Honorine | Page 9

for me,' and trust me with the
work in hand.
"This man, wrapped in the threefold duties of the statesman, the judge,
and the orator, charmed me by a taste for flowers, which shows an
elegant mind, and which is shared by almost all persons of refinement.
His garden and his study were full of the rarest plants, but he always
bought them half-withered. Perhaps it pleased him to see such an image
of his own fate! He was faded like these dying flowers, whose almost
decaying fragrance mounted strangely to his brain. The Count loved his
country; he devoted himself to public interests with the frenzy of a
heart that seeks to cheat some other passion; but the studies and work
into which he threw himself were not enough for him; there were
frightful struggles in his mind, of which some echoes reached me.
Finally, he would give utterance to harrowing aspirations for happiness,
and it seemed to me he ought yet to be happy; but what was the
obstacle? Was there a woman he loved? This was a question I asked
myself. You may imagine the extent of the circles of torment that my
mind had searched before coming to so simple and so terrible a
question. Notwithstanding his efforts, my patron did not succeed in
stifling the movements of his heart. Under his austere manner, under
the reserve of the magistrate, a passion rebelled, though coerced with
such force that no one but I who lived with him ever guessed the secret.
His motto seemed to be, 'I suffer, and am silent.' The escort of respect
and admiration which attended him; the friendship of workers as
valiant as himself--Grandville and Serizy, both presiding judges--had

no hold over the Count: either he told them nothing, or they knew all.
Impassible and lofty in public, the Count betrayed the man only on rare
intervals when, alone in his garden or his study, he supposed himself
unobserved; but then he was a child again, he gave course to the tears
hidden beneath the toga, to the excitement which, if wrongly
interpreted, might have damaged his credit for perspicacity as a
statesman.
"When all this had become to me a matter of certainty, Comte Octave
had all the attractions of a problem, and won on my affection as much
as though he had been my own father. Can you enter into the feeling of
curiosity, tempered by respect? What catastrophe had blasted this
learned man, who, like Pitt, had devoted himself from the age of
eighteen to the studies indispensable to power, while he had no
ambition; this judge, who thoroughly knew the law of nations, political
law, civil and criminal law, and who could find in these a weapon
against every anxiety, against every mistake; this profound legislator,
this serious writer, this pious celibate whose life sufficiently proved
that he was open to no reproach? A criminal could not have been more
hardly punished by God than was my master; sorrow had robbed him of
half his slumbers; he never slept more than four hours. What struggle
was it that went on in the depths of these hours apparently so calm, so
studious, passing without a sound or a murmur, during which I often
detected him, when the pen had dropped from his fingers, with his head
resting on one hand, his eyes like two fixed stars, and sometimes wet
with tears? How could the waters of that living spring flow over the
burning strand without being dried up by the subterranean fire? Was
there below it, as there is under the sea, between it and the central fires
of the globe, a bed of granite? And would the volcano burst at last?
"Sometimes the Count would give me a look of that sagacious and
keen-eyed curiosity by which one man searches another when he
desires an accomplice; then he shunned my eye as he saw it open a
mouth, so to speak, insisting on a reply, and seeming to say, 'Speak
first!' Now and then Comte Octave's melancholy was surly and gruff. If
these spurts of temper offended me, he could get over it without
thinking of asking my pardon; but then his manners were gracious to

the point of Christian humility.
"When I became attached like a son to this man--to me such a mystery,
but so intelligible to the outer world, to whom the epithet eccentric is
enough to account for all the enigmas of the heart--I changed the state
of the house. Neglect of his own interests was carried by the Count to
the length of folly in the management of his affairs. Possessing an
income of about a hundred and sixty thousand francs, without including
the emoluments of his appointments--three of which did not come
under the