The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  “Such is the bleak and bitter side of our work. Certain rules of a peaceful conscience have to be compromised when opening one’s soul to our holy fanaticism. Will you have this courage, young priestess of pure heart and candid tongue?”

  “After everything I have just heard from you, there can be no going back,” replied Consuelo after a moment’s silence. “An initial scruple might drag me into a series of reservations and fears that would turn me into a coward. I’ve received your austere secrets; I feel that I no longer belong to myself. Alas! yes, I must say that I’ll often suffer in the role you’ve ordained for me, for I’ve already bitterly suffered from having to lie to King Frederick to save friends in peril. Let me blush one last time as a soul free of all guile and shed a tear for the candor of my ignorant, peaceable youth. I can’t help feeling these regrets, but I’ll know how to avoid pusillanimous remorse later on. I must no longer be the innocuous, useless child that I was just a while ago, which I’ve already ceased to be, since here I am forced to choose between conspiring against humanity’s oppressors or betraying their liberators. I’ve eaten of the tree of knowledge; its fruit is bitter, but I won’t cast it far from me. Knowledge is pain, but it’s a crime to refuse to act when one knows what must be done.”

  “Your replies have been wise and brave,” said the initiator. “We are pleased with you. Tomorrow night will be your initiation. Take the whole day to prepare for a new baptism, a tremendous commitment, by meditation and prayer, even by confession if your soul is not free of all personal concerns.”

  Chapter XXXII

  Consuelo was awakened at the break of day by sounding horns and barking dogs. When Matteus brought her breakfast, she was told that a great hunt of stags and wild boars was taking place in the forest. Over a hundred guests, he said, had gathered at the castle for this lordly recreation. Consuelo understood that a great number of Invisibles had ostensibly convened for the hunt here at the castle where they generally held their most important conclaves. She felt a bit intimidated by the thought that all these men might witness her initiation and wondered if the order really considered it interesting enough to bring together so many of its members. To comply with the prescriptions of the initiator she did her best to read and meditate, but she was even more distracted by inner commotion and vague fears than by the fanfares, galloping horses, and howling bloodhounds echoing through the surrounding woods all day long. Was this a real hunt or not? Had Albert undergone such a conversion to all the habits of ordinary life that he would take part in this and fearlessly shed the blood of innocent beasts? Wasn’t Liverani going to take advantage of the confusion to steal away from the festivities and come disturb the neophyte in the privacy of her retreat?

  Consuelo saw no part of what was going on outside, and Liverani did not come. Matteus, too busy no doubt at the castle to give a thought to her, did not bring her dinner. Was this, as Supperville maintained, a fast deliberately imposed to weaken the disciple’s strength of mind? She resigned herself to it.

  Toward nightfall, returning to the library that she had left an hour before to get some air, she recoiled in fear at the sight of a masked man all in red sitting in her armchair, but she immediately felt reassured, having recognized the frail old man who served, so to speak, as her spiritual father.

  “Child,” he said getting up and coming toward her, “have you nothing to tell me? Do I still have your trust?”

  “You do, sir,” replied Consuelo, making him sit back down in the armchair and taking a campstool next to him in the recess of the window. “I’ve been very eager to talk to you, and for a long time.”

  Then she gave him a faithful account of everything that had transpired between herself, Albert, and the stranger since her last confession and without hiding any of her involuntary feelings.

  Once she had finished, the old man was silent for such a long time that Consuelo became troubled and embarrassed. After she urged him to render his judgment, he finally said, “Your behavior is excusable, almost irreproachable, but what can I say about your feelings? This sudden, overwhelming, and violent affection called love springs from the good or bad instincts that God had placed in souls or let enter them for their refinement or punishment in this life. Bad human laws that thwart the will of nature and the designs of Providence in nearly everything often make a crime of the very things that God had inspired and curse the feelings he had blessed, all the while sanctioning vile unions and sordid instincts. It is up to us, extraordinary legislators, secret architects of a new society, to discern as far as possible right and true love from that which is wrong and hollow so that we can decide, in the name of a law more pure, generous, and just than the world’s, the fate you deserve. Do you wish to submit to our decision? Will you give us the right to bind or unbind you?”

  “You inspire absolute trust in me, I’ve already said so, and now I’m saying it again.”

  “Well then, Consuelo, we shall weigh this question of life and death for your soul and Albert’s.”

  “Won’t I have the right to make the cry of my conscience heard?”

  “Yes, in order to enlighten us; I have heard it, and I’ll be your advocate. You must waive the secrecy of your confession to me.”

  “What! You’ll no longer be the sole confidant of my innermost feelings, my trials and tribulations?”

  “If you were to sue for divorce in court, wouldn’t you have to lodge a public complaint? That grief will be spared you. You won’t have to bring an action against anyone. Isn’t confessing love sweeter than declaring hatred?”

  “So simply experiencing a new love gives one the right to forswear the previous one?”

  “You didn’t love Albert.”

  “It seems to me that I didn’t; yet I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  “Had you loved him, you wouldn’t have any doubts. Besides, your question is in itself an answer. Each new love perforce excludes the previous one.”

  “Don’t be too hasty in your judgment, father,” said Consuelo with a sad smile. “I may love Albert differently from the other one, but I don’t love him any less than I used to. Who knows if I don’t love him more? For his sake I feel prepared to sacrifice this stranger, the thought of whom robs me of sleep and makes my heart pound even now as I’m speaking to you.”

  “Is it not pride in duty, eagerness for sacrifice more than affection that exhort you to this sort of preference for Albert?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Are you quite sure? Bear in mind that here you are far from the world, safe from its judgments, outside all its laws. If we give you a new formula and new notions of duty, will you persist in preferring the happiness of the man you don’t love to that of the man you do?”

  “Have I ever said that I didn’t love Albert?” Consuelo burst out.

  “I can only answer your questions with other questions, daughter. Can one heart hold two loves at one and the same time?”

  “Yes, two different loves. One loves at one and the same time a brother and a husband.”

  “But not a husband and a lover. The rights of a husband and a brother are indeed different. Those of a husband and a lover would be the same unless the husband were to agree to become a brother again. Then the law of marriage would be broken in its most mysterious, intimate, and sacred essence. That would be a divorce, minus the publicity. Tell me this, Consuelo. I am an old man on the edge of the grave, and you a child. I am here as your father, your confessor. I cannot alarm your sense of modesty with this delicate question, and I hope that you’ll give me a courageous answer. In your enthusiastic affection for Albert, wasn’t there always a secret, overwhelming terror at the idea of his caress?”

  “That is true,” said Consuelo blushing. “That idea wasn’t ordinarily associated with that of his love, it seemed foreign to it, but when it cropped up, the chill of death would run through my veins.”

  “And the man you know as Liverani, hasn’t his breath given you the fire of life?”

 
“That too is true. But mustn’t we smother such instincts with our willpower?”

  “For what reason? Did God instill them in you for nothing? Did he authorize you to forswear your sex, to pronounce in marriage the vow of virginity or the still more hideous and degrading vow of servitude? Slavery’s passivity has something of the coldness, the brutishness of prostitution. Is it part of God’s design that a being such as you should be so degraded? Woe to the children born of such unions! God inflicts on them some disgrace, a deficient, delirious, or stupid constitution. They bear the seal of disobedience; they aren’t fully human, for they weren’t conceived according to humanity’s law of mutual desire, of shared aspirations between man and woman. Where there is no such reciprocity, there is no equality, and where equality is broken, there is no real union. So rest assured that God, far from imposing such sacrifices on your sex, rejects them and denies you the right to undertake them. Committing suicide in this way is as guilty and even more cowardly than giving up life. The vow of virginity is antihuman and antisocial, but sacrificing yourself without love is something similarly monstrous. Think it over, Consuelo, and if you persist in annihilating yourself to this point, consider the role that you would be reserving for your husband if he were to accept your submission without understanding it. Unless he were deceived, he would never accept it, that I need not tell you, but deluded by your spirit of sacrifice, intoxicated by your generosity, wouldn’t he soon seem to you strangely egotistical or crass in his error? Wouldn’t you be degrading him in his own eyes, degrading him in fact before God, by setting this trap for his simplicity, by giving him this nearly irresistible opportunity to fall into it? Where would be his grandeur, his sensitivity, if he failed to notice your pale lips and teary eyes? Do you really think that, despite yourself, hatred wouldn’t enter your heart, along with shame and grief at not having been understood or divined? No, woman! You have no right to betray the love in your heart, you would instead have that of quashing it. No matter what cynical philosophers may have said about the passive condition of females in the natural order, what will always distinguish man’s companion from that of an animal is discernment in love and the right to choose. Vanity and greed turn most marriages into sworn prostitution, as the ancient Lollards used to say. Self-sacrifice and generosity can lead a simple soul to the same result. I’ve had to instruct you, a virgin, in these delicate matters that your pure life and thoughts have prevented you from anticipating or analyzing. When a mother marries off her daughter, she half reveals to her, with more or less wisdom and decorum, the mysteries that she has kept hidden until then. You had no mother when you vowed, with an enthusiasm more fanatic than human, to belong to a man you didn’t love completely. Today you’ve been given a mother to help and enlighten you in your new resolutions at the hour of divorce or the definitive sanction of this strange marriage. I am that mother, Consuelo, and I’m no man but a woman.”

  “You, a woman?” said Consuelo looking in surprise at the skinny, bluish hand, yet delicate and truly feminine that had taken hers during this speech.

  “This little old man, gaunt and decrepit,” said the problematic confessor, “this overburdened, suffering creature whose feeble voice no longer has a sex is a woman broken by pain, illness, and worry more than age. I am no more than sixty, Consuelo, even though in this habit, which I only wear for my functions as an Invisible, I look like a doddering octogenarian. For that matter, whether in woman’s dress or this habit, I am nothing but a wreck underneath, yet I was once a tall, strong, beautiful woman of commanding presence. But by the age of thirty I was already bent over and trembling as you see me now. And do you know, child, the cause of that precocious collapse? This is the misfortune from which I want to save you. It was incomplete affection, an unhappy union, a horrifying labor of courage and resignation that kept me bound for ten years to a man I esteemed and respected without managing to love him. A man wouldn’t have been able to tell you a woman’s sacred rights and true duties in the domain of love. Men have made their laws and formed their ideas without consulting us, yet I have often enlightened the consciences of my fellow Invisibles in that respect, and they have had the courage and fair-mindedness to hear me out. But, believe me, I was sure that unless they put me in direct contact with you, they wouldn’t find the key to your heart and might condemn you to eternal suffering, total degradation, all the while believing that they were assuring your happiness in the comfort of virtue. So open your whole soul to me now, tell me if this Liverani. . . .”

  “Alas, this Liverani, I love him; it’s only too true,” said Consuelo lifting the mysterious sibyl’s hand to her lips. “His presence alarms me even more than Albert’s, but how different the alarm, and how mingled with strange delights! His arms draw me like a magnet, and with a kiss to my brow he takes me to another world where I live and breathe in some new way.”

  “Well then, Consuelo, you must love this man and forget the other one. I am pronouncing your divorce here and now, which is my duty and my right.”

  “Despite what you say, I cannot accept this verdict before I’ve seen Albert, before he’s told me himself that he’s giving me up without regret and releasing me from my vow without contempt.”

  “You don’t know Albert yet, or you’re afraid of him. I, however, know him. I have even more rights over than him than over you, and I can speak in his name. We are alone, Consuelo, and I’ve not been forbidden to open myself fully to you even though I’m part of the supreme council, whose members are never known to their closest disciples. Yet my situation and yours are exceptional, so take a good look at my withered face and tell me if it seems unknown to you.”

  With these words the sibyl whipped off her mask, beard, cap, and wig, and Consuelo saw the head of a woman who was indeed old and sick, but the lines of her face were incomparably beautiful and her expression sublimely kind, sad, and strong. These three habits of the soul, so different and so rarely conjoined in the same person, were apparent in the broad forehead, maternal smile, and deep gaze of the unfamiliar woman. The shape of her head and jaw demonstrated an innately strong constitution, but the ravages of pain were only too visible, and this beautiful head reminiscent of Niobe dying, or rather Mary collapsing at the foot of the cross, was nodding with a sort of nervous tremor. Gray hair, fine and smooth as virgin silk, parted over her broad forehead and neatly looped back at the temples, completed the noble peculiarity of these striking features. In those years all women wore their hair powdered, teased up, and drawn back, leaving exposed a bare, bold forehead. The sibyl had tied hers back to accommodate her disguise, never suspecting that this coiffure was the most harmonious with the form and expression of her face. Consuelo contemplated her for a long while with respect and admiration; then all of a sudden, struck with amazement, she grabbed the old woman’s hands and exclaimed, “Oh! My God, how much you look like him!”

  “Yes, I look like Albert, or rather Albert looks prodigiously like me,” she replied. “But haven’t you ever seen a portrait of me?” And seeing that Consuelo was trying to remember, she helped her out by adding, “A portrait that resembled me as much as art can resemble nature, of which I am nothing more than a shadow today; a grand portrait of a young, fresh, radiant woman with a gold brocade bodice laden with jeweled flowers, a crimson cloak, and locks of black hair escaping from knots of rubies and pearls and curling down over her shoulders. That’s what I was wearing more than forty years ago, the day after my wedding. I was beautiful, but not for long; in my soul I was already dead.”

  “That portrait,” said Consuelo turning pale, “is at the Castle of the Giants in Albert’s old room. . . . It’s the portrait of his mother whom he scarcely knew and yet adored . . . and he believed that he could see and hear her in his transports of ecstasy. So would you be a close relative of the noble Wanda z Prachalitz, and therefore. . . .”

  “I am Wanda z Prachalitz herself,” replied the sibyl, regaining some firmness of voice and bearing. “I am the mother of Albert and the wido
w of Christian von Rudolstadt; I am the descendant of Jan Zizka of the Chalice and the mother-in-law of Consuelo, but now I only wish to be her friend and adoptive mother because Consuelo doesn’t love Albert and Albert’s happiness mustn’t come at the price of his companion’s.”