The Lily of the Valley | Page 6

attempts.
My father had presented me to one of my aunts who lived in the Ile St.
Louis. With her I was to dine on Sundays and Thursdays, escorted to
the house by either Monsieur or Madame Lepitre, who went out
themselves on those days and were to call for me on their way home.
Singular amusement for a young lad! My aunt, the Marquise de
Listomere, was a great lady, of ceremonious habits, who would never
have dreamed of offering me money. Old as a cathedral, painted like a
miniature, sumptuous in dress, she lived in her great house as though
Louis XV. were not dead, and saw none but old women and men of a
past day,--a fossil society which made me think I was in a graveyard.
No one spoke to me and I had not the courage to speak first. Cold and
alien looks made me ashamed of my youth, which seemed to annoy
them. I counted on this indifference to aid me in certain plans; I was
resolved to escape some day directly after dinner and rush to the
Palais-Royal. Once seated at whist my aunt would pay no attention to
me. Jean, the footman, cared little for Monsieur Lepitre and would have
aided me; but on the day I chose for my adventure that luckless dinner
was longer than usual,--either because the jaws employed were worn
out or the false teeth more imperfect. At last, between eight and nine

o'clock, I reached the staircase, my heart beating like that of Bianca
Capello on the day of her flight; but when the porter pulled the cord I
beheld in the street before me Monsieur Lepitre's hackney-coach, and I
heard his pursy voice demanding me!
Three times did fate interpose between the hell of the Palais-Royal and
the heaven of my youth. On the day when I, ashamed at twenty years of
age of my own ignorance, determined to risk all dangers to put an end
to it, at the very moment when I was about to run away from Monsieur
Lepitre as he got into the coach,--a difficult process, for he was as fat as
Louis XVIII. and club-footed,--well, can you believe it, my mother
arrived in a post-chaise! Her glance arrested me; I stood still, like a bird
before a snake. What fate had brought her there? The simplest thing in
the world. Napoleon was then making his last efforts. My father, who
foresaw the return of the Bourbons, had come to Paris with my mother
to advise my brother, who was employed in the imperial diplomatic
service. My mother was to take me back with her, out of the way of
dangers which seemed, to those who followed the march of events
intelligently, to threaten the capital. In a few minutes, as it were, I was
taken out of Paris, at the very moment when my life there was about to
become fatal to me.
The tortures of imagination excited by repressed desires, the weariness
of a life depressed by constant privations had driven me to study, just
as men, weary of fate, confine themselves in a cloister. To me, study
had become a passion, which might even be fatal to my health by
imprisoning me at a period of life when young men ought to yield to
the bewitching activities of their springtide youth.
This slight sketch of my boyhood, in which you, Natalie, can readily
perceive innumerable songs of woe, was needful to explain to you its
influence on my future life. At twenty years of age, and affected by
many morbid elements, I was still small and thin and pale. My soul,
filled with the will to do, struggled with a body that seemed weakly,
but which, in the words of an old physician at Tours, was undergoing
its final fusion into a temperament of iron. Child in body and old in
mind, I had read and thought so much that I knew life metaphysically at

its highest reaches at the moment when I was about to enter the
tortuous difficulties of its defiles and the sandy roads of its plains. A
strange chance had held me long in that delightful period when the soul
awakes to its first tumults, to its desires for joy, and the savor of life is
fresh. I stood in the period between puberty and manhood,--the one
prolonged by my excessive study, the other tardily developing its living
shoots. No young man was ever more thoroughly prepared to feel and
to love. To understand my history, let your mind dwell on that pure
time of youth when the mouth is innocent of falsehood; when the
glance of the eye is honest, though veiled by lids which droop from
timidity contradicting desire; when the soul bends not to