The French Lieutenant’s Woman

by John Robert Fowles

  The dark silence and emptiness welled back once the ritual words were said. He began to compose a special prayer for his circumstances: “Forgive me, O Lord, for my selfishness. Forgive me for breaking Thy laws. Forgive me my dishonor, forgive me my unchastity. Forgive me my dissatisfaction with myself, forgive me my lack of faith in Thy wisdom and charity. Forgive and advise me, O Lord in my travail…” but then, by means of one of those miserable puns made by a distracted subconscious, Sarah’s face rose before him, tear-stained, agonized, with all the features of a Mater Dolorosa by Grunewald he had seen in Colmar, Coblenz, Cologne… he could not remember. For a few absurd seconds his mind ran after the forgotten town, it began with a C… he got off his knees and sat back in his pew. How empty the church was, how silent. He stared at the crucifix; but instead of Christ’s face, he saw only Sarah’s. He tried to recommence his prayer. But it was hopeless. He knew it was not heard. He began abruptly to cry.

  In all but a very few Victorian atheists (that militant elite led by Bradlaugh) and agnostics there was a profound sense of exclusion, of a gift withdrawn. Among friends of like persuasion they might make fun of the follies of the Church, of its sectarian squabbles, its luxurious bishops and intriguing canons, its absentee rectors [14] and underpaid curates, its antiquated theology and all the rest; but Christ remained, a terrible anomaly in reason. He could not be for them what he is to so many of us today, a completely secularized figure, a man called Jesus of Nazareth with a brilliant gift for metaphor, for creating a personal mythology, for acting on his beliefs. All the rest of the world believed in his divinity; and thus his reproach came stronger to the unbeliever. Between the cruelties of our own age and our guilt we have erected a vast edifice of government-administered welfare and aid; charity is fully organized. But the Victorians lived much closer to that cruelty; the intelligent and sensitive felt far more personally responsible; and it was thus all the harder, in hard times, to reject the universal symbol of compassion.

  Deep in his heart Charles did not wish to be an agnostic. Because he had never needed faith, he had quite happily learned to do without it; and his reason, his knowledge of Lyell and Darwin, had told him he was right to do without its dogma. Yet here he was, not weeping for Sarah, but for his own inability to speak to God. He knew, in that dark church, that the wires were down. No communication was possible.

  There was a loud clack in the silence. He turned round, hastily touching his eyes with his sleeve. But whoever had tried to enter apparently accepted that the church was now closed; it was as if a rejected part of Charles himself had walked away. He stood up and began to pace up and down the aisle between the pews, his hands behind his back. Worn names and dates, last fossil remains of other lives, stared illegibly at him from the gravestones embedded in the floor. Perhaps the pacing up and down those stones, the slight sense of blasphemy he had in doing it, perhaps his previous moments of despair, but something did finally bring calm and a kind of clarity back to him. A dialogue began to form, between his better and his worse self—or perhaps between him and that spreadeagled figure in the shadows at the church’s end.

  Where shall I begin?

  Begin with what you have done, my friend. And stop wishing you had not done it.

  I did not do it. I was led to do it.

  What led you to do it?

  I was deceived.

  What intent lay behind the deception?

  I do not know.

  But you must judge.

  If she had truly loved me she could not have let me go.

  If she had truly loved you, could she have continued to deceive?

  She gave me no choice. She said herself that marriage between us was impossible.

  What reason did she give?

  Our difference in social position.

  A noble cause.

  Then Ernestina. I have given her my solemn promise.

  It is already broken.

  I will mend it.

  With love? Or with guilt?

  It does not matter which. A vow is sacred.

  If it does not matter which, a vow cannot be sacred.

  My duty is clear.

  Charles, Charles, I have read that thought in the cruelest eyes. Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

  She wished me to go. I could see it in her eyes—a contempt.

  Shall I tell you what Contempt is doing at this moment? She is weeping her heart out.

  I cannot go back.

  Do you think water can wash that blood from your loins?

  I cannot go back.

  Did you have to meet her again in the Undercliff? Did you have to stop this night in Exeter? Did you have to go to her room? Let her hand rest on yours? Did you—

  I admit these things! I have sinned. But I was fallen into her snare.

  Then why are you now free of her?

  There was no answer from Charles. He sat again in his pew. He locked his fingers with a white violence, as if he would break his knuckles, staring, staring into the darkness. But the other voice would not let him be.

  My friend, perhaps there is one thing she loves more than you. And what you do not understand is that because she truly loves you she must give you the thing she loves more. I will tell you why she weeps: because you lack the courage to give her back her gift.

  What right had she to set me on the rack?

  What right had you to be born? To breathe? To be rich?

  I do but render unto Caesar—

  Or unto Mr. Freeman?

  That is a base accusation.

  And unto me? Is this your tribute? These nails you hammer through my palms?

  With the greatest respect—Ernestina also has palms.

  Then let us take one and read it. I see no happiness. She knows she is not truly loved. She is deceived. Not once, but again and again, each day of marriage.

  Charles put his arms on the ledge in front of him and buried his head in them. He felt caught in a dilemma that was also a current of indecision: it was almost palpable, not passive but active, driving him forwards into a future it, not he, would choose.

  My poor Charles, search your heart—you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to prove to yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But escape is not one act, my friend. It is no more achieved by that than you could reach Jerusalem from here by one small step. Each day, Charles, each hour, it has to be taken again. Each minute the nail waits to be hammered in. You know your choice. You stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honor, self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified. Your only companions the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence of cities, and their hate.

  I am weak.

  But ashamed of your weakness.

  What good could my strength bring to the world?

  No answer came. But something made Charles rise from his pew and go to the roodscreen. He looked through one of its wooden windows at the Cross above the altar; and then, after a hesitation, stepped through the central door and past the choir stalls to the steps to the altar table. The light at the other end of the church penetrated but feebly there. He could barely make out the features of the Christ, yet a mysterious empathy invaded him. He saw himself hanging there… not, to be sure, with any of the nobility and universality of Jesus, but crucified.

  And yet not on the Cross—on something else. He had thought sometimes of Sarah in a way that might suggest he saw himself crucified on her; but such blasphemy, both religious and real, was not in his mind. Rather she seemed there beside him, as it were awaiting the marriage service; yet with another end in view. For a moment he could not seize it—and then it came.

  To uncrucify!

  In a sudden flash of illumination Charles saw the right purpose of Christianity; it was not to celebrate this barbarous image, not to maintain it on high because there was a useful profit—the redemption of sins—to be derived from so doing, but to bring about
a world in which the hanging man could be descended, could be seen not with the rictus of agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a victory brought about by, and in, living men and women.

  He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings. That was what had deceived him; and it was totally without love or freedom… but also without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; and it was not human, but a machine. That was the vicious circle that haunted him; that was the failure, the weakness, the cancer, the vital flaw that had brought him to what he was: more an indecision than a reality, more a dream than a man, more a silence than a word, a bone than an action. And fossils!

  He had become, while still alive, as if dead.

  It was like coming to a bottomless brink.

  And something else: a strange sense he had had, ever since entering that church—and not particular to it, but a presentiment he always had upon entering empty churches—that he was not alone. A whole dense congregation of others stood behind him. He turned and looked back into the nave.

  Silent, empty pews.

  And Charles thought: if they were truly dead, if there were no afterlife, what should I care of their view of me? They would not know, they could not judge.

  Then he made the great leap: They do not know, they cannot judge.

  Now what he was throwing off haunted, and profoundly damaged, his age. It is stated very clearly by Tennyson in the fiftieth poem of In Memoriam. Listen:

  Do we indeed desire the dead

  Should still be near us at our side?

  Is there no baseness we would hide?

  No inner vileness that we dread?

  Shall he for whose applause I strove,

  I had such reverence for his blame,

  See with clear eye some hidden shame

  And I be lessen’d in his love?

  I wrong the grave with fears untrue:

  Shall love be blamed for want of faith?

  There must be wisdom with great Death;

  The dead shall look me thro’ and thro’.

  Be near us when we climb or fall:

  Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours

  With larger other eyes than ours,

  To make allowance for us all.

  There must be wisdom with great Death; the dead shall look me thro’ and thro’. Charles’s whole being rose up against those two foul propositions; against this macabre desire to go backwards into the future, mesmerized eyes on one’s dead fathers instead of on one’s unborn sons. It was as if his previous belief in the ghostly presence of the past had condemned him, without his ever realizing it, to a life in the grave.

  Though this may seem like a leap into atheism, it was not so; it did not diminish Christ in Charles’s eyes. Rather it made Him come alive, it uncrucified Him, if not completely, then at least partially. Charles walked slowly back into the nave, turning his back on the indifferent wooden carving. But not on Jesus. He began again to pace up and down, his eyes on the paving stones. What he saw now was like a glimpse of another world: a new reality, a new causality, a new creation. A cascade of concrete visions—if you like, another chapter from his hypothetical autobiography—poured through his mind. At a similar high-flying moment you may recall that Mrs. Poulteney had descended, in three ticks of her marble and ormolu drawing-room clock, from eternal salvation to Lady Cotton. And I would be hiding the truth if I did not reveal that at this moment Charles thought of his uncle. He would not blame on Sir Robert a broken marriage and an alliance unworthy of the family; but his uncle would blame himself. Another scene leaped unbidden into his mind: Lady Bella faced with Sarah. Miraculous to relate, he saw who would come out with more dignity; for Ernestina would fight with Lady Bella’s weapons, and Sarah… those eyes—how they would swallow snubs and insults! Comprehend them in silence! Make them dwindle into mere specks of smut in an azure sky!

  And dressing Sarah! Taking her to Paris, to Florence, to Rome!

  This is clearly not the moment to bring in a comparison with St. Paul on the road to Damascus. But Charles was stopped—alas, with his back to the altar once more—and there was a kind of radiance in his face. It may simply have been that from the gaslight by the steps; he has not translated the nobler but abstract reasons that had coursed through his mind very attractively. But I hope you will believe that Sarah on his arm in the Uffizi did stand, however banally, for the pure essence of cruel but necessary (if we are to survive—and yes, still today) freedom.

  He turned then and went back to his pew; and did something very irrational, since he knelt and prayed, though very briefly. Then he went down the aisle, pulled down the wire till the gaslight was a pale will-o’-the-wisp, and left the church.

  49

  I keep but a man and a maid, ever ready to slander and steal…

  Tennyson, Maud (1855)

  Charles found the curate’s house and rang the bell. A maid answered, but the bewhiskered young man himself hovered in the hallway behind her. The maid retreated, as her master came forward to take the heavy old key.

  “Thank you, sir. I celebrate Holy Communion at eight every morning. You stay long in Exeter?”

  “Alas, no. I am simply en passage.”

  “I had hoped to see you again. I can be of no further assistance?”

  And he gestured, the poor young shrimp, towards a door behind which no doubt lay his study. Charles had already noted a certain ostentation about the church furnishings; and he knew he was being invited to Confession. It did not need magical powers to see through the wall and discern a priedieu and a discreet statue of the Virgin; for this was one of the young men born too late for the Tractarian schism and who now dallied naughtily but safely—since Dr. Phillpotts was High Church—with rituals and vestments, a very prevalent form of ecclesiastical dandyism. Charles measured him a moment and took heart in his own new vision: it could not be more foolish than this. So he bowed and refused, and went on his way. He was shriven of established religion for the rest of his life.

  His way… you think, perhaps, that that must lead straight back to Endicott’s Family Hotel. A modern man would no doubt have gone straight back there. But Charles’s accursed sense of Duty and Propriety stood like castle walls against that. His first task was to cleanse himself of past obligations; only then could he present himself to offer his hand.

  He began to understand Sarah’s deceit. She knew he loved her; and she knew he had been blind to the true depth of that love. The false version of her betrayal by Varguennes, her other devices, were but stratagems to unblind him; all she had said after she had brought him to the realization was but a test of his new vision. He had failed miserably; and she had then used the same stratagems as a proof of her worthless-ness. Out of what nobility must such self-sacrifice spring! If he had but sprung forward and taken her into his arms again, told her she was his, ungainsayably!

  And if only—he might have added, but didn’t—there were not that fatal dichotomy (perhaps the most dreadful result of their mania for categorization) in the Victorians, which led them to see the “soul” as more real than the body, far more real, their only real self; indeed hardly connected with the body at all, but floating high over the beast; and yet, by some inexplicable flaw in the nature of things, reluctantly dragged along in the wake of the beast’s movements, like a white captive balloon behind a disgraceful and disobedient child.

  This—the fact that every Victorian had two minds—is the one piece of equipment we must always take with us on our travels back to the nineteenth century. It is a schizophrenia seen at its clearest, its most notorious, in the poets I have quoted from so often—in Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy; but scarcely less clearly in the extraordinary political veerings from Right to Left and back again of men
like the younger Mill and Gladstone; in the ubiquitous neuroses and psychosomatic illnesses of intellectuals otherwise as different as Charles Kingsley and Darwin; in the execration at first poured on the Pre-Raphaelites, who tried—or seemed to be trying—to be one-minded about both art and life; in the endless tug-of-war between Liberty and Restraint, Excess and Moderation, Propriety and Conviction, between the principled man’s cry for Universal Education and his terror of Universal Suffrage; transparent also in the mania for editing and revising, so that if we want to know the real Mill or the real Hardy we can learn far more from the deletions and alterations of their autobiographies than from the published versions… more from correspondence that somehow escaped burning, from private diaries, from the petty detritus of the concealment operation. Never was the record so completely confused, never a public facade so successfully passed off as the truth on a gullible posterity; and this, I think, makes the best guidebook to the age very possibly Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Behind its latterday Gothick lies a very profound and epoch-revealing truth.

  Every Victorian had two minds; and Charles had at least that. Already, as he walked up Fore Street towards the Ship, he was rehearsing the words his white balloon would utter when the wicked child saw Sarah again; the passionate yet honorable arguments that would reduce her to a tearful gratitude and the confession that she could not live without him. He saw it all, so vividly I feel tempted to set it down. But here is reality, in the form of Sam, standing at the doors of the ancient inn.