Chapter II: On the Terrace

“There must be some misunderstanding,” said the Marquis.

“I am afraid,” rejoined the Curé, “that there is something worse.”

They were pacing slowly up and down the terrace at Chantemerle among the roses of the late June of 1792. The little river Lay, curled about the foot of the hill, and hugged by the wooded slopes which clung above it, caught the eye with an occasional sparkle of its shallows, for the south façade of the house, dominating the slightly sloping garden, owned a bolder prospect than many in the province. On the other side, indeed, where the avenue approached it on level ground, the topmost windows of the château showed only the characteristic Vendean expanse of view, which gave the look of a flat country to a region that was not really flat, but which had nothing to catch the eye, among the innumerable stunted trees which bordered every field, save a roof or two with its red and curving tiles. But the garden front looked down on what was almost a ravine.

As they turned at the end of the path the Marquis glanced up at the house, and at that moment Madame de Château-Foix emerged from the structure in the Palladian style by which the Marquis Octavien-François had, in the days of Louis XIV., somewhat disastrously enlarged his semi-Renaissance dwelling-place. She stood for a moment on the level stone space at the head of the flight of steps running down to the terrace, then, smiling at her son, seated herself in a low chair set in the shade of the incongruous pavilion, which was in fact her boudoir. Gilbert and the priest continued their leisurely and absorbed promenade.

Beside the Marquise, on a table, lay some unfinished needlework, and in its bright folds a dingy little volume, to which her hand went out mechanically. But she did not read it; her eyes strayed to the figure of her son, as he passed with bent head and a puzzled expression in the gaze which now and again met her own, but hardly saw her. She glanced quickly at his companion. At that instant the Curé leisurely folded up the letter which he had been reading, and handed it back to the Marquis. In his face, at least, there was no lack of comprehension, no hesitation. But M. des Graves would not attempt more than the bare expression of his thoughts; he would neither urge nor persuade. That was not his way. If it had been, Gilbert de Chantemerle would not have been down there with him now; that his mother knew very well.

She recognised—was rather proud of—the unyielding character of her son, his insusceptibility to influence, his inflexible adherence to his own standards of conduct—and these were high. She realised, though less clearly, how little M. des Graves tried to influence him. Devout Catholic as she was, it was only given to her in rare glimpses to see that the priest had a settled policy of holding his hand, not from the impossibility of accomplishing anything, but from principle. She knew that he held strong views on the abuse of power. There was always about this old friend of her husband’s a sensation—to her uncomfortable—of force voluntarily withheld from exercise. Sometimes the sensation affected her with almost physical irritation. And deep down in her soul, beneath the occasional mild exultation at her son’s untrammelled state, lay the regret that M. des Graves had not brought his influence to bear on Gilbert’s spiritual life. For Gilbert’s somewhat devout boyhood had merged into a manhood of indifference; his preoccupation with Catholicism was ethical, his creed a joyless allegiance to a system of morals. He had never openly broken away from the Church as his father had done, and to her ordinances he paid the bare outward homage that she demanded—but it was less than a minimum payment. Not without reason, as she suspected, did he always absent himself from Chantemerle at Easter, timing his annual visit to his less exacting Southern tenantry to coincide with that critical festival. The Vendean peasantry were thus free to draw the charitable but untrue conclusion that he went to his duties at Château-Foix. Yet in any other part of France his conduct would have passed as exemplary, but here, in the midst of a people ardently faithful, it had not that complexion. And this, with a priest always at hand as counsellor!

Counsellor, indeed, M. des Graves had been, and what a good one! Indeed, it sometimes seemed to the Marquise that almost all through her married life he had been explaining something to some one of them—her husband, herself, her son. Eight years ago, in that episode of supreme joy which shone out amidst her grief, when Gilbert had taken the resolution of living on his estates, it was to the Curé that he had turned for help in his unfamiliar task. And the priest had given him the most unstinted aid. But it was not difficult to see his capacity for assistance in matters of larger import, and Gilbert had discussed with him every political crisis of which the last three years had been so prodigal, from the calling of the States-General in ’89, at which, as a good Liberal, he had rejoiced, to the declaration of war against Austria in the spring of the present year, which had not pleased him at all.

There was, indeed, in recent events material enough for many and many a conference on the terrace walk. In the great flood which was changing the face of France there ran a tide bearing the provinces of the West to a destination which no man could see—a tide whose waves threatened, with the submerging of every familiar landmark, to engulf more particularly M. des Graves and all his caste. Since the suppression of the religious orders, the sales of ecclesiastical property, and the promulgation of the civil constitution of the clergy in 1790, no part of France had suffered more severely from the anti-clerical policy of the Government. Hundreds of parishes had been deprived of the priest who refused the civil oath. In some the “constitutional” curé, the “intrus,” celebrated Masses which the faithful would not attend; in some the church had been devoted to other uses, while the non-juror, if he were not in hiding, or in a foreign country, was probably eating out his heart in the _chef-lieu_ of the department, cut off from his people, and forced to report himself every morning to the authorities. For the Vendean peasant, with his fervid piety, no more cruel persecution could have been devised. But though hundreds of priests were interned at Angers, in order to prevent them from preparing their flocks for the Easter communion, Vendée proper had not suffered to such an extent as the neighbouring departments until, in the early spring of 1792, the authorities decreed that all non-jurors residing there for less than a year, should leave it in a week.

It was the first step of purely local persecution. The municipality of Chantonnay, the little town in whose district lay the village of Chantemerle, had been very slow indeed to take any anti-clerical action. No “constitutional” priest had ever been installed at Chantemerle, and M. des Graves was accustomed to proceed with his ministrations as calmly as though he were ignorant of what was hanging over his head. But he knew well enough—and his flock, too—that he was a favoured exception. His parish was like a little island which the encroaching tide is bound in the end to submerge. Neither château nor village had yet recovered from the horror with which they had heard of Vergniaud’s proposal in the Assembly on May 27th for the deportation of priests to foreign parts, when orders came from Fontenay that all non-jurors not born in the department were to leave it at once. And M. des Graves was not a Vendean born.

Yet, though the thunderbolt had fallen in the first week of June, on this, the 25th of the same month, the Curé had said his Mass as usual in the little church, had visited his parishioners, and was now pacing sedately up and down with the master of the Château, who, as a noble, was only a shade less obnoxious to the Jacobin Directory than himself. The explanation lay in the priest’s resolution, and in the fact that Fontenay-le-Comte, the _chef-lieu_, was a good deal further away than Chantonnay. The municipality had not moved. Neither had M. des Graves.

On all these things did Madame de Château-Foix reflect as she watched the two figures. She did not allow herself to dwell on what would happen if M. des Graves were actually turned out of his cure. The prospect was too terrible. It had naturally been discussed ere this, and she knew that Gilbert was determined to shelter the priest, as long as possible, in the château itself, turning the chapel into a resort for the villagers, as had been done the previous September, with temporary success, at Saint-Mars-la-Réorthe. To have the Curé permanently in the house would not be so great a change after all.

From this consideration the Marquise passed to that of another imminent change which would, on the other hand, make a vast difference to her. Fate had preserved her son to her long unmarried. Lucienne d’Aucourt, who had left her convent at the age of fifteen nearly four years ago, had spent the ensuing years with her mother—transferred in 1778 to the newly-formed household of the Princess Elisabeth—in her apartments at Versailles, and, afterwards, at the Tuileries, whither Gilbert went twice a year to pay his respects. But the shock of the disastrous flight to Varennes had killed Madame d’Aucourt within three months. Her death would have seemed the signal for Gilbert to claim his bride, but the Comtesse’s last wish was that her daughter should not be married until she had reached the unusually late age of nineteen. Respect for this desire and the friendship which the Princess Elisabeth extended to the daughter of her lady-in-waiting induced Gilbert, unwillingly, to postpone the ceremony, and Lucienne remained at Court under the technical chaperonage of an old cousin of her mother’s, Madame de Fontenelle. But her nineteenth birthday was advancing; by the autumn the château would know a new mistress. It was the plain duty of the present châtelaine to school herself to the thought; repugnance, as she recognised, was insensate, for she was genuinely fond of Lucienne, who was, moreover, the bride of her own choosing. She took up again the little book of devotions as if to find there a corrective for her own rather jealous thoughts.

A moment later the volume was again in her lap. Gilbert was reading to the priest a portion of the letter which he held in his hand. He was too far away for Madame de Château-Foix to hear the words, yet a frown of impatience creased her brow, for she knew from whom the letter came. For perhaps the hundredth time she was submerged in the bewildering rush of affection and annoyance, familiar enough in the years that had passed since Louis de Saint-Ermay had come to amaze them with his naughtiness and hold them captive with his audacious joy. She was as sure as if she had read it that his letter was the harbinger of annoyance. And Gilbert would give him his time and his advice, just as in old days he had given up to him his toys. Life, it seemed, was consistently unfair—always ready to heap fresh gifts on the spoilt child. Louis had always had what he wanted, and there were always to be found persons holding that ridiculous opinion enunciated years ago by M. des Graves—that it was good for him to be happy. And what sort of happiness was his? The Marquise had never closely enquired into the manner of the Vicomte’s life in Paris, but she had every reason to believe that he amused himself somewhat over-well. His modest estate near Poitiers was hopelessly mortgaged; she suspected Gilbert of having more than once paid his debts for him. Now that the King’s constitutional guard, the successor of the bodyguard, had been disbanded also, she might have wondered what kept him still in Paris, had she not known his fervid loyalty—and that, too, of a type rather rare when almost every extreme Royalist conceived it to be his duty to emigrate. This devotion Madame de Château-Foix considered to be the best thing she knew about her nephew; she set it over against his unconquerable levity and extravagance. It was not, in her eyes, a count against him that his reckless temper sometimes got the better of the nonchalant frivolity beneath which it was buried, for she infinitely preferred the volcanic to the surface stratum. He had, for instance, as a _garde-du-corps_, been at Versailles on the great night of the 5th of October 1789, and, so far as his family had been able to elicit, had had on that occasion a narrow escape of sharing the fate of his massacred comrades, MM. de Varicourt and Deshuttes. The Marquis de Lafayette told Gilbert that his cousin was only saved from the effects of an entirely useless defiance of the mob, as the whole cortège started the next day for Paris, by a fishwife from the Halles, who threw her arms round him and declared that no one should touch _un si bel enfant_. The Vicomte always denied this tale, which was galling to his dignity—for what youth of twenty-three (as he then was) is pleased to be termed a child?—and doubly so because, in common with most of the extreme Royalists, he hated and distrusted the narrator. When Château-Foix first asked him about it, he replied that the incident was undoubtedly one of the dreams which came to Lafayette in that inopportune and much-derided slumber on which the opposite party laid so much of the blame for that night’s events.

But Louis’ scrapes were not always political.

It was no mitigation of the Marquise’s annoyance—rather it was an addition of fresh fuel—to know that if Louis had come himself instead of writing she would have denied him nothing; there was no resisting his personal charm. But her principles, her prejudices, and her maternal jealousy, all of which the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay could vanquish when he was present, were apt, in his absence, to clamour the louder for their temporary extinction. It was so this evening.