The Lily of the Valley | Page 7

worldly
Jesuitism, and the heart throbs as violently from trepidation as from the
generous impulses of young emotion.
I need say nothing of the journey I made with my mother from Paris to
Tours. The coldness of her behavior repressed me. At each relay I tried
to speak; but a look, a word from her frightened away the speeches I
had been meditating. At Orleans, where we had passed the night, my
mother complained of my silence. I threw myself at her feet and
clasped her knees; with tears I opened my heart. I tried to touch hers by
the eloquence of my hungry love in accents that might have moved a
stepmother. She replied that I was playing comedy. I complained that
she had abandoned me. She called me an unnatural child. My whole
nature was so wrung that at Blois I went upon the bridge to drown
myself in the Loire. The height of the parapet prevented my suicide.
When I reached home, my two sisters, who did not know me, showed
more surprise than tenderness. Afterwards, however, they seemed, by
comparison, to be full of kindness towards me. I was given a room on
the third story. You will understand the extent of my hardships when I
tell you that my mother left me, a young man of twenty, without other
linen than my miserable school outfit, or any other outside clothes than
those I had long worn in Paris. If I ran from one end of the room to the
other to pick up her handkerchief, she took it with the cold thanks a
lady gives to her footman. Driven to watch her to find if there were any
soft spot where I could fasten the rootlets of affection, I came to see her
as she was,--a tall, spare woman, given to cards, egotistical and insolent,

like all the Listomeres, who count insolence as part of their dowry. She
saw nothing in life except duties to be fulfilled. All cold women whom
I have known made, as she did, a religion of duty; she received our
homage as a priest receives the incense of the mass. My elder brother
appeared to absorb the trifling sentiment of maternity which was in her
nature. She stabbed us constantly with her sharp irony,--the weapon of
those who have no heart,--and which she used against us, who could
make her no reply.
Notwithstanding these thorny hindrances, the instinctive sentiments
have so many roots, the religious fear inspired by a mother whom it is
dangerous to displease holds by so many threads, that the sublime
mistake--if I may so call it--of our love for our mother lasted until the
day, much later in our lives, when we judged her finally. This terrible
despotism drove from my mind all thoughts of the voluptuous
enjoyments I had dreamed of finding at Tours. In despair I took refuge
in my father's library, where I set myself to read every book I did not
know. These long periods of hard study saved me from contact with my
mother; but they aggravated the dangers of my moral condition.
Sometimes my eldest sister--she who afterwards married our cousin,
the Marquis de Listomere--tried to comfort me, without, however,
being able to calm the irritation to which I was a victim. I desired to
die.
Great events, of which I knew nothing, were then in preparation. The
Duc d'Angouleme, who had left Bordeaux to join Louis XVIII. in Paris,
was received in every town through which he passed with ovations
inspired by the enthusiasm felt throughout old France at the return of
the Bourbons. Touraine was aroused for its legitimate princes; the town
itself was in a flutter, every window decorated, the inhabitants in their
Sunday clothes, a festival in preparation, and that nameless excitement
in the air which intoxicates, and which gave me a strong desire to be
present at the ball given by the duke. When I summoned courage to
make this request of my mother, who was too ill to go herself, she
became extremely angry. "Had I come from Congo?" she inquired.
"How could I suppose that our family would not be represented at the
ball? In the absence of my father and brother, of course it was my duty

to be present. Had I no mother? Was she not always thinking of the
welfare of her children?"
In a moment the semi-disinherited son had become a personage! I was
more dumfounded by my importance than by the deluge of ironical
reasoning with which my mother received my request. I questioned my
sisters, and then discovered that my mother, who liked such theatrical
plots, was already attending to my clothes. The tailors in Tours were
fully occupied by the sudden demands of their regular customers, and
my