The Brotherhood of Consolation | Page 6

by his own shortcomings.
She tried to marry him to an excellent young girl, the only daughter of
a retired merchant,--a woman well fitted to play the part of guardian to
the sickened soul of her son. But the father had the business spirit
which never abandons an old merchant, especially in matrimonial
negotiations, and after a year of attentions and neighborly intercourse,
Godefroid was not accepted. In the first place, his former career seemed
to these worthy people profoundly immoral; then, during this very year,
he had made still further inroads into his capital, as much to dazzle the
parents as to please the daughter. This vanity, excusable as it was,
caused his final rejection by the family, who held dissipation of
property in holy horror, and who now discovered that in six years
Godefroid had spent or lost a hundred and fifty thousand francs of his
capital.
This blow struck the young man's already wounded heart the more
deeply because the girl herself had no personal beauty. But, guided by
his mother in judging her character, he had ended by recognizing in the
woman he sought the great value of an earnest soul, and the vast
advantages of a sound mind. He had grown accustomed to the face; he
had studied the countenance; he loved the voice, the manners, the
glance of that young girl. Having cast on this attachment the last stake
of his life, the disappointment he endured was the bitterest of all. His

mother died, and he found himself, he who had always desired luxury,
with five thousand francs a year for his whole fortune, and with the
certainty that never in his future life could he repair any loss
whatsoever; for he felt himself incapable of the effort expressed in that
terrible injunction, to /make his way/.
Weak, impatient grief cannot easily be shaken off. During his mourning,
Godefroid tried the various chances and distractions of Paris; he dined
at table-d'hotes; he made acquaintances heedlessly; he sought society,
with no result but that of increasing his expenditures. Walking along
the boulevards, he often suffered deeply at the sight of a mother
walking with a marriageable daughter,--a sight which caused him as
painful an emotion as he formerly felt when a young man passed him
riding to the Bois, or driving in an elegant equipage. The sense of his
impotence told him that he could never hope for the best of even
secondary positions, nor for any easily won career; and he had heart
enough to feel constantly wounded, mind enough to make in his own
breast the bitterest of elegies.
Unfitted to struggle against circumstances, having an inward
consciousness of superior faculties without the will that could put them
in action, feeling himself incomplete, without force to undertake any
great thing, without resistance against the tastes derived from his earlier
life, his education, and his indolence, he was the victim of three
maladies, any one of which would be enough to sicken of life a young
man long alienated from religious faith.
Thus it was that Godefroid presented, even to the eye, the face that we
meet so often in Paris that it might be called the type of the Parisian; in
it we may see ambitions deceived or dead, inward wretchedness, hatred
sleeping in the indolence of a life passed in watching the daily and
external life of Paris, apathy which seeks stimulation, lament without
talent, a mimicry of strength, the venom of past disappointments which
excites to cynicism, and spits upon all that enlarges and grows,
misconceives all necessary authority, rejoicing in its embarrassments,
and will not hold to any social form. This Parisian malady is to the
active and permanent impulse towards conspiracy in persons of energy
what the sapwood is to the sap of the trees; it preserves it, feeds it, and
conceals it.

II
OLD HOUSE, OLD PEOPLE, OLD CUSTOMS
Weary of himself, Godefroid attempted one day to give a meaning to
his life, after meeting a former comrade who had been the tortoise in
the fable, while he in earlier days had been the hare. In one of those
conversations which arise when schoolmates meet again in after years,
--a conversation held as they were walking together in the sunshine on
the boulevard des Italiens,--he was startled to learn the success of a
man endowed apparently with less gifts, less means, less fortune than
himself; but who had bent his will each morning to the purpose
resolved upon the night before. The sick soul then determined to
imitate that simple action.
"Social existence is like the soil," his comrade had said to him; "it
makes us a return in proportion to our efforts."
Godefroid was in debt. As a first test, a first task, he resolved to live in
some