By her care, her vigilance, and her infinite exertions she saved me; and it is certain that only she could have done so. I have very little faith in doctors’ medicine, but a great deal in that of true friends; actions on which one’s happiness depends are always done better than any others. If there is such a thing in life as a sensation of delight, we felt it on being restored to one another. Our mutual affection did not increase; that was impossible. But it took on an indefinably closer intimacy, the more affecting for its great simplicity. I became entirely her concern, entirely her child, and more so than if she had been my real mother. We began imperceptibly to become inseparable and, in a sense, to share our whole existence in common. Feeling that we were not only necessary but sufficient to one another, we grew accustomed to thinking of nothing outside ourselves, completely to confine our happiness and our desires to our possession of one another, which was perhaps unique among human kind. For it was not, as I have said, a love relationship, but a more real possession, dependent not on the senses, on sex, age, or personal beauty, but on everything by which one is oneself, and which one cannot lose except by ceasing to be.
How was it that this pleasurable crisis did not bring happiness to the rest of her days and to mine? The fault was not mine, I can console myself with that conviction. It was not hers either; at least it was not wilfully so. It was decreed that soon the invincible nature of things should reassert its sway. But this fatal reversion did not take place immediately. There was, Heaven be praised, an interval, a short and precious interval, which did not end through any fault of mine, and which I need not reproach myself for having made poor use of.
Although recovered from my serious illness, I had not regained my strength. My chest was not sound, and some traces of fever still remained, which made me languid. I had no desire left for anything but to end my days near that person who was dear to me, to keep her to her good resolutions, to show her where the real charm of happiness was to be found, and to make her life happy, in so far as it depended upon me. But I saw, and felt also, that the continual solitude of life together in a dark and melancholy house would finally become melancholy too. The remedy for this presented itself of its own accord. Mamma had prescribed milk for me, and wanted me to go and take it in the country. I agreed, provided that she came with me. That was enough to decide her; all that remained was to choose the place. The garden in the suburb was not properly in the country; being shut in by houses and other gardens, it lacked the attractions of a country retreat. Besides, after Anet’s death, we had given it up for reasons of economy, having no longer any desire to raise plants; and other considerations had intervened to lessen our regret for its loss.
Profiting now by the dislike which I found she felt for the town, I suggested that we should leave it altogether and establish ourselves in a pleasant solitude, in some little house far enough away to throw importunate visitors off the scent. She might have consented, and this move, the prompting of her good angel and mine, would in all probability have ensured us a happy and peaceful existence up to the moment of our separation by death. But it was not to that state that we were called. After spending a life of plenty, Mamma was fated to experience all the miseries of want and discomfort, in order that she might leave the world with less regret; and I, by a concatenation of every sort of evil, was doomed one day to be an example to all who, solely out of a love for justice and the public good, and strong in their innocence alone, might dare openly to speak the truth to men, without relying on cabals or forming parties to protect themselves.
She was deterred by an unfortunate fear. She had not the courage to leave her wretched house, through fear of offending its owner. ‘Your idea of a retreat is delightful,’ she said to me, ‘and much to my taste; but in that retreat one must live. In leaving my prison, I take the risk of losing my bread; and when this gives out and we are in the woods, we shall return to the town to look for more. To minimize that risk, let us not quit the town entirely. Let us pay our little pension to the Count de Saint-Laurent so that he shall leave me mine; and look for some retreat far enough away for us to live in peace, and near enough for us to return at any time it may be necessary.’ That is what we did. After looking around a little, we settled at Les Charmettes, an estate belonging to M. de Conzié, just outside Chambéry, but as retired and solitary as if it had been three hundred miles away. Between two fairly high hills lies a little valley running north and south, down which a stream trickles over pebbles and under trees. Along this valley, halfway up the hill, are some scattered houses, very attractive to anyone liking a sanctuary somewhat wild and aloof. After having tried two or three of these houses, we finally chose the prettiest, which belonged to a gentleman in the army, M. Noiret by name. The house was very habitable. In front was a terraced garden; above it a vineyard, below it an orchard, facing it was a little chestnut plantation, close by was a spring, and higher up the mountain were meadows for grazing cattle. In fact here was everything that was necessary for the little country household we wished to set up. So far as I can remember dates and seasons, we took possession towards the end of the summer of 1736.* The first night we slept there I was enraptured. ‘Oh, Mamma,’ I said to that dear friend, as I embraced her, at the same time breaking into tears of tenderness and joy, ‘in this spot true happiness and innocence dwell. If we do not find both of them here, it will be no good looking for them anywhere else.’
BOOK SIX
1738
Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus,
Hortus ubi, et tecto vicinus jugis aquae fons;
Et paulum silvae super his foret… *
cannot add:
Auctius atque
Dis melius fecere;†
But no matter; I needed nothing more, I did not even need the property. The enjoyment was enough for me. For a long time now I have said and felt that it is not only in the case of husbands and lovers that the owner and the possessor are so often two very different persons.
Here begins the short period of my life’s happiness; here I come to those peaceful but transient moments that have given me the right to say I have lived. Precious and ever-regretted moments, begin to run your charming course again for me! Flow one after another through my memory, more slowly, if you can, than you did in your fugitive reality! What shall I do to prolong this touching and simple tale, as I should like to; endlessly to repeat the same words, and no more to weary my readers by their repetition than I wearied myself by beginning them for ever afresh? Indeed if it all consisted of facts, deeds, and words, I could describe it and in a sense convey its meaning. But how can I tell what was neither said, nor done, nor even thought, but only relished and felt, when I cannot adduce any other cause for my happiness but just this feeling? I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went for walks, and I was happy; I saw Mamma, and I was happy; I left her, and I was happy; I strolled through the woods and over the hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lazed, I worked in the garden, I picked the fruit, I helped in the household, and happiness followed me everywhere; it lay in no definable object, it was entirely within me; it would not leave me for a single moment.
Nothing that happened to me during that delightful time, nothing that I did, said, or thought all the while it lasted, has slipped from my memory. The period preceding it and following it recur to me at intervals; I recall them irregularly and confusedly; but I recall that time in its entirety, as if it existed still. My imagination, which in my youth always looked forward but now looks back, compensates me with these sweet memories for the hope I have lost for ever. I no longer see anything in the future to attract me; only a return into the past can please me, and these vivid and precise returns into the period of which I am speaking often give me moments of happiness in spite of my misfortunes.
I will present a single example of these memories, which will give some idea of their strength and precision. The first day we went out to sleep at Les Charmettes Mamma was in a sedan-chair, and I followed on foot. The road cli
mbed; she was rather heavy and, being afraid of over-tiring her porters, she insisted on getting out at about half-way and completing the journey on foot. As she walked she saw something blue in the hedge, and said to me: ‘Look! There are some periwinkle still in flower.’ I had never seen a periwinkle, I did not stoop to examine it, and I am too short-sighted to distinguish plants on the ground without doing so. I merely gave it a passing glance, and nearly thirty years elapsed before I saw any periwinkle again, or at least before I noticed any. In 1764, when I was at Cressier with my friend M. du Peyrou, we were climbing a hill, on the top of which he has built a pretty little look-out which he rightly calls Belle Vue. I was then beginning to botanize a little and, as I climbed and looked among the bushes, I gave a shout of joy: ‘Look, there are some periwinkle!’, as in fact they were. Du Peyrou noticed my delight, but he did not know its cause; he will learn it, I hope, when one day he reads this. The reader can judge by the effect on me of something so small, the degree to which I have been moved by everything which relates to that stage in my life.
However, the country air did not restore me to my former state of health. I was languid, and became more so. I could not endure the milk, and had to give it up. The water cure was then fashionable for all complaints; I resorted to that, and so immoderately that it almost put an end not to my illness but to my life. Every morning when I got up I went to the spring with a large goblet, and as I walked about I drank the equivalent of two bottles full on end. I altogether gave up wine with my meals. The water I drank was rather hard and, like most mountain waters, difficult to pass. I managed, indeed, in less than two months totally to ruin my stomach, which had been excellent up till then. No longer able to digest my food, I realized that there was no more hope of a cure. At that same time there occurred an event as strange in itself as in its consequences, which will be with me for so long as I live.
One morning, on which I was no more ill than usual, I was putting a little table upon its legs when I felt a sudden, almost inconceivable disturbance throughout my whole body. I cannot describe it better than as a kind of storm which started in my blood and instantly took control of all my limbs. My arteries began to throb so powerfully that not only did I feel their beating but I even heard it, especially that of the carotids. This was accompanied by a great noise in my ears of three or four different kinds: a dull, heavy buzzing, a sharper note as of running water, a very shrill whistling and the throbbing I have described, the pulsations of which I could easily count without feeling my pulse or touching my body with my hands. This internal noise was so loud that it robbed me of the fine ear I had once possessed, making me not completely deaf but hard of hearing, as I have been to this day.
My surprise and alarm may be imagined. I thought I was dying; I took to my bed; the doctor was called; tremblingly I told him my case, which I considered to be past cure. I think that he thought the same. However, he performed his office, stringing together some long explanations of which I could not understand a word. Then, following on his sublime theory, he began in anima vili the experimental cure which it pleased him to attempt. It was so painful, so disgusting, and so ineffective that I soon wearied of it; and at the end of several weeks, seeing that I was neither better nor worse, I got up from bed and resumed my ordinary life, with my throbbing arteries and my buzzings in my head, which have not left me for a minute since that time, that is to say for the last thirty years.
I had been a fine sleeper up to then. The total sleeplessness which accompanied these symptoms, and which has constantly done so to the present day, finally convinced me that I had not long to live. This conviction temporarily suspended my endeavours to find a cure. Being unable to prolong my life, I decided to make the best possible use of so much of it as remained; which I was enabled to do, thanks to a special favour of Nature which, in my sad state, exempted me from the pain that I might have expected. I was bothered by this noise, but it was not painful; it was accompanied by no other inconvenience but insomnia at nights and a perpetual shortness of breath, not amounting to asthma, which I only noticed when I tried to run or to attempt any degree of exertion.
This accident, which might have killed me altogether, only extinguished my passions; and I thank Heaven every day for this beneficial effect which it had on my soul. I can well say that I did not begin to live until I looked on myself as a dead man. Estimating the things I was about to leave behind me at their true value, I began to concern myself with nobler preoccupations, as if in anticipation of the duties I should soon have to fulfil and which I had seriously neglected till then. I had frequently made fun of religion in my own way, but I had never been totally without it. So it was less difficult for me to revert to a subject which many people find so melancholy, but which is sweet to anyone who finds in it a source of hope and consolation. Mamma was more helpful to me in this respect than all the theologians in the world could have been.
Since she always reduced things to a system, she had not failed to treat religion in this way, and her system was made up of the most ill-assorted ideas, some of them extremely sensible, and others most foolish, of feelings that were the product of her character and of prejudices derived from her education. Believers in general create God in their own image; the good make Him good, the evil, evil; fanatics, being full of hatred and bile, can see only Hell, because they wish to damn the whole world, while gentle, loving souls hardly believe in such a place. I can scarcely get over my astonishment at finding the good Fénelon speak of it in his Telemachus as if he really believed in it. But I hope that he was lying at the time; for after all, however truthful a man may be, he must lie sometimes if he is a bishop. Mamma did not lie to me. Being a creature free from gall, she could not imagine a vindictive and ever-wrathful deity; where fanatics see justice and punishment she saw only mercy and pity. Often she would say that there would be no justice in God if he were to be strictly just towards us. For since he has not made us such as to be good he would then be requiring of us more than he has given. The queer thing was that though she did not believe in Hell she believed in purgatory. This arose from the fact that she did not know what to do about the souls of the wicked, being equally incapable of damning them and of putting them with the good until they become so themselves; and it must be admitted that the wicked are always a considerable embarrassment, in this world and in the next.
Another queer thing. Her system clearly destroyed the whole doctrine of original sin and redemption, and shook the complete basis of common Christianity, so that Catholicism, at any rate, could not subsist with it. Yet Mamma was a good Catholic, or claimed to be, and it is clear that her claim was made in very good faith. In her opinion the Scriptures were too literally and too severely interpreted. All that is written there about eternal torments was in her opinion to be interpreted as a warning, or in a figurative sense. The death of Jesus Christ seemed to her an example of truly divine charity, to teach men to love God and to love one another. In brief, she was true to the faith she had embraced, and sincerely accepted its whole creed; but when it came to the discussion of each separate article, it turned out that her belief was quite different from the Church’s, though she always submitted to its authority. In such matters she displayed a simplicity of heart and a candour which were more eloquent than any arguments and which frequently embarrassed even her confessor, from whom she kept nothing. ‘I am a good Catholic,’ she would say to him, ‘and wish always to be one. I accept the decisions of our Holy Mother Church with all the strength of my heart. I am not mistress of my faith, but I am mistress of my will, which I unreservedly submit. I endeavour to believe everything. What more can you ask of me?’