Chapter XLI: My Marriage and Its Results 393 (1)

THE ROMANCE OF MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

I

MY GRANDMOTHER

As I advance in years, one of the things which astonishes me most is the singular vividness of my memories of my childhood.

Some of them, it is true, have been related many times over to me--and these are the most indistinct--by the nurse who tended me and by my grandparents, for whom everything that concerned their only granddaughter had a primal importance.

However, amid these oft-repeated stories I discover impressions, acts, that might have been known to any of my family, which arise before me with extraordinary precision.

I am the prey, moreover, of a scruple, and I ask myself whether these impressions really do come to me strictly in the manner in which I felt and acted them at the time, or whether, returning to them after all the experiences of life, I do not unconsciously exaggerate them?

To reassure my wish to be sincere, which has many disturbing suggestions, I endeavour to recall to myself in what terms, at every epoch of my life, I have spoken of my childhood, and also to obtain information from a few notes, too rare, alas! that I wrote in my youth which have been kept by my family. It is, therefore, preoccupied with a jealous desire to be entirely truthful that I begin this work.

As I was brought up by my grandmother, I shall speak of her a great deal. Shall I succeed in making her live again in all her originality, in her passion for the romantic, which she imposed upon us all, making the lives of her family, from the primal and dominating impulsion she gave to all their actions, a perpetual race towards the romantic?

No woman in a gymnasium was ever more closely imprisoned. I never saw my grandmother leave her large house and great garden a hundred times, except to go to mass at eight o’clock on Sundays; on the other hand, I never perceived in any mind such a love for adventure, such a horror for preordained and enforced existence, such a constant and imperious appetite for written or enacted romance.

Her affection for me was so absorbing that I monopolised her life, as it were, from the moment when she consecrated it to me.

I loved her exclusively until the day when my father, with his power for argument, in which he usually opposed the accepted ideas of our surroundings, and, with his kindness of character, took possession of my mind and led me to accept his way of thinking.

Between these two exceptional and somewhat erratic beings, the one possessing admirable generosity of heart, sectarian uprightness, passionately earnest in his unchangeable exaltations, the other with true nobility of soul, rigid virtue, but with an imagination fantastic beyond expression; between these two, loving them in turn, sometimes one more than the other, I was cast about to such a degree that it would have been impossible for me to find foothold for my original thoughts, amid these continual oscillations, if I had not constantly endeavoured to seek for my own true self and to find it. And yet, in spite of this effort, what a long time it took me to free myself from the double imprint given to my character by my beloved relatives!

What shielded me from total absorption by one or the other of them, what caused me to escape from the ardent desire of both, to mould me to their image, so dissimilar one from the other, was the very precocious consciousness I had of the precious advantages of possessing personal will.

Between my father and my grandmother I applied myself, instinctively at first, determinedly later, to be something. Was that the starting-point of my resolve to be somebody?

In the ceaseless struggle between my father and grandmother, myself being the coveted prize, there were three of us.

Many stories are involved in my souvenirs, more strange, more eccentric, one than the other, of the marriages of my grandparents and great-grandparents in my maternal grandmother’s family.

Their adventures interested my youth to such a degree that I should not hesitate to unfold them to the surprise of my readers were they not too numerous.

My grandmother, who talked and who related stories with a very quick, sharp, and bantering wit, took much pleasure in telling of the romantic lives of her grandmothers. She delighted in repainting for me all these family portraits on her side, never speaking to me of my father’s family, which I grew to know later.

She possessed the pride of her merchant and _bourgeoise_ caste. I learned through her many obscure things in the history of the struggles of French royalty against the great feudal lords, the internationalists of that time.

She said, speaking to me of her own people: “We are descended from those merchant families of Noyon, of Chauny, of Saint-Quentin, so influential in the councils of the communes, of whom several were seneschals, faithful to their town, to their province above all, faithful to royalty, not always to the king, to religion, not always to the Pope; liberals, men of progress, of pure Gallic race, enriching themselves with great honesty and strongly disdaining those among themselves who, for services rendered to the sovereign, solicited from him titles of nobility.”

My grandmother’s mother, when fourteen years old, fell madly in love with one of her relatives from Noyon, who had come to talk business, and who, after a day’s conversation, more serious than poetical, and continued through breakfast and dinner, received at his departure the following declaration from her: “Cousin, when you come next year it will be to ask me in marriage.” They laughed much at this whim, but, as the young girl was an only daughter and would have a large _dot_, the relatives of Noyon, less well off, did not disdain the offer made to their son.

When she was fifteen, the precocious Charlotte married her cousin Raincourt, a very handsome youth twenty-two years of age, but she died in childbed the following year, giving birth to my grandmother.

The young widower confided little Pélagie to his wife’s mother, now a widow herself, and while my great-grandfather married again when twenty-four years of age, and had three daughters, who were very good, very properly educated--Sophie, Constance, and Anastasie--my grandmother grew up like a little savage and sometimes stupefied the quiet town of Chauny by the eccentricities of a spoiled child.

She read everything that fell into her hands, no selection being made for her, and refused to allow herself to be led by any one, or for any reason whatever.

As soon as she was thirteen she announced to her grandmother that her education was finished. She left the boarding-school, where during five years she had learned very little, and devoted herself entirely and for the rest of her life to the reading of novels.

Witty, full of life, brilliant, and even sometimes a little impish, my grandmother had red hair at a time when “carrotty”-coloured hair had but little success. She had superb teeth, a delicate nose with sensitive nostrils, bright green eyes, and her very white complexion was marked with tiny yellow spots, all of which gave her the physiognomy of an odd-looking yet very attractive girl.

Romantic, as had been her mother and her grandmothers, she wished to choose her own husband, and she had not found him when she was fifteen. In spite of the sad fate of her mother, who had died in childbirth, being married too young, Pélagie was in despair at remaining a maid so long.

Mlle. Lenormant’s predictions had given birth throughout France to a crowd of fortune-tellers, and my grandmother consulted one, who told her: “You will marry a stranger to this town.”

This did not astonish her, for she knew all those who could aspire to her hand, and there was not one among them who answered to all that her imagination sought in a husband. Not a single young man of Chauny of good family had as yet had any romantic adventure.

She took good care not to confide her impatience to her three half-sisters, their father having declared that Pélagie should not marry before she was twenty-one. He wished to keep in his own hands the administration of his first wife’s fortune as long as possible for the benefit of the three daughters born of his second marriage.

These, moreover, continually said that Pélagie was too eccentric to be marriageable. The eldest, Sophie, was only fourteen months younger than Pélagie, but ten years older in common-sense and knowledge.

Pélagie made a voyage to Noyon with her grandmother to look for a husband. She lived for a month in a handsome old house on the Cathedral Square, owned by an aged relative who would have liked to make a second marriage with her grandmother. The love-affair of these old people amused her, but she did not find the husband for whom she was seeking, and--she left as she came.

But one fine day a young surgeon arrived at Chauny in quest of practice.

Here is “the stranger to the town” predicted by the fortune-teller, thought Pélagie even before she had seen him, and she spoke of her hope to her grandmother.

“There is one thing to which I will never consent,” replied the latter, “it is that you should marry any one who is not of a good _bourgeoise_ family,” and her grandmother assumed an air of authority, at which the young girl laughed heartily.

The young surgeon’s name was Pierre Seron, and he could not have been better born in the _bourgeoise_ class. He was descended from one of the physicians of Louis XIV. His father was the most prominent doctor at Compiègne, and his reputation reached as far as Paris. A cousin Seron had been a Conventional with Jean de Bien, and had played a great political rôle in Belgium, from whence the first French Serons had come.

“Of good family!” Pélagie and her grandmother repeated in chorus. “If only he has not had too commonplace an existence,” thought Pélagie.

Pierre Seron went up and down all the streets of the town, so as to make believe that he had already secured practice on arriving, and he soon had some successful cases which gave him a reputation.

He was a superb-looking man, his figure resembling that of a grenadier of the Imperial Guard. His face was not handsome. He wore his hair flat _à la_ Napoleon, but his forehead was a little narrow, and he had great, convex, grey eyes and too full a nose, but his mouth--he was always clean-shaven--wore an attractive, gay, and mocking smile, in spite of very thick, sensual lips.

He was never seen except in a dress coat and white cravat. In a word, well-built, of fine presence, Pierre Seron had a distinguished air and was really a very handsome man.

He would have needed to be blind, and not to have had the necessity of making a rich marriage, if he had not remarked the interest which Mlle. Pélagie Raincourt took in his comings and goings.

“Why, his father being a doctor at Compiègne, has this young surgeon come to establish himself at Chauny?” asked the grandmother often. “There must be something,” she said.

Oh, yes! there was something. And, as Pierre Seron was rather talkative and as Compiègne was not a hundred leagues from Chauny, the story was soon known.

He was simply a hero of romance. “His life is a romance--a great, a real romance,” cried Pélagie one day on returning from a visit paid to an old relative whom Pierre Seron was attending and from whom she had heard it all!

Her grandmother, touched by her grandchild’s emotion, listened to the story enthusiastically told by Pélagie, who was already in love with Pierre Seron’s sad adventure as much as, and perhaps more than, with himself.

He was the second son of a father who hated him from the day of his birth. Doctor Seron loved only his elder son, his pride, he who should have been an “only child.”

He continually said this to his timid, submissive wife, who hardly dared to protect the ill-used, beaten younger son, who was made to live with the servants.

Poor little fellow! except for a rare kiss, a furtive caress from his mother, he was a victim to his family’s dislike.

One day, when very ill with the croup, his father wished to send him to the hospital, fearing contagion for the elder brother. But his mother on this occasion resisted. She shut herself up with him in his little room, took care of him, watched over him, and by her energy and devotion saved him from death. But she had worn out her own strength. She seemed half-stunned, and the child suffered so much during his convalescence that he was almost in as much danger as while ill.

When he was nine years old, a servant accused him of a theft which he had committed himself, and he was driven from his home one autumn night, possessing nothing but the poor clothes he wore and a few crowns, painfully economised by his mother, who slipped them into his hand without even kissing him.

He lay in front of the door when it was closed upon him, hoping that some one passing would crush him. He cried, he supplicated. The neighbours gathered around him, pitying him, and saying loudly that it was abominable, that the law should protect the unhappy little child, but no one dared to take him to his home.

As soon as Pierre found himself alone again, abandoned by all, he looked for a last time at what he called “the great, wicked and shining eyes” of the lighted windows of the house.

“That,” said Pélagie to her grandmother, “was the very phrase Pierre Seron used in relating his story, and the poor boy started off, not knowing whither he went.”

Instinctively he turned towards a farm, where every morning at dawn, and in all weathers, his father’s servants sent him to get milk.

The farmer’s wife had felt pity for him many times before when he was telling her of his sufferings, and he now remembered something she had one day said to him: “You would be happier as a cowherd.”

He entered the farmhouse, where the farmers were at supper, and, sitting down beside them, he burst into tears. He could not speak.

“Have they driven you from your home?” asked the farmer’s wife. He made a sign: “Yes.” Then the good people tried to console him, made him eat some supper, and put him to sleep on some fresh straw in the stable. They kept him with them, giving him work on the farm by which he earned his food.

The next year, when he was ten years of age, though he looked fourteen, so much had he grown, the cowherd being gone, he replaced him. He did everything in his power to prove his gratitude to those who had sheltered him. Being faithful at his work, devoted to his protectors, and very intelligent, he compensated for his youth by his good will, always on the alert.

The farmer, after the day when Pierre Seron went to him, refused to sell any more milk to Doctor Seron, and later he went bravely to express his indignation to him, thinking to humiliate him when he should hear that his son had become a cowherd.

“So much the better,” replied his father, harshly, “it is probably the only work that he will ever be able to do.”

These words, repeated to Pierre, instead of discouraging him, settled his fate.

“I will also be a Doctor Seron one day,” he swore to himself.

His mother had taught him to read Latin-French in a small, old medical dictionary, which never left him, and by the aid of which he improved his very imperfect knowledge of the conjunction of words.

From that day, while he was watching his cows, not only did he learn to read well and to write with a stick on the ground, but he learned also the Latin and French words in the dictionary, one by one, and his youthful brain developed with this rude and imperfect method of study.

Whenever he made a little money he bought books on medicine with it, and studied hard by day; in the evenings he read under the farmer’s smoky lamp, and at night by moonlight.

He gathered simples for an herbalist whom he had met in the fields, and received some useful lessons from him. This herbalist took an interest in the poor child, directed his studies a little, and bought him some useful books.

Pierre invented a pretty wicker-basket in which to put fresh cheese during the summer, and, as the farmer’s wife sold her cheese in these baskets for a few cents extra, she shared the profits with Pierre.

Some years passed thus. Pierre tried several times to see his mother, but she lived shut up in the house, sequestered, perhaps, and he could never succeed in catching a glimpse of her.

His brother, who was five years older than himself, and studying medicine at Paris, passed his time merrily during his vacations at home with the young men of the town.

Pierre saw him pointed out by a friend one day, when he came with a troop of young men and pretty girls to drink warm milk at the farm.

“This milk is served to you by the cowherd of this place, who is your legitimate brother,” said Pierre to him, presenting him with a frothy bowl of it.

“My brother is dead,” replied he.

“You will find him before many years very much alive in Paris, sir!” answered Pierre.

On hearing of this incident there was much talk at Compiègne over the half-forgotten story of the exiled and abandoned child.

As the elder son gave very little satisfaction to his father, they said it was God who was punishing the latter for his cruelty, but no one paid any attention to the cowherd’s prediction.

When he was nineteen Pierre possessed eleven hundred francs of savings. One autumn day when his father took the diligence, as he did every fortnight to go and see his eldest son at Paris, and especially to recommend him to his professors, who could do nothing with this student, an enemy of study, Pierre Seron, the younger, with bare feet, in order not to use his shoes, and with his knapsack on his back, started for the capital.

One can imagine in what sort of hovel he lived in the Latin quarter. Before inscribing himself at the Faculty, he sought out night-work on the wharves. His tall figure was an excellent recommendation for him, and he was engaged as an unloader of boats from eight o’clock in the evening to two o’clock in the morning at the price of forty-five cents. He needed no more on which to live, and he even hoped to add to his small hoard, which he feared would not be sufficient to pay for his terms and his books.

How many times have I, myself, made my grandfather tell me of this epoch of his life, which he recalled with pride.

Pélagie continued her story to her grandmother, who listened open-mouthed, touched to tears.

Pierre had taken his working clothes with him, and every night he became, not a dancing costumed sailor at public balls like his brother, but a boat-heaver on the Seine wharves.

During the day he followed the lectures with such zeal, such application, such passionate ardour, that he was soon remarked by his professors.

His name struck them; they questioned him, and one of them whom Doctor Seron had offended by reproaching him rudely for severity towards his eldest son, extolled the younger Seron, took special interest in him, and soon two camps were formed: that of the hard workers and friends of Pierre, and that of the rakes, friends of Théophile Seron. One day they came to blows, and Pierre, taking his brother by the arms, shook him vigorously.

“I told you that your brother, the cowherd, would find you again in Paris,” he said, letting him fall rather heavily on the floor.

While his brother was holding high revel, Pierre was freezing under the roofs in winter, and roasting beneath them in summer, eating and sleeping badly, and working every night on the wharves. On Sundays he mended his clothes, bought at the old clothes-man’s, which were far from being good, and he washed his own poor linen. Pierre wore only shirt-fronts and wristbands of passable quality, his shirt being of the coarsest material. His socks had only tops and no bottoms. He suffered in every way from poverty and all manner of privations.

But he had, on the other hand, the satisfaction of feeling the advantage it was to have had refined parents. He easily acquired good manners, and his hereditary intelligence seemed to fit him for the most arduous medical studies. He found that he possessed faculties of assimilation which astonished himself. To be brief, he passed his examinations brilliantly, while his brother failed in every one.

Doctor Seron, whom he met from time to time with his brother, was now an old man, bent down beneath the weight of troubles; his well-beloved son was ruining him.

When Pierre Seron had finished his studies and obtained his degrees, he wrote to his father and mother, saying that he would return to them like a son who had only been absent for a time, and that he forgave everything. He received no answer from his mother, but a letter full of furious maledictions from his father.

His friend, the herbalist of Compiègne, discovered that there was a chance for him at Chauny, and lent him some money. He found no help except from this faithful protector.

“And so it happens,” continued Pélagie Raincourt, “that Pierre Seron has come to establish himself in our town, where I have been waiting for him,” and she added: “Grandmother, he must be my husband.”

“Certainly,” replied her grandmother, “I love him, brave heart! already, but he must fall in love with you.”

Pélagie had never thought of that.

A friend was commissioned to ask Doctor Seron--they already gave him this title, without adding his first name, in order to avenge his father’s cruelties--a friend was asked to question him with regard to the possible feelings with which Mlle. Pélagie Raincourt had inspired him.

“She is a handsome girl,” he replied, “but I detest red-haired women.”

It can be imagined what Pélagie felt when her grandmother, with infinite precautions, told her his answer, for she had always thought herself irresistible.

Her despair and rage were so great that she threatened to throw herself out of the window. As she was in her room, on the first story, she leaned out so suddenly that her frightened grandmother caught hold of her, and pulling her violently backward, caught her foot in Pélagie’s long gown, fell and dislocated her wrist.

They sent for Doctor Seron, who came at once, and more like a bone-setter, anxious to make an effect on important patients than like a prudent surgeon, he reset her wrist.

Pélagie lavished the most affectionate care on her beloved grandmother, who was suffering through her fault. She was haughty, almost insolent to Doctor Seron, who “detested red-haired women,” but she struck him by her extreme grace, and by her wit, which he was surprised to find so original, so brilliant in a provincial girl. He came twice a day, and, cruel though he was, he pleased Pélagie more than ever with his attractive Compiègne accent, and that of Paris, a little lisping.

But she had endured too many emotions. She was taken with fever and obliged to go to bed. Pierre took great interest in attending her, and soon lost his head seeing himself adored by an attractive, rich young girl scarcely sixteen, and loved maternally by her grandmother, for he had always considered family affection as the most rare and enviable happiness.

One evening Pierre declared his love in as burning words as Pélagie could desire; and then and there they both went and knelt before her delighted grandmother and obtained her consent to their marriage.

Doctor Seron asked at once that the wedding day should be fixed, but they were obliged to enlighten him on the existing situation of affairs, and to acquaint him with the obstacles to so prompt a solution.

Pierre, who was very poor and in no wise insensible to the advantages of his betrothed’s fortune, found it somewhat hard to abandon to his father-in-law, as the grandmother advised, all, or the greater part of, the famous _dot_ of his first wife, which Monsieur Raincourt did not wish to relinquish. He proposed to reflect a few days over the best measures to take and to see a notary. But the notary saw no possibility of doing without the father’s consent, or to escape from the conditions which Pélagie’s grandmother presumed he would exact.

“I will double,” said the latter, “what I intended to give Pélagie, if her father bargains over my beloved grandchild’s happiness.”

Doctor Seron went off to ask Monsieur Raincourt for his daughter Pélagie’s hand, which was refused until he proposed--if he obtained her hand--very pretty, by the way--to ask no account of his tutorship.

The agreement was concluded and the wedding day fixed.

Pierre Seron wrote again to his mother and father, persisting in begging some token of their affection. But he received no word, not a single line from his mother, only more curses from his father.

He learned by a letter from his friend the herbalist, who consented to be one of the witnesses to his marriage, that his brother was dying at Compiègne; that his father, two thirds ruined by having lost his practice through his too frequent journeys to Paris to snatch away his son from his debaucheries, had been struck with paralysis.

Thus was misfortune overwhelming him who had grown hard in injustice and in cruelty, while the poor boy, so shamefully driven from his home, saw his situation greatly improved for the better, and the hour of complete happiness approaching.

He was about to have his dreams realised, to possess a fine fortune, a captivating wife, of whom he became more and more fond, and who loved him madly.

But on the eve of the day so earnestly desired, Pélagie was determined to provoke her sisters, already irritated at this marriage which made her so insolently happy. She wished to take revenge for all she had endured hearing her youngest sister, Sophie, say constantly to her: “You are not marriageable.”

And, when the contract was signed, when everything was ready and all obstacles overcome for the wedding on the morrow, a very violent scene took place between the future Madame Pierre Seron and her three sisters.

Pélagie’s stepmother took sides with her daughters, their father with his wife, and the marriage was cancelled, Monsieur Raincourt taking back his consent and disavowing his promises.

Pélagie’s grandmother lost patience with her, Pierre was in despair, and the young girl took to her bed, furious with herself, weeping, biting her pillow, haunted in her feverish sleeplessness with the most extraordinary projects, and making up her mind to do the most unheard-of things.

At break of day, beside herself, not knowing what she was doing, she left the house in her dressing-gown and night-cap, and started on foot for Noyon, saying to herself she would seek asylum with her grandmother’s old friend and her relative.

What she wished above all was to escape Pierre’s reproaches, her grandmother’s blame, and not to hear the echo of all the gossip of the town, which she knew would reach her ears. The humiliation of being condemned by public opinion, the sorrow to have made Pierre suffer, who had already suffered so much, was such agonising pain to her that she felt obliged to fly. She was trying to escape from her own self-condemnation, which followed her.

After proceeding some miles, little used to walking, exhausted, she sat down on a heap of stones, her head in her hands, weeping aloud in despair.

A horseman passed in a dress coat and white cravat, bare-headed and mounted on a saddleless horse: it was Pierre, and he saw her.

“Your father has consented again,” he said, jumping off the horse. “Come quickly, I will put you up behind, and, to be sure that he does not take back his word again and that you will not commit any other folly, we will go straight to the church, where your grandmother has had everything prepared. It was she who divined that you had taken the road to Noyon, unless you should have come to my house, for she even suspected you of being capable of that, silly girl that you are!”

He lifted her up on the horse, supported her there with one arm, while with the other hand he held a simple halter passed round the animal’s neck.

“Come, come,” said he, “it is high time you should have a master. You deserve to be whipped.”

“But,” she replied, made merry with the romantic adventure; “I am not going to be married in a night-cap.”

“Why not? It is a penance you deserve, and you have great need of absolution. You can dress yourself as a bride when you have become one, at the end of the wedding.”

And so it was, sitting up behind a bare-backed horse, that my grandmother made her entrance into Chauny. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and all the gossips were at the windows, in the street, and at the church door.

Pélagie got down from the horse, with hair dishevelled under her night-cap, and her eyes still swollen from tears. A woman in the street pinned a white pink on her night-cap, and she entered the church on Pierre’s arm. There was a general outburst of laughter. Never had such a bride been seen.

The old priest, who was attached to Pélagie on account of her charity and kindness, could not keep from laughing himself, and he made haste, smiling through half of the ceremony.

Pélagie turned and faced the crowd. People thought her confusion would make her feel like sinking to the ground. “It is a merry marriage,” was all she said. And thus was my very romantic grandmother married, scandalising a great number of persons and amusing others.

The white pink and the night-cap became family relics. I have seen and held them in my hand, knowing their history.

II

WHEN THE ALLIES WERE AT THE GATES OF PARIS

Twenty days after his marriage, although he had drawn one of the first numbers when the drawing for lots for the army took place, Doctor Seron received orders to leave for the imperial army as surgeon. He was obliged to find a surgeon to take his place, and this cost a very large sum.

At the end of the year Madame Pierre Seron became the mother of twin daughters. The young couple were perfectly happy. The poor, abandoned child had become a tender, glad father, who would return often to the house to rock his daughters and to amuse them by singing to them.

The children were not eight months old when the poor young surgeon received new orders to join the Imperial army in Germany. Pierre Seron did not look for a substitute this time. His wife’s _dot_ was diminishing too fast, and he was obliged to think of future _dots_ for his daughters. He left them with a breaking heart.

Pélagie’s grandmother went to live with her, because it was impossible to leave the young woman alone, especially as her father, stepmother, and sisters, to whom Doctor Seron had turned a cold shoulder, often making them ridiculous by his witty remarks, and whose lives he had made quite unpleasant, would seize the young surgeon’s departure as an occasion to revenge themselves; but Pélagie and her grandmother were upheld by Pierre’s numerous friends, and all the town took sides with the half-widowed young woman, and blamed and annoyed Monsieur Raincourt to such a degree that he finally left Chauny to go and settle in the department of Soissons, from whence his second wife had come.

Pélagie breathed freely, for her father had never ceased to annoy her. But, alas! misfortune came to overwhelm her. She lost her grandmother and was left alone as head of the family, and obliged, before she was eighteen, to look after her fortune, and the intervals between the times when she received news from her husband became more and more lengthened.

One morning Chauny awoke threatened with war. The Allies were at the town’s gates, and it was said they plundered everything on their way, and, what was worse, the first eight Prussians who had appeared on the canal bridge had been slain. Two hours after, the inhabitants of Chauny were apprised that if they did not pay within twenty-four hours an enormous war indemnity they would all be put to the sword.

Madame Seron, alone, without protection, was one of the most heavily taxed, and in order to pay the share exacted from her, she was obliged to make ruinous engagements.

She passed a night digging a hole in her cellar under a large cask which she removed with difficulty, and which the wet-nurse of one of her young daughters--she nursed the other one herself--aided her in replacing. In this hole she hid her jewels, her silver, and a box containing her most valuable papers. This done, she decided, like many others, to abandon her house, very prominent on the square, where the invaders were to come and be lodged.

The inhabitants lost their heads, they fled and hid themselves in the woods, where the enemy, they said, would not venture.

Madame Seron took a few clothes with her and a little linen, which she put in a bag and carried on her back like a poor woman. The wet-nurse carried the two babies, and they set forth on the road to Viry.

On the way Madame Seron saw a convoy of mules returning unladen from the town whither they had carried wood. Each mule had two baskets attached to his pack-saddle. She put the nurse on one of them and one of the little twins in each basket. The nurse was a peasant and knew how to ride a mule, but the young mother was now afraid of everything, and, instead of mounting another, she walked by the side of the one carrying her little ones, resting her hand on one of the baskets.

She met the Messrs. de Sainte-Aldegonde on horseback, wearing white gloves, who, the mule-driver said, had been writing for their “good friends the enemies” for several days and were now going to meet them.

The Messrs, de Sainte-Aldegonde were galloping, and the brisk pace of their horses roused the mules, which started off in a mad race. The nurse was thrown off. The little children screamed with pain; their mother running, frightened, cried and supplicated for help.

“Never,” said she afterward, “did I suffer such torture.”

The mule-driver jumped on one of the hindermost mules and galloped towards the one whose baskets held the twins. He stopped it, and their mother and the nurse, who was only slightly wounded on the forehead and cheek, ran and rescued the babies from the baskets, who, with their hands and faces covered with blood, had fainted. The wretched women held them in their arms, looking at them overcome with grief, and, as if dumb-stricken, uttering not a word, they wept.

Mechanically they turned back on the road to Chauny, not knowing where they went, nor what they were doing, with eyes fixed on the motionless and bleeding little faces. They entered a house, where they asked for water and washed the wounds. The poor mother had kept the knapsack and bag of linen. They undressed the little ones, changed their blood-stained frocks, rubbed them with vinegar and brandy, and almost at the same moment they opened their eyes and began to sob and cry.

Their wounds continued to bleed and they were pitiful to behold. When Madame Seron reached her house some Cossacks were about to blow open the closed door; the nurse approached with the key and opened it. She also had her forehead and cheek tied up with a bloody cloth. The child she was carrying was groaning, the other in the mother’s arms was crying.

The Cossacks spoke a little French and were touched with pity at the sight. There were four of them, two of whom took the babies and held them in their arms while the mother and nurse washed their poor little faces and applied court-plaster to the wounds.

Madame Seron, after a few hours, felt a little reassured about her children and was completely at rest regarding the Cossacks, whom she treated as kindly as she could. The following days they assisted in doing the housework, the cook having fled to the woods. They walked with the children, amused them, and took devoted care of them, for the little ones had not recovered from the shock they had suffered; their nurses’ milk, disturbed by fright, gave them fever. The children grew weaker and, in spite of the energetic care that a doctor, a friend of their father’s, took of them, he could not save them; they were taken with convulsions and both died on the same day. The Cossacks wept over them with their mother.

Quite alone now, suffering from her country’s misfortunes, for she was very patriotic, in despair at her beloved little children’s death and that of her grandmother, at her husband’s absence and the dangers he was incurring, cheated by the men of business with whom she was struggling, life became so horribly hard to the young woman that she attempted to kill herself. A Cossack saved her, and his comrades and he tried to console her in such a simple, touching manner that she sadly took up life again.

Madame Seron repeated all her life, and in later years she profoundly engrafted in me, her grandchild, this axiom: “One must hate the English, fear Prussian brutality, and love the Russians.”

My grandfather returned from the army followed by a German woman, who would not leave him, and who refused to believe in his marriage. He had great trouble in getting rid of her, and succeeded in so doing only because his wife took up arms against her. Wounded to the quick, Pélagie found courage to counteract this influence only in her passion for the romantic. She was enacting a romance and her struggles with her rival were full of incident. Finally she succeeded, after having been assailed in her own house by the German, in having the woman taken to the frontier.

Doctor Seron had been present at many battles, among which those of Lützen and of Bautzen were the principal. He talked much about them, as he also did of the arms and legs he had amputated with his master, Larrey, surgeon-in-chief of the Imperial armies, the number of which increased every year.

Pierre’s conjugal fidelity, lost during his campaigns, never returned. He became a sort of Don Juan, about whose conquests the ill-natured tongues of the town were always wagging. When I grew up, how many great-uncles were pointed out to me!

Having been deprived of wine in Germany, he loved it all the more on his return to France. Very sober in the morning until breakfast hour, at which time he returned home after having performed his operations at the hospital or in the town, he drank regularly every day a dozen bottles of a light Mâcon wine, always the same. To say that this great, portly man got drunk would be an exaggeration, but in the afternoon he was talkative, full of jokes and braggings to such a degree that all the white lies, all the jests that were told at Chauny and its environs were called “seronades.”

My grandmother’s passion for her husband faded away, illusion after illusion, in spite of the prodigious effort she made not to condemn my grandfather on the first proofs he gave of his sensual appetites, of his brutal way of enjoying life. Pierre’s strength was so great that in all physical exercises, hunting, and fishing he wore out the most intrepid; his love for excitement was so artless, his gaiety so exuberant that people overlooked the sensual self-indulgence of his temperament, his excesses even, when they would not have pardoned them in others.

But little by little they wearied of all this at his home, while his friends could not have enough of him. His wife saw him depart at dawn and not return until far into the night without regret. He was never late for meals, about which great care had to be taken for him.

“It is elementary politeness,” he would say, drawing out his lisping accent on the word “elementary,” “not to leave the companion of one’s home, if not of one’s life, alone at table.”

III

THE MARRIAGE OF MY FATHER AND MOTHER

A daughter, Olympe, was born to them after the German woman’s departure; her mother nursed her, brought her up with loving care, and you may be sure that the imaginative Pélagie dreamed at an early hour of the possible romance of the future marriage of her only child.

Unfortunately Olympe distressed her by the fantastical turn of her mind. She took great interest from her earliest age in the details of housekeeping, was troublesome, humdrum even, said her mother.

She disliked to read, was much annoyed at her father’s absence from home, whose motives she loudly incriminated. Urged to this by the servants’ stories, she quarrelled with him, bitterly reproached her mother for the number of books she read; and she introduced into the home, where the careless indifference of one member, the resignation of the other, might have brought about peace, an agitation which fed the constant disputes.

However, the husband and wife, so much disunited, were proud of their daughter’s beauty. Her father would often say: “She deserves a prince,” while her mother would reply: “A shepherd would please her better.”

Nothing foretold that this admirable statue would be animated some day. Olympe was fifteen years old, and in her family the marriage bells had always rung at that age. Olympe’s parents were humiliated at the thought that no one had as yet asked for their daughter’s hand.

The romantic Pélagie dreamed of an “unforeseen” marriage for Olympe, as she had done formerly for herself. But no predictions had been made concerning it. Madame Seron could never induce her daughter to go to a fortune-teller with her. Alas! the way seemed obscure, but just as it had been impossible for her to find her own hero among the youths of the town, so did it seem impossible to discover another hero for Olympe at Chauny.

How was it, one would say, that she did not judge her own experience of the “unforeseen” lamentable? On the contrary, Pélagie regretted nothing, and, were it to be done over again, she would have made the same marriage, taking all its consequences.

The desired romance had, after all, been written. How many finalities of marriage resembled hers! The important thing was to have loved. Her Don Juan of a husband did not disgust her. She, the faithful wife, although living in a manner separated from him, still preserved, in the romance of her life, a rôle in no wise commonplace. Her husband, obliged to respect her, could not forget the past either, and he sometimes courteously alluded to it, adding: “I am always constant to my affection for my better half, even amid my inconstancies.”

And this was quite true. He did really love his wife, and would not have hesitated to sacrifice his most devoted women friends to her. He never opposed any of her plans, and he repeated her words: “What shall we do, where shall we seek, how shall we discover a husband for Olympe?”

They lived in the Rue de Noyon, the house on the square having become hateful to Madame Seron, who had lost, while living in it, her grandmother and her twins, and had also suffered there from the invasion and from scenes with the German woman. Now, in this street, opposite to one of the windows of the large drawing-room where Pélagie passed the greater part of her days embroidering, and especially devouring novels by the dozen, was the large front door of a young boys’ school. Madame Seron knew every pupil, every professor.

She had remarked among the latter a young man of tall stature and handsome presence, who never left the school without a book in his hand. He bowed respectfully to her several times a day, for she involuntarily raised her eyes every time the door opposite was shut noisily.

One evening, when the master of the school, M. Blangy, came to consult Doctor Seron, whom he knew he would find at meal-time, Madame Seron questioned him about his new professor.

“He has a very romantic history.”

“Tell us about him.”

“His name is Jean Louis Lambert. His father, when a baby, was brought one day dressed in a richly embroidered frock covered with lace by a midwife to a well-to-do farmer of Pontoise, near Noyon, who, having no children, consented to receive the child (who, the midwife said, was an orphan), and to bring him up. A girl was born to the farmer five years later, and the two young persons, who loved each other, were married afterwards.

“My professor is the eldest of four children. His father wished to make him a priest and placed him at the Seminary of Beauvais. On entering there he was remarked for his intelligence, his religious ardour, his poetic talent, and for his theological science, and they soon endowed him with the minor orders.

“The archbishop of Beauvais became his protector and made Jean Louis Lambert his secretary. He was not bigoted, but very pious, even mystical, and they hastened on for him the moment when he should be invested with the major orders.

“On the evening before the day when he was to pronounce his new sacerdotal vows, he was present at a dinner which the archbishop gave to the members of the high clergy of his diocese, and he heard these gentlemen talk at table like ordinary convivial guests. As the dinner went on, they exchanged witty remarks on things terrestrial and even celestial, which seemed to Jean Louis Lambert suggested by the devil himself. A stupid joke about the pillars of the church confessing idle nonsense completely revolted the young postulant. On account of a few jests the young fellow, who was so artless, so little worldly, felt the whole scaffolding of his faith fall to the ground. He wished to speak, to cry anathema to those who seemed blasphemers to him, but, trembling, he slid out of the dining-room, went up to his room, took a valise, in which he packed his books, the manuscript of his ‘Canticles to the Virgin,’ his scant wardrobe, and left the archbishop’s residence half wild. Almost running, he walked twenty-four leagues, and arrived at his father’s house exhausted, in despair, and declared he would never be a priest.

“His excitement, the mad race he had run, gave him so bad a fever that his life was in danger. When he was cured he was obliged to suffer the pious exhortations of the old village priest who had instructed him; his masters came themselves to endeavour to win him back and calm his indignation. They succeeded in proving to him that he had exaggerated things to a ridiculous degree, but the ideal of his vocation was so shattered that his disillusions soon made him an atheist.

“I confess to you,” added M. Blangy, “that I am somewhat alarmed at having him as professor of philosophy, and I made some observations lately which offended him; but he is such a hard worker, and so intelligent, so full of loyalty and so conscientious, that in spite of my fears I do not regret having taken him into my school. His pupils adore him and make rapid progress with him, and were it not for his passion for negation, I think I should take him as my partner.”

This was sufficient to inflame Olympe’s mother’s imagination. A romance was within her reach. She would protect this young man, thrown out of place, who had abandoned his first proposed career and who was without fortune; she would make something of him, and induce him to accept the career she proposed for him, that of a physician. She would have in him a grateful son, who should become her daughter’s husband, and, perhaps, the father of a little girl whom she would love as her grandmother had loved her, and whom she would bring up as she had been educated.

“As badly?” asked her husband, laughing, to whom she at once confided her plans.

One Sunday Madame Seron invited Jean Louis Lambert to breakfast. He almost lost his mind with joy, for he was hopelessly in love with Olympe, his inaccessible star.

After breakfast my grandfather, according to his habit, hastened to leave the house, understanding besides that he would be in the way. Olympe also having left home to pass the afternoon with a friend, the romantic Pélagie, alone with her _protégé_, whom she already called to herself her “dear child,” experienced one of the sweetest joys of her life.

She questioned him, and--miracle of miracles! His great ambition was to be a doctor! But he could not impose upon his parents the expense that would necessitate the taking up of a new career. They were all so good to him, his sisters so devoted; and his young brother had just entered the army in order that he should not be obliged to perform his military service.

Madame Seron waded in complete felicity. She talked, and appeared to the young professor like some unreal, beneficent fairy, who, with a touch of her magic wand, changes a woodcutter into a prince, a disinherited man into the most fortunate one in the world.

Jean Louis Lambert’s emotion, his gratitude, were expressed in such noble, almost passionate, terms that it brought tears to her eyes, and she at once assumed the rôle of an ideal mother to him.

They agreed, approved, and understood each other in everything. Jean Louis--his protectrice already left off the Lambert--during the next three months would prepare himself for his new studies, and then, on some very plausible pretext, would leave the school and go to Paris, where his future mother-in-law, as an advance on her daughter’s _dot_, would provide for all expenses until he should have passed his examinations.

He would study doubly hard, and, as soon as he should have obtained his degrees, he would return and marry Olympe, whom, meanwhile, her mother would influence favourably towards the match.

Isolated in Paris, with but one friend from Chauny, Bergeron, who later fired a pistol at Louis Philippe, Jean Louis worked with passionate ardour. In love for the first time and with the woman whom he knew would be his wife, infatuated with his studies, his mystical adoration for the Virgin transformed into a desire to possess the object he adored, he lived in a fever, impatient to deserve the promised happiness, and finding the reward for all his struggles far superior to the efforts he made to acquire it.

Doctor Seron completely approved his wife’s romantic plan, considering that it was without question his place, who had been so cruelly abandoned by all save the humble, to protect a young, hard-working, and virtuous man.

This latter adjective he rolled out with great emphasis, which much amused Olympe’s mother every time he pronounced it.

“No one more than myself esteems, admires, and honours purity and virtue,” said Pélagie’s amusing husband, “for no one is so conscious of the rarity, the beauty of these two traits.”

A renewal of good feeling flourished between the husband and wife. Every letter from their future son-in-law was read, commented upon, admired, and even re-read by them both; these youthful, exuberant, loving letters, often containing very good poetry, rejuvenated the parents’ hearts, already extremely proud of him whom they called between themselves: “Our son.”

Olympe, while her parents were enthusiastic, was perfectly indifferent. One day, when they were both exasperated at her, they asked whether or not she would consent to this marriage. The young girl replied to her anxious mother, and to her father, revolted at seeing her so prosaic:

“Since you desire it, since you have committed yourselves so far that you cannot withdraw, I will resign myself to it. Where you have tied the goat she will browse.”

Ah! that phrase, what a rôle it played in the disputes between the Lambert and Seron families, so frequent in later years.

Olympe’s parents were assailed day and night by these words, which they repeated to themselves aghast. “Where you have tied the goat she will browse.”

Jean Louis Lambert returned to Chauny and was married, a little disappointed at his wife’s coldness, but trusting to his passion to inspire her with the love he himself felt.