The general had been caught up and swiftly transported by the flight of this powerful spirit, following it into the regions it had just traveled. He fully understood the images unleashed by this burning symphony, and for him the chords flew far away. For him, as for the sister, this poem was the future, the present, and the past. Music—even theater music—for tender and poetic souls, for suffering and wounded hearts, is surely a text they may develop at the whim of memories. If a musician has the heart of a poet, certainly it takes poetry and love to hear and understand great musical works. Religion, love, and music are the threefold expression of a single fact, the need for expansion that stirs every noble soul. And these three poetries ascend to God, who untangles all earthly emotions. This holy human Trinity must be part of the infinite grandeurs of God, whom we can only imagine surrounded by the fires of love, the golden rays of music, light, and harmony. Is He not the beginning and the end of our works?
The Frenchman understood that in this desert, on this rock surrounded by the sea, the nun had seized upon music as an expression of all the passion that still consumed her. Had she made her love an homage to God or was it the triumph of love over God? Questions difficult to answer. But surely the general could not doubt that in this dead heart of the world he had found a passion still burning as fiercely as his own. Vespers done, he returned to the alcalde, with whom he was lodged. At first he was still prey to a thousand pleasures that a long-postponed satisfaction, painfully sought, lavished on him, and he could see nothing beyond it. He was still loved. Solitude had increased the love in her heart, just as his love had grown stronger as he breached the successive obstacles this woman had set between them. This flowering of the soul reached its natural end. Then came the desire to see this woman again, to contend with God for her, to carry her away—a daring scheme that pleased this audacious man. After the meal, he went to bed to avoid questions, to be alone, and to think clearly, and he lay plunged in the deepest meditations until daybreak. He rose only to go to Mass. He went to the church and sat near the grille, his forehead touching the curtain, and he would have torn it open, but he was not alone: His host had accompanied him out of politeness, and the least imprudence might compromise the future of his passion, spoiling all his hopes.
The organ was heard, but it was not played by the same musician. For the general, it was all colorless and cold. Had his mistress been devastated by the same emotions that had nearly felled a strong man’s heart? Had she so fully shared and understood a loyal and desired love that she now lay dying in her small cell? While a thousand thoughts of this kind baffled the Frenchman’s mind, the voice of the woman he adored rang out nearby and he recognized its clear timbre. This voice, slightly altered by a trembling that modest timidity gave to young girls, cut through the chant like a prima donna’s through the harmony of a finale. It shone like gold or silver thread in a dark frieze.
Surely it was she! Ever the Parisienne, she had not shed her coquetry when she left behind the adornments of the social world for the headband and stiff muslin of the Carmelites. After signaling her love the evening before through praises addressed to the Lord, now she seemed to say to her lover: “Yes, it is me, I am here, I still love you, but I am sheltered from love. You will hear me, my soul will enfold you, and I will remain beneath the brown shroud of this choir, from which no one can tear me away. You will not see me again.”
“It really is her!” said the general to himself, raising his head, for at first he had been leaning on his hands, unable to bear the crushing emotion that surged like a whirlwind in his heart when that familiar voice vibrated under the arches, accompanied by the murmur of the waves. The storm was outside and calm prevailed inside the sanctuary. Still, that rich voice continued to deploy all its tender ways: It fell like a balm on the lover’s burning heart, it blossomed in the air, which a man would want to breathe more deeply, filled with the exaltations of a soul’s love expressed in the words of the prayer. The alcalde came to join his guest and, finding him dissolved in tears at the elevation chanted by the nun, led him back to his house. Surprised to encounter such devotion in a French military man, the magistrate invited the confessor of the convent to dine and informed the general, who took the greatest pleasure in this news. During supper the confessor was the object of the Frenchman’s attentions, and his not entirely disinterested respect confirmed the Spaniards in their high regard for his piety. He solemnly inquired about the number of nuns, asked for details on the convent’s endowments and its treasures as if he wished to engage the good old priest on subjects that most concerned him. He informed himself on the way of life these holy women led. Were they allowed to go out of the convent or to be seen?
“Señor,” said the venerable ecclesiastic, “the rule is strict. Women cannot enter a convent of the order of Saint Bruno without permission from Our Holy Father. The same strict rule is followed here. It is impossible for a man to enter a convent of Barefoot Carmelites unless he is a priest and attached by the archbishop to the service of the House. None of the sisters leaves the convent. However, the great saint Mother Teresa often left her cell. The visitor or the mother superior alone can allow a nun, with the authorization of the archbishop, to see outsiders, especially in the case of illness. Now, we are one of the principal houses of the order, and consequently we have a mother superior at the convent. Among other foreigners, we have a Frenchwoman, Sister Theresa, who directs the music in the chapel.”
“Ah!” answered the general, feigning surprise. “She must have been pleased by the military triumph of the House of Bourbon.”
“I told them the reason for the Mass—they are all a little curious.”
“But Sister Theresa may have interests in France, perhaps she would like to know something about it, to ask for news?”
“I do not think so; she would have sought me out for such knowledge.”
“As a compatriot, I would be very curious to see her . . . if this were possible, if the mother superior would consent, if—”
“At the grille, and even in the presence of the reverend mother, an interview would be impossible for anyone whatsoever. But strict as the mother is, as a favor to a liberator of the Catholic throne and our holy religion, the rule might be relaxed,” said the confessor, blinking. “I will speak to her.”
“How old is Sister Theresa?” asked the lover, who dared not question the priest about the nun’s beauty.
“She has no age,” answered the good man, with a simplicity that made the general shiver.
The next day, before siesta, the confessor came to inform the Frenchman that Sister Theresa and the mother consented to receive him before vespers at the grille of the parlor. After siesta, which the general spent pacing back and forth along the harbor in the heat of midday, the priest returned to find him and led him into the convent by way of a gallery that bordered a cemetery. Several fountains, many green trees, and the rows of arches provided a coolness in harmony with the silence of the place. At the end of this long gallery, the priest led his companion into a room divided into two parts by a grille covered with a brown curtain. In the more or less public half of the space, where the confessor left the general, a wooden bench ran along the wall and several chairs, also of wood, were set near the grille. The ceiling consisted of exposed beams made of live oak without any decoration. Daylight came through two windows situated in the nuns’ portion of the room, although this weak light, poorly reflected by dark wood, scarcely lit the large black Christ, the portrait of Saint Teresa, and a painting of the Virgin that hung on the gray walls of the parlor. The general’s feelings, in spite of their violence, took on a melancholy tinge. He grew calm in this domestic calm. Something of the grandeur of the tomb took possession of him beneath these cool boards. Wasn’t this the eternal silence of the tomb, its deep peace, its sense of the infinite? In addition, the cloister’s quiet and fixed thought, thought that slips into the air, into the dim light, into everything although it is written nowhere, looms still larger in the ima
gination. That great phrase “Peace in the Lord” enters here into the soul of the least religious as a living force.
The monk’s life is scarcely conceivable; man in a monastery seems weak: He is born to act, to accomplish a life of work, which he renounces in his cell. But what virile vigor and touching weakness in a convent of women! A man can be pushed by a thousand feelings to bury himself in monastic life, he throws himself into it as he would jump off a cliff. But a woman comes here led only by one feeling: not to denature herself but to marry God. You may ask the monks: Why did you not struggle? But isn’t a woman’s withdrawal from the world always a sublime struggle? In short, the general found this mute visiting room and this convent lost in the sea full of himself. Love seldom reaches solemnity, yet surely love still faithful in the bosom of God was something solemn and something more than a man had the right to hope for in the nineteenth century, given the prevailing customs. The infinite grandeurs of this situation were able to act on the general’s mind, and he was indeed beyond any thought of politics, honors, Spain, Parisian society, and was able to rise to the heights of this glorious conclusion. Besides, what could be more truly tragic? How much feeling united the two lovers in the middle of the sea on a granite ledge, yet they were separated by an idea, by an unbridgeable barrier! Observe the man say to himself, “Will I triumph over God in her heart?” A slight rustling sound made him tremble, and the brown curtain was drawn back.
In the light he saw a woman standing there whose face was hidden by the length of pleated veil on her head. Following the rule of the order, she was clothed in a robe whose color has become proverbial. The general could not see the nun’s naked feet, which would have borne witness to her alarming thinness; however, despite the numerous folds of the coarse robe so entirely covering her body, he could see that tears, prayer, passion, and her solitary life had already wasted her.
A woman’s icy hand, no doubt the mother superior’s, held back the curtain. The general examined the necessary witness to this interview, met the dark and penetrating look of an aged nun, almost a hundred years old. But hers was a clear, youthful look that belied the numerous wrinkles by which the pale face of this woman was furrowed.
“Madame la duchesse,” he ventured, his voice full of emotion, to the nun who stood with bowed head. “Does your companion understand French?”
“There is no duchess here,” answered the nun. “You are in the presence of Sister Theresa. The woman you call my companion is my mother in God, my superior here below.”
These words—so humbly spoken by the voice that had once been in harmony with the luxury and elegance of her surroundings, the queen of fashionable Paris whose lips had once pronounced the language so lightly, so mockingly—struck the general like a bolt of lightning.
“My holy mother speaks only Latin and Spanish,” she added.
“I know neither one. My dear Antoinette, make my apologies to her.”
Hearing her name gently spoken by a man who had been so hard on her in the past, the nun felt a vivid inner emotion betrayed by the slight quivering of her veil, on which the daylight fell directly.
“My brother,” she said, bringing her sleeve up under her veil, perhaps to wipe her eyes, “my name is Sister Theresa . . .” Then she turned toward the mother superior and spoke in Spanish words that the general perfectly understood, for he knew enough to understand and perhaps also to speak. “My dear mother, this gentleman presents his respects and begs you to excuse him if he cannot pay them himself, but he knows neither of the two languages you speak . . .”
The old woman bowed her head slowly, an expression of angelic sweetness, enhanced by the consciousness of her power and dignity.
“Do you know this gentleman?” the mother asked her with a penetrating look.
“Yes, my mother.”
“Go back to your cell, my daughter!” said the mother superior in an imperious tone.
The general slipped quickly behind the curtain to prevent the terrible emotions that shook him from showing on his face, and in the shadows, he thought he could still see the mother superior’s piercing eyes. He was afraid of this woman, mistress of the fragile and fleeting happiness that had cost him such efforts, and he was trembling, this man whom a triple row of cannon had never frightened. The duchess was walking toward the door, but she turned back. “My mother,” she said, in a stunningly calm tone of voice, “this Frenchman is one of my brothers.”
“Stay then, my daughter!” said the old woman after a pause.
This admirable sophistry revealed such love and regret that a man less stalwart than the general might have felt faint at such keen pleasure in the midst of great peril—and for him this was something entirely new. How precious, then, were words, looks, and gestures when love must baffle the eyes of the lynx, the claws of the tiger! Sister Theresa came back.
“You see, my brother, what I have dared to do only to speak with you for a moment of your salvation, of the prayers my soul addresses each day to heaven on your behalf. I am committing a mortal sin. I have lied. How many days of penance it will take to expiate this lie! But I will suffer for you. You do not know, my brother, what happiness it is to love in heaven, to confess your feelings when religion has purified them, transported them into the highest spheres so that we are permitted to look only at the soul. If the doctrine and spirit of the saint to whom we owe this asylum had not borne me far above earthly anguish and set me, although far below the sphere where she dwells but surely above this world, I would not have seen you again. But I can see you and hear your voice and stay calm—”
“Ah, Antoinette,” cried the general interrupting these words. “Let me see you. I love you now as passionately, as madly, as you wanted me to love you.”
“Do not call me Antoinette, I beg you. Memories of the past hurt me. You must see here only Sister Theresa, a creature trusting in divine mercy . . .” And she added after a pause: “Control yourself, my brother. Our mother would separate us pitilessly if your face betrayed earthly passions or if you allowed tears to fall from your eyes.”
The general bowed his head as if to gather himself. When he raised his eyes to the grille, he saw between two bars the emaciated, pale, but still ardent face of the nun. Her complexion, formerly blooming with all the enchantment of youth, in which the happy contrast of matte white played with the colors of a Bengal rose, had taken on the warm tone of an earthenware bowl lit by a weak light from within. The beautiful head of hair, once this woman’s pride, had been shorn. A bandeau cinched her forehead and enveloped her face. The austerities of this life had left dark, bruised circles around her eyes, which at moments still sent out feverish rays, their usual calm merely a veil. In brief, all that remained of this woman was her soul.
“Ah! You shall leave this tomb, you have become my very life! You belong to me and were not free to give yourself, even to God. Did you not promise me to sacrifice everything at my slightest demand? Perhaps now you will find me worthy of this promise when you learn what I have done for you. I have sought you across the world. For five years, you have been in my thoughts every moment, my sole occupation. My friends, very powerful friends, as you know, have helped me with all their might to search through every convent in France, Italy, Spain, Sicily, and America. My love burned brighter with every vain search; I often made long journeys on a false hope; I have spent my life and the strongest throbbing of my heart beneath the dark walls of many cloisters. I am not speaking to you about unlimited fidelity—what is that? Nothing compared to the infinite longings of my love. If your remorse has been sincere, you must not hesitate to follow me today.”
“You forget that I am not free.”
“The duke is dead,” he answered quickly.
Sister Theresa blushed.
“May heaven be open to him,” she said with vivid feeling. “He was generous to me. But I was not speaking of such ties. One of my sins was wanting to break them all, without scruple, for you.”
“You are speaking of your v
ows,” cried the general, frowning. “I did not think that anything weighed in your heart but your love. Yet have no doubts, Antoinette, I will obtain a writ from the Holy Father to absolve your vows. I will go to Rome, certainly, to beg all the powers on earth. And if God could come down from heaven, I—”
“Do not commit blasphemy.”
“Do not worry about God! Oh, I would love you even more if you would breach these walls for me, if this very evening you would hurl yourself into a boat below the rocks. We would go and be happy together, somewhere at the end of the world! And with me at your side, you would come back to life and health, under the wings of love.”
“You must not talk like that,” Sister Theresa went on. “You do not know what you have become for me. I love you much more than I ever did. I pray to God every day for you, and I no longer see you with the body’s eyes. If you knew, Armand, the happiness of being able to surrender without shame to a pure friendship watched over by God! You do not know how happy I am to pray for heaven’s blessings on you. I never pray for myself: God will treat me according to His will. But even at the cost of my eternal life I would like to be sure that you are happy in this world, and that you will be happy in the next for all the centuries to come. My eternal life is all that wretchedness has left me to offer you. Now I am aged by tears, I am neither young nor beautiful; besides, you would have contempt for a nun who became a wife, whom no feeling, not even maternal love, would absolve . . . What can you say to outweigh the innumerable reflections accumulated in my heart for five years, thoughts that have changed it, hollowed it, withered it? I should have made a less sorrowful gift to God!”