filling it with the fragrance of her
virtues. Love, infinite love, without other sustenance than the
vision, dimly seen, of which my soul was full, was there, expressed to
me by that long ribbon of water flowing in the sunshine between the
grass-green banks, by the lines of the poplars adorning with their
mobile laces that vale of love, by the oak-woods coming down between
the vineyards to the shore, which the river curved and rounded as it
chose, and by those dim varying horizons as they fled confusedly away.

If you would see nature beautiful and virgin as a bride, go there of a
spring morning. If you would still the bleeding wounds of your heart,
return in the last days of autumn. In the spring, Love beats his wings
beneath the broad blue sky; in the autumn, we think of those who are
no more. The lungs diseased breathe in a blessed purity; the eyes will
rest on golden copses which impart to the soul their peaceful
stillness. At this moment, when I stood there for the first time, the
mills upon the brooksides gave a voice to the quivering valley; the
poplars were laughing as they swayed; not a cloud was in the sky; the
birds sang, the crickets chirped,--all was melody. Do not ask me again
why I love Touraine. I love it, not as we love our cradle, not as we
love the oasis in a desert; I love it as an artist loves art; I love
it less than I love you; but without Touraine, perhaps I might not now
be living.

Without knowing why, my eyes reverted ever to that white spot, to the
woman who shone in that garden as the bell of a convolvulus shines
amid the underbrush, and wilts if touched. Moved to the soul, I
descended the slope and soon saw a village, which the superabounding
poetry that filled my heart made me fancy without an equal. Imagine
three mills placed among islands of graceful outline crowned with
groves of trees and rising from a field of water,--for what other name
can I give to that aquatic vegetation, so verdant, so finely colored,
which carpeted the river, rose above its surface and undulated upon
it, yielding to its caprices and swaying to the turmoil of the water
when the mill-wheels lashed it. Here and there were mounds of gravel,
against which the wavelets broke in fringes that shimmered in the
sunlight. Amaryllis, water-lilies, reeds, and phloxes decorated the
banks with their glorious tapestry. A trembling bridge of rotten
planks, the abutments swathed with flowers, and the hand-rails green
with perennials and velvet mosses drooping to the river but not
falling to it; mouldering boats, fishing-nets; the monotonous
sing-song of a shepherd; ducks paddling among the islands or preening
on the "jard,"--a name given to the coarse sand which the Loire brings
down; the millers, with their caps over one ear, busily loading their
mules,--all these details made the scene before me one of primitive
simplicity. Imagine, also, beyond the bridge two or three farm-houses,
a dove-cote, turtle-doves, thirty or more dilapidated cottages,
separated by gardens, by hedges of honeysuckle, clematis, and jasmine;
a dunghill beside each door, and cocks and hens about the road. Such
is the village of Pont-de-Ruan, a picturesque little hamlet leading up
to an old church full of character, a church of the days of the
Crusades, such a one as painters desire for their pictures. Surround
this scene with ancient walnut-trees and slim young poplars with their
pale-gold leaves; dot graceful buildings here and there along the
grassy slopes where sight is lost beneath the vaporous, warm sky, and
you will have some idea of one of the points of view of this most
lovely region.

I followed the road to Sache along the left bank of the river,
noticing carefully the details of the hills on the opposite shore. At
length I reached a park embellished with centennial trees, which I
knew to be that of Frapesle. I arrived just as the bell was ringing
for breakfast. After the meal, my host, who little suspected that I
had walked from Tours, carried me over his estate, from the borders of
which I saw the valley on all sides under its many aspects,--here
through a vista, there to its broad extent; often my eyes were drawn
to the horizon along the golden blade of the Loire, where the sails
made fantastic figures among the currents as they flew before the
wind. As we mounted a crest I came in sight of the chateau d'Azay,
like a diamond of many facets in a setting of the Indre, standing on
wooden piles concealed by flowers. Farther on, in a hollow, I saw the
romantic masses of the chateau of Sache, a sad retreat though full of
harmony; too sad for the superficial, but dear to a poet with a soul
in pain. I, too, came to love its silence, its great gnarled trees,
and the nameless mysterious influence of its solitary valley. But now,
each time that we reached an opening towards the neighboring slope
which gave to view the pretty castle I had first noticed in the
morning, I stopped to look at it with pleasure.

"Hey!" said my host, reading in my eyes the sparkling desires which
youth so ingenuously betrays, "so you scent from afar a pretty woman
as a dog scents game!"

I did not like the speech, but I asked the name of the castle and of
its owner.

"It is Clochegourde," he replied; "a pretty house belonging to the
Comte de Mortsauf, the head of an historic family in Touraine, whose
fortune dates from the days of Louis XI., and whose name tells the
story to which they owe their arms and their distinction. Monsieur de
Mortsauf is descended from a man who survived the gallows. The family
bear: Or, a cross potent and counter-potent sable, charged with a
fleur-de-lis or; and 'Dieu saulve le Roi notre Sire,' for motto. The
count settled here after the return of the emigration. The estate
belongs to his wife, a demoiselle de Lenoncourt, of the house of
Lenoncourt-Givry which is now dying out. Madame de Mortsauf is an only
daughter. The limited fortune of the family contrasts strangely with
the distinction of their names; either from pride, or, possibly, from
necessity, they never leave Clochegourde and see no company. Until now
their attachment to the Bourbons explained this retirement, but the
return of the king has not changed their way of living. When I came to
reside here last year I paid them a visit of courtesy; they returned
it and invited us to dinner; the winter separated us for some months,
and political events kept me away from Frapesle until recently. Madame
de Mortsauf is a woman who would hold the highest position wherever
she might be."

"Does she often come to Tours?"

"She never goes there. However," he added, correcting himself, "she
did go there lately to the ball given to the Duc d'Angouleme, who was
very gracious to her husband."

"It was she!" I exclaimed.

"She! who?"

"A woman with beautiful shoulders."

"You will meet a great many women with beautiful shoulders in
Touraine," he said, laughing. "But if you are not tired we can cross
the river and call at Clochegourde and you shall renew acquaintance
with those particular shoulders."

I agreed, not without a blush of shame and pleasure. About four
o'clock we reached the little chateau on which my eyes had fastened
from the first. The building, which is finely effective in the
landscape, is in reality very modest. It has five windows on the
front; those at each end of the facade, looking south, project about
twelve feet,--an architectural device which gives the idea of two
towers and adds grace to the structure. The middle window serves as a
door from which you descend through a double portico into a terraced
garden which joins the narrow strip of grass-land that skirts the
Indre along its whole course. Though this meadow is separated from the
lower terrace, which is shaded by a double line of acacias and
Japanese ailanthus, by the country road, it nevertheless appears from
the house to be a part of the garden, for the road is sunken and
hemmed in on one side by the terrace, on the other side by a Norman
hedge. The terraces being very well managed put enough distance
between the house and the river to avoid the inconvenience of too
great proximity to water, without losing the charms of it. Below the
house are the stables, coach-house, green-houses, and kitchen, the
various openings to which form an arcade. The roof is charmingly
rounded at the angles, and bears mansarde windows with carved mullions
and leaden finials on their gables. This roof, no doubt much neglected
during the Revolution, is stained by a sort of mildew produced by
lichens and the reddish moss which grows on houses exposed to the sun.
The glass door of the portico is surmounted by a little tower which
holds the bell, and on which is carved the escutcheon of the
Blamont-Chauvry family, to which Madame de Mortsauf belonged, as follows:
Gules, a pale vair, flanked quarterly by two hands clasped or, and two
lances in chevron sable. The motto, "Voyez tous, nul ne touche!"
struck me greatly. The supporters, a griffin and dragon gules,
enchained or, made a pretty effect in the carving. The Revolution has
damaged the ducal crown and the crest, which was a palm-tree vert with
fruit or. Senart, the secretary of the committee of public safety was
bailiff of Sache before 1781, which explains this destruction.