by Walter Pater
Les Deux Fleurs is another Story Of Other Days, reminding us somewhat of Flaubert’s St. Julien l’Hospitalier. Its aim is, again, that of an apologue, impressing the characteristically French moral that, “in the regard of Heaven, charity is of equal value with chastity. It is best to have both if one can. Let him who lacks the second, try at all events to attain the first Amen!” As a picture from the Middle Ages it possesses a reality of impression not often found amid mediæval sceneries — an impression much enhanced by the gently satiric effect of the half-sceptical chaplain (a figure worthy of Chaucer), who accompanies the hero to the Crusades. Already in the Middle Ages, as he goes decorously on his way, he can divert himself in a curious observation of the ideas, the deportment of others.
“Simon Godard, mounted on his old mule, rode usually side by side with the knight-errant his master, whose candour of spirit he loved; and oftentimes they conversed together to while away the length of the journey. ( Shall we be soon in Palestine?’ Sir Oy de Hautecœur asked him one day, being no great clerk in matters of geography. ‘About a month hence we shall be getting near it, if no accident happens,’ answered the chaplain. ‘But only one-half of our number will be left when we arrive. In the East large numbers die of want, of fatigue, of malignant fevers. I don’t know whether you perceive it, lost in dreaming as you always are, but we leave behind us many of our companions; and as there is no time to dig their graves, the dogs and the crows provide them another sort of sepulture.’
“‘I don’t pity those,’ said the knight-errant, ‘who go before us to Paradise. The body is but a prison: its substance vile; and it matters little what becomes of it.’
“‘ Sire, there are moments when for my part I fail to distinguish clearly the prison from the prisoner. It grieves me that so many of us die. And I don’t see precisely what good end is served by their deaths. We are spending a year and more on the work of taking two or three towns, and when the day of conquest comes we shall be but a handful of men.’
“‘ True! But the walls of Jericho did not fall till the seventh day, and this is not yet the seventh crusade.’
“‘But is it really necessary that Christians should possess the sepulchre of the Lord, which, after all, is an empty sepulchre, and which He suffers to remain for a thousand years in the hands of infidels? And don’t you think that the soil of their country belongs to them, as lawfully as the soil of Fiance to Frenchmen?’
“‘ Talk not thus, Master Chaplain: such railleries ill become a Churchman and a holy man like yourself.’
“‘I am not Joking, sire! But the will of Heaven does not appear to me so manifestly as it appears to you. It irks me to think that Heaven has given to its worst enemies a wiser industry than ours, and better engines of war, and the victory over its faithful servants.’
“‘ Are you unaware then that their riches come from the devil and serve only to maintain them in their abominable manners? If Heaven permits them to overcome us from time to time, that is because it tries those whom it loves, because trials purify and lift us to itself.’
“‘ Sire! you would make an excellent theologian and I but an indifferent knight But if by good fortune I were a seigneur in the land of France, I think I should seldom leave it While the seigneurs go afar to get killed, the stay-at homes fall behind with their dues. The bourgeois in the towns add pound to pound, and as the seigneurs want money for their distant expeditions, get by purchase all sorts of liberties. I don’t complain of that, being of the people myself. But what I say is, that a nobleman who takes the Cross is greatly taken in.’
“‘I am aware, Master Chaplain, that you are not uttering your true thoughts, and that all this is meant to try me. I am not troubled because other Christians endeavour to improve their low and hard condition. For myself, I am neither a draper nor a grocer that I should remain always in my hole, taking no thought except for money and bodily gratification. I am in quest of what is of higher price. I am made of different paste from your bourgeois and your serfs. I should scarce be able to remain long in any one place, or limit my happiness to the things one can see and touch. I love the Demoiselle de Blanc-Lys, and I leave her not knowing whether I shall return. I go to make my trial in an adventure which you declare foolish and useless, and of which certainly I shall have no profit even if I succeed. And wherefore? — I know not. Only I can do no otherwise. And I have a sense that it is pleasing to God and that I am a workman of His.’
“Master Simon Godard could only answer, ‘Amen!’”
On the whole, Pauvre Ame is the most characteristic of M. Lemaitre’s shorter stories. We think the English reader will forgive some copious extracts.
“If one must needs feel pity for all people’s sorrows, the life and heart of an honest man would not suffice. One would begin by lamenting the violent and tragic griefs which force themselves into view. And then those other sorrows, the sorrows which are modest, which hide themselves under a veil of sweetness and seeming serenity. There are destinies stifled and silent, where the pain is so secret and so equable in its continuance, and makes so little sound, that no one thinks of commiseration. Yet nothing is more worthy of pity than those unquiet and solitary hearts, which have yearned to give themselves and no one has cared to take, which have lavished their treasures unheeded and without fruit, and which death at last carries away, outwardly intact, but torn within, because they preyed upon themselves.”
Mademoiselle de Mérisols, then, one of those quiet souls whose fortunes M. Lemaître loves to trace, inhabited in an old street of convents a small set of apartments, with melancholy old furniture she had been able to keep from what had belonged to her parents. The happiest hours of her life were at the Sunday mass and vespers. She would have been pretty could she have felt gay. She loves and is disappointed; but she bravely resumes once more her life of hard work as a teacher, putting her from time to time in contact with home scenes which only bring the closer to herself her sense of isolation in the world. Love comes at last, but in that ironic mood which seems to be one of M. Lemaître’s fixed ideas of the spirit of human life. She was thirty-five. The excellent M. de Maucroix was twenty years older. But she felt afraid of eternal solitude. She had hopes of a child, but it never came. For eight years she was her husband’s nurse. She closed his eyes and shed tears for him. She found herself rich. Only once again the poor soul was alone in the world. She busied herself in good works, but felt an immense weariness. What she needed was some one she might love singly and with all her force. Then follows one of those curious episodes only possible in Roman Catholic France, and the writer finds his opportunity for a striking clerical portrait.
“Madame de Maucroix was in the habit of attending the Sunday Offices at the chapel of the Dominicans. It was wanner, sweeter, more intimate, than in the churches. Many women of fashion repaired thither, rustling softly as in a drawing-room.
“One great festival a monk preached — thirty years of age, handsome, slender, with a superb pallor. He talked much of love and human affections. He quoted Plato, Virgil, Lamartine. He preached on doubt, and was still more modern. He quoted contemporaries — Jouffroy, Leopardi, Heine, De Musset. He described the anguish of a mind which does not believe; and some of his touches would have been equally appropriate to the picture of a heart in anguish because it does not love. Father Montarcy was one of those generous hearts with a superficial mind often to be found in the order of St. Dominic. He had all the beautiful illusions of Lacordaire, and united to them some pretensions to science. He was one of those monks who have read Darwin and attend the physiological courses at the Sorbonne. His style of speaking was vague and inflated, but with flights of real beauty. He moved along, involved in his dream, isolated from what is real, body and soul alike draped in white — draped with much skill He was profoundly chaste, but felt his power over women, taking pleasure in it in spite of himself, lending himself to their adoration.
“He became the director of Madame de Maucroix. She told him the story of her
life and confided to him the void in her heart. What was she to do to fill that void? And every time she called him Father bethought herself that he might have been her son.
“With a fine stroke of policy, moved also by the poor woman’s desolation, and responding to his own secret desire, he observed gravely: ‘My daughter, it is I who should call you mother, and you should call me son. I am young, and I feel how feeble I should be without that special aid which Heaven accords to its priests. I may believe that you have acquired by a life of virtue an illumination equal to that conferred by the holy oil of the priesthood. Will you be my mother and director?’ And he, in his turn, confessed himself to Madame de Maucroix.”
She had a son, then! Her life became a charming one. Every morning she assisted at his mass. She busied herself, precisely as a mother might have done, with his wardrobe and his linen. She accompanied him to the various towns to which he went to preach, and listened with delight to all his sermons. She seeks to know the family history of Father Montarcy, and hearing that he was an orphan feels her joy renewed. He was the son of a working-man, like the Saviour, like many who have become powerful in this world. She does but admire him the more. He had but one sister, devout, insignificant enough, a dressmaker in a country town. Madame de Maucroix provided a dowry and got her well married. She feels proud to have a hand in all the affairs of the convent, in going thither with perfect freedom, receiving from the fathers as she passes ceremonious smiles and greetings, as if in recognition of her right. Often she would call to mind the great Christian women of the early Church, Paula, Monica. It was fascinating to play the part of a Mother of the Church. What Madame Swetchine had been for Lacordaire, it was her dream to be for Father Montarcy.
Only she carried the part of director a little too far. A kind of jealousy — jealousy of penitents younger, and with other charms than hers — mingles with her devotion.
“‘Pardon my freedom,’ she says one day, ‘but it is dangerous for a man of your age to listen for hours to the confessions of young women made after the manner of the one who has just left you.’
“It was like a blow in the face. The young monk raised himself in all the pride of his priesthood, pride of a man chaste and sure of himself, with the rudeness of a monk contemptuous of women. — The chapel was empty. He darted out of the confessional, and with a terrible voice, a magnificent tragic movement of his great sleeves, exclaimed: ‘Madame de Maucroix! Understand! I forbid you to intrude into my life as a priest and interfere in matters which concern Heaven and myself alone.’ And he quitted the chapel with majestic step.
“Madame de Maucroix sank upon the pavement. Next day, broken down with grief and quite prepared to humiliate herself, she returned to the convent. The porter informed her that Father Montarcy was absent. The Prior, whom she asked to see, announced in freezing tones that he was departed for the Tyrol, where he purposed to spend some months in a convent recently founded. She understood that all was over. She possessed in Sologne a little old country-house, and thither she took refuge. There she lived for a year amid the melancholy of the pinewoods, of the violet heaths and motionless meres stained with blood at sunset, passing her days in the practice of a minute and mechanical devotion, sleepily plucking the beads of her rosary, chilled, without thoughts, with tearless eyes. In truth, she was dying day by day of an affection of the liver, aggravated suddenly by her recent emotions. When she saw that her end was near, she begged the sister who nursed her to write to Father Montarcy that she was going to die. Actually she died next day, and the Father’s answer came too late. It was wanting in simplicity, though perhaps not in sincerity: ‘My mother! my mother! all is forgotten. Ah! often have I wept in the presence of Heaven,’ &c., &c. It was signed, ‘Your son.’
“The good sister, who received the letter, thought she might open it, and felt somewhat surprised and scandalised.”
The peculiar sense of irony which is the closing effect of every one of these shorter pieces is also the prevailing note of Serenus — that more lengthy and weighty narrative, which gives name to the whole volume. It embodies the imaginary confession of a supposed Christian martyr, who was not in reality a Christian at all, who had in truth died by his own hand.
At daybreak, on a morning of March, A. D. 90, a group of Christians has come to the Mamertine prison to receive the bodies of certain criminals condemned to death.
“It was cold: small rain was falling: towards the east the sky was tinged with an impure and ghastly yellow. The Eternal City, emerging from the shadows of night, unrolled around the Capitol its grey billows of houses, like a dirty sea after a storm. Certain ponderous monuments rose above the rest here and there. Their wet roofs shone feebly in the dawn.”
“Let us pray for our brothers!” says an aged priest in the company; and at that moment the magistrates entrusted with the execution of capital sentences emerge from the prison. The Christians enter. The head and trunk of the grey-haired consular, Flavius Clemens, are lying there. A patch of blood glistens on the ground beside him. One of the Christians dips in it the corner of a white linen cloth, which he folds carefully and hides within his tunic. In the next cell lay the corpse of a man still young. He seemed to have died a natural death. Even in death his fine but enigmatic features wore an air of irony and pride. “The body of Marcus Annæus Serenus!” cries the gaoler. “He was found dead this morning. The triumvirs thought it not worth while to decapitate a dead body. It is thought he died of poison.” The rude face of the aged priest contracted suddenly with a look of surprise, of pain and indignation.
Through the midst of the contemptuous bystanders the bodies are reverently borne away along the Appian Way, well described by M. Lemaître, to a vast subterranean chamber, the tomb of Flavius Clemens, where the priest Timotheus remains alone for a time with the sacred remains. As he gazes on the face of Serenus with a look “keen and persistent, as if he would have fathomed to its depths the mysterious soul which dwelt no longer in that elegant form,” his hand rests for a moment on the bosom of the corpse. He feels something below the silken tunic — a roll of parchment. He recognises the handwriting of Serenus. But the characters are small and fine, impossible to read in that feeble light. Hardly pausing to cover the pale face, he hastens from the sepulchre, and returns with the manuscript to his sordid lodging in Rome. Here he draws forth and reads with eagerness the confessions of Serenus.
“It is folly perhaps to undertake this confession. Either it will not be read, or it will distress those who read it. Still, it may be, that in recounting my story to myself for the last time, I shall justify myself in my own eyes. Some worthy souls have loved me, but none have really known me. Now, though for a long time past it has been my pride to live in myself, to be impenetrable to every one beside, my secret weighs upon me to-day. A certain regret comes to me ( it is almost remorse ) that I have played so successfully the singular part which circumstances and my own curiosity have imposed upon me; and I should wish, by way of persuading myself that I could not have acted otherwise, to take up the entire chain of my thoughts and actions from my earliest days to the day on which I am to die.”
It is a charming figure, certainly, which Serenus displays, rich with intellectual endowments, and a heart that, amid all the opportunities for corruption which could beset a fortunate patrician in the days of Domitian, never loses its purity to the last — affectionate, reflective, impressible by pity, with “the gift of tears.” And here is one of his earliest experiences.
“I was twelve years old when the great fire destroyed one-half of Rome and threw more than a hundred thousand people on the pavements. During two or three years, in spite of the enormous distributions of money and bread ordered by the emperor, the misery in Rome was fearful. The spectacle of so much undeserved suffering wounded my heart incurably. I conceived a lively notion of the injustice of things and the absurdity of men’s destinies. I found it unjust that my father should be the possessor of five hundred slaves while so many poor people were dyin
g of hunger. I gave away all the money I could dispose of. But, with the stiff logic of my age, I considered that no thanks were due to me, and avoided people’s effusive thanks, the coarseness of which shocked the fine taste of my aristocratic youth. One day my tutor took me to a grand festival which Nero gave to the people in his gardens. To divert the anger of the populace, which accused him of being the author of the conflagration, he had caused some hundreds of Christians to be arrested. The majority of them had been thrown to the beasts in the circus: others, arrayed in sacks steeped in resin, were attached to tall stakes at intervals along the broad pathways. At nightfall fire was applied to them. The crowds pressed with load vociferations around the living torches. The flame which enveloped the culprits, hollowed by the wind from time to time, allowed the horrible faces to be seen, with great open mouths, though one could not hear the cries. A stench of burnt flesh filled the air. I had a nervous attack and was carried home half dead. The shock had been too great; and although at that age the most painful impressions are quickly effaced, something of it remained with me — a languor of spirits at certain moments, a melancholy, an indolence of pulse, rare in a child.”
This was on one side: on the other were the varied intellectual interests offered to a reflective mind in that curious, highly educated, wistful age. In a few effective but sparing traits Serenus depicts his intellectual course, through the noble dreams of a chaste Stoicism, through the exquisite material voluptuousness of Epicureanism when the natural reaction had come, until, having exhausted experience, as he fancies, he proposes to die.
It was an age in which people had carried the art of enjoyment to its height.
