The Lily of the Valley, Honoré de Balzac [the little red hen read aloud TXT] 📗

regarded the tortures Monsieur de Mortsauf has inflicted on
me as expiations; I bore them proudly in condemnation of my faulty
desires. Formerly I was disposed to murmur at my life, but since
you entered it I have recovered some gaiety, and this has been the
better for the count. Without this strength, which I derived
through you, I should long since have succumbed to the inward life
of which I told you.

If you have counted for much in the exercise of my duty so have my
children also. I felt I had deprived them of something, and I
feared I could never do enough to make amends to them; my life was
thus a continual struggle which I loved. Feeling that I was less a
mother, less an honest wife, remorse entered my heart; fearing to
fail in my obligations, I constantly went beyond them. Often have
I put Madeleine between you and me, giving you to each other,
raising barriers between us,--barriers that were powerless! for
what could stifle the emotions which you caused me? Absent or
present, you had the same power. I preferred Madeleine to Jacques
because Madeleine was sometime to be yours. But I did not yield
you to my daughter without a struggle. I told myself that I was
only twenty-eight when I first met you, and you were nearly
twenty-two; I shortened the distance between us; I gave myself up
to delusive hopes. Oh, Felix! I tell you these things to save you
from remorse; also, perhaps, to show you that I was not cold and
insensible, that our sufferings were cruelly mutual; that Arabella
had no superiority of love over mine. I too am the daughter of a
fallen race, such as men love well.

There came a moment when the struggle was so terrible that I wept
the long nights through; my hair fell off,--you have it! Do you
remember the count's illness? Your nobility of soul far from
raising my soul belittled it. Alas! I dreamed of giving myself to
you some day as the reward of so much heroism; but the folly was a
brief one. I laid it at the feet of God during the mass that day
when you refused to be with me. Jacques' illness and Madeleine's
sufferings seemed to me the warnings of God calling back to Him
His lost sheep.

Then your love--which is so natural--for that Englishwoman
revealed to me secrets of which I had no knowledge. I loved you
better than I knew. The constant emotions of this stormy life, the
efforts that I made to subdue myself with no other succor than
that religion gave me, all, all has brought about the malady of
which I die. The terrible shocks I have undergone brought on
attacks about which I kept silence. I saw in death the sole
solution of this hidden tragedy. A lifetime of anger, jealousy,
and rage lay in those two months between the time my mother told
me of your relations with Lady Dudley, and your return to
Clochegourde. I wished to go to Paris; murder was in my heart; I
desired that woman's death; I was indifferent to my children.
Prayer, which had hitherto been to me a balm, was now without
influence on my soul. Jealousy made the breach through which death
has entered. And yet I have kept a placid brow. Yes, that period
of struggle was a secret between God and myself. After your return
and when I saw that I was loved, even as I loved you, that nature
had betrayed me and not your thought, I wished to live,--it was
then too late! God had taken me under His protection, filled no
doubt with pity for a being true with herself, true with Him,
whose sufferings had often led her to the gates of the sanctuary.

My beloved! God has judged me, Monsieur de Mortsauf will pardon
me, but you--will you be merciful? Will you listen to this voice
which now issues from my tomb? Will you repair the evils of which
we are equally guilty?--you, perhaps, less than I. You know what I
wish to ask of you. Be to Monsieur de Mortsauf what a sister of
charity is to a sick man; listen to him, love him--no one loves
him. Interpose between him and his children as I have done. Your
task will not be a long one. Jacques will soon leave home to be in
Paris near his grandfather, and you have long promised me to guide
him through the dangers of that life. As for Madeleine, she will
marry; I pray that you may please her. She is all myself, but
stronger; she has the will in which I am lacking; the energy
necessary for the companion of a man whose career destines him to
the storms of political life; she is clever and perceptive. If
your lives are united she will be happier than her mother. By
acquiring the right to continue my work at Clochegourde you will
blot out the faults I have not sufficiently expiated, though they
are pardoned in heaven and also on earth, for _he_ is generous and
will forgive me. You see I am ever selfish; is it not the proof of
a despotic love? I wish you to still love me in mine. Unable to be
yours in life, I bequeath to you my thoughts and also my duties.
If you do not wish to marry Madeleine you will at least seek the
repose of my soul by making Monsieur de Mortsauf as happy as he
ever can be.

Farewell, dear child of my heart; this is the farewell of a mind
absolutely sane, still full of life; the farewell of a spirit on
which thou hast shed too many and too great joys to suffer thee to
feel remorse for the catastrophe they have caused. I use that word
"catastrophe" thinking of you and how you love me; as for me, I
reach the haven of my rest, sacrificed to duty and not without
regret--ah! I tremble at that thought. God knows better than I
whether I have fulfilled his holy laws in accordance with their
spirit. Often, no doubt, I have tottered, but I have not fallen;
the most potent cause of my wrong-doing lay in the grandeur of the
seductions that encompassed me. The Lord will behold me trembling
when I enter His presence as though I had succumbed. Farewell
again, a long farewell like that I gave last night to our dear
valley, where I soon shall rest and where you will often--will you
not?--return.

Henriette.

I fell into an abyss of terrible reflections, as I perceived the depths unknown of the life now lighted up by this expiring flame. The clouds of my egotism rolled away. She had suffered as much as I--more than I, for she was dead. She believed that others would be kind to her friend; she was so blinded by love that she had never so much as suspected the enmity of her daughter. That last proof of her tenderness pained me terribly. Poor Henriette wished to give me Clochegourde and her daughter.

Natalie, from that dread day when first I entered a graveyard following the remains of my noble Henriette, whom now you know, the sun has been less warm, less luminous, the nights more gloomy, movement less agile, thought more dull. There are some departed whom we bury in the earth, but there are others more deeply loved for whom our souls are winding-sheets, whose memory mingles daily with our heart-beats; we think of them as we breathe; they are in us by the tender law of a metempsychosis special to love. A soul is within my soul. When some good thing is done by me, when some true word is spoken, that soul acts and speaks. All that is good within me issues from that grave, as the fragrance of a lily fills the air; sarcasm, bitterness, all that you blame in me is mine. Natalie, when next my eyes are darkened by a cloud or raised to heaven after long contemplation of earth, when my lips make no reply to your words or your devotion, do not ask me again, "Of what are you thinking?"

* * * * *


Dear Natalie, I ceased to write some days ago; these memories were too bitter for me. Still, I owe you an account of the events which followed this catastrophe; they need few words. When a life is made up of action and movement it is soon told, but when it passes in the higher regions of the soul its story becomes diffuse. Henriette's letter put the star of hope before my eyes. In this great shipwreck I saw an isle on which I might be rescued. To live at Clochegourde with Madeleine, consecrating my life to hers, was a fate which satisfied the ideas of which my heart was full. But it was necessary to know the truth as to her real feelings. As I was bound to bid the count farewell, I went to Clochegourde to see him, and met him on the terrace. We walked up and down for some time. At first he spoke of the countess like a man who knew the extent of his loss, and all the injury it was doing to his inner self. But after the first outbreak of his grief was over he seemed more concerned about the future than the present. He feared his daughter, who, he told me, had not her mother's gentleness. Madeleine's firm character, in which there was something heroic blending with her mother's gracious nature, alarmed the old man, used to Henriette's tenderness, and he now foresaw the power of a will that never yielded. His only consolation for his irreparable loss, he said, was the certainty of soon rejoining his wife; the agitations, the griefs of these last few weeks had increased his illness and brought back all his former pains; the struggle which he foresaw between his authority as a father and that of his daughter, now mistress of the house, would end his days in bitterness; for though he should have struggled against his wife, he should, he knew, be forced to give way before his child. Besides, his son was soon to leave him; his daughter would marry, and what sort of son-in-law was he likely to have? Though he thus talked of dying, his real distress was in feeling himself alone for many years to come without sympathy.

During this